The Faultcats Strike(-Slip) Back!

I really need to clean the piles of papers and books off my apartment floor. It doesn't help, however, that my cats tend to pull books off the bookshelf for fun. Andreas has, in this case, chosen some entirely too appropriate literature to pull down and sit on:


Garlock caught wind of this, and objected that the field guide in question does not represent his namesake. He made sure to show Andreas and I exactly where it ought to go on that map:


(This picture is not posed. Yes, I dropped the rubber band on the book, but that's only because I was sitting near the book in order to get pictures of Andreas sitting on the book. Garlock pulled the rubber band to that particular position all by himself. Smart kitty!)

Meet the Faultcats

So, Callan Bentley at NOVA Geoblog posted an incredibly cute picture of his feline lab assistant, which has inspired me to share photos of my own fuzzy seismically-inclined monsters.

This is Andreas:

He knows what he's named after, and he clearly feels it is his responsibility to learn as much about that namesake as he can.

He's had these tendencies from a very young age:

(Andreas and his five littermates were born in my apartment this past summer. Their mother was a stray that I took in, not knowing she was pregnant. The mommycat and four of the other babies have since been adopted, but I decided to keep Andreas and his brother Garlock. He's three weeks old in this photo, and he crawled onto the computer all by himself.)

While it's cute to see Andreas studying, it's not the most opportune thing when he decides to read the same thing I'm reading while I'm reading it.


Garlock has similar studious tendencies, though he seems to have taken more to ethnomusicology than to the earth sciences. However, he is afraid of my camera, so I have many fewer pictures of him in general, let alone while he's "working." This is one of the better ones (Garlock's the black one):

(The Siamese on the right is Jacinto, who is, believe it or not, part of the same litter as Andreas and Garlock. Guess what the other three kittens were named.)