[CAT] Shakespeare from above

[BRIEF NOTE] On the demise of Future Shop

I was going to go to the Future Shop location at Yonge and Dundas today to pick up my newly-repaired laptop. After I woke up this morning, I checked Facebook to discover that the entire chain had closed down. The Toronto Star's Francine Kopun has a nice article outlining the case for the chain's closing-down.

The Future Shop banner in Canada was shut down for good this morning as U.S. based owner Best Buy Co. consolidates the stores under the Best Buy banner, eliminating 500 full-time and 1,000 part-time positions.

In all 131 Future Shop stores were closed Saturday — 66 of them permanently. Another 65 will be closed for a week, reopening under the Best Buy banner.

“Currently, 80 per cent of our customers are within a 15 minute drive to a store and this won’t change,” said Ron Wilson, President and COO of Best Buy Canada. “We will continue to have a strong store presence in all major markets in Canada.”

Best Buy spokesman Elliott Chun said Best Buy will invest upwards of $200 million over the next two years, “to provide an improved single-brand customer experience, both in-store and online.”

Chun pointed out that many Future Shop and Best Buy stores are located next to each other — sometimes across the same parking lot.

“Best Buy stores have larger formats, which allows us to invest in appliances and in-store experiences,” Chun added.

In the particular case of the Future Shop at Yonge and Dundas, there is a Best Buy location a couple hundred metres away in the Eaton Centre. I wasn't very surprised, then, to see as I approached the Future Shop's doors earlier this afternoon a sign noting that this particular location was going to be closed down permanently.

In the case of me and my laptop, I was assured in person by the manager who came out after I knocked on the door, and again on Twitter after I posted my account, that I should be able to pick up my laptop in a week's time, once everything gets shifted over. I'll hold them to that.

Why, I wonder, was it impossible for Best Buy to give advance warning that this might happen?

[CAT] "Bubba the cat found after 40 days under snow-covered deck"

CBC Prince Edward Island had a heart-warming story about a Prince Edward Island cat who survived more than a month buried under snow.

An 18-year-old cat was able to survive for 40 days under a snow-covered deck, much to the amazement of her P.E.I. owners.

Bubba lives with Howard Hogan and Lucina Costain in St. Felix, on the western tip of the Island.

One day in January, Bubba went under the step for a bathroom break, but then she seemed to disappear.

Hogan said he and his wife looked for her, but thought she had run off or been killed by a coyote.

The weeks passed, the snow fell. Close to three metres of snow has fallen on the Island since the end of January.

But from time to time Hogan thought he heard meowing.

So finally he decided to spend half an hour digging through the snow to a hole under the step.

[CAT] "Music Made for Cats Wins Feline Approval"

Discovery News' Jennifer Vargas writes about the interesting discoveries of some researchers that cats not only react well to music, but that it's possible to create music for cats in mind. Half-minute samples of some of the songs created are available here.

Music that incorporates everything from purrs to meow-like sounds is gaining feline fans, according to a new study that suggests cats enjoy tunes that are crafted just for them.

The study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Applied Animal Behavioral Science, adds to the growing body of evidence that many animals respond favorably to species-specific music. This is music that takes into account a particular animal's favorite sounds, hearing range, commonly used tones and other factors.

"Here we found that cats showed orientation and approach behavior toward the speaker with the cat music, often rubbing against the speaker while the music was on," lead author Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told Discovery News.

Snowdon and colleague Megan Savage worked with composer and musician David Teie, who created the cat-centric music.

"We looked at the natural vocalizations of cats and matched our music to the same frequency range, which is about an octave or more higher than human voices," Snowdon said. "We incorporated tempos that we thought cats would find interesting -- the tempo of purring in one piece and the tempo of suckling in another -- and since cats use lots of sliding frequencies in their calls, the cat music had many more sliding notes than the human music."

The researchers then played this music for 47 domestic cats in their homes with their owners present. As a comparison, Snowdon and his colleagues also played "human" music for the cats. This consisted of two pieces that have been highly rated as being "pleasing and affiliative to humans": Gabriel Fauré's Elegie and Johann Sebastian Bach's Air on a G String.

[CAT] On the cat island of Aoshima, Japan

Earlier this month, The Atlantic featured a Reuters photo essay by Thomas Peter depicting the cats of the Japanese island of Aoshima. As one source describes it, Aoshima--located off of the coast of the major Japanese island of Shikoku--is an island with an aging human population and a rapidly growing cat population. This latter gives it some economic heft.

A remote island in southern Japan is home to 22 people and more than 120 cats.

Aoshima is a dwindling fishing community of elderly people who live mainly off retirement benefits. The cats were originally brought over to the island to deal with mice plaguing fishing boats. But they've since multiplied as there are no natural predators.

Tourists have been flocking to the island off Ehime prefecture on a ferry that runs twice twice a day. Cat lover Makiko Yamasaki, 27, said: "I came here looking to relax. And as for how is it? Well there is a ton of cats here, then there was this sort of cat witch, who came out to feed the cats, which was quite fun. So I'd want to come again."

Many more photos are available at the links.

The phenomenon of the "cat island" or "cat village" seems to common in East Asia. Outside Japan, where the Pacific-coast cat island of Tashirohima received attention after being spared by the 2011 tsunami, I blogged back in 2011 about the Taiwanese village of Houtong, also taken over by cats after its human population had substantially departed. What these communities all seem to share in common is a recent sharp decline in human populations, coupled with a growth of cat populations. It's reasonable to imagine that, in decaying human settlements, cats might do reasonably well, taking shelter in human constructions and feeding off of prey.

These pictures are cute. The huge problem with the phenomenon is that without humans actively taking care of their cats--one woman is shown in the photo essay as actively providing the cats with food, for instance--these dense cat populations could easily end badly. What would happen to them without food? What are their lives like, living largely in the wild exposed to the dangers of outdoor life?

Still. Cute photos, these. Go, see.