Aaron Landry

Luxurious Mooki Reflection on Flickr

(Post originally on Minnesota Meow)

Name: Mooki
Nicknames: Silly Butt, Monkey, Blinky, Winky, Mister (when he is demanding)
Born: 14 Jul 2005
Lives in: Sheridan, Minneapolis
Lives with: Chuck Olsen and Lori Erickson

Mooki is a bengal cat that came from Spotogold Cattery and now lives in Minneapolis. The internet is filled with Mooki videos: Mooki being picked up from the cat shelter and Mooki’s trip to the vet to get fixed are good places to start. Mooki even has his own vlog, MookiTV!

As Lori writes:

He likes to make up games and stuff. He loves to ride around in 12 can pop boxes - it’s a lot like the kleenex box thing, except he runs into it on the floor and then sits there whipping his tail back and forth waiting for us to either pick it up by the handle and zoom him around like an airplane, or scoot him around on the floor like he’s in a car. He just purrs and purrs when we do that! We’ve been thinking of getting him a child’s skateboard and rigging him up a little car on that. Then again, maybe he’ll just like to ride on the skateboard.

Boxes are definitely his favorite thing, I think it’s part of the Bengal breed though, ’cause other Bengal owner’s have said the same thing. It really doesn’t matter how small the box is, he’ll at least stick his head in it. I even have footage of him trying to get into an regular envelope and scooting around on the floor with his two front paws in it.

He also love to put toys and stuff in the water bowl. He just seems to find it so fun to play with a toy around the bowl and slosh some water out then, sometimes he’ll kind of come running and slip around in the water on the tile floor on purpose. I pretty much have to change the water and wash out the bowl everyday because he gets it so dirty!

He also still likes to climb the curtains. Luckily, we have sturdy cotton canvass type curtains, or they’d be all ripped to shreds. He got it in his head one time that he was going to make it up to the top of the curtain rod, and it took him maybe about a week or less and he did it. He got all the way up to the top of the rod and was standing on top of it, but then he didn’t know where to go or what to do. I think Chuck had to get a chair to get him down. After he made it up there, though, he pretty much was done with that. Now he just climbs them (or threatens to) to force us to pay attention to him, you know, when we’re watching TV or having dinner.

He likes to also climb our slatted bedroom door in the morning if we’ve overslept according to him. Sometimes though, he seems to do it just because he needs to burn off some energy. Come to think of it, Mooki likes to climb things a lot like a Monkey too. Perhaps he’s part monkey?

Chuck adds:

We’re thinking of getting a baby sister kitten to play with, because he’s so incredibly active and we can’t keep him entertained. He’s very dog-like in a lot of ways and gets really crazy, enough that I half-worry he might inflict some harm on a little kitten. So I like to ask Mooki in a little baby voice, “Did you kill your sister? Huh? Did you kill your sister?”

Mooki lives with painter and photographer Lori Erickson who blogs at Secret Farm: A Garden Blog and maintains MookiTV. She also has a forthcoming blog/vlog project that we will link to when it is launched.

Mooki also lives with Chuck Olsen who is a Minnesota blogger, videographer and citizen media empresario. Some of his many projects include the award-winning Minnesota Stories, the ahead-of-its-time blog-documentry “Blogumentry,” and Vlog Santa. He’s a regular contributor to Rocketboom and has worked with numerous local and national political candidates on making online video work for them. His latest adventure is The UpTake, a large-scale, distributed citizen journalism project.

More on Mooki can be found at MookiTV and the Mooki tag on Flickr.