Author: Pudgy Cat

Poe’s The Black Cat: Guilt, Alcohol, and an Unreliable Confession

Poe’s The Black Cat explained: the 1843 story, its unreliable narrator, guilt, alcohol, real cats and the films that borrowed its unsettling legacy.

Kuching, the City of Cats: How a Malaysian Capital Built a Civic Identity on Felines

Kuching’s cat statues, municipal museum and festivals: how Sarawak’s capital turned a debated name into a distinctive civic identity.

Unsinkable Sam: What Can We Really Say About the Ship’s Cat?

Unsinkable Sam’s three-ship legend has wartime newspaper references, disputed links and a famous portrait. Here is what the evidence can—and cannot—show.

Cats in the Middle Ages: The Truth About the Medieval Cat Massacres

What medieval sources actually say about cats: papal letters, valued mousers, local cruelty and the shaky claim that cat killings caused the Black Death.

The Cats of the Colosseum: Rome’s Protected Feral Colonies, Explained

Why Rome protects its free-roaming cats: the laws, the gattare, Torre Argentina and what thirty years of colony-management data can tell us.

Do Cats Know Their Own Names? What the Research Actually Shows

What controlled studies show about cats recognising names, linking faces to sounds and learning picture-word associations.

Ship’s Cats: The Naval History of Felines at Sea

From Trim and Mrs Chippy to Simon of HMS Amethyst: the working lives, voyages, legends and changing fortunes of ships’ cats.

The Rise and Reinvention of Cat Blogs: A History of the Feline Web

From Usenet and Friday catblogging to Cute Overload and Cheezburger: how cat blogs built communities, found audiences and adapted to social feeds.

Cat People (1942): How a Low-Budget Horror Film Redefined the Genre

How Cat People (1942) used shadows, sound and the famous Lewton bus to turn a small RKO production into a lasting horror classic.

The Cat in Japanese Literature: From Soseki to Murakami

Cats in Japanese literature, from Soseki’s nameless narrator and Tanizaki’s Lily to Murakami’s missing cats and quieter modern novels.