“Hello, Hello? Can you hear me?” I meowed into the telephone to my friend who lives in Tokyo, Japan. “Moshi moshi Gulliver. No need to shout, I can hear you even 5100 miles away!” The first telephones were strung in 1876. They were used by businesses and government centers, and each call required six connections: the caller, four switchboard operators and the receiver. All the operators listened to the conversations to know when to disconnect the lines. As more telephone lines were strung, most homes had a phone. There were “party lines” with different rings for each house, but anyone on the line could listen in. Later telephones used rotary dials and people had their own “address” of numbers and letters, for each private line. Cell phones can be traced back to two way radios used by taxicabs and police, and are now more common than “landlines” which are tied to a location. But if it takes pictures and can use the internet like a computer, why is it still called a phone? Purrs, Gulliver

I must have over indulged in the rich food over the holidays. I had strange dreams which included meeting some creatures that don’t exist anymore. One dream included mastodons, which lived around 15-30,000 years ago. I thought it was an elephant at first, and then realized that they had heavy coats of hair and smaller ears than elephants. They lived in North and Central America during a time the earth was much colder than it is today.

Unlike elephants and mammoths, mastodons didn’t graze on grass but browsed on trees and bushes. As the earth warmed and people migrated to new lands both mastodons and mammoths disappeared. They were hunted for their meat, skin and bones and much of what they ate died out due to the weather changing.

Scientists learned a lot about them from looking at old skeletons found in the last couple of centuries. They were big animals, standing 7-9 feet tall and weighed 7-12 tons, about the same as two cars piled on top of each other. In my dream I made sure to stay out from underfoot, or I would have been squashed like a bug! Purrs, Gulliver

Here is one of my favorite poems. I hope you enjoy it. Purrs, Gulliver
Grizzly Bear
by Mary Austin

If you ever, ever, ever meet a grizzly bear,
You must never, never, never ask him where
He is going,
Or what he is doing;

For if you ever, ever dare
To stop a grizzly bear,
You will never meet another grizzly bear.