Ask Ambrose – “My Human is Driving Me Nuts!”
Cat Has Privacy Problem
Dear Ambrose,
I am a cat whose bed is in his humans’ bathroom. What this means is that my humans feel free to come in at any time of the day or night and take a dump in the middle of my bedroom! I have tried meowing loudly and hissing whenever they do it, but to no avail. As you can see from the photograph, I also try to stop them by standing guard over the toilet, but this does no good as they simply lift me out of the way and place me in the sink so I have to watch them do their filthy business! I have even tried to destroy the toilet paper roll but they always have another one hidden somewhere in the house, I don’t know where. And don’t even get me started on that time I made the mistake of trying to stop them by lying down inside the bowl! I am at my wit’s end. I don’t want to get violent, but fear I will have to.
Grossed Out Puss
Seattle, Washington
Dear Grossed Out Puss,
I can certainly understand your consternation over this matter. It is a situation which is both disgusting and unhygienic, but it has a rather obvious solution, which is to report your humans to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or whatever its equivalent is in your state. Tell them your humans are abusing you by invading your privacy and grossing you out. Hopefully this will lead to lengthy jail sentences for the culprits and you will then be able to sleep in peace, safe in the knowledge that no one is about to take a crap in the middle of your bedroom. If this does not work you may want to seek some sort of legal emancipation from your humans, though this can be a costly and complicated process and so should be seen as the very last resort.
Hoping I have been of help,
Ambrose
Dog Has Weirdo Human
Dear Ambrose,
My human is a huge fan of the TV series The Walking Dead (a show which, I have noticed, has no dogs in its primary cast) and as a result he has started to speak in a Southern accent much of the time. Due to this bizarre new habit I rarely understand anything he says anymore. The other day I thought he was asking me to get him a dead possum when he was in fact asking me where I had put the remote (I have resorted to hiding it in the hope that his proper accent will return) and he wasn’t at all pleased when he came home that night to find a dead possum laid out on the dinner table. I noticed, however, that his annoyance did not prevent him from eating said possum, which leads me to believe that he is starting to pick up more than just the accent. Last week he even went so far as to hire an FX guy to make me up as a zombie (see accompanying photo) on the pretext that it was Halloween. He knows I am no fool so he had already filled the house with pumpkins and put his recording of “The Monster Mash” on repeat, all in a lame attempt to convince me it was already October. Soon I fear he will start listening to country and western music or killing the local squirrels with a crossbow, at which time the only option I see is to leave home and move in with some valley girls. Please help.
Sick of Zombies
L.A, California
Dear Sick of Zombies,
The first step is to get rid of his recordings of the show or, failing that, to turn off the power supply to the house so that he will not be able to watch said recordings. As “The Walking Dead” is currently “The Holidaying Dead,” i.e. on hiatus, this is an opportune time to re-direct his attention to something that does not involve so many rednecks. I recommend a steady diet of reality TV, as long as it isn’t those nuts with the ducks or that dreadful little girl, obviously. Concentrate on something with at least one Kardashian in it – if he isn’t into the show at first you can go out of your way to regularly make comments such as “Man, that Kim is one hot tamale, isn’t she?” and such. Humans being highly suggestible creatures you will soon find him becoming a fan and within a few weeks not only will he have dropped the Southern accent but he will have turned into some sort of blithering idiot, which will make it pretty impossible for him to ever learn any kind of accent again. You may have to re-teach him how to open doors and use eating utensils, but nobody said it was a perfect solution.
Hoping I have been of help,
Ambrose
Kitty Has Litter Problem
Dear Ambrose,
My human keeps buying me really cheap kitty litter, and puts it in a really small litter box. I know the bastard has money somewhere, due to his numerous business interests, yet I still have to put up with this cheap, rough litter that feels mildly uncomfortable under my paws and smells faintly of lavender whereas I would prefer it to smell strongly of Giorgio Armani’s “Lui.” What can I do about this situation? I have considered killing him by putting one of his dumbbells at the top of the stairs and then watching him plummet to his death, but I wouldn’t know how to dispose of the body. I suppose I could eat it (the human’s body, not the litter,) but that would still leave the bones and I am not fond of digging. Please help.
Glenn Danzig’s Cat
New Jersey
Dear Glenn Danzig’s Cat,
While it is very frustrating to be owned by a rich cheapskate, I feel you are being a bit too fussy. I, for one, would be quite glad to have a bathroom that smells like lavender – mine has for several months smelled like the inside of my car, which is something that has me rather puzzled…Wait, I can’t have spent all this time going to the toilet in my car, could I? But back to your problem. If the cheap bastard won’t get you high quality litter with the right fragrance you can always sneak into his bedroom late at night, borrow whatever expensive fragrance he dabs on those sideburns of his and spray it on your crappy kitty litter. If he becomes suspicious about the reduced amount of cologne in the bottle you can always suggest that it’s all the doing of the after-shave pixies or, if he doesn’t buy the bit about the pixies, the fault of that other jerk from the Misfits. You may also try buying your own kitty litter, but these artistic types are notoriously sensitive and you may end up hurting his feelings by implying he is an inadequate pet owner.
