Tag Archives: America

Another famous Irishman

July 31, 2013 The Cat Leave a comment

Another famous Irishman

Marc O’Polo was an explorer wasn’t he? Didn’t he drink the Silk Road dry? Or something like that!

Well I suppose that is a fair achievement but don’t forget there are more famous Irish explorers remember Christ O’Phercolumbus he drank his way all across America.

About the Author

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The Cat is one of the most successful feline authors in the history of Catkind. His sharp elegant wit has produced the bestselling book ‘Getting Out – Excerpts from a Cat’s Diary’ and of course the much plagiarised gag of the same name which appears on all of the funniest joke sites on the internet.

Copies of the Cat’s masterpiece of feline literature ‘Getting Out – Excerpts from a Cat’s Diary’ and his latest wonderful book ‘The Cat’s Travelogue’ can be purchased at a bookstore near you or from the internet at Amazon.com and here for the Travelogue The Cat’s Travelogue Paperback Edition or at what The Cat calls his www – wickedly wonderful website here www.thecatsdiary.com where you can not only learn more about me the genius Cat but also play my games they are all paw picked by me and have been described as “exactly what free on-line games should be, fun, free and fantastic.”

I would like to tell you all about something new and rather nice that you can get from the Apple iBooks store at last, yes it’s my wonderful first book ‘Getting Out – Excerpts from a Cat’s Diary’ so what are you waiting for you lovely Apple users?

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July 20th a good day for a Moon landing!

July 20, 2012 The Cat Leave a comment

Today, July 20, 1969, America achieved something amazing, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the surface of the Moon. And below is a marvellous photograph of his footprint in the lunar dust.

Neil Amrstrong Foot Print

So much for all of the idiots who say that this monumental event was staged!

Buzz Aldrin photographed by Neil Armstrong 20 July 1969

Sadly as far as this Cat is aware, neither the people who came up with the peculiar idea that the lunar landing was a hoax or just a publicity stunt, nor the daft people who have blindly repeated this nonsense over the years have achieved anything on this day July 20th or indeed at any day in the past.

Of course before any humans ever went into space animals had been there already. There is no truth in the rumour that any of these animal pioneers from the very beginning of spaceflight there volunteers. On the contrary animals had no choice in the matter whatsoever they were simply bundled up and tied down in the cockpits of various rockets destined for the heavens.

The first animal in space was a rhesus monkey called Albert I, he was blasted off from White Sands, New Mexico on June 11, 1948, in a V-2 Blossom rocket. Of course if you look at the V-2 Blossom rocket closely, you’ll note that it is actually the same as the ones used to ‘bomb’ London towards the end of the war.

Albert II V2 launch

Now I am not suggesting that these were exactly the same rockets that made such an impact on London or that the ones that hit London were a result of what is called ‘friendly fire.’ But I am suggesting that the Nazi technology which vanished from Germany at the end of the war turned up in New Mexico along with the scientists who had planned to use these V-2 rockets to completely re-arrange the landscape of London!

For those of you who like Cats, the nicest people in the world as far as I am concerned, I thought I would mention that the first Cat to be launched into space, very much against his will, was called Felix. Felix made a brief but successful flight on October 18, 1963 and Felix happily was landed successfully after a parachute descent.

Felix

Sadly the rocket which was carrying the second Cat to be launched into space by the French, just six days, later ran into difficulties that prevented recovery. No one knows what happened to the Cat sadly.

All wasn’t so bad for the SpaceCats though because the French government had quite a few Cats in intensive training for possible space flight in 1963. Unfortunately ten had to sacked or as the French government put it ‘decommissioned’ the official reason rather embarrassing is that under the strict training regime the Cats put on too much weight to be able to fit into the spacecraft. I have to say that I admire those ten almost as much as Felix don’t you?

This episode also reinforces the idea that the Cats used in the french space programme were starts from the streets of Paris and if they were I am sure they made the most of their good fortune.

About the Author

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Sinonauts take their Cats into space

July 19, 2012 The Cat Leave a comment

While I was away or possibly asleep the Chinese have been beavering away building space rockets and even a space station. It goes without saying that they have given their space craft silly names like the “Long March” and probably “Mao’s Delight” but amazingly considering how badly they make products for western consumption their rockets are achieving low Earth Orbit.

Of course we shouldn’t encourage the Chinese by congratulating them because they might get carried away attempt to do something spectacular and actually relevant in space and not just copy the Russian and the Americans achievements from the 60’s and 70’s then over reach their abilities, which we all know are desperately limited you only have to open a newly purchased box of some electronic something or other to know that!

Still you have to hand it to the Chinese they are sending their Sinonauts, as they call their Astronauts, into space quite regularly and under their own power unlike the Americans sadly, but then that has more to do with the cash they have earned from the west than any other reason I suppose.

All of which brings me on nicely to a picture I saw, and was touched by, this week. It’s of three brave members of the party and army (of course) one of whom had not only to be qualified and fit enough to get fired into space but also to had to be married and had a baby (guess which one). Surely these requirements are a little odd for anyone wanting to go into space aren’t they well that is what I thought.

The picture that caught my attention was of the brave trio, one of whom was married and had had a baby, saluting, I don’t actually know who or possibly what they were saluting but that is not important. What I thought was important and rather touching was that the three, as you can plainly see, were allowed to take their Cats into space, safely housed in their Cat carriers for the journey.

I think that the Chinese authorities have been rather nice in allowing their Sinonauts to do that and in addition I think that it is such a wonderful co-incidence that all of the Sinonauts on this mission to nowhere own Cats, although the Cat carrier of the lady Sinonaut might be adapted to carry the baby that she had to have had to qualify for the journey mighten it!

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Food with it’s own particular aroma

May 22, 2012 The Cat Leave a comment

I love America because the people are open, honest and fun, where else in the world would they call a restaurant Captain Poo’s Blue Marlin Bar and Grill? Nowhere and that is a fact which is why Captain Poo’s Blue Marlin Bar and Grill is at 2200 Little River Neck Road, North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in the good ole US of A.

Food with it s own particular aroma

Of course Captain Poo’s Blue Marlin Bar and Grill serves a lot of very good grilled fish but it isn’t right next to the sea as suggested on the sign it is about a mile inland but it is right next to the Little Neck River and that flows into the sea eventually.

And if you don’t fancy Captain Poo’s why not try Fibbers on the Water?

Fibber banner

It isn’t that far away down at 4498 Water Front Ave, Little River, South Carolina, though I have to say if you watch their video presentation here Fibbers you’ll see why they call the restaurant ‘Fibbers’ their “Shepherd’s Pie” has a pie crust and everyone in the place that that dish was invented knows that Shepherd’s Pie has a Mashed Potato topping duh!

For those of you who don’t know what a proper Shepherd’s Pie is and that obviously includes the good people of Fibbers Restaurant here is a picture of a rather tasty one, I blush to say who made it of course!

Shepherds Pie

Lastly for those of you for whom the English language is not their native language and of course I include Americans in that group I would like to explain the word ‘fibber.’ In the English language to tell a fib is to lie and the person telling the ‘fib’ is a ‘fibber.’ Tee hee!

About the Author

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The English are so dedicated customer service

April 11, 2012 The Cat Leave a comment

If I was writing about America, or Sweden or Spain or indeed most civilised countries in the world where offering a service or selling something means backing the sale up with hard work, dedication and an attitude dedicated to delighting the customer then I wouldn’t be using the picture below which was taken outside a small business in Devon in the UK and sums up the attitude of UK businesses to their customers.

The English Are So Dedicate Customer Service

The idea of providing customer service in the UK sadly is one that seems to have been dropped by all businesses just as the UK’s general public have dropped the idea of community, caring for the elderly, and so many more values that define a modern caring society this is one of the major reasons why the UK is slipping in all of the tables that identify great places in the world to live.

