Without further ado, I present pictures of said kitty.

Now, what I find about most cat-haters is that they think cats are stupid because they're independent, loners, lazy, wah wah wah. Whatever. So are people.
Cats have personalities, and if you're a shrewd shopper, you can find the right one.
My mom chose Purriey by kneeling in the middle of a litter of kittens, and they all ignored her but one, who hopped right onto her knee and starting mewing at her.

To find Scamp, I visited four or five local shelters every day for about a week, searching for a kitten with an interesting personality. I found Scamp in the Burbank shelter with a sign on his cage that said he'd been hit by a car and lived.
I'm inclined to believe that, because it's a neat story, but who knows what sort of tactics animal shelters will go to to tug on your heartstrings? I shit you not, the cage across from his said, "Apparently no one thinks I'm cute enough to adopt." What is this, a Sally Struthers infomercial?

Anyway, I chose him because he was purring and rubbing my arm and doing all sorts of flips and tricks in my arms, and the girl next to me really wanted him, so I knew I had to act fast.

The second we got him home, his personality showed through, and let me tell you what, this cat is ca-razy.

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but let's take a look at some of his traits.
On a futon and the bed, he's king.
All night long, he declares Meow-had on every square inch of my comforter and pounces like a jackrabbit until 4 AM when I've had enough and I lock him outside the door until his lonely and repentant meowing leads me to let him back in where he softly and calmly digs his claws into my chest as he sleeps.

However, he's terrified of the floor. It's like he thinks there's two nice people slightly around his height who pet him on the futon and bed, but when he's on the floor, suddenly, he's surrounded by two giants who only want to step on him.
This is extra cute due to our hard-wood floors and the fact that whenever we come near, he jumps ten feet in the air in fright and then skids off, feet going in all directions like some drunk newborn deer in the ice capades.
What?

Also, he's a klutz. The step up to our bathrooms (toilet for bipeds, litter box to him) is about half a foot higher than the rest of our house, and he never fails to jump a quarter of a foot to clear it and trip and go so0/mersaulting into the shower door. He also has a habit of forgetting he has, you know, a mass, and will fling his entire body, claws out, onto the side of a small pillow, and crash back to the ground.

All these things are probably kitten traits, but his last quirk is that he's obsessive compulsive. He's a little Adrian Monk cat.
First, it came in handy.
When he eats from his bowl, as most cats do, while he crunches, a lot of crumbs and fragments fall onto the ground, outside the bowl.
At the end of his meal, he uses his paw and -- again, I shit you not -- scrapes the crumbs into a little pile and then eats that.
Okay, that was cute.
Then I noticed him in his litter box.
Before even going to the bathroom, he uses his paw to shape the once-flat litter into a little mountain in the middle of the box. Then, he goes to the bathroom on top. Now, I'll admit from my experience in Switzerland, it is pretty fun to go to the bathroom on the top of a mountain, but it seems to me like a lot of work to maintain.

Finally, the other day, I noticed a plastic bag covering his food bowl.
Thinking he had chased it around the room and gotten bored, I moved it out of the way of his bowl and across the room for him to pounce on again later.
When I saw it later in the same place over his bowl, I slowly moved it away and kept and eye on him.

He walked over to the bag and dragged it across the ground with his paw and put it right over his food. I thought for a long time that maybe he's a genius cat and he was telling me that he didn't like the new Iams food as much as the free Whiskas sample the kennel gave me by covering it with a bag.
Then I started to worry that he wouldn't eat at all and would waste away to nothing (only one of the horrible death scenarios I imagine him in while I'm away all day at work), but then I saw him burrowing his head under the bag to eat his food.
Now I'm really puzzled.
Is he trying to keep it fresh? Is he embarrassed to eat in public? Or is he just plum crazy?

He just jumped up into my lap as I'm typing this and decided to mistake my typing on keys as antagonism towards him and he is currently attacking my fingers.
He just discovered the desk yesterday, and commenced celebrating the occasion by -- again, not joking -- walking across my keyboard and deleting my My Documents folder.
Justin recovered it later on, but I think Scamp's planning another attack, perhaps on my Pictures of Puppies directory.

But my very favorite thing of all is that, sometimes when he's in your lap, he does a little wizard dance where he wiggles his front paws over his head like he's casting a cute spell on you.
Any cat that does a wizard dance is A-OK in my book.