Pictures of Cats With Funny Expressions on their Faces

Last week during my blog I discovered the secret of life. Somewhat surprisingly I found it in a car park in Louisville, Kentucky. It is strange the links that are made in life that eventually lead to self actualisation, but there it is. Alas rumour has it that this will now form the plot for Dan Brown's next novel. So I can only apologise to the car park users as I expect the lot to be full with tourists from now on (once they find it).

Anyway, this week I promised pictures of cats with funny expressions on their faces.

This is my cat Lulu, named after the diminutive Scottish teen pop singer from the 60s. Why? I suppose you haven't heard my cat sing.

Happy Lulu

Serious Lulu

Reflective Lulu

Angry Lulu

Lulu in love

Can I go now?

Taking cat photos was not as easy as I expected. Just google 'cat' and millions of cute felines suddenly appear - how is that possible? I follow my cat for days taking photographs and nothing cute happens. Although I did rip my trousers falling out of a tree in the local park, and the old lady I fell on didn't find the experience cute at all. It was only when the policeman examined the boring cat images on the camera was I allowed to leave the station - 4 hours later.

Frustrated, I took action. When I attempted to put a clown's nose on Lulu, she objected. It wasn't a fair fight. She was young, quick, angry and well armed and I wasn't. I beat a hasty retreat as I didn't want to go into work with mysterious marks on my face again. So I ended up with these photos - and from this moment on let it be known that all other cat pictures on the internet have been Photoshopped - do not believe them.

This incident confirmed what I had always suspected - I had a small dose of ailurophobia*, but also made me realise I had a big dose of amychophobia**. This got me thinking about phobias. It is well known that Alfred Mosher Butts invented Scrabble to overcome his hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia***. I'm not sure I've spelt that correctly because my word processor's angry caterpillar immediately underlined it. I then realised it was set at U.S. English so took out any unnecessary 'u's and swapped the 's's for 'z's - that didn't help at all - the caterpillar just got angrier. So I set my spellchecker to 'English' English and ignored the caterpillar confident in the knowledge that machines don't know everything.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about phobias. Then it got me thinking about phobias in museums. It is thought that the director of a certain farming museum is an agoraphobe****, and rumour has it that the Visitor Services Manager at the People's History Museum is an alektorophobe*****.

So this week I will be conducting a survey at the Museum of Unreason to discover and then report on the ten most common phobias in the heritage world  - watch this space (unless, of course, you are an astrophobe).

* fear of cats
** fear of being scratched
*** fear of long words
**** fear of tractors - probably
***** fear of chickens