172/365: Cato Cake.

This could be a long story, but I'll try to make it short...

"Cato" refers to a character from the original Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies, Inspector Clouseau's Chinese valet, who has been instructed to unexpectedly attack Clouseau at random, to help the good inspector stay sharp and ready for combat. With Cato around, you gotta be on your toes. A lot like Coyote, only, nobody asked Coyote to do any of... the stuff he does.

My friend Lucas brought the Cato Mentality into our lives when he moved to Chapel Hill shortly after we finished college. Pranks of the harmless sort, nothing to really get paranoid about. I am honored to say that I was the first to take it up a notch. Have a look at some footage from 2002 or '03 that shows the first (in our circle) of what would be forever known as CATO (noun, verb, Proper Noun, many uses):

From that night on, it WAS on. Quite a few folks got caught up into the mix, and there are stories of certain folks (Bash) waiting on the roof for three hours with a headlamp, novel, and bottle of whiskey. And a bucket of water, of course. It had to move away from the house eventually, as everyone was so paranoid when returning to the house after dark that we started carrying flashlights to spot potential Catos. Some folks got Catoed on campus. Traveling left you no safer. I was biking across the country, in the middle of Pennsylvania, when I saw 'CATO' scrawled onto a road sign. Somewhere hundreds of miles in front of me, Lucas was waiting. When I finally caught up to him it was in the suburbs of Cleveland, and he was waiting on the roof with a bucket of water balloons, but I was paranoid enough to give the house a wide berth till I confirmed that he was waiting. Shit got heavy.

My wife picked up the mantle as well, but mainly only on my birthday. The advantage that she had over us was a superior intellect and vast patience and planning skills. How she messed me up on several occasions is too much to relate here, but most of these schemes have been of Da Vinci Code proportion. To the point that I get wary this week (b-day is the 24th). Yesterday we had a little gathering of folks to celebrate the Summer Solstice, and apparently, my birthday too. As they were all singing Happy Birthday to me, I was looking for the water, but I just couldn't see it anywhere, and we were out in the yard, so I felt safe for a second or two. Then I opened the cake box that she was holding, and pints of water appeared in everyone's hands, and then on me. And there's Coyote on the cake, with the sign. Obviously, he's got an accomplice, since I didn't take that picture. It only occurred to me much later to wonder what the cake folks thought when they printed that one up. Well, t'was all in good fun, and bonus: Joe got Lucas earlier that night with a water hose from the roof.

-llg