Kittens

[davidn]

It's quite shocking for me to realize that even as far back as this journal goes (it now spans eight years), I've never before posted about my parents getting new pets - the latest in the lineage of cats survived a truly impressive amount of time, as they'd been around for a good while before I even left for university. But a family friend emailed them about a litter that they wanted to give to a good home, and so for the first time, I've been introduced to the new family cats via a webcam. The successors of Pushkin, Toby, Cleo, Jaguar, Max, Smokey, Cassie, Chekhov (who didn't have a Gun) and Gandalf (who was neither Grey nor White) are these beautiful striped grey kittens...







Cat X and Cat XI don't yet have names. As Russians seem to survive the longest, I would suggest something like Karpov and Kasparov, but one's a boy and one's a girl. My brother suggested a couple of names that I really liked, but I'm not sure if having cats named after our next-door neighbours would be weird and/or confusing.

Maybe Wilkshire and Cumberbatch.

Comments

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Oh dear lord how adorable, I want regular updates and lots of pictures.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Oh, by the way: Stalin and Sokolov.

[davidn]

They really are beautiful - I'd forgotten after this long :) Outright going for "Stalin" might be a bit... blatantly Soviet (and wouldn't be too far off calling a cat Hitler). "Sokolov" is nice, though :)

[kjorteo]

Jonathan and Celine, obviously.

Also, they are adorable.

[davidn]

Don't ruin my entire image of the concept of cats, now!

Although, as much as all cat faces look pretty similar to us, there was something about the way that the one on the right is holding his/her head that reminded me of one of your character portraits...

[kjorteo]

You know, I didn't notice that before, but ... you're right, I see the similarities, now.

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

Gagarin and Tereskova (or Yuri and Valentina) for first man and woman in space?

[davidn]

I like those a lot! I'll pass them on. (After I went on to Wikipedia just to double-check that they had both actually survived.)

[kibet.livejournal.com]

What about Kot (cat in Russian) and Koschka (kitty in Russian)?

[davidn]

I really loved the combination of sounds - but "Kot" sadly shares the meaning "faeces" in German! "Katze and Koshka" sounds good, but might be slightly too similar - though it's not as if I can really tell them apart anyway.

[kjorteo]

Boris and Natasha.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

Godamnit you beat me to it.

[kjorteo]

And my Boris made it to like 22-point-something so clearly the name works.

[davidn]

I was about to have this terrified jaw-dropping Psycho Mantis moment because those are the names of my parents-in-law's cats, but then remembered that they'd been named after characters from that film with the moose and the squirrel-thing.

[kjorteo]

You ... weren't familiar with them?

[davidn]

No, in fact I'd never heard of them before the cats.

That last bit is... surprisingly topical for something made fifty years ago.