A new way to frighten your cat
(or, "Are Cats 'Art' or 'Craft'?")

In mid February (2004), I experienced an event that frightened Tangerine. I described it to several friends this way:

First, make sure that your cat is sleeping peacefully nearby. Make no noise or other disturbance that might accidentally awaken the cat.

Next, sit down on your computer chair, which (unknown to you or the cat) is about to break. The chair will break, dump you onto the floor, and create a great deal of noise.

Between the time you notice the chair beginning to break and the time you hit the floor, the cat will vanish. When found later, the cat will be smirking.

Among the responses I received:

From a glass artisan in California:

This helps resolve a pigeon-holing categorization problem recently discursion on my glass discussion board. The age old augment over what is art and what is craft came back up, and it finally was concluded that if you could actually USE the art object for something, it wasn't art, it is craft. IF it is "only" to look at - that's art. I was really glad that the boys settled that centuries old problem.

In this instance, tho, I don't know if we can actually conclude that Cat is art OR craft. They are, first and foremost, crafty, So that would seem to give them a leg up on the craft scale. And Cat definitely served a function in mocking you and assuring that your humiliation was adequate.

However, in fairness, the greater use would have been to have the prescience to fore-ordain that the chair was in danger of imminent collapse and provide suitable warning before you sat down, springing from a sleeping position, directly to your shoulder, slapping your eyes with the tail as it went, insuring that you would NOT sit on the defective chair, but to the side of it. thereby only bruising your Coxix instead of picking up unnecessary scrapes on the way to the floor. So perhaps it could be argued that Cat was not, in this instance, useful at all, and what you perceived to be a humorous reflection on Cat's face was naught but curiosity at the perfidity of humans.

From an editor who had experienced a similar problem:

I can go you one better, having performed that process with a cat on my lap at the time. In addition to the bruised elbow and the wrenched shoulder, which I gained in my foolish and foolhardy effort to make sure that the cat was unharmed, my hand and arm were thoroughly clawed as the little darling accelerated from sleeping to 60 in nothing flat. Your cat may have smirked, but mine autographed her work.

My conclusion: Cats may be good for nothing, but they're very good at it.