Why God invented cats

Dieu a inventé le chat pour que l'homme ait un tigre à caresser chez lui // God invented the cat so that man could have a tiger to stroke at home.

 

 

 

When Victor Hugo wrote this, he probably had in mind fluffy cuties who indulgently allow themselves to be stroked in exchange for food, cushy bed and other necessities. 

I wonder what breeds of cats were around in his times. Perhaps unstrokable cats, the hissing balls of fury, all claws, teeth and glowing eyes came into fashion later and he simply wasn't aware of their existence.

Deep and profound brain things inside my head

La meilleure façon de se venger d'un ennemi, c'est de ne pas lui ressembler. // The best revenge is not to be like your enemy

 

I am sure Marcus Aureluis meant something much more profound than the lack of resemblance between the cat and a chihuahua, but well, it serves as an illustration, n'est-ce pas?

Two observations:

 --  A chihuahua en face looks very much like Yoda. Same goes for fennec fox. 

-- As you probably know, chihuahuas are "hate and tremble" type of dogs. I first read this definition in Russian - "дрожь и ненависть". Now, just for the heck of it, let's translate it into French. Google Translate comes up with "haine et tremblement" as one of the possibilities. But a search on these words plus "dog/chien" doesn't bring up photos of chihuahuas, as it does with Russian and English versions. So I probably got the translation wrong. Surely the French have made the same observation. 

Well, three observations, actually. The word "chihuahua" replaces but perfectly the first line in the chorus of "Que sera, sera".

 

There is no winter without snow

 

Il n'est pas d'hiver sans neige, de printemps sans soleil, et de joie sans être partagée // There is no winter without snow, no spring without sun, and no joy without being shared

While the Canary Islands are being slowly getting covered by a thin reddish layer of calima dust, Moscow is blanketed by a record-breaking layer of snow. My sister is sending me snowy pics of the beautiful, if very cold, winter they are having. 

Some of the photos show a small boat on the river Moscow. It stayed there for a few months already, caught in the ice by the first big frost. Now, with all the snow around it, it positively looks like something that belongs to a book on polar exploration. 

The phrase above is a Serbian proverb. Going by it, I didn't have a single winter in the last few years, if we discount the snow on Teide. No shortage of sun, though.