Plant Lover

Dear Plant Lover:

The point isn't whether or not geranium is a claw food. The question to ask yourself is: "How are all the other cats in the household eating it?" If they're using their paws, you should, too. However, if they're carving up the geranium leaves with knives and forks, then you're expected to do the same. Etiquette requires that we make our fellow felines feel as comfortable in our society as they possibly can, at all times. Remember: It's far better to meow with our friends than it is to purr alone. And don't forget to use a napkin to wipe the geranium juice off your whiskers!

Would you like to save money on your phone bills? Well, DialingWithPawPads has a deal for you. Install the software, plug in a microphone, and you can make all the long distance and local phone calls you want - for free!

The program ships with an address book that lets you enter the names and phone numbers of your feline friends, family members, and business associates. It even has special hot keys for such important personages as the fire chief (for those times when your human climbs a tree and can't get down again), the doctor (in case a human chews on inedible cat toys or poisonous house plants), and AAA (so your humans' car can be safely towed away before they can even think about putting you in it and taking you for a ride).

Although the quality of the calls may not match those of a regular phone line, there are several ways to improve the sound. First and foremost, you can use a set of headphones made especially for cats (or you can adapt your humans' headphones by stretching the earpads and pinching the ends to create a conical shape). This will cut out extraneous sounds, such as whimpering dogs, fellow felines in heat, bawling young humanoids, blaring television sets, and so on. Secondly, if you can try placing a homemade wind shield over the microphone to make it unidirectional. However, in our trials, we weren't able to find a material that wasn't pierced too easily by claws during animated phone calls.

DialingWithPawPads can be used by humans, too, if they don an optional PawPad glove. However, the keyboard - which depicts turkey twos, fishbone fives, sardine sixes, and the like -- was created with cats' needs in mind. Also, the advertisements that support the calls are geared toward cat consumers and may not be appropriate for all humans - particularly, the squeamish ones.

This software may not put your local bell company out of business anytime soon. However, it can help you stretch your budget as you reach out and paw all the cats who really matter.

This week I went undercover - literally - and attacked all the slipcovers in the house.

I'd long been aware that my humans hid the choicest furniture from view with a variety of plastic and cloth dropcloths. What are they keeping from me, I naturally wondered. When the question became an obsession, I decided to something about it.

One by one, I lifted the slipcovers off all the chairs in the house. Then, with the furniture plainly in view, I did an immediate on-site inspection of the uncovered items. As I suspected, they were no great shakes. We're talking discount store quality chairs made mostly of cardboard, paste, and scraps of cheap fabric. There were no heirlooms or antiques here. There was nothing, in fact, that deserved to remain intact.

Please use a #2 claw, and compute all percentages to three decimal points. I'll ask you to turn in your worksheets along with your answers.

1. How many times a day, on average, does your human insult you?
2. What percentage of those insults are justified?
3. What percentage of those insults arise from humans' failure to acknowledge your superiority?
4. How many of those insults would violate your community's standards of decency?
5. What percentage of those violations would get those humans' offspring expelled from school?
6. What percentage of those violations are new vocabulary words to you?
7. How often to you react to such insults with violence?
8. How often, when responding to those insults, do you break items precious to your humans?
9. What percentage of those breakages are ultimately attributed to you?
10. What percentage do you actually get away with?

Talk back to Socratail: socratail@meowmail.com

A. You should be. While Microsoft is much reviled for many things, it has long shown an interest in helping cats compute. Remember the first edible wheel mouse that entertained us by periodically playing dead? How about the introduction of WFC (Word for Cats), the first word processor designed for claw typists who prefer to walk on the keyboard rather than sit in a chair? Then there's Microsoft NV (Night Vision) 4.0, for cats who do their best programming after hours. Alas, if the government splits Microsoft into two or more companies, it might actually have to spend its time creating bug-free products for humans that contain useful features. Which, in turn, means that the folks in Redmond will have less time to sit around developing feline-friendly software and accessories. Stay tuned for more on this important topic in future Hairball columns.