https://youtu.be/wPVBGE6uUS4

However, less is said about them and there's less meme / awareness about female black cats being less common.

I suspect this is that an intact male orange cat is much more noticeably male than an intact male black cat.

Huh, I had not heard that. In my experience it's pretty evenly split -- at least, in my circle of friends and family there's eight black cats, four of each. (Most short-haired, one long-haired black cat that's female.)

Let's denote this as Xo and Xb for the genes. An orange female cat is XoXo, a tortoise shell / calico cat is XoXb and a black female cat is XbXb.

Male cats are either XbY or XoY - there are no tortoise shell male cats (there are cats with Klinefelter's syndrome that can be XbXoY but only mentioning this for a full coverage of the topic - and for a real example of this https://disneylandcats.com/cat-profile-francisco/ and it confuses things since XbXbY and XoXoY cats would be difficult to identify without a genetic test).

The thing with all of this is that the genetics for XoXo or XbXb and XoY or XbY are exactly the same percentages.

Doing the Punnett squares for cat coats and all the possible pairings and you get simplified

    Genotype Count Percent of XX or XY
    XoXo     3     25%
    XoXb     6     50%
    XbXb     3     25%
    XoY      6     50%
    XbY      6     50%

http://messybeast.com/mosaicism6.htm

Francisco is the example I picked since he's likely the most well known of tortoiseshell (supposedly) male cats.

I suspect that some of the claims that he's female is based on a lack of knowledge of Klinefelter's syndrome.

But smart or stupid, impish or limpish, all cats are baby.

She is pure, hate-filled joy.

Cats are full of love and murder; all in different amounts. Sounds like yours has lots of both <3

She came out of a storm drain as a very, very young kitten, so her wiring is probably all sorts of messed up.

My current cat is a calico and white and she's...emotional. =)

However, some of that might be explained by the fact that he was a very, very sickly kitten who almost didn't make it, and he seems to have a mild case of cerebellar hypoplasia.

He loved BBQ it was obvious his previous owner did a lot of BBQing. My Dad dropped some raw hamburger for him.

Dad's Lay-Z-Boy chair wouldn't do down. What he didn't know was the cat was under it. The chair would slam down on his head but that was of no concern of the cat.

But my siamese was extremely stupid. For example, it is the only cat that could be distracted. If you took a cat on your lap and it didn't feel like sitting on your lap, it would be hard to keep cat there, it would take any chance to run away. But my siamese would allow me to distract her and would forget that she wanted to run away. It could be distracted from food also. Her attention span was seconds, not like most of cats who get an idea and become obsessed with it.

She had broken spine near the tail. My theory is cats hide their real brain somewhere in the back of the spine, while the thing in their heads exists to mislead humans.