Cats, cats, cats, and more cats, part 4

Over half a year ago I wrote I wasn't done with showing you cats and more cats from my place.
If you are interested, you can find part 1 to 3 here, here, and here. There I said "I have quite a few around the place, some because I fell in love with them myself, others because for some weird reason people think I like cats and have given me a lot of items over the years. Really strange, I know. Why would they think something like that? 😂"

Let's start with a tiny one. An online friend had sent me a surprise parcel and among other things it had a cute little glass cat in it.
The very first miniature basket I crocheted from wire in 2010 had a little black polymer clay cat in it and some colored wire loosely stuffed in to mimic yarn. I thought I still had a picture of it, but it's probably in a "safe spot", too ... anyhow, it was my first clay cat, a little creepy looking because I was really bad at it then, and also my baskets have improved a lot after that. So this single earring is kind of a homage to my (very humble) beginnings.
I have been searching for similar glass cats since then, but never found one that worked as well as this one (it's not a bead and I don't use glue, so it needs to be a specific way for me to attach it safely).

This sweetie with the sparkle eyes was a gift, but I have to admit I'm not sure anymore by whom. It's rather heavy, so I think it would work better as a bag charm.

Bikky's print has been on my blog before, but I love it so much that I want to show it again. Bikky's model for her digital paintings is her own cat Broccoli which also gave her shop the name - "Broccoli Cat Art".
A cat on a book holding a teddy, could it be any more perfect for me?

As a kid, I had one of those animals which collapsed if you pushed on the hidden spring with your thumb although I don't remember which animal it was. I had to look up what they are called - one name for them is push puppets.
A Swiss toy maker invented them (some sources say 1926, some 1932) and called his company Wakouwa using the first letters from his name Walter Kourt Walls. Originally, they were from wood, but soon other companies began making them as well, and plastic was used, too.
Here's my (nameless) cat.

The last two are from the MUTTS universe and new additions.
I just noticed that I never really talked about cartoons here. I love cartoons and comic strips and like to say that the cartoonists I follow and who so generously share their work publicly (I wish I could support all of them) help keeping me sane in these times.
There are the timeless ones, the bizarre ones, the witty ones, the smart ones, the satirical ones, the silly ones, the creepy ones and so on (although cartoons and comics can be more than one thing, of course) - and if I could share just one word for MUTTS, it would be "warm-hearted".
Patrick McDonnell created MUTTS in 1994 telling the everyday adventures of Earl the dog (based on his own dog), Mooch the cat, and the animals and people around them.
On the website it says that "Compassion for all creatures is at the heart of MUTTS. Throughout their adventures, Mooch and Earl befriend an adorable array of creatures, including neighborhood pets and their guardians, wild animals, adoptable shelter pets and rescue workers, animals at farm sanctuaries, and more."
The stories make me smile, laugh, and sometimes cry, like the story of Guard Dog, for example, or the pleas of Shtinky Puddin', the kitten "who cares passionately about protecting endangered animals".
This magnet of Shtinky gazing into the night sky is now on my fridge.

"Hopeful Stargazing"

Then there was this comic strip.
When I looked in the shop, I couldn't find it as a print. So I reached out to the team on social media. They said they'd put in a request with the design team to resize it for a print, confirmed shortly after that it would get made available, and a few weeks later it was.
It only arrived a few days ago - much faster than I had expected, though - so I haven't chosen a frame for it yet, but I just had to show you.

For personal reasons that I don't want to go into, this strip hits really close to home in more than one way, therefore I was so glad they did that.
"Some days you hold your cat. Some days your cats holds you." 💕

You can find MUTTS on their own website, on Instagram or Facebook, you can also subscribe to a daily comic strip (I really don't have many email subscriptions, but this one gives me a boost).
I should add that I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I'm just a huge fan, and if you are an animal lover and don't know the strips yet, you maybe should have a look, too.
Also, as usual I asked beforehand if it was okay to share this.

A little warning at the end, there will definitely be a part 5.

Inspiration is everywhere - Donald Duck and the mirror earrings

The other day I really doubted myself. For years, I had had the plan to make a pair of earrings with little mirrors. My inspiration was a Donald Duck story about a Greek nymph who threw her hand mirror to the ground where it turned into a lake, and I also had the feeling that the story had been inspired by a real Greek tale.
I even started writing a blog post, but when I tried to find out more about the Greek tale, I came up empty. Next I tried to find something about the Donald story, but a site that a friend told me about didn't help me, either, because only titles were listed, no contents.
I questioned my family, but to no avail which was very disappointing ;-)

So now I had a pair of bead embroidered earrings in light blue (for the water), with small mirrors on top and sparkly crystals in the handle, and the story that inspired them didn't even exist?