On the other paw the lack of a need to provide decent customer service or to hold any civic responsibility whatsoever in the UK means that the number of banks, (insurance companies and other financial institutions who cause so much harm in the world) who locate their headquarters in the UK and in particular dreadfully polluted London has increased year on year .

But then banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions pride themselves in not providing any form of customer service or support for the money that they are trusted with and so they fit right in.

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The Cat's Travelogue

Shoes, Feet And Other ‘Insults’

November 29, 2011 The Cat Leave a comment

I was going through some old pictures and when I came across this one (below) it reminded me of my aimless wanderings that resulted in the writing of my wonderful masterpiece ‘The Cat’s Travelogue’ (if you are one of the few people on the planet not to have a copy you can get it discreetly here www.amazon.com and no one will ever know that you didn’t have one of the latest trendiest ‘must have consumer products’ because you can pretend that you had it all the time).

The picture comes from the ultra modern high rising cement constructed emirate of UAE and brought back all sorts of dreadful memories of a place where the contradictions of life are many, various and confusing to say nothing of their translations into English!

Imagine spending $20 billion on an hotel – imagine the Burj Khalifa – and then try to imagine why you wouldn’t spend $20 on correctly translating a sign from Gulf Arabic to English, if you can do that then you can imagine just what life is like in Dubai or the UAE!

The UAE is a place where ‘foreigners’ are loathed, but welcomed so that they can fill the seven star hotels and try their hardest to buy at least a tenth of all of the dreadful modern and over priced real estate that has been thrown up for them on newly created ‘islands’ in the middle of enormous lagoons which are now sadly sinking back into the depths of the lagoons from where they were dredged up.

The UAE is a place that likes to pretend that it is modern, go ahead and forward thinking but can’t do more than pretend, take a recent innocent example of a multinational shoe manufacturer (Puma) who thought that the very rich inhabitants of the UAE and the tourists, who troll around the place gaping at the enormous buildings, pleasure parks and the greater number of building sites where construction has ground to a halt, would like a pair of trainers with the UAE flag plastered all over them.

These ‘special edition shoes’ (whatever that can possibly mean) were intended to mark the 40th UAE National Day. All that Puma had to do was to make them and put a stupidly high price on them ($190 because they are special I suppose), stick them in their own stores and ‘bam’ they would be a few million dollars richer even if half of the products sold would have to be returned because they were so badly made in China.

Well it was a brilliant marketing plan what could go wrong?

What went wrong was simple the very conservative inhabitants of the UAE didn’t like the the fact that the nations flag colours were being used on shoes!

At this moment it might be a good idea to cast your mind back to the Iraq war, just at the end when America was being thanked and celebrated before the Iraqis changed their minds, when the enormous statue of old walrus face was toppled and locals started hitting it with their shoes.

Then a short while later after the Iraqis had forgotten all about the repression of the old ways under the tough guy with the big soup strainer and more importantly who had rescued them from torture and terrible moustaches some idiot threw a shoe at Pres. Georgie B, can you see a pattern emerging here?

For some reason in the Arab world, best known only to Arabs, feet and footwear are considered dirty, the Cat who writes blogs thinks that it is such a shame that there isn’t more widespread use shoe polish and foot baths in the Arab world as that surely would sort of solve little problems like this and then the UAE could make a better pretence of being what it pretends to be – a modern country that is a great place for tourists and second home owners. Because as incidents like this demonstrate currently the mind set of the people is still firmly entrenched in prehistoric Wadi mud, remember the Cat who writes blogs is just a Cat and Cats aren’t as clever as humans! Are they? But I have to say this I am glad that Cats have Paws and not feet and never wear shoes, unless they are dressed up by idiot humans – but that is the subject of another blog and nothing to do with this one!

