                      THE ZEN-SUFI GUIDE TO CATS

    Polly the cat shows a remarkable understanding of property
relations. She brings titbits of catfood from her bowl and deposits
them on the keeper's pillow as a form of tribute. She will tug and
carry the end of a piece of string held by the keeper. Her attempts to
pull and wrest control of the end of a piece of string shows that the
cat brain can appreciate the finer points of economics. String games
are models of zero sum games: the cat pulls, and the keeper follows,
but the keeper could also decide to pull. The cat seems to enjoy such
games. The hunting instinct is changed to something else, in theory.


                     ASTRONAUT TRAINING FOR CATS.

    You can share our dreams for the demilitarization of space. Enrol
your cat on an astronaut training course. If you have room to swing a
cat then there is no problem. Please ring 0(44)7944 764312 for further
details.

                 THE FURRY GUIDE TO CATS AND THEIR WISDOM

    Copyright Statement: Cats are telepathic creatures, either
worshipped as Gods or else thought to be reincarnations of deserving
humans. Hlam is the medium for this message. Hlam is sharp. Sharp
claws, sharp criticism.

    29 NOVEMBER
    Current date is Thu 11-29-2001
    catnip 1 pill each
    >1 vomit food
    1 shit outside tray
    little food
    later the cats were very friendly

    12 DECEMBER
    Current date is Wed 12-12-2001

    Barn and Hlam are cats. Hlam is smaller and more active than Barn.
Barn is Hlam's brother. His mother's name is Echo. Hlam is a Thai word
for 'sharp'. Hlam has sharp claws. His ears are bitten in places.
Hlam's claws are coupled to a motion detector. A white string on a
black background is good. A piece of string with two ends is more
interesting for a cat than a closed loop.

    Hlam is more interested in games than his brother. Barn is lazy. He
is fatter than Hlam, and does not show the same agility in jumping on
to the furniture. Barn acts like a baby and rolls on his back when he
wants stroking. He likes stroking on the stomach and then he waves
about his paws with the claws flexing, but he always withdraws them
when moving to the owner's hand.

    Hlam will claw the owner when the owner tries to straighten a
carpet. This is the motion detector effect. But also the motion is at
the edge of something.

    The cats seem to like human affection, or love, just as much as
food. They have co-evolved with humans, and have been known as
companions for millenia, long before the age of radio and TV. The
electrical intereaction between a stroked cat and it's human carer is
undoubtedly among the first electrical phenomena known in the home. The
cats must have kept alive the human hope to control electricity. Indeed
early electricity was popularised by communal electroshock seances. The
Leyden Jar was a good party trick in pre-TV days.

    I just stroked Barn's stomach and drew a spark from his extended
claws. The opened claws are in this case not necessarily hostile but
they may be there to concentrate the force lines, rather like
lightening conductors are designed with sharp edges. When Barn lies on
his back to be stroked, and waves his paws with the claws out, then he
is in fact maximising the chance of a spark.

                        INTELLIGENT CATS

    Fritz Leiber's book 'The Wanderer' is the classical story of smart
cats. In this book an evolved species of cats control a planet size
spaceship which just jumps into the solar system close to earth and
causes havoc. The book deals with the possibility of love between man
and cat, but the question is not resolved.

    The space station may eventually have cats. Already some pet owners
are willing to send their pets by plane to distant continents. Clearly
the spate of 'Alien' films around show militaristic methods of vermin
control rather than breeding smart cats to catch the rats. Bone loss
will be a problem. Zero-G could be very terrible for cats. Somehow that
was no problem for the big rats in the 'Alien' films.

    Greedy capitalists are often portrayed as 'Fat Cats'. These are
often cats which have doting owners that feed them all the time. Barn
seems a good example of a fat cat.

There are also thin cats and feral cats which have to catch or scavenge
their own food. There were many of these in Jeddah in 1982. As is often
the case the feral cats often prefer human leftovers to searching and
destroying rats.

    Most smart cats are just entities of fiction, especially comic books
and TV cartoons. In these stories the cats are obviously speaking the
lines of the owner.

                             AL BIS

    Abdul Hakim came from the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. He was a guard at
the SOGEX project in Jeddah, and most of hist time he sat in a sentry
box at the entrance of a large construction site. One morning I saw him
giving a cat a saucer of milk, and I asked him what the creature was
called.

    "Al Bis", was the reply. Apparently Al-bis is a popular Arabic word
for cat. Abdul Hakim also showed me how to write Arabic from the top
down, rather than right to left. The vertical bar of the Alef becomes a
simple horizontal dash.

                            STEVEN ROSE'S CAT

    Stephen Rose is a professor of moleculer biology at England's Open
University. Steven Rose keeps at least one cat. Steven Rose has written
many polemical articles attacking 'Darwinism' and 'Evolutionary
Psychology'. Neither of these things seems to have anything to do with
the energy cycle in cells. In fact there is still insufficient evidence
to back up all of Darwin's theories. That does not matter. The
creationists, who were always the intellectual opponents of Darwin, are
to be counted off with the wacky businessman that wanted to patent an
inaccurate value of Pi. The creationists and businessmen thrive in a
monoculture where people can be brainwashed to accept a common set of
values which place great emphasis on wealth and power.

    Steven Rose sides with the angels in his intellectual pursuits, so
he visted Viet-Nam when it suffered American bombing. He did his best
to protect the common people of Northern Ireland against the lethality
of oppressive policing.

    The cat is a watcher to these things. The cat may be a jealous cat,
just like the old testament God, or indeed any tyrant. When there are
two cats there will be mutual affection and also disputes. The same
rule seems to serve for both kings and gods. Islam and Judaeism and so
on go on for settling disputes between gods by claiming 'tawaheed' or
unity. Yin-Yang philosophies still allow for unity through diversity.

    Steven Rose's cat is totally different to Schrodinger's Cat. The
latter cat is half way between life and death. Quantum coupling could
make the two cats brothers. One may die, and the other may live. Action
at a distance could bring the two cats together, even if they are
physically seperated by light years.

                        TANITH LEE'S CAT

    Tanith Lee is one of the most creative writers to use the English
language, and she started writing at nine years old. Tanith still
sticks to manuscript: no computers or other gizmos for her. Just like
many professional writers her career has had its ups and downs.

    Tanith Lee's cat belongs to a woman with an excellent mind. The
books written when Tanith Lee was quite young remain some of the best.
These were distributed in the USA before they became so popular in
England. The 'Sword & Sorcery' genre had already become a niche market
in America with books such as 'Dune' by Frank Herbert.

    Tanith Lee jumped onto the magic carpet of feminism at an early age.
Women take strong roles in most of her stories. Sex is also there, and
usually with a twist. Transmogrification may take place to either to
satisfy the craving for vengeance or the satisfaction of lust, and the
reader may be left guessing. Prostitutes are friendly. Magic is often
explained by reason, and even science.

    Some of Tanith Lee's earlier fiction invented a whole pantheon of
Gods and their opposites. She incorporates many old fables into
entertaining stories. Her stories also include natural and man made
disasters. Plague, war and famine are all grist for her mill. Another
theme is the loss of knowledge. Her medieval fantasy worlds are full of
artifacts like the big tunnels of Europe. Two of these have already
seen conflagration, as has one of the greatest tunnels of Asia, the
Salang Tunnel.

