Drifter
On my travels reading about black holes I was introduced to Shrödinger’s Cat, and find myself wondering how the cat felt about being simultaneously alive and dead? Did anyone ever ask it?
I asked my cat Drifter how he would feel about being Shrödinger’s cat and he thought it sounded a bit mean to be locked in a steel chamber. He had some questions. Would there be a litter box? An in-house grooming service? A DVD player with nature programs featuring David Attenborough? Any crab and salmon crunchy cat treats to help him maintain a healthy coat? I had to confess that most discussions on quantum mechanics did not seem to go into these details.
“Well then I wouldn’t go into their box,” he retorted. Fair enough, I thought. I should explain here that Drifter is an ex-feral cat and used to making quick decisions.
“Why a cat?” he asked as though an afterthought, but I couldn’t help him there except to suggest that perhaps an Eastern Lowland Gorilla might not have fitted into the steel box quite so easily. Besides, they’re hard to get. It was clearly a low budget affair with a limited script and gorillas’ agents are known to be sticky on that.
“Like Mount Everest, I added, “the cat was there.”
“Ah,” he replied.
I was thinking some more about all this at 6.15 this morning when Sketch (my other cat) began walking in and out of my bedroom, howling in a very loud voice. Intermittently howling. With just enough time between bouts for me to fall asleep again. And get back into that lovely dream where I was…
“Rrrraaarrrrh! Rrarrh. Rrarrh. Rrraaarrrrh!”
I made a mental note to talk to him later about steel boxes, hydrocyanic acid and decaying radioactive atoms, and meanwhile I put Emergency Plan A into operation.
For those of you who are not familiar with Emergency Plan A, it is a quick and reliable strategy for removing troublesome felines from your immediate vicinity. You will need:
a) one English concertina or other loud reed instrument or
b) one vacuum cleaner (can also be handy as backup)
c) one protesting cat
This procedure should be used of course, only when other more conventional methods have failed (e.g. cushion throwing, sarcasm, threats of litigation, etc.).
Method: Lift concertina, place thumbs in thumbstraps, fingers in finger rests and play. You don’t need to be a virtuoso – anything will do. In fact there are theories that to play too well may result in several neat rows of neighbourhood cats all lining up in front of you expectantly waiting for the rest of the concert. Personally this hasn’t happened to me, and I find that a quick blast of discordant notes works like a charm. As to how it works, I believe that it is the equivalent of pressing the cat’s “reset” switch, putting it into “automatic” mode. When in automatic mode, the cat will not sit in front of the cat door wondering whether it’s safe to go out or whether it wouldn’t just prefer to sit in and howl a bit for the hell of it. It will shoot out of the cat door like a spring-loaded giraffe then look back puzzled, unsure how it got there.
If you don’t happen to have a handy Lachenal 48-key, metal-ended concertina handy, try a vacuum cleaner. The range of keys is a little limited, and they’re a bit hard to play standing up, but they’ll do in a pinch. If your cat is particularly noisy, you may find that in time you become quite proficient on the thing and can enter for “New Zealand’s Got Talent,” or “Cambodia’s Got Talent,” or wherever it is you live. In addition there is that handy feature of being able to win the approval of the judges by cleaning up the stage while you play. Including of course quickly and effectively removing the opposition. You can’t do that with a concertina. We concertina players have our own ways of dealing with the opposition but more of that another time!
2016-02-07
The Blethering Ant 