Just imagine for a moment if we were so precious about the British Union Jack or the American Stars and Stripes, we would have tacky mugs, tea towels and souvenir shop rubbish in general, Jimi Hendrix’s masterpiece of guitar playing the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ would be lost forever and we would never have had anything to roll our ‘herbal’ cigarettes in at college would we?

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Thanksgiving Bombshell – Happy Thanksgiving To All My Readers

November 24, 2011 The Cat Leave a comment

I’m a very inquisitive Cat and so usually I like to find out a lot of interesting information about places, events and so on and so forth and then turn them into little jokes, you just have to read either ‘Getting Out Excerpts from a Cat’s Diary’ or ‘The Cat’s Travelogue’ to know that; which is why I think I have failed the entire American Nation today and that makes me at the very least very downcast.

It seems a shame that there just isn’t much to say about Thanksgiving that is particularly interesting, weird or funny if, that is, you want to talk about odd traditions and practices and I do.

Yes I’ll admit there are some strange Thanksgiving Day notions such as the one that says you have to knock a few times on wood before putting the Turkey into the oven so that it will be tender and succulent, to say nothing of the fact that it’s best to first check the Turkey’s pulse! But that isn’t really an odd tradition like the ones that lurk around old Europe as Pres. George Bush once called us lot over here.

You know the sort of odd tradition I’m talking about like the one in Scotland where you must carry a bit of coal in your pocket as you go from dozens of strangers houses on New Year’s Eve and drink vast quantities of other people’s Scotch Whiskey, that’s called either ‘Firstfooting or ‘First Footing.’

I’m afraid I have no idea which is right ‘Firstfooting or ‘First Footing’ because both words are always said with a Scottish accent which as we all know is very close to incomprehensible nonsense at the best of times and totally alien on New Year’s Eve due to the vast amounts of Scotch Whiskey consumed by the speaker which has an effect not only on the amount of slur added to a Scots persons speech but also the number of ‘o’s’ added to words that not only contain ‘o’s’ normally but ones that have never been spelt with an ‘o’ before! To say nothing of the fact that if you look up ‘Firstfooting or ‘First Footing’on the internet all of the results are in American from the awful Wikipedia to the Websters Dictionary they use ‘First-Footing’ with a hyphen between the words and that in the main apart from where it has been used for centuries in the surnames by a few mad aristocratic English families and more recently by a lot of ethnic unmarried couples, is an American invention.

The only thing that is clear about ‘Firstfooting or ‘First Footing,’ as the picture below shows, is that you don’t have to be Scottish, look ridiculous and talk nonsense to join in the fun or indeed even wear a kilt!

Prince c in kilt

In fact it seems that the Scots didn’t invent the practice of ‘Firstfooting or ‘First Footing’ it gets its name from a Manx Gaelic word ‘Quaaltagh’ so it would seem that the Scots ‘borrowed’ the tradition from the Isle of Man.

‘Firstfooting or ‘First Footing’ is also practiced by the Serb nation who celebrate Polažajnik on New year’s Eve where they go to other people’s houses and get drunk. Even during the worst persecutions of their neighbours in the 1980’s the Serbs didn’t stop the custom.

The Greeks use a word similar to the Serb ‘Polažajnik’ when they go from house to house getting drunk on New Year’s Eve it is ‘Podariko’ for any of you who are vaguely interested and aren’t wondering what on Earth this all has to do with Thanksgiving like I have to say the writer!

So back to Thanksgiving! Happily (for me) I did discover one potential bombshell about Thanksgiving though and that is that if Thanksgiving has officially been an annual tradition since 1863, when during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26th 1863 it may not be a day of celebration for the whole country!

Abe Lincoln

I hear you ask what does that mad Cat mean?

Well if President (of the Union States only) Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in the middle of the Civil War only the North would have observed it, I can’t imagine President Jefferson Davis and the rest of the Southern Nation embracing a Northern President’s ideas can you?