    27 DECEMBER

    The cats do not seem to recognise their owner. Saifon took her other
two cats to Thailand, and came back here to the UK. The cats are being
boarded in a council estate reminiscent of a Tanith Lee fantasy with
young men being sick on the landings, and lifts that don't work. Tanith
Lee has now written many stories set in England, but we can't hold that
against her. She lives in the South East and is well able to observe
the social changes of the greedy and thuggish Thatcher- Blair era. She
therefore confronts the real difficulty that you can't write Science
Fiction anymore. The dystopian scenario of Orwell's 'NINETEEN
EIGHTYFOUR' was played out in Chile in the 1970s and SLORC dominated
Burma of the 1990s. But Tanith Lee does not go for the end of history.
She seems able to shift from gothic fantasy to heavy metal science
fiction quite easily .... although the science is often only hinted at
as a rather forgotten craft. This goes well with the perceived dumbing
down of mass culture, although wisdom is more important than rote
learning. Certainly Tanith Lee's description of whores emphasises their
intellectual training: they are often tought to play chess. Cultivating
an agile mind is important for women and cats.

                        CAT'S TONGUES

    The cat licks tomato sauce from a plate, carefully avoiding the
pilchard. The other cat licks its private parts as an act of cleaning
and purification. In either case the human may see how long is the
cat's tongue. The tongue of the cat is quite long when necessary. But
the cat's tongue is not so useful for speaking. Cats are good at
miaowing, purring, and squeaking, but their language is not a human
language just yet. Cats hiss when angry, but they generally do not mix
this with miaowing and purring. The aggressive body language is
reserved for hissing.

    A squeak is quite often part of a greeting of the cat to its carer.
Echo and Hlam both do this. Barn prefers a very quiet sort of miaow.

                      DR. MARK'S CAT

    Dr Mark Westhusin succeeded in cloning a cat at Texas A&M
University. The kitten was born by caesarian section just before
Christmas 2001, but the cloning experiment was only announced in
February 2002. The kitten took the front page of many of the World's
newspapers. The little cat is called 'Carbon Copy'. She has been cloned
from a female tortoise shell type, and the egg cell was implanted into
a surrogate mother. There were at least at least 200 attempts to create
clone, including the selection of cells from the mouths of male cats.
Of these 87 matured enough to be implanted in surrogate mothers and
only two pregnencies were established.

    CC does not look like her mother; a cat's distinctive pattern is
determined to a large extent by environmental factors as the infant
develops in the womb.

    Animal welfare groups are not enthusiastic. The commercial
organisation sponsoring the experiments is called 'Genetic Savings &
Clone', and it claims ownership to the technique, after investing
millions of dollars into the research. On the same day that CC was born
at least 6000 unwanted cats were put down in the USA alone.

    CC was born just before Christmas 2001, but the announcement was
only made seven weeks later, in February, when it appeared that the
kitten was thriving. The pictures in the newspapers made welcome relief
from the usual misrable stories about war and famine.

    Ref: <cats.jpg> <wcat15.jpg>

                       CAT MEDITATION

    A cat sits on a carpet and meditates. The cat attempts to teach its
owner insight. When the ears are pointed upwards, then concentration of
thoughts are present. The cat has a very small brain, although some say
that it is large in proportion to the total animal. Whatever the truth,
it is hard to look at an alert waiting cat without thinking that the
cat wants to teach us something.

                       KUKLACHEV'S CATS

    There is a Russian expert on cats called Kuchlachev. He is a cat
whisperer, and he has trained cats to do tricks in front of an
audience. This was shown on the BBC on 3 March, 2002. The cat's tricks
were mainly natural leaping and balancing acts of cats, but contrived
to be done in public. Barn and Hlam are rather too shy for this at the
moment, but there are clear future possibilities.

                        TRACY EMIN'S CAT

    Tracy Emin is a British artist. She is famous for exhibiting a used
bed in an art gallery. The bed had cigarette ash and used condoms on it
but no cat shit, to my knowledge. In March 2002, Tracy Emin lost her
cat. The cat's name is Docket. The loss reached radio and the
newspapers. BBC's news quiz mentioned the item, as did the Guardian.
Unfortunately neither story says whether the cat has been reunited with
the owner. What did happen is that some posters advertising the loss of
the cat got picked up by people who thought the art work would become a
commodity.

    The media stories made fun of the affair, with remarks about the
other famous British artist Damian Hirst whose speciality is exhibiting
sections of dead animals. The speculation is whether Docket will end up
in the hands of Mr Hirst.

    There is much urban myth about missing cats. In working class areas
of Britain there are racial slurs made about the cuisine of immigrants,
or perhaps stories of traffikers roaming the streets to provide cats
for vivisectionist laboratories.

    The truth is that traffic kills cats. Cats may have nine lives, but
increased traffic can use them up very quickly. Other urban hazards may
be around. Used syringes from junkies are now a common feature of the
UK urban environment. England has had one of the most repressive
anti-drugs legislation on the books with twenty five year sentences for
smugglers but still there are used syringes in the parks and pathways
of urban Britain. These must be terrible hazards to cats and dogs, and
yet the legislators do nothing about it. In England they go on about
fox hunting instead of the more serious issues of mechanical beasts
driving down and crushing cats, or even the syringe problem.

    The Christians may talk about the crucifixion of Christ the Son of
God, but there are tens of thousands who each day seek voluntary
crucifixion with hypodermic needles, rather than nails. The junky will
hunt veins and eventually get the injuries of crucifixion. The junky
becomes the twenty first century son of God. Nietzche was wrong! God is
not dead, but the father of a junkie.

    The cats live in 'Junkie Land'. Drugs problems are always supposed
to exacerbate problems in poverty striken urban housing schemes. The
problems include vandalism, and abandoned vehicles. It is not uncommon
to see cars blazing after they have been set alight by joyriders. In
some parts of Yorkshire members of the public may even attack
firefighters with missiles once they are called to put out a fire. When
the two cats look over the balcony they can see two burnt out wrecks of
cars stuck on a former basket ball area. The lifts on the estate work
for the most part, but there are people who use the lifts as urinals.
One has to ask whether it is a civilised place for the cats.

    12 October 2002

    Tracy Emin was invited to edit the Weekend Guardian. Docket wrote
the story on the pet page, describing his adventures. Apparently the
cat got trapped in a derelict house, and survived for six days by
drinking water from the toilet bowl. Eventually Docket's miaows alerted
the keeper who happend to be passing close by.

    Tracy Emin is to be congratulated on sharing this happy story with
her public. The first person singular is quite adaptable to cat
stories. There have even been web postings describing a cat's last
visit to the vet in this style. Apparently Docket gets chicken and ham
to eat.


                          CAT CHROMOSOMES

    38 Chromosomes, according to some counts.. That's more than human.
The count of human chromosomes is lower because chromosomes are
supposed to have merged in the past.

                        FASCIST CHECK

    Everyone knows that Hitler had a dog called Blondi. Hitler liked
dogs, and apparently Mussolini was more partial to cats. Stories like
this feature much in modern animal lore. When it comes to dogs the
terms Junkyard Dog, and Reservoir Dog refer to the sort of dogs that
jealously guard private property, and the descendents of these dogs
which become feral dogs running around the margins of big and expensive
construction projects. Dogs may be used to project the owner's power
and anger, but felines have gone out of fashion for this since the days
when the Romans are supposed to have thrown Christians into the arena
to be devoured by lions.

    Nowadays no one uses a cat to project anger and power. In fact the
most famous lion in recent news was Marjam the Lion, of Kabul Zoo.
During the civil war in Afghanistan Marjam himself became the victim of
a hand grenade attack. Despite horrible injuries the lion lingered on
in captivity until the Afghan capital changed hands in the fall of
2001. He died shortly afterwards.

