When I was a kid we had a cat for a long time that was commonly called Fat Cat*. Actually, he was large, but not fat. And he was a black-and-white with semi-long hair. He adopted us after Dad fed him the leftover Thanksgiving turkey carcass Mom was saving for soup, a cooking strategy Dad wasn’t aware of, so he thought he’d give it to the clearly hungry stray.
I don’t think the cat ate quite that well after that, but he didn’t leave, either.
The Flat Cat, shown here, arrived later, I think in a Christmas stocking (but I may be artificially creating another commonality—a holiday connection—for these two Ef Cats). This one is also quite similar in markings (less so body type) to the famous JRB family cat, named TinTin, pronounced correctly (tan-tan). And the JRB family gave us the Flat Cat…so we would have a cat that wouldn’t trigger any allergies.
Actually, this was one of a pair of Flat Cats, but the other one got chewed on by Baby B, the offspring member of JRB, and thus it wasn’t pristine enough for long-term preservation. Of course, it looked like their other cat…Mieze (pronounced, by me anyway: mee-zuh).
* Fat Cat’s real name was Omar Ben Sufi, named by my bro for the cat in Edward Peple‘s lovely A Night Out (1909). As the Project Gutenberg version shows, the first sentence is: “Omar Ben Sufi was a cat.” Nice.