Saturday, February 21, 2015

4013 Slow days

Saturday, February  21, 2015

People who are stupid, unskilled, or incompetent are frequently too stupid, unskilled, or incompetent to realize how stupid, unskilled, or incompetent they really are. That's basically known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

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Did you know that cats reserve open-mouth meows for when addressing humans?  They never meow to each other, or to anything else, or for any other reason.  Just to humans.   It's like they invented a whole language especially for talking to us!  And every cat speaks it.

I've had cats pretty much all my life, and I'd never noticed that, but now, yeah, come to think of it, it seems true.  I wonder how they learn that.  Mother cats talk to their kittens in a closed-mouth sort of "mmmmrrrrrrrr", which is sort of almost but not quite a meow.  Perhaps cats consider humans equivalent to hearing-impaired  kittens.

Thoughts?

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I'm writing this on my little tablet, because a few days ago the Wifi finder and hooker upper thingy on my laptop stopped finding and hooking up, and finally it simply declared it no longer existed.  As far as I'm concerned, no Internet = brick.   Monday I'll take it in for service.

In the meantime, the tablet (or whatever Sony calls it).  Onscreen keyboard.  switching back and forth for numbers letters punctuation.  Bleck.  I had bought a wonderful little Bluetooth keyboard for it that worked beautifully, but I can't seem to get it to charge this time, so that also will get a checkup on Monday.

Sigh.  And it's snowing.  Again.

I've had a cold that seems to swap back and forth from nose/throat to sinuses to throat only and through the cycle again.  Bad cough for two days, then slight cough with severe body aches for two days, then all fine except for hot throat for two days, then start the cycle again.  No fever at all so far, but today I've got a new one --- my voice is completely gone.  I have nothing above a whisper.

Mmmmmmmrrrrrrrrrrrr.
.

8 comments:

the queen said...

Maybe cats like humans more than other cats, and we are the in,y ones worthy of their attention. There are no packs of cats, are there?
Sorry to hear you're sick. Are you reinfecting yourself, maybe?

~~Silk said...

Oh no doubt of reinfection, but not self. The Nugget is in nursery school, and most days of the week she visits for a few hours. She's a compact germ distribution machine, with a better immune system than mine. I accept the risk.

~~Silk said...

Queen, domestic cats are usually solitary animals, but they do make friends, especially when they live together. In addition to body language, they do have vocalizations they use with each other, like murphs, hisses, rumbles --- but not open-mouth meows. That sems to be for humans only.

Anonymous said...

Cats are pretty manipulative of humans and probably find us rather simple and biddable (with training).

rockygrace said...

I call that noise mama cats make with their kittens "chirping". My cats will yowl at each other when they're play-fighting. And the caterwauling that goes on when a strange cat is in the yard can wake me up out of a sound sleep. Two young cats, if used to being together and then placed in separate rooms, will meow out as if trying to echo-locate each other.

And if you've ever heard a cat "chatter" while birdwatching, Jackson Galaxy says that they're trying to hypnotize the birds. Hmmm ...

~~Silk said...

There's a neighborhood cat who comes to the back sgd to visit Jasper and the growls and screams back and forth through the glass are literally hair raising.
Almost all my cats have done the bird chitter at the windows. (I've always interpreted it as "come pretty birdy, see how harmless I am?) The most interesting chitters came from a huge Maine Coon named Scruffy.

~~Silk said...

The most ineresting part of the bird chitters is how intense the cats are when they do it. I wonder if they even know they're doing it.

rockygrace said...

~~Silk, yeah, I've seen cats be so intent on the birds that they stop making the chitter noise - it's just their mouth moving a billion miles a minute. Maybe they're already chewing in their heads.