Here's one for the cat lovers on our forum:

Signs That Your Cat Is Too Fat

* Cat door retro-fitted with garage door opener.

* Confused guests constantly mistaking him for a beanbag chair.

* Always lands on her spleen.

* Fifteen month gestation period, and still no kittens.

* No longer cleans self unless coated in Cheese Whiz.

* Catfood dish replaced with a trough.

* Luxurious, shiny black fur replaced with mint green polyester pantsuit.

* It's no longer safe to lift him without a spotter.

* Waits for the third bowl of food to get finicky.

* She only catches mice that get trapped in her gravitational pull.

* Has more chins than lives.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

Answers

I've seen some cats matching that description . . . they look like giant tribbles ('member that Star Trek episode?). Still laughing Jim, good ones.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

My brother used to have an enormous orange Tom that looked like he has somehow managed to swallow an entire watermelon! Imagine a furry orange Goodyear blimp with legs. The cat's name was Thud, in honor of the noise he made when he jumped off the bed.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

I raced back to look at Maya wondering if you were teasing about her. Okay Maya's a little large but mostly just cute!!...Kirk

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

Kirk: Maya used to be fatter but she's slimmed down a bit over the last couple of years. I think when our other cat died (Leo) she lost her arch rival so she doesn't have his "competition" any more.

Sherri: Great name for a cat! LOL!

j.r.: I do remember that episode, actually. I watched the original series over an over again til I got sick of it. Now I can't watch the original as it's just too cheesy, IMO. But it was sure fun to watch at the time... :-)

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

Okay, thread drift here -- Did anyone see the episode of Deep Space 9 where they went back in time to thwart an attempt to change the past. It involved the Klingon agent exposed at the end of the Tribbles episode, so the characters from Deep Space 9 had to go back and make sure that his attempt didn't work. They wove old scenes in with new scenes and used computers to add things in. It was very funny! I enjoyed DS9, but that was probably my favorite episode!

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

ANOTHER time travel episode in the Star Trek universe, eh? How in the heck did the writers ever keep track of all those coming and goings? ;-D

BTW, I didn't watch much of DS9 when it was out but after hearing about that particular episode, I wish I had. Sounds pretty good.

My favorite episode from the original series: The City on the Edge of Forever. I thought the Guardian of Forever was cool.

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

Yes, I saw that episode! It was great! One of the most memorable parts of it was when someone turned to ask Worf why the Klingons back then looked different, and he got real uncomfortable and huffy and said (crossing his arms in front of his chest and staring off into space with assumed aloofness) "We do not like to speak of it".

LOL!

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

Oh yeah, and about thread drift. See, DS 9 is in the same milieu as TNG, and Data is on TNG. Data is a friend and compatriot of Worf who is on both DS9 and TNG. And Data has a cat named Spot. So its really still about cats... >:D

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

Yeah, Sojourner, that was a great moment. Nice save on the thread drift, too.

-- Anonymous, July 12, 2001

When I heard that the newest Trek series was going to be set pre- Enterprise I was really curious as to how they were going to deal with the whole Klingon appearance issue. According to the interview with Scott Baccula in the latest issue of TV guide, they're just going to ignore the problem. The Klingons are going to be the modern "Worf-type" and they're just going to pretend that the original Klingon look never existed.

No, I'm not a geek, even though I'm spending this weekend at a SciFi convention and by fiance is teaching himself how to speak Romulan!

-- Anonymous, July 12, 2001

Too funny!

I especially liked that bit about only washing itself when covered in cheese whiz! Now that's quite a picture. I used to have a graceless used cat named Isis who weighed 17 lbs. when I got her. Talk about your average lump! She was so graceless and off balance that standing on her hind legs to play with a fishing pole cat toy would always cause her to loose her balance and topple over backwards.

So much for cat dignity. She has new owners now who refer to her as "the diva formerly known as Isis"!

-- Anonymous, July 14, 2001

I don't have a cat (probably a Good Thing with all the small animals I have), but I'm an official Auntie to 'Sheba the Amoeba'. Sheba has some kind of a systemic problem, and even tho she couldn't *really* be mistaken for a beanbag chair, she does double as a sofa pillow. The cat 'amoebomizes' things around my friend's house. She lies down on them and they disappear into the soft folds. If you're lucky, you will see them again.

One day the phone disappeared, and Corky couldn't find it until the cat started ringing.

And Sheba is Spotted, so I guess it also leads back to Star Trek...

-- Anonymous, July 15, 2001