The Untitled Matt Colville Project

Four cats isn’t really four cats. If you have cats, you know this.

I go to Petsmart and the nice people there seem to enjoy chatting people up about their aminals. I try to remain coolly taciturn, but it’s hard when everyone in the store has brought their dogbeast with them. No one seems to bring catbeasts.

If you’re a sixty year old grandmother at PetSmart and this tallish, suntanned younger guy with great hair squeals “DOGGUMS!” You tend to smile proudly that someone is admiring your dog, albiet in a manner usually associated with 9 year old girls.

If, however, you’re a smoking-hot 20-something at Petsmart and this creepy, older, doughy white guy with great hair says “OMG Dee Oh Gee!” I think the situation is somewhat more complex.

Because the smoking-hot 20 something expects the attention. I mean she obviously expects the attention and certainly I wouldn’t normally mind giving it to her. At length. Several times a day with perhaps a 10 minute break now and then.

But she doesn’t expect me to ignore her and squeal quietly over her dog. Without fail the diabolically hot girl looks around. I don’t know why this is, because I am clearly reacting to a dog and she must know she has a dog with her, but I think she’s so used to being the center of attention that when someone of the otherwise appropriate sex seems not only to be ignoring her gender but her species as well, it’s disorientating. Maybe she’s not actually looking around, but turning her head left and right because she’s momentarily lost her balance and thinks it’s an inner ear thing.

I buy Feline Pine for litter and even though they sell it at PetSmart, the nice young ladies who scans my items are always astonished by it. They’ve never seen it before. The boxes are so light compared to clay litter they ask if the boxes are empty. Probably they’re being facetious. I started on the Feline Pine when one of my cats, Brain, was irradiated and became The Nuclear Cat for 12 days. But that’s another story.

They ask, they always ask, how many cats I have.

“I have four cats,” I say.

“That’s a lot of cats!” I usually get.

“Nah,” I say. And then explain Cat Math.

One cat is obviously one cat.

But two cats is really only a cat and a half. Cats are clean and lazy and mostly entertain themselves. Except for Blackitty, but that’s another story.

Three cats is basically 2 cats, and 4 cats is about 3 cats. Maybe less.

Dogs are different. It’s not clear to me that One Dog is even One Dog, I think One Dog is a dog and a half.

Two dogs is really three dogs, and three dogs is maybe 5.

The thing with dogs though is that once you get to around 5 dogs you get a Pack. I mean, technically one dog is a pack because you are the rest of the pack, but you only see dogs settle down mathematically once you hit 4 – 5 dogs in which case you’ve turned the Difficulty Level up high enough that you start to see some really sophisticated behavior from the Dog AI.

So now you know Cat Math and if someone says they have 4 cats you’ll know that’s not like saying they have 4 dogs. I can show you on your calculator where the C/D conversion button is, if you’d like.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under The Menagerie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.