This makes NO sense to me. So they CAN find the home, if the people are in it? But if the owner's leave, the cat can't find the home? Is this a trick question? Does it have to do with title insurance on the house, or some other mathematicals I'm unfamiliar with?
Or maybe this means the cat can find the HOUSE using their wily ways, but since the people are now in North Dakota or somewhere else, the cat can't find THEM. Which makes sense, as people can be very fickle, and move at the drop of a hat. And drive places in a car when they move cross country.
And the cat? Has to WALK everywhere. Pure logistics-based logic and four-legged walking speed at work in an illogical world driven by the internal combustion vehicle.
I'm pretty sure we could make a handy, dandy Mathematical Word Problem out of this dilemma, for the SAT or other spurious tests of human knowledge.
EXAMPLE WORD PROBLEM
SETTUP
The Smith family lives in Pilbrook, Ohio, and have a cat named Doplar. After Doplar R-U-N-N-O-F-T for a week to have kittens under an Azalea, the Smith family decided for some reason, to move to Casper, Wyoming.
The Smith's packed up the station wagon, tossed in the three kids, then drove cross-country toward the promise of great things in Wyoming.
When Doplar returned two weeks later,( sans kittens, they got a nice home when a nice cat-loving woman named Trudy trapped them down by the river), the Smith's were long gone, and Doplar only found an empty Ranch house. No Smith family anywhere to be seen. No food dish out back by the rain gutter off the garage. No treats on the kitchen stool every morning when she wakes up either.
Seeing no food dish, and and no other good reason to stay in Pillbrook, Doplar decided to head west, in search of her human family.
WORD PROBLEM
The Smith's drove an average of 426 miles a day, at an average speed of 63.7 mph. They stopped five times for rest and snack breaks during the trip. Three times at a Sud's, Ammo and Sip, and 2 at a standard 7-Eleven. Average time of each stop, 18 minutes. The station wagon broke down twice on the trip, but was fixed each time. Once by a guy named Ralph in Boise, and earlier on by a guy named Sid in Topeka. Total bill for the work: $796.32 Total down-time for the station wagon to be up on the lift: 18.46 hours.
The Smith family arrived two weeks later into Casper on a rainy, 37° day, and moved into their new house. A putty-brown Tudor with gable roofing. The family has 3 kids total, all separated by an average of 2.3 years in age. The oldest is 10, the youngest 5. Doplar is 11.76 inches tall, and weighs 12.4 pounds. She walks with an almost imperceptible limp due to a leaping mis-hap at 4 months of age.
SOLVE
Knowing all of this information, how many weeks would it take Doplar to get to Casper, if she returned to the house in Pillbrook on May 7th, and left two days later? Ten points extra credit if you can narrow it down to the EXACT day.
[ANSWER:]
She can't. Because the Smith's are no longer there. Doplar made it as far as Pocatello on the 18th of August. But the Smiths had moved again. Mr. Smith got layed off, when the flooring company he worked for in Wyoming went belly up due to bad investments and shoddy material's selection.
The Smith's then packed up the station wagon, tossed in the three kids, and drove to Coral Gables, Florida. The flooring business was booming in this economy at that time of the year in Florida.
Poor Doplar. She got as far as Pocatello, when her amazing and inexplicable kitty senses told her the Smith's were no longer in Wyoming. It then told her they'd moved cross-country to the South. So she turned AROUND, and headed back that way, aiming for Coral Gables, 1647 miles away. A long walk indeed.
The Bad News: she never made it to Florida.
The Good News: She ran into a handsome Tom in Barth, Oklahoma, set up shop in an big Azalea once more, and that was the end of that.
As for the Smiths? Mr. Smith liked his new job. They got another cat that Susie found on Sable Avenue in Coral Gables. A nice, lovable but very dumb orange and white gutter cat. They named him Buttsy Buttercup, and everyone lived happily ever after. Especially Doplar.*
-The End-
A cat’s eyesight is both better and worse than humans. It is better because cats can see in much dimmer light and they have a wider peripheral view. It’s worse because they don’t see color as well as humans do. Scientists believe grass appears red to cats.
So the first cat on Mars is going to have one heck of a time of it. Won't be able to tell WHICH way is up. Poor First Space Kitty. Though, at night, we'll be able to use them to see where the outhouse is when we have to run outside the dome.
Every time you masturbate God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.
Hmmm. Makes you wonder. Cats eat grass out in the yard, to get rid of hairballs. It makes them up-chuck. So, armed with this newest Cat Fact above....do cats think they are eating a tomato? Or ketchup, out in the back yard? Cherries? These are the kinds of life mysteries that keep me up nights.
Plus, if the grass looks red, does ketchup look green to them? Would eating ketchup still make them barf up a fur ball, by the power of suggestion? What about a tomato, though I guess ketchup IS made of tomatoes. We forget that sometimes.
Wow, I don't think I'm getting ANY sleep tonight.
Cats respond most readily to names that end in an \ee\" sound."""
Thank goodness we changed Stinky the Cat's name early on. She was originally Buttercup. But that name just did not fit a junkyard cat with a 'tude' and very few front teeth.
We call her "Busy" a lot now. As well as Stinklepuss. The Busy name fits this idea above well. The other one, Stinklepuss thing...not so much. That would explain why she usually ignores me when I call her that.
While many parts of Europe and North America consider the black cat a sign of bad luck, in Britain and Australia, black cats are considered lucky.
In My part of the country, they're just considered to be hard to see at night, and easy to trip over on the way to the bathroom at 3:06 in the morning.
I'm not so sure about this. I think Stinky the Cat responds to anything that sounds like a can opener. Or food klinking in her dish. Or the sound of the refrigerator opening up. Do any of those make an 'eeek' sound? Maybe in a super-sub-sonic sense, like a dog-whistle. But I think more research is in order here, before I put any socks in my basket on this whole idea.
No wonder cats like mice so much. Whenever a human sees a mouse, they shout "eeek". So this makes total sense.