Things You Should Never Try At Home

I've been clearing out the DVR whilst catching up on household chores and framing the various bits of art I picked up during my vacation. It's hard to fast-forward through commercials when your hands are full. Usually, I pay no attention to the blather, but it's a little hard to ignore a scuba-diving cat.

If you watch teevee, you might have seen that ad for HowStuffWorks.com. There's some dude steering a cat in diving gear around a pool. I know that people do bizarre things, but this is the first time I've seen a man retain his hand after dumping a feline in several thousand gallons of water. It caught my interest. And in these days of the intertoobz, I could find out if this was clever CGI or true insanity.

Turns out the cat really does dive:

So what does Hawkeye do when she's scuba diving? Sometimes she bounds around along the pool's bottom like Neil Armstrong on the moon's surface. She hasn't quite figured out how to swim underwater, even though she's a proficient surface swimmer. This is where Alba comes in. He'll typically hold Hawkeye's tank and lead her around the pool while she hangs around, checking everything out. According to Alba, scuba diving relaxes her -- the weightlessness of being underwater could be a welcome change from the gravity-bound shackles of dry land.

Apparently, since the commercial came out, people have been requesting scuba gear for their cats. I won't be among them. Granted, my rotund little beastie could use the exercise, but I value my limbs. I do not want to have to explain to curious members of the public just how I became a multiple amputee.

Besides, Hawkeye's owner isn't honoring requests for kitty scuba outfits. He knows the vast majority of cats wouldn't appreciate the opportunity to obtain a fish-eye view of the world. He only ever stuck his cat in scuba gear because she started swimming on her own.

It just goes to show there's an oddball in every bunch, dunnit?

For those of you who haven't overdosed on cute lately, watch and aw: