I've said it before and again: Kazon is a bit slow.  But, while there are brighter lights in the harbor, he does have his moments.  Still, sadly, there are times when I must admit that he never will get better.  This is one of those times.

I began "collecting" plastic bottle caps, the kind you get from sodas and bottled water, only a year or so after I adopted Kako and Kazon on November 15 of 1998.  While giving up all interest in soda of any kind, I began keeping quite a bit of bottled water in the house.  Anyone with cats knows that you often discover that, when it comes to toys, the best ones are those you didn't buy for your feline friends.  This includes straws, packing straps, strings, shoelaces, wrapping paper and newspaper, and… shall I go on?  You know what I mean if you've ever had a cat.

In the spirit of always searching for the next cheap toy, I tossed a cap recently freed from bottled water down to The Kids.  All of them inspected it.  All of them played with it a bit, as if to wonder aloud whether there was some intrinsic entertainment value in this cheap, meaningless trinket.  It took only minutes for all of them to discover that this was truly powerful with the play-hunt-kill mojo.  But Kazon took it a wee bit further, discovering some as yet cloaked form of nutrition or general yumminess.

There was great humor found in watching Kazon sit and gorge on the plastic tops for what at first seemed like hours.  It was amazing how much he enjoyed them and how many times in a single day he could be distracted like this.  Sometimes he roams from one to the other, taking brief tastes of each, until he settles upon what I can only assume to be the most delicious model available.  I've never let him be without since.

Some of you will find this video a bit boring.  Essentially it's nothing more than Kazon havin' some bottle cap.  Sure, Grendel has two brief and unobtrusive cameos, but it's still pretty much just Kazon being weird.  I've speculated that perhaps he likes the feel of the rough plastic surface inside the cap or that he tasted a few caps early in life that had residual something-or-other on them (fruit juice, millk, soda, whatever), but I can't honestly say I understand this.  The only bottle caps they get now (all of them joyfully play with bottle caps) are from water.  I replace them regularly.  They're all plastic.  Your guess is as good as mine is.  By the way, I don't remember how long he was doing this before I grabbed the camera.

This video is in Windows Media Player (WMV) format. It's 1:37 (one minute thirty-seven seconds) in length and is about 4.35 MB (so be prepared for the download if you're using dial-up).