A while back I caught The Bruce up to his typical mischievous ways, attacking phantoms behind the couch. So I got the camera out, and captured the following.

I like this picture simply because the chair adds an interesting aspect to its composition.

The Bruce loves getting up behind the large living room windows to look out at the world. I’m always getting out the camera to try and capture an artistic picture of him looking out between the blinds. So far, this is the best I’ve got.

There’s a funny scene in Braveheart, one of my all-time favorite movies. William Wallace and two of his companions are planning their battle strategy.

Wallace: “We’ll make spears. Hundreds of them, long spears. Twice as long as a man.”

Hamish: “Some men are longer than others.”

Campbell: “Your mother been telling you stories about me again, eh?”

The quote seemed well suited for The Bruce this week. He was recently caught grasping at a red straw my wife was playing with. He is shockingly long, reaching up to her waist with his arms extended.

Even when she stopped enticing him with the straw, he still chased after something imaginary. For incredibly bizarre reasons, The Bruce will occasionally “attack” the side of the wall, or act as if he’s trying to climb up it. Notice that he’s reaching up past the door knob.

It wasn’t long after I got The Bruce that I noticed just how long he was. He could come up to the table, and from the floor, stand up to see over the edge. Indeed, some men are longer than others.

It’s Saturday (Sunday now that I’ve published it), but I feel like doing a little Friday Cat Blogging. I didn’t get to yesterday, though not for a lack of something to say.

I’m taking a graduate level genetics course this semester and low and behold what did we study Thursday night but the genetics of domestic cats… A whole evening spent talking about alleles, incomplete dominance, and epistasis. And looking at dozens of cat pictures.

Now I’ve mentioned before that The Bruce’s unique characteristics come in part from his Scottish Fold looks, namely a mutation which made his ears fold. I tend to talk less about his being half Siamese, since of course everybody knows what a Siamese looks like.

What I didn’t know until last night is that Siamese get their distinctive color because of mutations of their own. The dark areas of their fur are caused by a mutation in the gene that makes an enzyme necessary in the production of melanin. Melanin as you probably know serves as a dark pigment. (It’s the complete lack of it for example that results in albinism).

Here’s what’s so cool about this mutated Siamese enzyme. It’s temperature specific. The reason the extremities (legs, tail, and muzzle) are darker in Siamese is that they’re cooler than the trunk of the body. Were you to take a Siamese and put him in a refrigerator at 33 degrees for 6 months, you’d come back to find a black cat. If you left him outside the entire summer, his extremities would become much paler.

Interestingly, this same phenomenon occurs in other animals, like the Himalayan rabbit. Studies on this animal were what determined the temperature specific nature of this trait. You can fit the animals with a long term ice pack and get a black spot of fur underneath.

Pretty cool stuff.

I was so proud of myself recently. If you’re a reader of the blog, you’ll recall that I got some sweet bobcat pictures recently. People said nice things about me, and I basically felt good about myself.

bobcat kitten

But some people just have to go and ruin the fun, doing whatever it takes to crush the competition. My mother’s been a contractor at the local air force base in her town, helping with various bird related surveys. And low and behold, it seems a mother bobcat got a little too used to people and decided to take up residence near the hospital. Naturally this produced some good opportunities for pictures, and she even got an entire photo gallery of bobcat kittens in the trees! She also has video of the kittens being captured by a wildlife rehabilitator. The sweet cute little kittens become roaring lions as they’re being moved to the cage. If she ever posts it, I’ll be sure to link to it.

How, I ask you, am I supposed to compete with that? Nobody can compete with multiple bobcat kittens.

As great a cat as a he is, he’s still a cat. And he occasionally gets that cat look. You know, the one where your presence annoys him, and he expects you to worship him as a deity again, harking back to the good old days of cat worship in Egypt.

The Bruce, looking very Sphinx-like

Sorry Bruce. Get over yourself. While you are indeed the coolest cat in the world, you’re still just my pet.

If there’s any work that cats willingly do, it’s eventing new ways of laziness. And The Bruce is no exception. One of his favorite things to do is pick the spot on the floor where the afternoon sun comes through the windows. At the very time when my wife and I are burning up and wish to close the blinds to keep the heat out, this bizarre creature in a solid fur coat goes and sits directly in the sun…

The Bruce has always been a cat of weird proportions. Small head, very small ears curled downwards, large eyes, long legs, etc. But every now and then, you look over to see him doing something very bizarre.

In this picture, he looks like he could pass as a kangaroo. His tail is bent just the right way, and the flat part of his back feet are parallel with the ground. For what it’s worth, he’s got such a flabby belly that I’m sure there’s a pouch down below too.

On another occasion (one where I couldn’t reach the camera fast enough), he looked just like a seal, with his legs bent and tucked under him like a seal who’s flippers angle backwards as they move through the water.

With The Bruce, you just never know what you’re going to see next.

It’s time for the real deal. A cat that actually has claws. Move over Bruce. There’s a new king of the jungle (or at least west Texas mesquite scrub).

This is Lynx rufus, commonly known as the bobcat. Last week, I was out shooting pictures of prairie dogs at our local state park. One of the little turds poked his head up out of his hole and started yapping like a French poodle. Now this both confused and annoyed me because I’d been there for 30 minutes, and he hadn’t really protested my presence until just now. Little did I know he wasn’t protesting me at all.

I looked up to see a real cat walking out of the woods onto the edge of the prairie dog town. All I could think at the moment was don’t screw it up. Get the pictures. Though the light wasn’t perfect and the cat was a little distant, I sure was glad to have my camera ready.