    Cats can get eaten. When domestic cats get eaten by other cats then
there is clearly a moral problem. The keeper realises that there is no
compromise solution. One country where the people faced this problem is
Israel. There was a kibbutz where the people objected to their cats
being eaten by leopards. They could have decided to keep the cats
indoors like many Americans and other city dwellers, but instead the
kibbutzniks insisted on the leopards being confined to a zoo on the
coast. In fact some humans are jealous of the big cats and won't leave
them alone. Predatory behaviour is much more often a case of human
attack rather than cat attack. Cats will eat animals, birds and fish.

    Fascist regimes can be very bad for cats. Accompanying famine
increases food competition and also makes it tempting for humans to eat
cats. It's also not good for people to divide their loyalties,
according to many fascistic doctrines. There is the odd chance someone
will revere a pet cat more than the dear leader, or father of the
nation. There is no cat in Famille, Patrie, Travail, the slogans of
French fascism. Of course these may all make good names for individual
cats. Or Hitler and Stalin.

    In April 2002 Jean Marie Le Pen came second in the first round of
the French presidential election. Lionel Jospin, one of the earlier
favourites, took only the third place. This means that France has just
a choice of two right wingers for the presidential elections, and one
of them has a reputation for corruption which would appear like a story
of mediaeval family empires were it not for the airline tickets. There
is no way that any sensible person can say that this is a victory for
democracy.

    French students and school children have already gone out into the
streets to fight the riot police. Many of them must be ashamed of the
way that many older people voted. The pundits say it's the losers in
globalisation that go out and vote fascist. Austria, Belgium, Denmark,
France, Italy and The Netherlands all have neo-fascist parties. All of
these parties show intolerance to non European immigrants, and they
tend to promise more detentions centers and departations. In this they
are following the lead taken by the recent Australian government, and
the authorities in Hong Kong who have run detention centers since the
1970s.

    Just as in the 1930s, modern fascist parties get the votes of the
unemployed and the pressurised small business community. In the UK some
of the most right wing people are farmers and 'country side' people who
want to keep alive the sport of hunting with hounds. In reality these
people may be on the fringes of green fascism where society can become
controlled to a sufficient degree for the ruling class to engage in
manhunts, just like the mediaeval knights.

    Modern football matches offer examples of this when the crowds get
out of control. Many police forces employ horsemen and women along with
dogs to control the crowds. It seems obvious from some TV pictures of
football riots that the alsations really love the excuse to run around
and chase hooligans.

    The police also have started to employ far more small dogs in modern
times. These are the sniffer dogs whose task it is to spot drug
smugglers, or to sniff around containers in warehouses and freight
terminals looking for illicit human cargo, or drugs, or possibly
explosives.

    This modern use of dogs is best illustrated by a short anecdote.

                    A MODERN DOG STORY

    A man got onto an aeroplane with a small dog, and for some reason
the cabin crew did not object. The man and his dog shared a seat at the
back of the plane with a curious passenger.

    After the plane took off the owner unleashed the dog and let it walk
down the aisle sniffing the passengers and their luggage. After a while
the dog stopped at a particular passenger, then came back and put its
left paw on the owner's knee.

    "What is going on" said the man sitting next to the dog's keeper.

    "I work for the Drug Enforcement Agency", said the dog's owner.
    "His left paw means marijuana. I will note the man's seat number and
boarding card details, and he will get a thorough going over on
landing. Now I will send the dog out again".

    The dog moved into the cabin again, and after sniffing a few more
passengers came back and put it's right paw on the owners knee.

    "That's a good bust. The right paw means heroin or cocaine. I will
note the passengers seat number, and the authorities at the airport
will know what do do. We can try once more".

    With that the dog went back to it's task and then it suddenly ran
back to it's owner, jumped onto his lap, and defecated.

    "what's that. The dog's shit on your pants."

    "Yes, one of the passengers is carrying a bomb" said the dog owner.

                         DEATH OF A CAT

    Booby the cat died within six months of being flown out to Thailand.
Booby's owner is very unhappy, because she did not really want to part
with the cats.

    Travelling is always a strain, and Booby never really seemed to
recover from the long journey. The climate change was extremely
stressful. Bangkok seems stiflingly hot compared with London, and air
conditioning is still not so common in middle class homes.

    The environmental pollution in Bangkok is far beyond anything
experienced in Northern Europe, and there are many sick animals on the
streets of the Thai capital. Asthma hits the human population hard. The
heavy traffic makes life very dangerous for free roaming cats.

    Booby was very shy in his new abode, and never regained his
confidence after the flight. Within days of his arrival in Bangkok it
became clear that he was in trouble. Later visits to the vet confirmed
kidney problems: always a danger for pet cats.

    John Hayes has written about Bangkok in The Guardian (27.08.02). He
left the city because the pollution was bad for his children.

                           CAT HELL

    The modern Saudi city of Taif has traffic schemes including concrete
canyons for cars rather like the Boulevard Peripherique in Paris.
During my only visit to the place I cannot forget a feeling of horror
as I became aware of an injured creature crawling about in the murdrous
traffic. It was only a fleeting moment as I was travelling quite fast,
but the sense of helplessness remains. The road was a dual carriageway
in a cutting, with steep walls on either side, so it seemed quite
likely the cat would die. It's sure that I felt more sympathy for that
cat than for the hundreds of humans killed on Saudi roads. The trouble
with Saudi is that the authorities have the reputation of locking up
the wrong people when it comes to traffic accidents: the owners of
parked cars are jailed while drunken Saudi drivers are proclaimed
innocent.

                   CAT AMONGST THE PIGEONS

    On the morning of May 19, 2002,  I was awakened by frantic activity
going on around the edges of the room. Hlam was having a great time
chasing a live pigeon around my room. There was a go board with some
stones on it, where I had been studying a position the previous night.
TALIBAN had just lost to feetball. Hlam loves feetball with the plastic
rattling balls that I bought him. None of that stuff in the centre of
the room was disturbed. The pigeon was hiding under the desk where the
computer screen is situated.

    The pigeon tried fluttering and eventually got airborne and managed
to cross the kitchen and fly out of the door. In all the bird
sucessfully navigated three doors to escape, despite being brutalised
by Hlam. Barn and myself were mere spectators to the scene. We don't
know how Hlam brought the pigeon into the room. It saved me the job of
disposing of the body.

    In fact there are plenty of pigeons here. Some tenants keep pigeons,
because it's an old working class hobby in these parts. People used to
breed pigeons and set them up in competitive races. The hobby of pigeon
racing could have been a spin off from neneteenth century military
communications. Carrier pigeons were once important, before the days of
radio. The ability of pigeons to navigate is still imperfectly
understood today despite great advances in communications science.

    Because the cats are living eight floors up they are in the zone of
birds. There are high winds, but because I am paying a flat rate for
heating I can have all the doors open and still be warm. This means
that I can let the cats have access to the balcony during the night.
They can guard the plants against intrudors.

    There are a couple of pigeon feathers on the carpet to remind me
that the incident actually happened. It's no real surprise the animal
escaped. I have seen that Hlam and Barn will often sit and watch rather
than attack a rat or a mouse.

                        STALKING

    Internet stalking may be a topic of conversation for the chattering
classes, but stalking behaviour can be boring. The cat pays attention
for a long time before getting accustomed to the background. The cat
can then detect motion, and pounce.

    The motion is the motion of just a few pixels. There may also be a
sound cue, and the type of object is known by its smell. The cat can
detect whether it's hunting prey, or perhaps a mate, or maybe it's
something to be feared.

