Peckerwood Manor

Forget monkeys. Forget hoomans. Forget janky Disney movies. 60 years ago this year, the French did a very French thing: they launched the first and only  chatte into space (" chatte" is "cat" in French, you rube). Her name was Felicette. She was but a simple stray wandering the streets of Paris, smoking Gitanes and enjoying the occasional espresso dans les cafes . Everything changed when she was secretly recruited to serve her country by Cerma, the French space agency. Competing against 14 other cats for the honor, Madmoiselle Felicette charmed her space hoomans and was chosen to be shot into space. This was very courageous on her part, since in 1963, space travel was still quite treacherous. Several dogs and a monkey had already died during their rocket launches, so Felicitte knew there was no guarantee that she would return alive (much less in one piece). But Viva La France! Viva Le Chatte! She was up for the mission.  Kaboom! Felicette, pictured above in her...

Why this isn't celebrated on a Caturday, I'll never know, but today is International Cat Day, a day to bow down before our vicious furry gremlins, pray that they don't eat us should we die in our sleep, and give them extra treats. If your response to this is, "But I already do that every single day," then you're doing it right, but do better. You can always do better.  There are many fun facts about cats. And many cat celebrities. Post-Egyptian, the first modern cat megastar arrived in 1919 with the animated short, "Feline Follies," which introduced mere mortals to Felix The Cat just after WWI.  Then there's Carol Channing.  "Wait, what?" you say, "Was Carol a cat?" Could have been! But actually, she famously played a cat in "Archy and Mehitabel," a musical adaptation of the famed 1916 daily newspaper column by Don Marquis, which was published in The New York Sun.  The columns were later collected and published in se...