I’m too tired to write much, so I’ll make this a cat post instead.
Väinämöinen, or Vai for short, was named after the Väinämöinen of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, who was a creator figure & a tietäjä, or man of knowledge — the Finnish word for what in Siberian cultures would be called a shaman.
This painting is called “The Defense of the Sampo” by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Väinämöinen is the whitebearded guy on the left.
Vaistache
Adamastache
This Väinämöinen is a really cool cat. He also has the power to occasionally & temporarily give me a really fat porno mustache so that I bear an uncanny resemblance to Admiral Adama at the beginning of Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Don’tcha think?
Like all cats, he likes hanging out in weird places that he doesn’t consider weird at all, like my laundry basket.
He also enjoys the back of my couch. Here, he was watching me sitting at my computer desk.
He finds it irritating when the dog looks at him. Sweetheart continually fails to understand that it is blasphemy for a mere Evil Dog from Hell to gaze upon the countenance, or even just the back fur, of His Lordship. That’s what was happening in this shot.
Here’s a slideshow of all the photos of him I’ve uploaded to my Flickr photostream.
What a handsome tuxedo cat Vai is!
I adopted one about 20 years ago –I called him Fang because he bit me on the knuckle in fright the first day. We were great friends for 6 years. He loved to go on walks with me, and was delighted to travel with us on minivan vacation trips (I have a picture of him nose-to-nose with a curious deer). Sadly, he developed congestive heart failure, and I had to send him to kitty heaven because he was suffering so much. I still sorrow over losing him; I’ve adopted many cats over time, several very intelligent, very personable cats, and Fang was the best.
Vai looks like he could be Fang reincarnated, in every way. He has a sparkle in his eyes in your pictures.
Great slide show of you and Vai together. You are both good at acting. I enjoyed seeing Vai preening and scoping out his home. Your wonderful tattoo looks just like it did twenty years ago. Thank you for sharing Vai and your life.
Lovely Vai. Cat memory lane time, I had a tuxedo cat named Abercrombie. He had more white on his face with a nice black booger under his nose. I still miss him – 18 years later.
Vai is my fourth tuxedo cat (& the second one named after a Kalevala hero!) — I’m a real sucker for them. But of course I’m a sucker for any cats too — have had many over my lifetime.
Cats of my childhood through high school/college — Salamar, Samarkand, Prince Chula Long Corn, Sing Song (all Siamese, with Singer being especially “mine”); Tom (a stray we adopted), Ebony, Ivory (pure black & pure white cat, brother & sister); Chin Chin (my first tuxedo cat, only female of them)
Cats since I was on my own — Adam (tuxedo); Kyllikki (my first “Kalevala cat”); Lemminkäinen (tuxedo, Lem for short) & his sister Lumihiutale (“snowflake” in Finnish, Lumi for short); Eight Lives; Väinämöinen (tuxedo, Vai for short).
Were it not for cats, I’d have been a goner long since.
I was drawn here today because of the name of your cat, realising it was Finnish. My husband’s Mum was from Finland and have been exposed to the language over the years.
Wow what a handsome cat! I’m from a different part of the world and have never heard of the expression “tuxedo cat”. It is such a wonderful description for cats with these markings.
We have a ginger “tom” that came to us via my son and his inability to take proper care of it. Sadly this cat he slips back into an undomesticated state almost daily. Despite being provided with whatever he wants to eat he chooses to kill rabbits, possums, sugar gliders, birds, lizards and whatever else he can lay his paws on.
Recently we placed 8 bells on the collar around his neck , because he had learned how to walk without making the three we had there previously, jingle. This new strategy seems to be working very well. It has certainly slowed him down. Over the past month we have only had one bird, which is really amazing!
Love your photos, love your cat and his name. Our son named our cat “blanket” which is a much more appropriate name for a cat than a child I think. Cheers!
Hey Tildama,
I’m of Finnish descent on my mom’s side, so Finnish stuff is a big interest of mine — so far, four cats with Finnish names, of which three come from the Kalevala. Finnish folklore plays a big part in the fiction I write too.
Blanket is a great name for a cat! Some of them might also be named Pillow, for how they try to lie down right on top of your face & almost suffocate you.
I was reading something somewhere the other day about how one of effects of killing off all/most of the large predators in a given area, like wolves or coyotes, results in lots of problems due to smaller predators — including house cats — not having any check on their predation. Of course, one of the reasons lots of people want to kill off the large predators is because they kill people’s predatory pets.
I let Vai go out, occasionally he brings back a small bird, but we live now in the middle of town so there’s not a lot else for him other than the mice that he sometimes finds in the apartment.
Thanks so much for stopping by & commenting!
I have one last comment, too, both about Finnish lore and about cats.
Your mention of the Finnish heroes reminded me of a childhood pastime. I never paid much attention when I was a kid to how we acquired books — except when the encyclopedia salesman came to the door and my parents bought the whole set — but at one time we acquired a big thick book of the mythologies of the different cultures of the world.
The Scandinavian mythologies particularly drew me, and that probably accounted for what types of books I read in my first forays into science fiction reading –yeah, Conan the Barbarian… 🙂 As for the Finnish mythologies, the lyrical names are what I remember best — so much more poetic than names like Loki or Odin or Thor. I loved ALL the tales, though.
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Cats as prey when out on their own predatory forays — coyotes have been a bane both in the Snohomish county Washington state community we lived in in the ’90s, and the last 8 years here on the Oregon coast.
We started out with 2 cats when we moved to Sno.Co., and lost them both to coyotes — before we moved to Oregon we had acquired one store-bought cat and 3 strays. We moved into a combined household with my sister, her son, and 3 more cats — eventually we lost everyone of them but the store-bought cat to coyotes, again. We currently have 2 more cats who seem to coexist with the neighborhood raccoons fine — I expect the coyotes have only found better pickings elsewhere…
You have nailed the problem we have here with respect to predatory behaviours. You see many of our native mammals and marsupials are nocturnal, and small. There are no coyotes here. These small natives are of course ideal pickings for our cat’s predatory behaviour, he can find any number of yummy things to eat during his night time hunting expeditions, if and when he sneaks out.
However, I could have done with the cat’s help the other day, we had a snake in the swimming pool and it couldn’t get out. It was a very poisonous brown snake. Fortunately in our area we have volunteer wildlife rescue people who will come to your house and take the animal away for you. This is indeed a great relief to know that there is a great service like this because neither my husband nor I could have handled getting rid of a snake.
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re Scandinavian heritage:
On my side of the family, my dad was Danish. So for some reason I was not brought up on Danish mythology but rather Hans Christian Anderson fairy-tales (which I found scary enough!)
So happy to make contact with you.