Manhattan has fashion. Ringoes, NJ has Wal-Mart jeans.

Manhattan has the Met and MoMa and the Guggenheim. Ringoes has a deli that kind of looks like a saloon.

But Manhattan and Ringoes both have exceptional cats of excellence.

As of this week, Ringoes may be leading Manhattan in the delegate count: we have just taken in eight Big Apple babies who spin the International Scale of Fabulosity up to eleven.

You’ve already met the tabby contingent of our new octet. Gunther is a very easy cat to adore, unless you happen to be a cat who would like to remain alive. Human? He’ll moosh and smush and mash his face against you, accepting endless eons of your love and returning it in Guntherian spades. Feline? You’re going down, to the ground. To a part of town where you’ll never be found, as a matter of fact.

Maybe Gunther’s just angry because he has to share his name with this guy. Or maybe he can’t help it; after all, he does also share his name with this guy – and guy #2 was a pretty serious butt-kicker. Maybe roughing up other cats is just the feline equivalent of pillaging villages and marauding with Vandals. Maybe Webster simply reminds Gunther of Olympiodorus of Thebes. At any rate, our love-bug/ruthless warrior will be conquering new territory starting today, as he makes his move to the Lobby. If the original Gunther thought he had his hands full with the old Celtic Roman settlement of Borbetomagus, he hadn’t met Boots and Gingko.

On the (extreeeeeeeeeeme) opposite end of the warrior spectrum is fellow New Yorker Anthony. Despite his tough-guy name (typically pronounced “Ant’ny”) and his New York upbringing, Anthony is more “Midwest nice” than Goodfellas. Our wide-eyed creamsicle guy is the lamb of Suite C, bashful and blinking and anxious just to keep the peace. If not for a certain annoying heart murmur, it’s likely Ant’ny would have been scooped up already by now. Alas, we have still not succeeded in getting Congress to outlaw nasty diseases for nice cats. But, Anthony handles his condition with typical grace and peace. (And, fortunately, it’s extremely mild, such that he doesn’t require any medication.) On second thought, maybe our gentlest New Yorker is a warrior of his own kind.

There’s no mistaking the Xena Warrior Princess style of our next Manhattanite. On this blog, we regularly use the word bodacious as a euphenism for “enormously fat.” (In the same vein, we dare to refer to Sluggo, on his adopt-me page, as “a bit chunky.” Based upon Sluggo’s weight, that is an entirely accurate statement. For a woolly mammoth.) Well, take heed: Naomi has personally curbed the market on bodacity (and audacity, for that matter). She hasn’t said as much, but I get the sense Naomi is a tad bit resentful of having been pulled away from the front row of Fashion Week to come to Tabby’s Place. With her long, luxe hair and her vast island of ego, Naomi throws her weight around Suite A with great force – and style. We’ve not yet seen her fling cell phones at photographers, but supermodel behavior is certainly the order of the day in Naomi’s world.

New York Animal Care & Control must have thought Ringoes needed a megadose of style, because Naomi isn’t the only glamour girl they sent our way. Likewise long-of-hair and large-of-attitude, Layla strutted the Suite C catwalk just briefly before her adoption. And what an adoption! Layla is such a superstar that she had two adopters fighting over her, and they just so happened to be George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Okay, now I am just making stuff up. But suffice to say: this sweet feline’s beauty had her (actual) adopters on their knees, happy to accept her advanced age (elevenish) and to let her turn their whole worlds upside-down. She continues to ease their worried minds.

Tiffany, on the other hand, takes great pleasure in worrying our minds.

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