Hoping I have been of help,
Ambrose
Cat Feels Aesthetically Disadvantaged
Dear Ambrose,
My human won’t take me to the beauty salon with her, and as a result I have to do my own beauty treatments at home. This has led to my being mocked by my friends and also to a shortage of cucumbers. I have tried tweezing my own eyebrows but had trouble holding the tweezers as I do not possess any opposable thumbs. Not only that, but I couldn’t find my eyebrows, probably because I do not have the proper training for such things. Then there was the time I gave myself a glycolic peel using caster sugar and it removed all the hair from my face! During the 3 weeks that it took for my hair to grow back I was often mistaken for a capuchin monkey! It was humiliating to be mistaken for a primate, and people kept offering me peanuts! The closest I have been able to get to a beauty salon is when the vet trims my claws, but the man has no sense of style and refuses to even paint them, much less adorn them with tiny little Swarovski crystals. I am feeling very frustrated, neglected, and, quite frankly, un-beautiful. Any advice would be appreciated.
Un-Pampered Feline
Chatswin, New York
Dear Un-Pampered Feline,
I suspect your problem is that your human sees you as a cat and not as a human being. This can be remedied by convincing her that you are not her cat but in fact her long-lost sister from Idaho. To achieve this, i suggest that you start wearing a pretty floral dress, preferably one festooned with fresh potatoes, and then, to really convince her that you are indeed a long-lost sibling, you should fake some DNA tests. This can best be done by finding her real long-lost sister then using some pretext to obtain a DNA sample ( tell her a handsome young billionaire is looking for a wife and wants to know if she would be genetically suitable to bear his offspring) which you can then pass off as your own. If she resents her sister not getting in touch with her she may even give you the DNA without any need for trickery. After a period of adjustment, you should find that your human will start taking you to the salon with her and happily introducing you as “My long-lost midget sister from Idaho!” Be careful however, not to get any hair removal treatments, not unless you have recently grown fond of peanuts.
Hoping I have been of help,
Ambrose
A Klimpse Of Klimt
Today we will be taking a look at the work of one Gustav Klimt, an Austrian painter who was a famous symbolist and Art Nouveau guy.
Klimt was born sometime during the 19th century in Schweingarten, a small hamlet near Vienna, into a family consisting of two parents and seven children, of which he was the eighth. This discrepancy always troubled the young Gustav and may very well explain why he grew up to be such a famous weirdo. His father was an inept toothpaste salesman whose meager earnings just barely kept the family out of the poorhouse ( as the gutter was known in those days ) and at the age of fifteen, sick of eating toothpaste three times a day, Klimt ran away from home and joined the Kunstgewerbeschule, an art school the name of which was so bewildering even to Austrians that everyone just referred to it as “The Place Across From Hans Grubber’s Sausage Shop.” Ironically, for someone who later became the leader of a rebel art movement, Klimt began his career as a painter in the rather staid and respectable academic tradition, meaning that he painted fairly realistic pictures that often used history and mythology as a poorly veiled excuse to portray hot babes in various states of undress…
Even at this early, more conservative, stage of his career, Klimt was starting to show his radical side by frequently being photographed wearing a dress. Soon, he was not only regarded as a great painter but also as Vienna’s most famous cross-dresser…
Perhaps surprisingly for a man who spent a considerable proportion of his time wearing dresses, Klimt was, as can be clearly seen in this photograph, notoriously fond of pussy…
Klimt’s style started to veer from the academic to the radical in the 1890s, after the deaths of both his father and one of his brothers – the former died from an age-related illness, and the latter was decapitated in a tragic haircutting accident. Soon, Klimt would become the leader of a bunch of Austrian nutjobs known as The Vienna Secession. At first Klimt joined the group because he was under the impression that they were some sort of dance troupe. When it was explained to him that they were in fact a bunch of avant-garde painters trying to shake up the establishment he was disappointed but nonetheless decided to stay, partly because he sympathized with their goals, and partly because he noticed that there were an unusual number of naked women standing around. Before you know it, Klimt was turning out some stunningly ornate paintings that blended depictions of the female figure with weird and colorful mosaic-like patterns…
The most famous of these, though I personally don’t care for it – I feel it looks too much like a penis – is this thing called “The Kiss.” Created from a combination of oil paint and gold leaf, this work depicts a man trying to eat some woman’s face during the Austrian Strudel Famine of 1866. The depiction of such a disturbing theme proved highly controversial and led to Klimt being banned not only from several galleries but also from his local hat blocker’s workshop.
