Episode 521 - The Cyprian Cat

I work in veterinary medicine, and when we have a euthanasia or a doa, one way we confirm that there is no brain activity is to check for a blink response. We also do this to check anesthesia depth during surgery. Blinking when something touches around your eye, or on the eye is one of the last reflexes to go, so this is an odd but legitimate way to check for brain activity.

100% would watch the gritty Murder She Wrote reboot!

Tia Solita

So I haven't read this story, but just finished the episode and towards the end I began to wonder if this was originally a script someone wrote as an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It was rejected and they turned it into this story. I can easily see the gang trying to get out of legal trouble when Frank shot someone and insisting he thought it was a cat (maybe Dennis' ex-wife Marlene who had surgery so she looked more catlike). Not to mention assaulting someone with wet towels as a means of waking them up, and poking at their eyeballs. If only the Cyprian cat was wearing kitten mittens, they might not have woken up our hero so he could start blasting.

I'm very sure that story was adapted for the PBS/BBC show 'Mystery'. It was my introduction to Lord Peter.

Scott Morrison

While in some sense a really neat idea I have to say I wasn't really feeling this one especially compared to The Leopard Lady where the supposed supernatural aspect worked even if it somehow turns out there was nothing supernatural going on at all. That said, one of the big take aways from this episode was learning about the authoress herself and just goes to show how crazy even mundane life is for some people.

Rich people are paranoid and they don’t really work. They have plenty of free time to read mystery novels that justify their paranoia, and they have plenty of money to buy them.

Re: gritty Murder She Wrote, the whole classic murder-mystery genre is a bit odd. How many murders are there that involve complex plots, inheritance, etc. among genteel people, as opposed to clumsy domestic or drug-deal-gone-bad murders? Why do we have a vast body of literature about what must be a rare type of crime?

"Cats walk across bridges all the time, they don't care." I am picturing a cat in silhouette, with its tail in the air, crossing a bridge, with a thought bubble saying "Whatever, I do what I want!" He-Man fan-fiction month sounds like a great time for some Thundarr the Barbarian...just saying.

Ugh. I can't stand stories where cats are killed. I mean, I get it, but, please, no more dead cats.

Peter Larsen

I recently watched The Uncanny (1977) which is a British horror anthology starring Peter Cushing. All the stories feature cats. It's a silly and fun movie. On Amazon if anyone wants more cat based horror.

David Halstead

Oh gosh I'm so delighted to hear you both talking about the word 'pukka.' I'm familiar with it from 35 years of studying Urdu and Hindi. It's a very useful word that's been conscripted into English usage. It means 'fully formed, ripe, solid, firm, fully cooked" and can be used to describe a solid gentleman, a brick home, a paved road, or even a ripe piece of fruit. Watch out for its counterpart - 'kachi' - which of course suggests otherwise, as in a house made of mud bricks that won't last through the monsoon, unripe mangos, or even 'in kachi abadi,' slums. And don't ever ever eat a kachi curry. Fair warning!

Although that depends where you're from: black cats are considered lucky in many places outside America.

Good point. It's also kind of like Pumpkinhead.

I'm surprised you left you Sayers' revenge on John Cornos, in the form of publishing a novel (Strong Poison) where a character who's clearly Cornos and also a dick gets murdered early on, and his former lover (Sayers stand-in Harriet Vane, who makes regular appearances thereafter) is put on trial for his murder, (Lord Peter naturally leaps in to save her from this unjust accusation) and over the course of the book, keeps heaping on details on just what an unpleasant person Not John Cornos was. Highly recommend the book, incidentally - Strong Poison is a great read.

Stewart Huntsman

I loved this episode, especially all of Chad's asides on weird cat person behavior. I think there's a little bit of Ancient Sorceries going on here - if you take a supernatural reading, which I'm inclined to, despite our unreliable narrator - it's suggested that the innkeepers are in league with the cats in some way, between when he catches the innkeeper surreptitiously feeding one of the cats, or the way the gun store owner speaks. Except instead of getting invited to late night satanic which cat rituals he adopts what I may say I'd always considered a very American attitude and goes "Well, I'd better get me a gun and shoot them non-supernatural cats."

Stewart Huntsman

Re: the eye poking thing, testing the corneal reflex (what I’m making the assumption this is) is a way to see if comatose or vegetative patients experienced brain-death. Essentially, if something touches your eye when you’re not consciously controlling for it, you WILL blink. If you don’t it means that there’s pretty serious nerve damage or that you’re dead. It’s similar to pupillary reflex, where as long as you’re alive your pupils should adjust to different amounts of light and expand/contract. Eyes are the window to the soul, or in this case whether or not your soul is still in your body.

Evan

So yes, Felice is the feminine form of Felix, but Felix the Cat is itself a bit of word play. Felix is latin for lucky and Felix the Cat is a black cat, traditionally an unlucky animal to cross.

