There are two cats in The Physics of Success. The first is Erwin Schrödinger’s Cat, which is surely an imaginary cat, as nobody would ever subject a cat to such a diabolical mechanism. It would be a waste of a perfectly good diabolical mechanism.
The other cat, unnamed until now, is Sammy, pictured below. He is very real, and just as it says in the book, he loves fresh bread, preferrably still in the wrapper. The picure is of somewhat poor quality, taken with a phone. Yes, the same phone mentioned in the book as well, although in the extensive list of amazing things that phone does, I neglected to mention the God-only-knows-how-many-megapixel still camera (with flash), not to mention the digital camcorder.
Back to the cat. Sammy is one of three cats in the house. They all have personalities, and they all have teeth and claws, and I’ve had various holes poked in me by all 60 claws at one time or another. Sammy, as you can see from the picture, is different. He’s a Bengal; a breed developed by breeding a tabby cat with an asian leopard. The offspring are then bred and registered as the Bengal, after Prionalurus Begalensis, the species name for the Asian leopard We rescued him after he was abandoned as a kitten in the middle of the winter. We could not leave him outside with temperatures in the teens and freezing rain predicted for the evening. At the time we never heard of a Bengal.
Upon entering the house, he immediately owned all the food, but would allow us to fight for our share. If you attempt to take him out the front door, he will tear you to shreds. Since we do outweigh him, and as mentioned in the book, have a more developed consciousness, we are able to eat without too much trouble. He has come to terms (mostly bad terms, but terms nonetheless) with the two girls, a tabby and a tortoise shell.
Sammy, when he gets paws on a favorite food, will actually say, “Nom-nom-nom” as he eats it, much to the amazement of anybody nearby. What he is actually doing is growling while he eats. Imagine my surprise last week when I hear a particularly loud “nom-nom-nom” coming from the kitchen. When I got there, I found him with a large stem of broccolli in his mouth, glaring up at me. Not the flower, the stem. I’ve got a leopard cat that likes whole wheat bread and broccolli. He’ll do steak, tuna, and chicken, mind you, but for the “nom-nom-nom” treatment you gotta get him some steamed broccolli stems.
