From polynominaldotcom on YouTube, another video featuring Mimi!

This time Mimi is posing with an E-MU Ultraproteus. It’s quite similar to the Morpheus that I sometimes use. I haven’t use that synth lately, but probably should break it out again sometime soon.

A cute bengal cat on a Moog Little Phatty. Via Moog Music Inc’s Facebook Page and matrixsynth.

“Happy Phatty Friday!

Love,
Your friends at Moog.

If you have a cat-and-gear photo to share, you can do so via our Facebook page, via Twitter @catsynth, or contact us.

The patio took quite a pounding this past season. During one particularly bad storm with high winds and heavy rain, that plant on the left side of the photo came crashing down from the sky, destroying a screen and one of those nice modernist black benches . Fortunately, everything can be cleaned up or replaced. And the sculptures were not damaged.

Luna ventures out onto the patio:

Of course, she goes right for the grass in that pot that fell fromt the sky.

I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be brown, as many decorative grasses are. But I don’t know that it’s safe for cats, so I tried to discourage Luna from chewing on this. It’s not easy, as she particularly loves found grass.

Weekend Cat Blogging, Mothers’ Day Edition, is at Mind of Mog.

The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this Sunday by Kashim, Othello and Salome.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

Via matrixsynth, a rare 1960s tube tape echo machine. The “COPICAT” Mk2 tube echo sports a stylized cat logo.

From the auction:

This sounds lovely both as a pre-amp and as an echo unit. All three heads work well and sound excellent – good strong repeats that break up in an evocative fashion, and run into self-oscillation when the ‘reverb’ knob is turned up for authentic dub effects. The echoes have a good tone for an old valve Copicat and degrade with a dark crunchy quality – they cannot be desribed as accurate repeats as this is not a digital delay, but they have a sound and vibe that is most pleasing and create a unique effect that sounds ‘right’.

Crossing from Virginia into North Carolina on I-95 (which I most recently did in 2009 under cover of darkness), one gets the sense that “now we are really in the South.” It’s perhaps a combination of the vegetation, terrain, but especially the name “Carolina”.

That particular trip involved traveling southward along I-95, and then later returning to the state near the coast on US 17. The contrast between the different corridors was quite apparent. The US 17 corridor, when when it was not exactly on the coast, was surrounded by shorter vegetation in a lighter shade of green. As we got closer to Wilmington and I-140, it was hard to tell whether we were in a quiet coastal region or in an outer suburb with lots of highways but relatively little visible development. From 17/I-140, we turned onto I-40 and headed north. But if I the time for a proper visit, I would have continued up US 17 back towards the Outer Banks.

One can talk a particularly scenic trip through the Outer Banks on North Carolina Highway 12, which stitches together many of the barrier islands via bridges, causeways and ferries with fantastic views. The road goes through the Hatteras National Seashore. It also goes through Kitty Hawk, often credit as the location of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, though it was actually in nearby Kill Devil Hills. One of the most prominent landmarks, in addition to the continuous stretches of beach, is the Hatteras Lighthouse.

The Outer Banks are part of a beautiful and quite fragile environment, and one that is quite prone to being hit by hurricanes and subject to storm surges and flooding. Consider this breach of the islands and the highway that occurred in 2011.

[Photo from NCDOT on flickr.]

If we leave the Outer Banks and head northward and eastward on I-40, we eventually come to the Raleigh, the state capital and one of the main cities of the Research Triangle together with Durham and Chapel Hill. The Research Triangle is home many technology companies (both in the Research Triangle Park and beyond), and is anchored by Duke University, University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University. These schools are also known for their basketball teams. Raleigh is a much larger city and the center of state government, and sports both an inner and outer beltway, I-440 and I-540 respectively, though the latter is only partially built. Durham, to the north and west, looks from images as a grittier city that might attract my interest, especially with the old tobacco-factory buildings that have been converted to mixed use.

[GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons]

It is also home to a large and vibrant African American community with a long history of successful businesses and a neighborhood once dubbed “The Black Wall Street.” It was also a center for early Civil Rights activity including some of the earliest “sit-ins.” Already in decline by the late 1960s, the neighborhood appears to have been torn apart by the construction of the Durham Freeway (NC 147) through the center of the city. It is a familiar sounding story (like the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York).

From Durham, I-85 and I-40 run concurrently to the city of Greensboro. Greensboro includes one stretch of I-40 which is signed with no fewer than six different highway numbers.

From Greensboro, we take I-85 south and west towards Charlotte, the state’s largest city. Charlotte has become a major banking center, most notably it is home to “way too big to fail” Bank of America. It has prospered and underwent a major construction boom with a large jumble of post-modern skyscrapers.

[By Riction (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons]

The Bank of America headquarters in Charlotte is the “tallest building between Philadelphia and Atlanta.” It is the one with the green lights on top in the photograph above. This sculpture, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Il Grande Disco sits on Bank of America Plaza. It is known locally as “The Disco Wheel.”

[Photo by Antonio Viva on flickr. (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)]

Bank of America is having its shareholder’s meeting this week, and a large protest is expected tomorrow to coincide with the meeting, presumably converging at this very plaza.

We return to Greensboro and head west on I-40. The development becomes sparser and the landscape more hilly and scenic as we approach the Blue Ridge Mountains. And more treacherous as well. We turn onto I-240 to the town of Asheville.

While I have not yet been to Asheville myself, it sounds a little bit like the resort towns here in northern California, with music, arts, and old-style downtown turned upscale, and new-age types. But for me it is most notable as the home of the late Bob Moog, the great synthesizer pioneer and of our heroes at CatSynth. Asheville continues to be the home of Moog Music, Inc, which makes both hardware synthesizers and one of my favorite musical iPad apps, Animoog. The independent but related Bob Moog Foundation is building a museum and cultural space in Asheville, and they are involved in education outreach and teaching students the science and art of electronic music with programs, with specific efforts in western North Carolina.

We conclude by turning north onto I-26, a relatively new and quite spectacular highway through the mountainous border region between North Carolina and Tennessee. The highway, which opened in its current Interstate form in 2003, winds it’s way through mountain passes, alongside cliffs, and even through a tunnel. This video gives a sense of what it is like, even though it is traveling in the opposite direction, from Tennessee back to North Carolina.

Another stylized photo of Yoko by Sawa Masaki on flickr.

Can anyone guess the synths through the painterly effects?

If you have your own cat-and-music pictures to submit, you can always do so via our facebook page, tweet us @catsynth, or contact us.

From carianoff on YouTube, via matrixsynth,.

“My cat Rikku performing some ambient music on the new Korg R3″

I always thought the name suited her well.

Photographing the moon is even harder than photographing cats. But I did also create this highly stylized image of the full moon with traffic from nearby Interstate 280 as it descends into downtown San Francisco.

Weekend Cat Blogging is hosted by Samantha, Clementine and Maverick.

The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted today by Ritzi at iInfidel.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.