Saturday, March 12, 2011

For Radio Amateurs

If you have cats, you may have noticed that many of them find the sounds coming out of your radio fascinating...

...Possibly too fascinating!
(Not a ham? Fine. Go watch a Slow Lorus basking in the joy of its very own umbrella.)

12 comments:

JC said...

Didn't know that cats understood Russian...

Roberta X said...

I'm not sure that "kot radist" is Russian -- notice the electrical receptacle on the wall? Looks very North American to me. Pluse the message is (SPOILER WARNING!) "flameproof me p" though perhaps that means something in Russian, too.

Anonymous said...

I like this a lot. Typical cat though, paying half its attention to what it is doing! :-)

Roberta X said...

(There's a kind of iffy "i" at the end, making the Morse end "...me pi." 3.14...?)

perlhaqr said...

Holy smokes, those were some cute vids.

Stranger said...

I like, but it hurts a little. Lost my second chair buddy, a 19 YO tom this week. When he was a youngster he could hear the CW even with the cans on, and became very attentive.

Stranger

Roberta X said...

I'm sorry for your loss -- I still miss Tommy (almost 22) and Slinky (20), who passed last Fall within weeks of one another.

Turk Turon said...

The cat has a good "paw" but not a great one.

Anonymous said...

Oh, sorry, Bobbi!

Kot=>male cat, tomcat

Radist=>one who operates a radio, radio operator, derived from "radio"

Sorry about being tardy! If need any other titles translated, just let me know.

Shootin' Buddy

Anonymous said...

Meanin' no disrespect, about 30% the time, translating from Russian is like working a substitution cipher; much like English, Russian speakers seem to take the sensible approach that if some other language already has a perfectly good word for something Russian lacks, they might as well just use it.

...I hadn't realized a "kot" was a tomcast, specifically, but "radist, I knew and the rest followed.

Anonymous said...

"Russian speakers seem to take the sensible approach that if some other language already has a perfectly good word for something Russian lacks, they might as well just use it."

Sometimes, yes. In fact, in Russia there is a big brewhaha about this literal borrowing from English.

Sometimes the translation gets all wierd. E.g., the Russian word for train station, "vokzal", is the name for a train station in downtown London, Vauxhall. When asked by the Russians what they called this place where trains gather to socialize, the English engineer, slightly confused, said "Vauxhall", not "train station".

And thus endth the interesting Russian lesson of the day.

Anonymous said...

"hadn't realized a "kot" was a tomcat"

Yes, Russian is a very sexist language. Don't tell Mrs. Clinton.

If it has an "a" on the end, the noun is likely female (could be genitive as well).

Shootin' Buddy