Not only that in 1861 President Jefferson Davis issued this proclamation about Thanksgiving Day which said it should be “a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer,” now that doesn’t sound like the sort of day that most Americans are going to have today does it? Although I expect it would make Turkeys all over the United States very happy indeed.

Jeff Davis

The reason why the Confederate States of America celebrated Thanksgiving Day for the first time in 1861 was not really Pilgrim related either. It was to celebrate a series of victories by Confederate forces in the east and west of the CSA and that’s probably not something that dear old Abe had in mind when he ‘invented’ Thanksgiving in 1863 is it.

Isn’t history wonderful?

So to lighten the mood and possibly to prevent a war between the south and north of America breaking out once again here are some Thanksgiving jokes.

Why did the Pilgrims eat Turkey at Thanksgiving?

Because they couldn’t fit a Moose in the oven!

What’s the best way to stuff a Turkey?

Get it to eat lots of pizza and ice cream!

If the Pilgrims were alive today what would they be most famous for?

Their age of course!

If you do want to hear loads of exciting, unusual and generally hilariously dotty traditions, practices and other mad things that humans get up to, let alone this Cat, then you could do no worse than read either, or better still both, of my wonderful works of feline literary genius which happily you can find either as paperback or ebooks here!

Paperback edition of Getting Out at Amazon.com

Kindle edition of Getting Out at Amazon.com

Paperback edition of The Cat’s Travelogue at Amazon.com

Kindle edition of The Cat’s Travelogue at Amazon.com

Lastly the really good news about Thanksgiving Day is that it was made in America (based on an English idea) and not made in China (copied from every nation’s original thought) and that means that it will last forever and not have been broken before it was taken out of the box, like all expensive rubbish that the hamfisted Chinese knock up over there!

I HOPE THAT YOU ALL HAVE A HAPPY THANKSGIVING AND PURRS TO ALL MY CUDDLY READERS

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Advertising Russian Style

September 27, 2011 The Cat Leave a comment

Although Russia and in particular Moscow is a tamer, more civilized place when compared to twenty years ago it’s a wild and dangerous place compared to America or England which have their moments of course.

But in either America or England you won’t find any personal physical threats in advertising, especially food advertising. The dreadful ‘love story’ coffee commercials on both side of the Atlantic come to mind here.

No one in New York or London is going to grab you by the collar and tell you to explore the taste of America or England – that as you can see from the shop window advert below is not the case in Moscow.

Explore The Taste Of Russia Or Else She ll Get You

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Sod Today… Bugger Tomorrow!

July 28, 2011 The Cat Leave a comment

As the sign says “Sod Today” and while you are about it I suppose you could “Bugger Tomorrow!”

I saw this sign when I was tottering around the planet while researching my wonderful unputdownable next book ‘The Cat’s Travelogue’ I was in, where else, America of course, I love the American attitude but unfortunately the “Sod Today” ideal seems to be coming home to roost and things are getting tight for a nation that doesn’t know what living above your means err, means!

Sod Today And Bugger Tomorrow

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American Freedom I Knew Someone Was responsible

April 29, 2011 The Cat Leave a comment

I always thought that once America had defeated mad old King George III’s evil Death Star they would go on to do great things and now and again they shine, sadly as the picture below demonstrates America even outsources the manufacturer of its ‘freedom’ these days.

At this rate in ten years time poor old America will be smelling funny, rocking in a chair, mishearing things and talking loudly about the good old days just like Great Britain.

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The Cat's Blog

Tag Archives: America

Another famous Irishman

July 20th a good day for a Moon landing!

Sinonauts take their Cats into space

Food with it’s own particular aroma

The English are so dedicated customer service

Shoes, Feet And Other ‘Insults’

Thanksgiving Bombshell – Happy Thanksgiving To All My Readers

Advertising Russian Style

Sod Today… Bugger Tomorrow!

American Freedom I Knew Someone Was responsible

The Cat's Blog