An email from Istanbul (note: felids!)

My friend Andrew Berry teaches a mini-course in Istanbul once a year, and of course Istanbul is Cat City Central (see below). I got an email from him today about his encounter with a cat while lecturing. As you’ll see, Istanbul cats are especially fearless, as the citizens of that beautiful city nurture them and defer to their needs. I post this with Andrew’s permission.

I’m in Istanbul, teaching evolution at Sabanci University.  An unexpected highlight yesterday was, well, rather charming, and brought you to mind.

As you well know, Istanbul is a very cat-y city.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/02/paw-sitive-relationship

And campus here is no exception.  There are various cats that roam the halls of the university, fed, I think, by cat-loving members of staff.  Yesterday morning, I was halfway through a lecture  (some 300 students in a cavernous lecture theatre) when a cat wandered in through the side door at the front giving access to the stage.  The cat, not appearing especially interested in what I was saying, decided to brush up, in the way that cats do, against the podium.  While I cheerfully held forth about — yes! — Turkish creationism, the cat explored its surroundings.  On the screen, I was showing the students my claim to fame in this particular area:

http://harunyahya.com/en/works/14429/darwinists-now-raise-their-hopes

And the cat kept looking around.  Then, unable to suppress its urge to explore vertically, it leapt in a single graceful bound on to the podium, delighting its student audience in the process.  The top of the podium is not especially spacious and most of it was occupied by my laptop.  This, apparently, looked like a nice place to sit down (I suppose it’s pleasantly warm), so the bloody animal plonked itself down on my keyboard.  This promptly disconnected the computer from the projector, killing my presentation.  The students were naturally extremely pleased by this performance.  I, however, began worrying that a conspiracy was afoot: that the cat was some kind of stealth agent sent in to my lecture by Turkey’s creationists with explicit instructions to interrupt and disrupt.  I accordingly expected resistance, so it was a relief that Creation Cat could easily be induced to forsake its comfy new perch, meaning that I could relaunch the presentation.  The cat, unimpressed by what it had found at the dizzying heights atop the podium, decided that this was all too exhausting, and wrapping itself, on the floor, around one edge of the foot of the podium, fell asleep.  There it remained for another hour or so, until after I’d finished the lecture.

Well, there you go.  Even though I most definitively am not a cat person (I’m allergic to the damn’d things.  I suppose that makes me a nothing person, because, as I think you know, I’m also not a dog person), I have to hand it to this beast.  What it did, it did well: stylishly, and with commendable unflappability.  Fortunately, not quite, as lecturing problems go, a cat-astrophe, but nearly.

I asked Andrew if he had a photo of this, and he responded with a similar photo:

In case it’s helpful, see below, I found this online.  It’s not my cat, but it is at this university, and doing something not far removed from what mine was doing (ie lounging on a lecture podium; this one, in contrast to mine, seems to have had the good grace to avoid the laptop keyboard)

Source

JAC: I recommend to readers once again that they see the recent movie Kedi, a terrific and heartwarming picture of the cats of Istanbul and the people who care for them. It’s at once a portrait of the city, of its inhabitants, and of their unique relationship with semi-feral moggies. I wrote a short review of the movie in July, and I see the critics at Rotten Tomatoes gave it a very high rating:

If you have a cat lover on your Christmas list, a DVD of Kedi is the perfect gift.  Remember, the last movie I recommended highly was “Spotlight”, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay in 2015.