Cat Toys
From The Encyclopaedia Expurgatia
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
There are, of course, many different kinds of cat toys. There are the cat toys which squeak when put under pressure, and there are the cat toys which have little bells all over them--not so much to amuse the cats, perhaps, as to annoy the cats' owners. Then there are the cat toys which work on wound coils of springs and which scamper about on wheels as if fleeing from the pursuing feline. And there are those fluffy, spongy cat toys which don't do much of anything at all.
Indeed, there are many different kinds of cat toys; but none are more different than those to be found on a small, dismal planet in the backwater boondocks of the System of Sirius.
Although the cats' home planet is one of the infinitesimal number of planets which are actually less exciting to live upon than Earth [a small, slightly less dismal planet in the System of Sol, in the galaxy called the Milky Way, in Universe 97D], it does produce and export rather some lovely cat toys.
Some such Siriunmade cat toys are: The Portable Hole, perfect for walking into a room and disappearing from the face of the planet; The Ventriloquist Sampler, perfect for the spontaneous emulation of a small, furry, quadrupedal feline who has no purpose in any of its rumoured nine lives [which, incidentally, all cats do have] than to follow, obey, and depend upon homosapiens [bipedal carbonbased organisms of the CATSBANE virus (V6.66) which are generally assumed to be indigenous to Earth, Solar System, Galaxy Milky Way, Universe 97D]; The Magic Mouse Escape Box, perfect for the civilised disposal of mice and the storage of other Siriunmade cat toys; and, of course, countless other Siriunmade cat toys which are all sold at a reasonable price.
These cat toys are available to all cats, great and small, rich and poor, clawed and declawed, and have but one warning which must always be followed at the cost of everything else: never allow a noncat, exempli gratia: a homosapien, a dog, a vegetable, or any other semisentient organism to see or use any Siriunmade cat toy. The penalty, by Siriun Law 242-91-8086-38XL Par 67 is so nasty that the government of Sirius have yet to completely finish writing the code. This is not so much due to the length of the penalty in words as it is that no scribe has ever yet been able to write the entire thing down without having his heart explode out of fear.
It really is a nasty punishment.
The Siriunmade cat toys also, for the most part, carry some cutesy little slogan to help sell the products. These are usually intolerably stupid little quips. For instance, on the original packaging for the Magic Mouse Escape Box can be found a sticker which reads:
Intolerably stupid though these slogans invariably are, those products which are adorned by such poetry sell by an average of seventy-two percent better than those without.
It just goes to show that, just because cats are smarter than humans, it doesn't actually make them intelligent.
