Some Mark Twain Trivia...!

Being a cat lover myself, I was delighted to find out that I was in good company.

There has been a lot of famous people that were cat lovers. Folks like Hemmingway, Abe Lincoln, and my favorite...Mark Twain. Here's some trivia on just how important Twain considered his cats to be.

MARK TWAIN

 Mark Twain (1835-1910) may well out-crazy even the craziest of cat people. He had up to 19 cats at one time, all of whom he loved and respected far beyond whatever he may have felt about people. "If man could be crossed with the cat," he said, "it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat." When he was away from home, he would rent cats, paying their owners a large enough sum to see to their needs for a lifetime.

In keeping with the tradition established by Richelieu, Southey, and Gautier, Twain gave his cats most excellent names, among them Apollinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite, Buffalo Bill, Satan, Sin, Sour Mash, Tammany, Zoroaster, Soapy Sal, Pestilence, and Bambino. To be fair, the credit for the last of these goes to Twain's daughter Clara, who took in Bambino during a sanatorium stay. She gave the kitten to her father after one of the other patients ratted her out.

When Bambino escaped one day, Twain was frantic. He put ads in New York newspapers describing the cat as "large and intensely black" and offering a $5 reward for his return. As Calvin Coolidge would find out 20 years later, a famous person asking for aid in the return of a lost cat was subject to an enormous quantity of doppelgangers and would-be changelings from people who just wanted to make contact with the celebrity. Even after Bambino turned up on his own a few days later and Twain sent notice to all the papers, people still turned up at his Fifth Avenue home with cats for him.

Now, I figure that if someone like Mark Twain was crazy enough to keep 19 cats at one time, and rent cats when he was on the road, then my having 4 cats at my house isn't too bad, ya know?

Coffee in the kitchen again today. Still have some cobbler left, if you want some.