    Get motion detection to be coordinate independent. It's just first
differentials you are looking for, and in fact our real space is just
obtained by integration. The first and most visible things are
movements, and this is just what are the variables in Langrangian and
Hamiltonian varients of the energy equations.

    Essentially the movement the predator seeks is a vortex. This is
perhaps a counterflow in some other rotating background. Angular
velocity is scanned for. There is no image until absolutely necessary.

    There is also the fact that a radius of curvature depends on second
differentials. Swirling motion and local rotations must reflect
acceleration rather than mere velocity. In animals it is the ear that
can best detect important movements like this.

                        CAT PSYCHODRAMA

    After keeping the cats for several months there are changes in our
relationship. Hlam is most greedy for attention because Barn is the top
cat. It begun several months ago when Hlam sat on top of a box
containing old copies of the Scientific American. I encouraged Hlam to
nest there because I thought it might make him a clever cat. Hlam
enjoyed curling up on top of this box for a couple of months or so
while Barn remained sat in the shelves of the TV stand.

    By the beginning of Spring, Barn started to sit in Hlam's box. In
fact Barn has lost a little weight, and he is now quite interested in
the games with string. Hlam remains the lightest and most agile cat, so
he can always get attention by sitting between me and the computer
screen. Hlam knows that I will then go to the fridge and get out a
slice of ham to feed him, so that I can go back to the computer. When
feeding Hlam I always give Barn the chance to eat a little, but Barn is
always more patient.

    Barn is the 'Top Cat'. Barn made this bid to be top cat about three
weeks after he arrived here last year. I always remember the emotion of
that time because Barn actually walked around a lttle on two legs just
to show that he could do that if he wanted. He has never done that
since then, because he had won my heart, although I did not know it at
the time, since my first love had been for Hlam.

    Barn seems more polite. Some observers might say than Barn behaves
more like a faithful dog, rather than a cat. Barn is certainly like his
keeper in one respect: both have rotting teeth. When Barn yawns it is
distinctly obvious that he has lost the long teeth on one side of the
mouth, and the teeth on the other side are dirty. Much of the dirt is
probably the result of passive smoking. Both of the cats have been
exposed to high levels of joss stick and cigarette smoke for nearly a
decade. The death of Booby in Bangkok adds to my concern about
pollution there, because I remember the stifling atmosphere of the
place.

    Barn seems ready to take things easy and accept life, but he is very
friendly about it. Hlam is always craving for more, and so he seems
more 'on edge'. When I lie down with Barn and tickle his chest, then
Hlam always seems to want to come and sit down between Barn and myself.
Hlam is jealous of both Barn and the computer. Sometimes Hlam and Barn
will have fights. Once or twice they seem to scratch at each other, and
I always hope they don't get hurt. In the past Hlam has run up medical
bills by attacking Booby. In fact some of the chasing behaviour is good
excercise and when they charge through the kitchen they split levels
with Hlam jumping onto the table and avoiding the Olivetti laptop in
the race to the chair beside the litter tray. It is surprising that
they hardly ever knock over the lamp on the table.

    Hlam is very adept at jumping onto a table full of clutter without
disturbing anything. He manages to do this when the table is above eye
level. He seems able to react in mid air as he makes his landing. I can
imagine that as I am writing this there will be the cats of rich people
muzzling around tables with expensive ornaments, some of them
undoubtedly the plundered antiquities (and fake antiquities) of almost
forgotten civilisations. The damage done to these artifacts by cats is
likely to be very low.

    Cats have adapted to survive with some humans it seems. The question
of cat allergy makes the adaptation less than 100%: there will always
be some who cannot easily love cats. That could afford some protection
to keepers of cats. Those people frightened off by the allergy may be
bothersome people.

    Barn and Hlam are both very shy with humans, rather like their
keeper. Whenever guests arrive, and that is not often, then they go and
hide under the television. They remain motionless until perhaps one of
them detects a chance to move unseen to a hiding place in the kitchen.
Hlam will occassionally walk out with great caution, but generally the
cats are not friendly to strangers.

    Despite the behaviour of the two cats described here it is obvious
that the cats do have a 'friendly gene'. Urban life has been around for
hundreds of years, but never more than now. The cats of Nada Village in
Jeddah are one example of a cat population explosion. While people are
starving in Africa and Afghanistan, the rich Gulf States have become a
sort of 'cat paradise' for some, and perhaps a 'cat hell' for others.

                        INFESTATION 2 JUNE 2002

    The first two days of July saw in the British queen's Golden
Jubilee. As a result there was no garbage collection on Tuesday. On
Thursday morning I went up the stairs towards the door to add another
bin bag from the kitchen to the larger black sack containing two other
bags. On opening the black bag I noticed a couple of maggots but
thought little of it until I looked closer and observed that there
seemed to be dozens of the little creatures writhing around.

    In fact I was not particularly surprised. The business of leaving
meat in open plates for the cats gives flies the chance to lay eggs.
The end of May had been rather warm and sunny, and there had been
plenty of flies in the kitchen.

    In Bangkok the local people say that mosquitoes generally do not
bother people living in high rise buildings. British vermin are more
persistent: ordinary house flies seem to go up to any height. Beetles
and cockroaches are also prevalent in older buildings. When I had lived
in Bayswater the whole block seemed infested with cockroaches to such
an extent that I informed the Westminster City Council. Later on I was
threatened with eviction from that building and left.

    Mosquitoes fly low but carrion eating flies seem less deterred by
heights. The carrion eating flies and bluebottles are features of
English country life. Some plants repel insects, and their extracts
have been economically important at least since the invention of modern
capitalism around 1600 AD. Garlic and onion were known for hundreds of
years, but more exotic tropical spices could be obtained large
quantities once the Dutch had opened up sea routes to the Moluccas.

    The use of modern insecticides has its place in life, but my own
personal experience is that the stuff you get in ordinary shops is very
weak, and many insects have built up such a resistance that they thrive
on the stuff.

    Ants also infest high rise buildings, but they seem relatively
harmless. I certainly remember the trails of ants on the third floor of
the prestigious Prapawit Building where I worked for Sahaviriya
Infortech Computers in Bangkok. The Prapawit Building housed a bank and
the Korean embassy, but it was still infested with ants. There were
well marked routes from one floor to the next, and we could sit down
and watch the ants when not inspired to program the computers.

    In Bangkok many of the buildings were inhabited by house lizards
which would eat any spare insect life. Spiders are quite good at this,
but it is not easy to encourage them to breed in high rise buildings.

    Rubbish disposal is a problem. In Bangkok this must have been done
by servants, but I was not really aware of them so much in the Prapawit
Building. Insect infestation was dealt with by large firms such as
Rentokil. These corporate giants will act as exterminators anywhere
where people will pay money for their services, and despite the
miserable attitude of the bosses these companies do make more money
with increasing prosperity: people throw away more food (because the
insects did not consume it before it was ready for the table) and
carniverous maggots thrive in the city.

    The relative population levels of humans, meat animals, pets and
insects are economically important and estimates are made by those who
monitor global warming. Humans have co-evolved with these satellite
species. For the last hundred years the human has had weapons unseen
before: hydrocarbons to spray puddles and breeding pools, poisonous
insecticides, and irradiation to probe the genes of insects.

    Irradiation studies on the non-carniverous fruit fly attracted the
attention of practical geneticists in the 1950s soon after atomic
weapons had been developed. School children were able to read of many
post nuclear war scenarios in comics of the time: the survivors would
be chased around by giant rats and mutated man eating insects.

