The Catula, or Cat Spatula, is a ridiculous invention meant to help kind-hearted cat owners to move their cats from one place to another. It would gently pick up and move a cat from a shady place on the floor to a new, sunny patch. If your cats are asleep in a cute position on a chair or the couch, and you want to sit down, just use your Catula!
I came up with this in 2003, picturing it as a thin sheet of plastic with handles attached. Then recently I saw this video for a motorized conveyor belt picker-upper-thingie that can move a smear of ketchup and mustard without disarranging its smeariness. The video is oddly hypnotic, as the disembodied human hands swirl the ketchup with a spoon into increasingly more messed up ways, then pick it up and put it back.
This would obviously be perfect for sleeping cats – if only it were completely silent. Not a hair out of place!
It’s really the perfect bad invention. It would never work, and having a special gadget just to avoid waking up your cat, well…
That video – sound muted even because it’s 3:30a and I’m in a dark bedroom pretending I’m not awake still – is hypnotic.
I keep thinking 3 things:
1) If you used that on a cat, there is no way the cat would stay in the same position. Cats are decidedly unlike artistic mustart-ketchup swirls. This must be why cat hair is not a good condiment (as anyone who has ever owned a cat can attest.)
2) Why? Why is there a need for a device that can do that? Are there art forms in Japan that require the artist to pickup then redeposit condiments? What sort of mad world needs that device?
3) I really want one of those. I’d spend hours creating condiment art and lifting it up & down in a most Homer-Simpson-like way.