Bryce Perry

Assuming the story is all an elaborate excuse for shooting one's lover, I like to imagine this little exchange: Hero: So, yeah. I was just shooting at a cat 'cause you know how I hate cats. Everybody knows how I hate cats. Except for shooting. Love to shoot at cats. Cats, you know? Not people. Just cats. Lawyer: Right. I think we've covered that. Now where did this firearm come from? You'd brought it with you on vacation? Hero: Well, yeah. No. I mean no. I didn't bring it with me. I bought out of town. At a shop. A gun shop. And I told the guy to sell me their best cat-killing gun 'cause I love killing me some cats. And he was all like, "Hey, maybe you should be careful about killing cats" and all and boy do I wish I'd listened to that guy. I mean, I wouldn't be in this position at all if I hadn't been so intent on killing cats. Lawyer: You wouldn't remember the name of the gun shop, would you? Hero: Yeah. Sure. It was something like Cat Kill Guns. 'Cause that's what caught my eye. That sign. Lawyer: And the proprietor can vouch for all this? Hero: Um.... Sure... Yeah... I mean, he's Canadian. From Canada. You wouldn't know him. It might be hard to find him.

Allowing the story as told, we could assume that the cat is her familiar and she is a witch. Evidently the familiar attracts a lot of other cats - or there are a ton of witches in town.

I took it as both a witch's mark and foreshadowing, like Jake Gittes noticing the black speck in Evelyn's eye in Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN.

Felice obviously wasn't transforming into a cat, since the narrator and Mr. Merridew perform a whole Three Stooges routine with her senseless body while the Cyprian cat is howling on a window sill; so was her consciousness/mind/spirit possessing a cat, or taking the form of a cat? I'm guessing the latter, since the only corpse found after the shooting was that of Felice. In which case, what's the deal with all the other cats in the story? Are the little ginger, the stinking black tom, and the white kitten real cats somehow drawn to the Cyprian, or is Little Hexham a popular destination for out of body experiences?

Concerning the mark on the wife's chest. While it could easily be just an awkward attempt at foreshadowing or the fumbled attempt of an unreliable narrator to take the blame off himself, there is an interesting third possiblity. Back during the witch hunts and inquisition the chief task of the inquisitor was to find proof of the accused's pact with the devil, this proof came in the form of some sort of "dark mark" on the witch's body. They would claim anything, a scar, a large birthmark, an odd shadow, dirt, and yes even...a mole. X) so perhaps this was meant to be more proof to the reader that this woman is indeed a supernatural creature? Or maybe I'm talking crazy and our narrator is just a perv, lol.

Those sexual demands were she had to kiss a goat.

Alan Ricks

All of this, and there's also their scientifically proven need to be as contrary and chaotic as possible at all times :)

Remember the Manly Wade Wellman story "O Ugly Bird!"? The connection between the cat and the woman reminded me very much of that between Mr Onselm and the Ugly Bird, which leads me to think that the clueless protagonist of this tale would have done better to have left the pistol alone and just swatted the cat with a guitar.

Adopted into English but, as Chad suspected, via India. From Hindi and Urdu, it means ripe or fully cooked and is used figuratively to mean fully formed, permanent or sure, so it's a short jump to the English use to mean something proper and good. I can imagine Rachel saying it in a Yorkshire accent and Chris not being able to pronounce it, but I'm confident any American can manage the word because it rhymes with Samuel L Jackson's catchphrase ...and also with trucker.

As a person starting a Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign soon, the idea of having some of my players completely ignorant of the Mythos or even folklore in general is something I’m excited about. I think that element has a lot of appeal, zombie films spring to mind. Usually those films follow a normal person completely unprepared for the supernatural and we follow them as it continues to intrude on their world. Fun stuff, now replace it with cat women from Saturn I guess?

Kit Ainslie

Pukka should sound like puck-a (as in hockey puck). It comes from the Hindi/Urdu word for "ripe" (by extension correct and proper) and similar words in other Indian languages. In my own mother tongue, Malayalam the equivalent "paccha" means "green" but by extension "fresh" or "proper". Malayalam unlike Hindi or Urdu (or English!) isn't an Indo-European language but a Dravidian one so this may be a linguistic false friend rather than an actually related word.

Y'know, there's a bit of a precedent for cats flocking to people that dislike them, actually. More accurately, they can be more affectionate to strangers that *ignore* them. From what I understand, cats tend to interpret close attention as caution--if some strange animal is paying close attention to them, staring, making weird sounds and movements at them, et alia, it's because they're concerned that cat may be a threat, and are ready to defend themselves. That's how it works if a new *cat* is acting that way to them, after all. As such, a person ignoring them, or looking at them with other signs of ease like half-lidded eyes (cats don't recognize the expression of squinting) or making the body "small" by slumping in your seat or recoiling away from them are things that make a new cat potentially think you're indifferent to their presence. You aren't considering them a threat, so they don't need to consider you one, either.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

Just dropping by to make sure someone brings up witch-marks: conspicuous moles or marks on the skin or witches that were supposedly nipples at which familiars would feed. I assume that's what the mole was invoking.

I really like the words that come to English from Indian. You get ones that you can spot (like Pukka) but then you get the ones that we just use everyday like Pundit and Pyjamas. Not sure about Saki over Masters of the Universe....

Yes - it is a joke. We didn't know what we were doing yet. Now we do - we'll be covering the author Saki!

You’re joking about the He-Man fan fic, right? Seriously, Manimal is ok but MotU is too much.

Puca (Poo-ka) is of Celtic origin - a mischievous shape changer, that turns from person to animal, like the trickster of many other cultures. Pukka (puck-er) is an English word for genuine, proper, or good. Best said with a broad Cockney accent and/or slang e.g. ‘Cheers Terry, that’s a pukka cup of Rosie’ There is also a brand of pies you’ll find in most English chip shops and supermarkets called ‘pukka pies’