Words | Cats | Ghosts

It's Caturday! Our boy Cake is currently on guard duty at his window seat by the front door. He's vigilantly watching out for Jehovah's Witnesses (and other similar pests), the mail carrier and his BFF (Best Feral Friend), Ghost Cat.

 Now, let's have a few words:

Rangoli
     noun
a traditional Hindu decoration on a floor or other flat surface usually made of powder, such as colored or dyed sand, chalk, crushed limestone, or rice flour.

Okay sure, that’s what a rangoli is but, sweah ta gawd, anytime I read that word the image that pops into my mind will be of ravioli. 

Strigiform
     adjective
of or pertaining to owls.
…is based on Latin strix (stem strig-), “screech owl,” which comes from Ancient Greek stríx, “owl,” of uncertain origin. (source)

Nope. A striiform is actually some kind of high tech science fictional device. Probably used by Bones in the med bay of the USS Enterprise.

Ghostwriter
     noun
a person who writes one or numerous speeches, books, articles, etc., for another person who is named as or presumed to be the author.

Oh please, everyone knows that a ghostwriter is a confirmed ghost who writes. Great doppelganger writers? Willy the Shake (who created great parts for ghostly actors in more than a few of his famous plays), Jack Kerouac (who mainly penned spectral stream of consciousness poetry and fiction) and Casper (who wrote and drew comic book adventure tales for children).

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road 

Happy Caturday!