Roadrunner Twice

I'm assuming everyone who follows my Mastodon/Twitter/old-Instagram already knows about Mogwai, Muffin, Willa, Tampa, Glitch, Zero-Day, and Bruce "Wipeout" Jones III, the cats who, at various times, have lived on our side of the block. But there are also some other cats we see occasionally, who hang out on one of the other sides of the block.

I don't have photos for most of these, sorry.

• Little Black Cat — a medium-sized black cat, but we call her little to distinguish her from Glitch and Zero, who are approximately cinderblock-shaped.
• Northern Spawn of Bruce — a smallish female with the exact same markings as Bruce, who hangs out on the northern side of the block and gets food from one of the houses there. Seems sweet-natured.
• Southern Spawn of Bruce — a medium-sized male with the exact same markings as Bruce, except in a darker grey that looks almost black from a distance. Extremely skitty.
• Fluffy Black Cat — a very large cat with tuxedo markings who is MASSIVELY FLUFFY.
• Muffin-Alike — a small tuxedo who looks almost exactly like Muffin from a distance. You can distinguish them by size (Alike is slightly bigger), face (Muffin has one off-center eye), and disposition (Alike is skitty at any distance; Muffin seems very sanguine until she doesn't).
• Orange Cat at Tyrone's — a medium-sized orange cat. Skitty.
  • Ruth also calls him Angry Orange Cat because he always looks furious.
• MissingNo (emeritus) — the third of the identical cinderblock-shaped black tomcats called Glitches, who we originally thought were just one cat until we started trapping them. We THINK we've seen No a couple times since getting him fixed, but it's dubious and we're not wholly sure where his territory is. Dude was just wrong place wrong time that day.
• Cat Under the Stairs — a medium-sized cat with a blobby white and grey pattern, who, as soon as he sees you, will run inside a hole in the concrete stairs up to this one house's porch. He has to squish to fit through, and then he'll turn and glare balefully out at you.
  • Update (July 2020): I met cat-under-the-stairs’ caretaker!!! This cat is a she, her name is Shorty Ro-Ro (which is short for Shorty Royana Whitehead), and she is Bruce’s littermate!! Her tail might have been truncated by a bird!
• Short-Tail Cat — A medium-sized cat with a blobby white and grey pattern who has a clipped tail. He will act like he doesn't see you, but will just happen to cross the street to avoid you.
  • Ruth says this is the same cat as Cat Under the Stairs! She is right.
• Colette — small tabby. Feral girlfriend of Pierre, a small black cat who is actually someone's pet and has a collar and everything. Their love is so pure 😭
• The Skunk — NOT TECHNICALLY A CAT.

Here’s an absolutely buck wild story from the Wikipedia page for aqua regia:

When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.