Cat 5
When I woke up this morning, my family had a cat. He’s six weeks old and the kitten of a feral cat that lives near Mom’s place of work. Apparently, she and her co-workers divided up the kittens last night, and she brought him home early this morning when she got off work (around midnight).
We spent the morning trying to come up with names.
The following were my initial suggestions:
Cat 5
Catilina (The Roman conspirator)1
Catullus
My brother suggested:
Rorschach (The cat is white with nearly symmetrical black blotches on its back.)
Garbage (Like a cat from The Office.)
We came up with many more, but these were basically the “A List.”2 In the end, we went with these names (except for Catullus, because I didn’t want to name the cat after a dirty poet), and drew one randomly. The result?
The cat is now named “Cat 5.” It’s a bad networking joke. It was also inspired partially by this User Friendly comic strip:
1 If I ever got a dog, I would name him Catilina and teach him commands in Latin. Sede! Recumbe! Surge! Dic! Veni! Mane! Etc. I could even train him like Father Veit’s dog, Maggie, to find things for me: “Affer claves!” (Maggie can find keys among other objects. It’s really amazing) If he misbehaved, I would get to shout things like, “O tempora! O mores!”
2 We also thought about making terrible puns on “cat” or “kitten” or even naming him after a UNIX shell command. Of course the cat command would be appropriate, but then people would just think we were lazy. Another Roman name could have been “Cato.”