It didn't even comfort me that I liked the result. Could I really be that wrong about something that had been taking up space in my brain for so long? I was sure I hadn't made that up myself.
Of course there was only one way to solve this problem, I had to look through my comic books.
I started with my "Walt Disneys Lustige Taschenbücher", translated "Walt Disney's Funny Pocketbooks", a comic book series that, other than the regular "Micky Maus", had around 250 pages and thus allowed for longer stories. They were published several times a year, not weekly like "Micky Maus", and with very few exceptions, the stories were by European artists, mostly Italian in the early years, in fact they were based on the Italian series "I Classici di Walt Disney". For economic reasons, the early books weren't fully colored, but the double pages were alternatedly black-white and colored.
The LTB as they are called here had many ups and downs regarding the quality of the stories - both the drawing and the writing - but I grew up on them; and although they can't compare with the work of Carl Barks, there are a few wonderful adventures in them.

And .... "Auf den Spuren der alten Griechen" (In the tracks of the ancient Greeks),
LTB 32 "Donald im Glück" (Donald in Luck)!
More like "Cat in Luck"! I didn't have to search as long as I had feared.
I had never looked for Greeks on the aforementioned site because I was so fixed on the mirror part or I may even have been quicker.

So, was the story based on a Greek tale?
Kind of. Actually it mixed up two Greek tales, added a detail of its own and threw in an Italian adventurer for good measure.
Tale 1: Deucalion and Pyrrha survive a flood sent by Zeus as a punishment thanks to being warned by Prometheus, Deucalion's father (they didn't take any animals, shame on them, Gundel and der Dekan said). When they ask the goddess Themis how to repopulate the world, she tells them to cover their heads and throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders, meaning Gaia, the mother of all living things, her bones being rocks. The rocks thrown by Deucalion turn into men, those thrown by Pyrrha into women. Again, it doesn't say anything about cat..., erm, animals.
Tale 2: Castalia, a nymph, tried to evade Apollo's amorous advances, and threw or transformed herself into a spring near Delphi.

In the story that Huey, Dewey, and Louie tell Scrooge and Donald, Deucalion and Pyrrha don't ask Themis for advice, but the gods in general. Next, the nymph Castalia appears. She throws her mirror to the ground and it turns into a mirror-shaped spring (not a lake, mea culpa) and advises the couple to throw Gaia's bones over their shoulders when the light of the full moon falls on the spring.
To get a free vacation to Greece, Donald convinces Scrooge to search for the spring and use it to turn stones into gold, and when they come to Greece and Donald finds an antique mirror in a shop, he sneaks it into the fire, determined to blame the mirror's age when the spell won't work.
Of course the nephews notice right away that the mirror is from glass and can't possible be as old as the tale, but Scrooge tries his luck, anyway.
Instead of being turned into gold, however, the rock gets duplicated. The nephews look the mirror up in their trusted scout guidebook and find out that Cagliostro, an Italian adventurer and "magician", invented this magic mirror.
Finally the mirror breaks and the pieces produce a crowd of Scrooge duplicates who chase after Donald, a spell that lasts for an hour.

There you go. What you never wanted to learn, I got it for you :-D
Oh yeah, and earrings.

All the Ducks belong to the Walt Disney Company. I am not affiliated with Disney in any way.

Quote of the week

Are you ready for a premiere? Today I didn't take my quote from a movie or a TV series, but from one of my all-time favorite comic strips. Its stars have been around for a long time and they are great not in a "right in the face" way, but in a subtle and intelligent way.

Mind you, what could be more subtle than a beagle being a world famous cashier or a WW I flying ace? ;-)

What do you want to be when you grow up? Linus decided to be a fanatic. A real fanatic. One who doesn't really care what to be fanatical about, though. Sort of a wishy-washy fanatic.

Then Charlie Brown sees him making weird faces.

Linus: I've decided I should be more than just a fanatic ... I'm going to be a wild-eyed fanatic!!

There's nothing to add to that.

Charles M. Schulz: But WE love you, Charlie Brown, 1959