    Ordinary wars can see increases in associated species. Increasing
poverty is good for parasites. Rats and cockroaches are associated with
poverty, ignorance and disease, but some people will say that rats can
be very clean. These will be pet rats kept by rich young people. It's
only in the slums where there are rats. I was bitten by a rat when
living in Soi Cham Chan in Bangkok, and I wanted to move to a less
infested place. There were not enough cats living in the slum, and
worse still those cats that lived there seemed to quickly succumb to
disease. The monks would care for these cats, but life was difficult.

                      MAHMOOUD DARWISH

    The Intifada which started in the fall of 2000 after Sharon's
bodyguards went on a shooting spree in the Al-Aqsa mosques has turned
Israel / Palestine into one of the World's key conflict zones. Most of
the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have been reduced
to near destitution. These are hardly favourable circumstances for
cats.

    Mahmoud Darwish, the Poet of Palestine, has been living in Ramallah
since the mid 1990s when the Israelis allowed him to return from exile.
Conditions are not good: Mahmoud Darwish opposed the original Oslo
Peace Accords because he thought, quite correctly as things turned out,
that the Oslo process was flawed to such an extent that there would be
an increase in violence. Mahmoud Darwish is no extremist, but he was
forced to take a position similar to the rejectionists of Hamas and
Hizbollah.

    Hardline muslims are not so keen on supporting secular poets. Many
of them appear to think that such poetry is an implicit criticism of
the Koran. It's not necessary to read much of the work of Mahmoud
Darwish to see that he is not in favour of brainwashing. Mahmoud writes
of martyrdom in the context of the World with the rain, the rivers, the
birds and the butterflies. It is the right of people to turn their
backs to oppression and walk undisturbed, but this right is being
denied to many. Mahmoud Darwish speaks out for all of the oppressed.

    During the Isreali invasion of April, 2002, Mahmoud Darwish did not
have so much to reassure him. The Israelis were destroying much of the
infrastructure of the Palestinian towns and villages. At the age of
sixty his health is not so good as it was. In an interview for the
Guardian Mahmoud Darwish said "my lust for life is less. I try to enjoy
every minute, but in very simple ways: to have a good glass of wine
with friends, to enjoy landscape, to watch cats. I love all the cats in
the neighbourhood. I listen better. I used to speak, but I became
wise."

    There is also a story of a suicide bomber who had regretted running
over four cats during his work as a taxi driver. Roads with long
periods of inactivity will become attractive to cats, especially if
they wish to feed on other animals which may have been killed by the
traffic.

    Israel Shamir writes about the stray cats of Jaffa, Mr Shamir runs a
webzine which I get, and he calls for the togetherness net. Because I
didn't go through the hassle of downloading MS Windows Arabic
extensions I end up reading the English and therefore Isreaili
Non-Zionist pundits about the Middle East. It's Barry Rubin and Rabbi
Michael Lerner that get my attention these days. I feel guilty going to
Palestine Support Group meetings and yet getting most of my web based
stuff from Jews.

    Isreal Shamir writes at great length, and he wrote an article
congratulating the French on voting for Monsieur Le Pen. This shows
that Mr Shamir is politically suspect, but he still praises the Miaow
that he and other residents of Jaffa share with their city.

    The feline residents of Jaffa may share nothing of the political
views of the humans, and they certainly don't go in for suicide
bombing. Israelis may have the luxury to sit in their houses and not go
out except to but catfood and minimise the risk of being suicide
bombed.

    Palestinians have not got the choice: the curfew must mean that the
cats are miowing, and the keeper will have to brave rockets from
Israeli helicopter gunships, or possibly heavy machine gun fire from
Israeli tanks and armoured area demolition vehicles, or even ordinary
light machine gun fire and sniping from Isreali conscripts based in the
local school or medical center.

    Getting cat food under curfew sounds quite lethal.

                    CAT EATS CANNABIS PLANT

    One night I put a cannabis plant, growing in an yoghurt container,
on my bedside table. Because I often fall asleep drunk and leave the
light on, I thought the extra light might boost the growth of the
plant. In fact I should really have more plants, but getting the seeds
to germinate and continue growing is much harder than I thought. Only
one in five seeds actually will keep on growing. Now I have two plants
growing well, and a third plant which shares a pot with the larger.

    I awoke to commotion on the bedside shelf. Hlam was nibbling away at
some of the leaves, but not all that much really. I quickly chased him
off, but I felt proud that he had shown such good taste. The leaves
undoubtedly contain useful oils, and maybe I could get a licence to
sell cannabis as a catfood supplement.

                           REC.PETS.CATS

    There is an internet newsgroup about cats. It's a high volume group
with many mind boggling stories about the quirky behaviour of other
people's cats. There are also words of sound advice: cars are more
dangerous than houseplants, for example, and advice against de-clawing
surgery.

    Cat medical problems feature as well as issues about shared litter
trays and cat's access to kitchen and cooking surfaces. Many people
seem to have advice about cats upsetting cups for example: but how many
of them offered wine or coffee to their cats ? Most cats don't want
that.

    Biting and scratching are dealt with in the newsgroup as well as
defecation and urinating. The latter is particularly important. Kidney
and urinary tract problems are leading causes of death amongst older
male cats. The writing is on the wall for the human males.

    The cat is going to die, so it's guardian must make even sickness
and death a pleasurable experience for the little beast, if possible.
If the cat is allowed out of doors then there are two main dangers:
unfriendly humans and motor cars. Both will cause anguish.

    Like many internet newsgroups there are many messages that appear to
be nothing but point scoring. Cat aggression seems translated to human
aggression. This is not always surprising. There are quotes from
newspapers of horrific instances of deliberate cruelty to cats. It's
easy to accuse cat lovers of putting the rights of their pets above the
rights of humans, and many of these accusations are true: the American
cat food budget could feed many of the world's hungry people. Japan and
the European Union could double that amount.

                    INSECT SEASON  JULY 2002

    A spell of cloudy weather with rain, followed by warming up has
brought more intense insect activity. During a walk to the West of
Sheffield I found midges made it impossible to enjoy sitting by the
Redmires reservoir or even in the garden of a the Three Merry Lads, a
pub near the former fever hospital at Lodge Moor.

    The cats' guardian sprayed the kitchen with insecticide. Permethrin
and synthesised pyrethrins. This insecticide is supposed to be
relatively non toxic to mammals, but the instructions on the aerosol
advise against spraying the stuff on food or cooking utensils.

    The next step is the cultivation of the Chrysanthemum plant. These
plants contain pyrethrins which are insect repellants. Pyrethrins work
well on the local bugs. Another cat owner in Sheffield also testifies
to the insect deterrent  efficacy of chrysthanthemums, when these are
kept as house plants.

                        CAT RELIGION

    There is no cat but cat and cat is the messenger of cat.
    Play five times a day.
    Accomodate irregular meal times with fasting.
    Go round the scratching pole.
    Be generous to the prey.

    The guardian waves a piece of string and the cats pretend to attack
the end. When both the guardian and the cat are tired this becomes more
a ritual than a serious game. When two cats are involved as well as the
guardian then this ritual involves cooperation in mind and body.

    Early human religion is supposed to have been about getting good
results in hunting. Maybe eating the brains of parents, enemies or
certain animals was considered power giving. Human religion is still
full of the tradition of animal sacrifice, and then later the
renunciation of this.

                        CAT SEX

    Nearly all books on cats mention that humans have had no success in
controlling cat breeds. Wild mating has lead to the cat shape remaining
pretty much the same throughout the world. There are few fancy breeds.

    Most expensively kept cats are spayed or neutered nowadays.