This next one is called “Goldfish,” and portrays three very small women whom Klimt kept in an aquarium in his studio. The women are thought to be some sort of pixie mermaid native to the Rhine, but I don’t know the species of the goldfish itself, nor do I know how he felt about having to share his home with such unusual interlopers. The figure at the base of the composition has been acknowledged by Spinal Tap lead guitarist David St. Hubbins as the inspiration for the band’s 1984 rock classic “Big Bottom.”
Next up is a piece entitled “Garden Path with Scary Chicken.” One can deduce from the title that Klimt found only one of these chickens scary, though which one remains a mystery. Though this may seem an unlikely subject for Klimt, it is in fact part of a series of chicken paintings that he was asked to do by his therapist in an attempt to deal with his lifelong fear of chickens – much in the same way that Van Gogh dealt with his fear of bread by creating dozens of paintings of wheat fields. The rest of these chicken paintings have unfortunately not survived, having been amongst the numerous Klimt works that were destroyed by the SS at Immendorf Castle towards the end of the war, the SS being, as any historian will tell you, notorious chicken-haters and a bunch of bastards completely lacking in any aesthetic sense.
Now we have what is easily the creepiest thing Klimt ever painted, at least of the 3 or 4 I have looked at. Entitled “Water Sprites,” this depicts a pair of disembodied heads who liked to float around Vienna’s famous Amalienbad public swimming pool looking to devour stray fishermen. As Vienna is landlocked and therefore has few fishermen, the two were rarely successful and this is thought to explain why they have wasted away to nothing but a pair of freaky-looking heads. Given Klimt’s well-known preference for red-heads it is notable that both women are brunettes – this suggests that he does not like these women, perhaps having confused them with chickens.
The following work is “Das Grosse Affe und die Nackte Frauen” which translates into English as “King Kong and the Bare-naked Ladies,” part of the famous Beethoven frieze, a piece Klimt created to honor the works of the great Austrian composer Johann Strauss, the Younger. The three figures on the left are thought to be the mythical Gorgons as they have snakes in their hair – notice once again his use of black hair to signify female evil. The redheaded woman on the right is thought to be Klimt’s main squeeze Emilie Flöge, a hot tamale whose hotness is signified by her red hair. I don’t know who the blonde is, probably just some girl who wandered into the studio when he was painting the thing. The big fat woman was for a long time thought to be Klimt’s mother-in-law until everyone remembered that Klimt had never married. She is now thought to be his Czechoslovakian landlady Olga Zázvorková, who gave him a break on the rent in return for occasionally being able to ruin one of his paintings.
The great mystery, of course, is the inclusion of King Kong as the center of the piece. Some have suggested that it is not King Kong at all but rather Donald Trump. This is a ridiculous suggestion for two reasons. First, Donald Trump had not yet been born when the painting was created, and second, Donald Trump has never been that handsome. Which brings us back to King Kong. My suspicion is that Klimt, possibly during one of his summer holidays, traveled to Skull Island and there met Kong, a fellow with whom he shared an obvious penchant for scantily clad babes. The two got along so well that on his return to Europe Klimt decided to sneak Kong into one of his paintings, surrounding him with the naked babes of which the big banana muncher was so fond.
Lastly we have 1901’s “Judith and the Head of Holofernes.” In this painting, Klimt depicts the great Jewish heroine with the freshly severed head of the Assyrian general Holofernes, hence the otherwise inexplicable title of “Judith and the Head of Holofernes.” As part of a systematic system of oppression instituted by his boss Nebuchadnezzar, Holofernes had been annoying the people of Judith’s town by denying them access to the Kosher bakery where they bought their bagels.
After several days of this foolishness, Judith decided something had to be done. Late one night, she put on a pink Teddy and some fluffy pink slippers, grabbed a sack full of cheese and wine and headed to Holofernes’ tent. After knocking (as this was a tent, the knocking was not done in the usual manner but instead consisted of the would-be guest uttering loudly the words “Knock, knock, knock,” until they were given entry) and being invited in by the unsuspecting general, Judith gave Holofernes the old “Hey, big boy, is that a bag of shekels in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” treatment and soon Holofernes realized he was about to get lucky. Unfortunately for him, as soon as he turned around to apply some cologne to his beard, Judith thumped him on the noggin with the cheese-and-wine-filled bag and then proceeded to hack his head off with a guillotine which she always carried for such emergencies. She then went back to her town where she became so celebrated a figure that she eventually wound up in a possibly apocryphal section of the bible. The moral of the story is a simple one – “Don’t mess with Judith’s bagels.” Or is it “Never turn your back on a woman with cheese?” I’m not sure. If there is a rabbi in the audience, please email me.
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