"Cat Cam" Reveals the Secret Life of Cats

When you're away, does your cat play?

What does your cat do when you're traveling or even just away for the day? Many people think that cats most of the time -- some would say the better to be lively at night. Jill Villarreal, an animal behavior scientist, was tasked with finding out for Nestle Purina PetCare's Friskies cat food. (As an aside, I still thought that Ralston-Purina made pet food and that Friskies was a separate brand -- and that Nestle wasn't necessarily involved at all. But I was wrong. Turns out that Nestle has owned Purina for quite some time and bought Friskies in 2001.) Anyway, this company, which has its own research center in Lausanne, Switzerland, to study human nutrition and other food-related issues, hired Villarreal to discover the corollary to, "When the cat's away, the mice will play."

Villarreal outfitted 50 housecats with cameras on their collars that took pictures every 15 minutes and then studied a total ot 777 photos. According to a widely published report, based on these pictures that Villarreal analyzed, here's how cats spent their time:

• 22 percent looking out of windows
• 12 percent interacting with other pets in the household
• 8 percent climbing on chairs or "kitty condos"
• 6 per cent sleeping
• 6 percent watching a television, computer or other screen
• 6 percent hiding under tables
• 5 percent playing with toys
• 4 percent eating or looking at food

Now I'm no math whiz, but those percentages don't add up to 100  percent. I want to know what they did the rest of the time. I think it might be trying to get cat cam off their necks.

Calgary Builds on Its Olympic Legacy

With Canada poised to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, the '88 Games have not been fogotten

When you visit a city that hosted the Summer Olympic Games, you might be shown a stadium that was used for track and field, a pool complex built for swimming and diving or watercourse used for rowing. But by and large, summer host cities are so huge that the Olympic legacy is dim. Not so with the Winter Games, where ski runs in use all winter, bobsled tracks that snake down mountains and ski jumps that punctuate the sky like explanation points are enduring landmarks of the Games.

Calgary hosted the Games in 1988, and in addition to being friendly neighbors with British Columbia, the province directly to the west which is hosting the 2010 Games two months from now, Calgarians are vicariously sharing the Canadian pride and joy of the Games.

Case in point: Dale Alward (below), who came to Calgary as a young man with intentions to return to the Maritimes but who was so captivated by the Olympic spirit and energy more than two decades ago that he has never left. He is a guide at the 627-foot Calgary Tower and likes nothing more than to point out Olympic venues, share his encyclopedic Olympic information and talk about the Games. Even if I weren't already an Olympic nut myself, I would have found his enthusiasm contagious.

The indoor Olympic Oval is still in use, both for speedskating training and for top-level compeitions like this weekends men's and women's World Cup. Skaters blaze around the oval in a combination of fluid motion and athletic power. This World Cup weekend features three days of speedskating competitions on ice known to be fast. In the lobby area are glass cases displaying speedskating trophies and sculptures. Outside, a mini-Olympic-style torch blazes for special events -- even in the midst of a blizzard.

Nothing is more symbolic of the Games than Canada Olympic Park right on the western outskirts of Calgary. In 1988, this small hill within sight of the Rockies hosted ski jumping, bobsledding, luge and the demonstration sport of freestyle skiing. Since then, COP has added a 22-foot snowboarding halfpipe, the Canada Olympic Museum, the Canada Winter Sports Institute (called WinSport), the Ice House (a refrigerated facility where bobsledders and lugers can practice their starts), and for summer, mountain bike trails and a zipline. Planned for the near future, an ice complex with three NHL-size rinks by December 2011.

The Alpine skiing events in 1988 were held at a nearly mountain called Nakiska, still in use as a day-trip ski area fom Calgary, and the cross-country skiing in a former mining town called Canmore. The afteruse and Calgarians' pride after all this time is a fine and inspiring Olympic legacy.

SWISS to Inaugurate San Francisco-Zürich Service

Airbus 340 slated for long-haul flight; SWISS service will make the time pass

SWISS just announced a new non-stop between San Francisco and Zürich, and I cheered, both for European skiers heading for North American mountains and for U.S. skiers heading for the Alps. The service is scheduled to begin on June 2, so skiers from both continents will have to wait until the winter of 2009-10. There will be six flights a week, and flight numbers and timetable are already in place:

San Francisco-Zürich (SFO-ZRH) LX 39 dep. 7:25 p.m. arr 3:40 p.m + the following day

Zürich-San Francisco (ZRH-SFO) LX 38 dep. 1:15 p.m. arr 4:30 p.m.

Deep-pocketed flyers will travel in the incomparable luxury of a SWISS First class cabin or the enhanced comfort of SWISS Business class with a new fully reclinable seats innovative air seat cushions that can be individually adjusted. Even for the rest of us, the carrier promises "a more comfortable SWISS economy experience."

And I don't doubt it. A lifetime ago, I worked as a sales promotion writer in New York for Swissair, the predecessor to the current SWISS. In those days, the airline's North American gateways were New York, Boston, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto. Today there are seven (Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Newark, and Montreal), and come June and the addition of San Francisco, there will be eight.