    Despite the loss of their sexual organs some cats still like being
stroked on the stomach. Some cats appear to get spasms of pleasure from
this and as it happens Barn shows such behaviour. When this happens he
sometimes likes to stretch at full length, and also rapidly extend his
claws. This is a reflex action, and the guardian should pay care. Barn,
the soft cat, drew blood from the side of his guardian's foot during
one such petting episode.

    During a spell in Jeddah the cats' guardian invited cats into his
house. He actually saw two of them starting to make love, but at this
time he was not so interested in cats, and shooed them away to do what
they wanted to do in private. He did notice that the male had actually
started the activity by grabbing some fur on the back of the female's
head in his mouth so as to get a hold.

                           CHAT MECHANT

    Hlam finished off the growing top of a cannabis plant. This happened
while I was sleeping. The plant had taken about three weeks to grow.

                          FEMALE CATS

    Barn and Hlam are both neutered males, and as a result they tend to
put on weight. This contrasts with two female cats I visited recently:
Tabetha and Sensei. Tabetha and Sensei have different keepers but both
are of similar colour: a sort of mottled brown and grey. Sensie appears
to have blackish stockings in the same way that Barn appears to have
white socks.

    Tabetha and Sensei are both much smaller cats than Hlam and Barn.
Tabetha mostly gets dry catfood, while Sensei gets quite a bit of Marks
& Spencer cat tuna from tins. Sensei's owner also gives the cat some
left over human food in the form of rice and vegetable curry.

    Apparently Sensei has been trained to act to the word 'Space'. She
will react to that word and sit down, looking forward, with her head
resting on her paws. This is similar to the pose often adopted by Hlam.
Sensei, just like Hlam, loves to be stroked at the base of the spine.
In fact Sensei's keeper strokes her with the rough sand paper side of a
large box of matches, and Sensei loves this. She also likes to be
stroked on the stomach. Sensei has been out of doors many times, and
she has lived in several houses. Sensie is also a mother cat. She had
kittens while still very young herself, before she was taken to the
vet.

                            PERE LACHAISE

    Old women feed cats in this famous cemetary during my stay in Paris
during 1978-80. The cemetary provided a welcome escape from the
respective madhouses of G.A.I. and Cabinet Derieux, not to mention the
flat of Andre Leroi Gourhan.

                            FLY CATCHING CAT

    Hlam enjoys hunting flying insects. Sometimes he catches and eats
one of these. Obviously if the insects are flying around they are not
affected by insecticides, so the food may be reasonably safe.

                            FRACTAL CATS

    Just like the Rorschach Inkblot test, so the different parts of the
edge of Mandelbrot sets can be imagined to look like cat's faces. The
bits that stick out could be rationalised as ears and whiskers. The
Mandelbrot set is certainly hairy.

    The Mandelbrot set is defined as the set of complex numbers such
that the set {c, c+c^2, c+(c+c^2)^2, ...} is bounded. Here each term of
the sequence is defined in terms of its predecessor: Z[0] = 0 and
z[n+1] = c + z[n]^2. The colour graphic images generated from the
Mandelbrot set (aka Gingerbread Man) are generally colourings of the
complement of the Mandelbrot set, with the colour representing the
amount of computation (work) necessary to establish that a given point
is _not_ in the Mandelbrot set.

    Cat's faces are better seen where the iteration rule is changed
slightly: Z[n+1] = c + z[n]^p where p is an exponent greater than two.

    p = 3               Double Mandelbrot set
    p = 4               Triangular shape
    p = 5               Square shape
    p = 6               Pentagonal shape.

    The interest in Mandelbrot sets is confined to the edges of these
sets. Because the edges are deeply convoluted it is possible to examine
the edge with ever closer magnification and see similar results,
although there will always be points which can never be mapped with
computer technology.

                   TOP CATS AND RAMSEY THEORY

    When cats and keepers are in groups then various relationships may
be charted. Behavioural scientists have for long attempted to explain
these relationships via various diagrams.

    Frank Plumpton Ramsey proved theorems on just how many different
types of social groupings could be found in sufficiently large
populations. Just like Kurt Godel and Alan Turing, Frank Ramsey was
motivated by meta-theories, or theorems about theorems. All of these
three men were excellent hunters in their youth: hunters for the
solutions of challenging problems.

                        DORIS LESSING'S CATS

    Carole Klein describes these in her biography of the writer.
Pictures appear in the biography. It seems Doris Lessing thinks it
suitable to let the cats have a basket as a form of space. These photos
were probably taken before the invention of cat igloos and suchlike.

    Doris (nee Taylor) was underfed as a small child in Kermanshah, but
when her parents moved to Teheren, the child, aged three, forced her
family to adopt a cat. The child then shared her bed with the cat for
the next two years. When the family left Teheran to return to England,
via Russia, the cat was left behind.

    After spending the rest of her childhood in Africa, Doris Lessing
returned to London where she again started to keep cats.

    Doris is willing to consign much intellectual junk to the bonfire.
She has obviously experienced the jealousy of the cat to the word
machine. When the cat is not getting enough attention it will sit
between the writer and the keyboard, or better still make its bed on
the manuscript. A bit of tearing and chewing will not go amiss, and
this will probably aid revision and editing more than human attentions.

    Doris Lessing had three children before getting her fallopean tubes
tied. She did voluntarily what many cat owners force on their cats. I
never read her book 'The Grass is Singing', and I am not tempted to do
so. The exigesis of the book is enough of a story in its own right. The
mother cat was content to crouch and watch, and return to this piece of
string over several years. She hunted literary fame with a single
minded focus very apt to the feline species.

                        CAT AND MOUSE

    Mouse really means rat. Specialists of behavioural science study
rats running mazes, or, more recently, mice swimming in milk. People
have tried to isolate learning or intelligence genes with the aid of
experiments of this type. The only possible cruelty of these
experiments is mental cruelty, but we don't really know if rats and
mice have a mentality like us.

    Skinner was the behaviourist scientist associated with rat
experiments. Skinner's doctrines are regarded as pernicious in some
circles. He tried to reduce all of human experience to simple stimulus
response models. This type of determinism offended many.

    When a cat crouches on its haunches and watches, ready to pounce, we
observe a form of concentration. Cats have much to teach many humans,
especially those who a regarded as requiring life long medication. ADS
and HAS aka Attention Deficit Syndrome, or Hyper Activity Syndrome are
diseases which are supposed to afflict modern youth. The medical
establishment prescribes Ritalin.

    The waiting cat is able to concentrate. Because the cat may have to
sit for a long time, before actually jumping and seizing the prey,
there is some energy conservation mechanism. The cat has the potential
to change from a serenely sitting beast to a three dimensional
probability distribution of teeth and claws.

    Concentration is the key to human martial arts. A predator will
concentrate on its prey, because the prey is feeding time. The predator
lets the prey addapt to the environment as regards vegetable food, but
the predator does not need to adapt so quickly. As long as the prey
species adapts enough to survive, the predator does not need to evolve.
The predator can afford to be lazy.

    A polar bear is more like a grizzley bear than a caribou is like a
walrus. Both types of bear can catch fish.

    Ball games are imitation of a predator chasing prey. This accounts
for their popularity.

    SEPTEMBER 15

    Saifon and Kaplan came up from London to take the cats. Barn went
first, and then Hlam. There is another cat in London, which Saifon has
adopted. This cat is called Willow, and she is a long haired cat,
coloured black and white. Although Willow has Persian cat ancestry she
does not particularly like being combed.

