Yesterday I was working on some reading for my MSU MSSE class, when Lola called me over. It was a reading day for her too, and she had just opened the most recent National Geographic. "Check this out," she meowed. The magazine had put a one-page story about "designer" mice (genetically modified for research) right across from a cat litter ad, and both the cat and the mouse were looking inward (towards the magazine's fold or "gutter"). This made it appear like they were looking at one another. The advertised cat apparently had other things on its mind than hunting mice, but I thought the overall layout was too funny to be a coincidence. Lola, on the other hand, was disgusted, feeling that the whole composition was disgraceful to catkind.

It reminded me of a time last month when Lola was reading the previous issue of National Geographic. This time, she was intensely reading, sounding out the big words, concentrating hard. I looked over her shoulder and saw this:

As part of that issue's focus on animal intelligence, it was a small photo of a baboon teaching a cat to sit upright. The photographed cat didn't want to sit upright, but Lola thought it was a great idea. For the next several days, she sat upright constantly, reading the New Yorker and Wine Spectator, puffing her meerschaum pipe and looking contemplative. But then she lost interest in sitting upright when she read about fossil ammonites. Admiring their graceful sprials, she promptly curled up into a ball. Immediately, she began purring. "It's much more comforable," she told me. "Ammonites must be smarter than baboons."

I pointed out her lack of exoskeleton. "Ammonites have shells, Lola," I said, admittedly a bit condescendingly. An hour later, I found she had taken over my office wastebasket:

Labels: humor, lola