CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
Before bad Photoshopping, folks pasted in crying babies whose heads are impossibly smaller than kittens'. But as a general rule, a basket of kittens does go with just about any photo, in the proper proportion, of course. From Die Bühne, 1926.
The secrets of How to Be Your Own Cat go back to the Meiji period of Japan, when cat people wrote books in between naps. For example, the author of the Japanese classic I Am a Cat was himself a feline: "Choosing a kitten for the main character has a two-fold meaning as Sōseki was, in fact, himself a stray kitten" (Aiko Ito & Graeme Wilson's introduction to Sōseki Natsume's I Am a Cat). Our illustration from a 1906 edition of the book.
We're having trouble finding any "pink pussycat" references earlier than the 1960s, but here's a pink pussycat from a 1938 issue of Die Muskete.This should also be of interest:How to Be Your Own Cat.