    Losing the cats makes this a sad day for me. It's like the loss of
close members of the family.

                           POLLY THE CAT
    5 Oct 2002.

    Polly Anne has arrived. She has said nothing since she arrived in
this flat. She has found a place to hide behind the refridgerator. This
is a very secure place for her, since it is hard for a human to reach.
As I write this, I do not know how she will adapt. She is shy. There
are now constant bangs around here in the run up to November 5.

    Remember, remember
    The fifth of November
    Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.

    In multi-cultural England we have other reasons for fireworks. The
Hindu festival of Devali is about this time, and the local muslims seem
keen enough to celebrate 'The Night Journey', and the Eids with
fireworks.

    The reason I acquired Polly can be put down to the factor of family
growth. The keepers, Taslima & Ad-Dargham, had had another baby, and
Polly had found herself more and more socially excluded in that family.

    I had got out of bed late today, and done the usual morning ritual
of watering the plants and getting a coffee and a joint. The main item
was to pay off my credit card by sending a pound to the recoveries
section of the lender. This meant a journey to the bank, and I could
stop on the way and look at an advertising magazine.

    Normally I don't want to pay for things like that. Reading the
periodical in store is a form of shop lifting, but if I pay for a hefty
Saturday Guardian in the same store, then I feel entitled to go and
read other periodicals from the same news stand. I chose a department
store, and just put the Guardian in the basket, then camped on the
floor to mine the local advertising magazine. This meant finding the
pets page, and the first cat advert, amongst rather more dogs, drew the
reader's attention to Tabby. The first letter was 'T'. The most
important cat letters seem to be 'K' for kittens, and 'P' for persian.

    I definitely preferred the idea of an older cat to kittens for
several reasons. Mainly I do not want the cat to jump out over the
balcony and fall ten floors onto concrete. The Tabby was advertised as
four years old, and answering to the name of Polly. This meant that the
cat had not thrown itself off a balcony, nor got into a fatal vehicle
accident. The cat had already shown survival traits. The name and phone
number got written down. I went to the tobacconist check out to pay for
my purchases and then went off to the bank, then returned home. I
quickly rang the number given in the advert, and I must be thankful
that my eyes are still good enough to allow me to read small adverts
unaided by glasses.

    The telephone was answered by a woman who seemed quite willing to
discuss the cat. I first enquired how many people had answered the
advert, and she said that I was number one. Next she explained the new
addition to the family and also that Polly was a scratchy cat. This
seems quite normal for any cat, so I thought it was OK, since Taslima
just wants a quiet home for Polly, and that is all. No money was asked
for.

    The people lived on a housing estate to the South of the city so I
mentioned that I would have to use public transport, and could not be
precise about when I would get there. After a cup of coffee I packed a
ruksack and readied the cat cage. Taslima had told me which buses to
try, and I took the map. I also phoned Dawud, a car owning friend of
mine and told him of the project. It was an auspicious day because he
answered the call. Quite of Dawud is asleep, or very apathetic during
the day. Like me he often stays up all night.

    I felt rather a fool walking around with a cage and a ruksack, but
that is normal on any first experience. In the end I found the right
bus, and used the cage as a seat while waiting.

    Taslima's house is a second floor maisonette. The wonder of mobile
phones is appreciated on such visits. It's possible to arrive at the
street and get talked into the house or flat without having to search
through lots of numbers.

    Taslima introduced me to Polly who seemed friendly. At least Polly
let me touch her, and that's more than I achieved with Barn over five
years.

    I chatted with Taslima over practical issues. What food does the cat
like? Anything. Has the cat got fleas? Yes. Has the cat been speyed?
No. Does Taslima use the computer that is in the room? No. That's for
Ad-Dargam. Is the cat dangerous? Not really.

    There were also too young children in the room, and they had
obviously been in this world for some time .. at least a year I
thought. In other words the decision to get rid of the cat had not been
taken immediately after the birth of the latest child (epsilon in Erdos
speak).

    The trajectories of cats and epsilons were diverging. Taslima had
one other cat, a canary and a hamster. The sleeping arrangements were
be complicated by the fact that the cats might go after the canary.

    Polly is a very small cat. She has tabby markings on top, but most
of her underside is white. The other cat in the house was a ginger tom.
He had been neutered at an early age. Taslima explained that the ginger
cat was allergic to Polly's fleas. Ginger was out on the balcony when I
arrived.

    Next I was able to ring Dawud and arrange for him to call round. It
was not so far from Dawud's flat in Totley, He could find the place on
the map, just as I had done. He arrived about half an hour later,
during which time I had made myself at home, accepting the offered tea
and smoking a cigarette. Once Dawud arrived Ad-Dargam put Polly in the
cage and I took my loads down to Dawud's car. There was another person
in the car but I spent most time looking at how the cat reacted to
travelling. I held the cat's cage on my lap, and Dawud drove us
straight to my flat. I gave Dawud some money for the journey.

                        POLLY SETTLES IN

    The first arrival in a new house is obviously a big event for a cat.
Many cats never change owners, but some are travellers. My own
immediate concern is that I can leave England with Polly, but probably
we could never return together because of quarantine laws.

    When Barn and Lam arrived here they both found places to try and
hide. Barn sat with the plastic bags around the wheels of the bike, and
then behind the soft chair. Polly was even more discreet. I opened the
cage in the kitchen, then took the ruksack into the bedroom. When I got
back to the kitchen Polly was out of the cage and out of site. She had
found a hiding place behind the refridgerator. I could not touch her
there, without moving the refridgerator, which stands in a recess
between the sink and the cupboard unit. Polly sat there several hours
although she did communicate when I lowered a cork on a piece of string
into the narrow space. She tugged. She was making a good job of being
the invisible cat.

    Later on, after sleeping for a while I returned to the kitchen and
tried to find the cat. I moved the fridge an inch or so, and saw there
was no cat. She had gone to the top of the stairs and was sitting
amongst the black plastic sacks behind the bicycle. She allowed me to
carry her downstairs but returned to the staircase. Now I offered her a
couple of pieces of ham on the staircase then carried her down to where
the food had been set out.

    Because Polly is such a tiny cat, I think she has a high metabolic
rate. She is probably more active than Hlam. It is also apparent that
she can consume five or six pounds worth of food a week if I feed her
on chicken and fish and ham all the time.

                        CAT REFUGE

    During these first days it is necessary to assess the chances that
Polly will run out of the flat when someone opens the outside door. The
best way to stop this is to confine Polly to the kitchen whenever the
keeper goes out, but this may be impossible to do in the long term.

    Barn and Hlam were no problem. They would run to favourite places,
normally the shelves under the television set. Polly seems to show a
penchant for sitting behind the fridge, and that is an exellent hiding
place. If the cat litter and food were hidden behind the soft chair,
then it would be possible to keep a very low profile.

                           WILLOW

    When Saifon and Kaplan moved into their new house in a fashionable
area of London not far from the resting place of Karl Marx they found a
cat waiting for them. Saifon called her Willow. Willow is a black and
white cat with some persian ancestry.

    Willow avoids Hlam and Barn, and Hlam and Barn avoid Willow and
Peter. Hlam and Barn are very close to each other. They would often
touch heads as a sign of affection. Saifon and Kaplan also have their
separate territories as much as possible in that house.

    Cats define territories by smell. Humans also do this. Some people
piss in the lifts for example. Others smoke cigarettes. More fastidious
people use deodrants. Deodrant use is commercially important and it is
meant to make for a better society.

    It is quite likely that smells have their own meanings to different
creatures. These meanings will generally be food, sex, or danger. Mimic
smells can be used to catch prey, or to deter predators.

