Rob Knop's Gratuitous Kitties! Page

My wife and I are both extreme cat people. Pictured above is Alyson with our cat Echelle, whom I adopted back in 1995, and who moved with us to Nashville, TN in 2001. Echelle passed away of kidney failure in April, 2003

Current Cats

Novella (9-year old female, adopted April 21, 2012)

Other kitties we have known

	Buttercup (2000-2021)
	Harry Boxlee (2002-2019)
	Zeus (1996?-2011)
	Echelle (1990?-2003)
	Sebastian (my dad's cat)
	(1984?-2000)
	My sister Linda (1970-) and our cat Baggins (1978-1996)

Regarding the name of Dart (or Zap): it is a quantum mechanical expression which says that the cat's name is an overlap of the two eigenstates "Zap" and "Dart". (She's a Schroedinger cat, see.) In practice, this means that when you measure her name (i.e. call her something), half the time her name comes out as "Zap", and half the time it comes out as "Dart". In actual practice, most of the time I call her "Kitty" (which is redundant with Echelle), or "Fuzzy" (in comparison to Echelle's "Fluffy").

If you think this cat's name is hopelessly nerdy, you're right. Lest you think that Echelle was lucky for not getting a nerdy name, be aware that an Echelle grating is a high-order dispersive element used in astronomical spectrometers.

If, when you went to the "cat" page, you thought you were going to see a treatise on the Unix command, you have no right to think me nerdy.