The bitch's nipples

Thanks to Flonase and Claritin, I was able to attend and actually enjoy the Cotton States Cat Club Inc.'s 65th annual Cat Fanciers' Association Championship and Household Pet Show. Held last Sunday at the Gwinnett Cultural & Civic Center, the show provided an opportunity for spectators to ogle the feline master race -- and for cat owners to mingle with the similarly feline-obsessed.

Inside the show, I took the opportunity to pick cat owners' brains about which cats are the most allergy-friendly. A gentle man in an American-flag rugby shirt, who had a face-licking cat named Romeo, told me I was looking for the Cornish Rex. He escorted me to champ breeder Trish Blees. Blees is a kind, soft-spoken and compelling advocate of all things C. Rex. The C. Rex is a small, allergy-friendly (but definitely not hypo-allergenic) cat with short hair, curly whiskers, gigantic eyes and long ears. And if you can get past the fact that they look more like natives of Mars than their actual place of origin, Cornwall, England, they seem like wonderful cats. Their short hair makes them super-warm and irresistibly cuddly.

Like Blees, most of the cat owners in attendance were soft-spoken. Obviously, I didn't meet every person there, but for such a large and crowded room, it was remarkably quiet. One exception was a male breeder dressed as Robert E. Lee. You haven't experienced incongruity until you've seen a uniformed Confederate general wiggling toys at a kitten while making cutesy noises.

Other than the judging, which involved a lot of cat grabbing and cat squeezing, the show's centerpiece was the elaborate Friskies House. Decorated with eerie cat-shaped pillars and a kitchen stocked with nothing but Purina-brand cat foods, it housed performing cats and a vet named Dr. Sandy Sawchuk. A veterinary version of Oxygen Channel sex advice guru Dr. Sue, Sawchuk answered sometimes-touchy questions with a deft, matter-of-fact-ness that made the asker comfortable.

Commenting on sprays that are used to make olfactory-centric house pets feel comfy, Sawchuk referred to a spray called Comfort Zone, whose main ingredient she identified as "the bitch's nipples." If there was ever a phrase worth snickering at, "the bitch's nipples" is it. Yet she fired it off with a nonchalance evocative of Dr. Sue talking about the curviness of the human rectum.

Beerly legal: On Saturday morning and early afternoon, I served as a judge at the Georgia Craft Brew Challenge at Max Lager's brewpub downtown. The event was part of a fundraiser for Georgians for World Class Beer, a group trying to overturn Georgia's bass-ackward laws banning the sale of pricey gourmet brews because they have a slightly higher alcohol content (but still way less alcohol than wine or liquor).

Although I'm an experienced purchaser and drinker of beer, I was (and still am) a novice at judging the taste. The experienced judges all seemed to be home-brewers. You can tell a home-brewer by both the frequency and the specificity with which yeasts come up in the conversation. If you hear someone saying, "The 10 L7 yeast is notorious for getting fluffy," you're in the presence of a home-brewer.

My knowledge of yeast begins and ends with Fleischmann's (America's favorite since 1868!). Nevertheless, with the help of more experienced judges at my table, I was able to pick out "malty, balanced with a pronounced hop bitterness" flavors and "pronounced, woody or rustic hop" aromas.

Beers from the Dogwood and Buckhead breweries dominated, taking 11 of the 21 prizes. Best of Show was a small batch of a barley wine-type beer from Dogwood (which, by the way, you can't buy because of our state's idiotic beer laws).

Rüms to gö: If mere mention of the term "Series 7 Chair" renders you giddy, swing by the Retromodern store on Peachtree. They've got an exhibit detailing the work of Danish design god and Series 7 inventor Arne Jacobsen. Opening the exhibit last Wednesday, Michael Sheridan, the author of Room 606 (a book detailing Jacobsen's legendary SAS House hotel in Copenhagen) lectured to local design buffs and Danish dignitaries about the meaning of Jacobsen's style and how it developed. Jacobsen designed not only the building, but also the furniture and fixtures within it.

If you like it when your towel-holders and doorknobs challenge your pre-existing notions of what they should look like, then you'll adore Jacobsen. If you prefer not to be challenged by your home furnishings and fixtures, you can at least appreciate his work's minimal elegance and grace -- which, 50 years after he came up with it, still defines modern style.

You must Swiffer: On Sunday night, I headed by Eyedrum and checked out Homefront Invasion!, a collection of prints by Mark Mothersbaugh. You probably know Mothersbaugh as the nerdy one from the new-wave band DEVO. Wait, they were all nerdy. Let's try that again.

You probably know him as DEVO's lead singer, and more recently as a film score composer (Rugrats: The Movie). If you don't already, you might want to consider knowing him as a visual artist as well. Looking is free, after all.

Homefront Invasion! features poster-sized digital prints of works Mothersbaugh originally created as postcards. They feature horrible-looking people in often disturbing situations in a style that looks like Roy Lichtenstein and R. Land drawing for "Ren & Stimpy." The titles often say it all -- "Sausage Jugglin' Santa," "Enlarged Prostate Print," "Couple Kissing" (Mothersbaugh at his most "Lichtenstein with a fat brush"-esque).

Unlike with most exhibits of its kind, the show's work is priced to sell. Some of the prints are less than $250 -- "low-brow art at low-ball prices" is how Mothersbaugh describes it. Perhaps all the money he's getting for the use of "Whip It" in Swiffer commercials has left him feeling a little generous.

andisheh@creativeloafing.com