Having kittens about filters

The jury is still out on whether appearing as a feline before a US judge during a video hearing is the worst cat-astrophe to befall a lawyer or a client, but the viral video of a talking moggy insisting it is a human will surely tug at many a heartstring. After all, issues of identity man-ifest themselves in a myriad of ways, so even the judge must not have had a moment’s hesitation accepting that a human may, indeed, have been trapped unwittingly in a cat’s body, though it ultimately turned out to be a kitten filter that the lawyer did not know how to turn off. The importance of having a sense of humour in addition to sangfroid was amply demonstrated by this interlude as the judge responded to the lawyer’s cat-egorical disavowal of his feline status with a mere deadpan ‘I can see that’ rather than any juridical censure.

The subsequent clarification of a lawmaker after he appeared upside down on a video meeting of a US House of Representatives’ committee that he is ‘not a cat’ — rather than ‘not a bat’ — points to the imminent elevation of the kitten-faced lawyer’s earnest disclaimer to shorthand for mistaken identity. The dangers of using even basic technology at home without expert help at hand clearly go beyond being seen dressed differently waist down and forgetting to turn the microphone off before making candid observations.