Purrfect Arch or Cat's Meow
- Choose the Cat’s Meow battery-powered mouse simulator, or the Purrfect Arch self-groomer and scratcher
- Might not get your cat to stop messing up your stuff, but will make you feel more justified in your rage
- Model: CM011112, PRO11106
Cats are not the opposite of dogs.
Can we get that straight? They’re practically twins. They’re both four-legged, warm-blooded, fur-bearing omnivores who give birth to live offspring that they nurse from mammary glands. They both owe their smashing success to their domestic relationship to humans. They’re a couple of genetic tweaks away from being identical. Nobody over the age of 8 has any business positing any scheme in which dogs and cats represent opposite conceptual poles.
“But dog people and cat people,” you might say, “they’re really opposite personalities!” Wrong again. How do you account for the millions of homes where cats and dogs coexist?
Apples are not the opposite of oranges, either. Country is not the opposite of rock ‘n’ roll. A Mac is not the opposite of a PC. Democrats are not the opposite of Republicans. Every half of each pair is almost the same as the other. A sweet round domesticated fruit. A small-band musical form typically featuring guitars, bass, drums, and vocals, with song structures based on British Isles ballad forms. A personal computer. A major American electoral political party accepting the general authority of the U.S. Constitution. Their differences are minor compared to their similarities. You might have very good reasons for choosing one over the other. But they’re not “opposites”.
Hence Elaine Benes’s confusion when Jerry Seinfeld tells her about Bizarro Superman. “Does he live underwater? Is he black?” It doesn’t even make sense that Bizarro World is a cube - it’s no more the “opposite” of a sphere than a triangular prism, or a flat plane, or a cylinder. There’s just no logical way to have a world that’s ours backward, because almost none of the qualities that define our world are binary.
Let’s outgrow this caveman impulse to posit everything as opposite to something else. We’re not squatting around the campfire anymore. Our survival doesn’t depend on dividing everything around us into immutable Us vs. Them dichotomies. That’s such a cat person thing to do.