    In this flat, Polly is cautious when entering the bedroom, and she
never stays long. The kitchen is different. When Barn and Hlam left I
swept up the kitchen, and sprayed insecticide where the beetles fed,
and especially at the back of the fridge. It seems surprising that
Polly jumped for the most toxic area in the whole kitchen when she
first got out of the transport cage. Or did she go there to try and get
rid of fleas ? She still scratches and licks, but her coat seems in
good condition. Not quite so good as Hlam and Barn yet, but I intend to
get her to put on a bit of weight. She is already behaving more like a
cat, and shows more interest in games after a couple of days.

                       A NEW SCRATCHING POST

    Polly has been here for a couple of weeks. After a few days I got
her a scratching post from a shop, but she does not use it. Photographs
on the Internet show quite elaborate assemblies built up from
scratching posts. Some of these have platforms and seats at different
levels, like cat skyscrapers to be put up in the house. Polly is
completely indifferent. She scratches the window near the cat litter
tray, just like Barn. She also likes to scratch the soft chair near the
litter tray. She always sleeps in the kitchen. Even though the door is
open, she does not come into the bedroom at night.

    Polly is not expensive to feed. She seems satisfied with solid cat
food, and she will eat chicken and pilchards like Hlam, but her
behaviour to ham seems quite different. Barn and Hlam regarded ham as
quite a treat, and ham slices would dissappear very quickly. Polly is
under no feeding pressure at all being the lone guest of a doting
keeper. Therefore there is no apparent reward system based on food.

    Games with string are the main control methods for this cat. She
will follow a long piece of string when I drag this around the house,
but she does not like the piece of string that has a brown paper bag
tied to the end. She will follow it a couple of times, but then she
will run away in fear.

    Polly makes up her own games with the pilchards and the ham. When I
give her a slice of ham she will leave on the dish until it is dry,
like old bacon. Just like Hlam she will start on pilchards by licking
off the tomato sauce and the skin. The delicate backbone of the fish
will get left till last. Now she shows quite constructive behaviour in
bringing these food remnants into the bedroom, and leaving them there.

    Polly also shows quite different behaviour to Barn and Hlam when she
sits on my knee for stroking. She puts her paws on my chest and starts
nibbling my shirt. She will not nibble my skin, but she likes nibbling
the clothes over my chest, just as though searching for the mother's
breast. This is still the behaviour of a very young cat. She seems to
enjoy doing this when she is being stroked.

    Because Polly does not use the scratching post yet it seems that
string has many uses. The tugging games give her some excercise for
teeth and claws, and she seems to be learning to tug the string and
even pull it away from me. Polly has also started sitting on the lower
shelf below the TV set, where Barn and Hlam used to hide.

                         GOODBYE MOG

    The Guardian magazine reviewed a cat book. 'Goodbye Mog' by Judith
Kerr highlights the life of a cat who lived to be 32 years old. This
cat was called Mog and she has featured in several illustrated books
for children. Mog could be jealous, and she could sulk, just like Hlam.
Mog was finicky about food, causing the keepers some concern at times.
She also saw many changes in the household over her life, including the
arrival a baby, a family of foxes, and other household cats. Kate
Kellaway, the reviewer, describes Mog as a career cat. This is
certainly true. Judith Kerr compiled several: Mog's Kittens, Mog in the
Dark, Mog's Bad Thing, Mog and the Granny, etc.

    Title:      Goodbye Mog
    Author:     Judith Kerr
    Publisher:  Picture Lions.
    Size: 30 pages
    Price: 9.99 pounds sterling

                        THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT

    Many people start learning english at school with a single
proposition: The Cat Sat on The Mat. This complete sentence contains a
subject, verb, and adverb clause. Most children can draw the cat as two
circles, the top circle having whiskers, eyes, and ears added. The
larger circle representing the body is given a tail, and any horizontal
line below the cat represents the floor and mat, or carpet.

                          BREKKIES

    Brekkies is a brand of cat food widely sold in the UK. The packet
contains a picture of a tabby cat standing up and looking smart. This
could be a picture of Polly. The only difference is the colour of the
nose. Cats with white fur around the mouth often have a pink nose.
Polly has small patches of black and brown on the left side of her
muzzle, so the skin cells have some pigment. The nose is like a ruby:
an exquisite jewel in a fine setting.

    Brekkies (TM) http://www.waltham.com

                  HUNDRED WATT BULB: SIZE MATTERS

    Some cats like to sit under a table lamp. During 1996 the cat's
keeper was staying in a house near the river Thames in West London.
There was a white cat living at that house. His name was simply Mister
Cat. This was the habit of the would be owner of the house.

    The white cat would sit for hours and hours with his head near to
the bulb of a table lamp. It seemed a form of cat meditation.

    The white cat was old, and his ears were showing incipiant signs of
cancer. The edges of the ears show many small scabs. The cat had been
obtained from a cat shelter, and was taken as companion for an old
woman who died a few months after acquiring the cat.

    Although being a neutered male, the white cat was fairly small.
Small cats are more likely to sit under table lamps. All domesticated
cats appreciate the benefits of civilisation, but size is important
both for the cat and the keeper. In the case of lighting and bedding it
is easier to satisfy a small cat.

    Hlam and Barn did not meditate under the light bulb. Size is one
factor influencing this behaviour, but it is quite likely that being
members of a larger household, two cats and a human, was also a factor.

                   POLLY AT THE WINTER SOLSTICE

    Polly now weighs about 3.75 kilos.
    She is now being fed on tinned cat food.
    She has intestinal worms, but rejects medecine.
    She does not use the scratching post.
    Polly likes to bring cat food from her bowl, into the bedroom.
    Polly likes to gnaw the bed cover when she is being stroked.
    When Polly brings food she miaows.
    Polly has run out to the balcony several times when I arrive home.
    Polly is much more agile than the other cats I had here.
    Polly does not purr so much as the other cats.

                        LAPTOP LANDING

    Polly has found a new game. As a single cat in the household she
cannot draw attention by fighting the other cats. Instead she has
chosen another form of attention seeking behaviour. She climbs the
curtains to get to the top of the window. The most convenient starting
point is the table on which is parked the Compaq laptop computer. The
curtain is attached to a plastic curtain rail which is held onto the
window with bits of wire. The jump to the shelf above the window is
very high. It's only a few inches below the ceiling. Polly always has
to scramble a little to mount the shelf above the window. The table
from which she jumps is cluttered with books, floppy disks, pencils,
matches, lighters and the ashtray. There is no good way for Polly
returning to the ground except by landing on the desk amomgst the
clutter. The Compaq is in the landing area. The folding lid of the
Compaq has seized up. The machine is almost ready for dumping, but not
quite yet. While the writer describes the cat, the cat sits under a
table lamp close to the computer. When she sits or stands under the
lamp she risks toppling it to the floor. The lamp has fallen many
times.

    Because of the high value of any laptop, the keeper is quite
disturbed when Polly jumps up to the top of the window. Several times
the cat has got down by stepping into a basket held above the keeper's
head. Polly then gets carried down and the basket is placed on the box
where it normally rests. Polly has been encouraged to sleep in this
basket, and the experiment is successful. She curls up in the basket
just like a dog sleeps in a larger basket.

                     MORE ON CAT SEX

    Polly gets sexually aroused every so often. She has not had an
operation to remove her ovaries. When Polly is on heat she shuffles
around the floor with her back arched downwards, and she takes the
comportement of a mythical beast such as a gryphon. She utters high
pitched growling sounds, and responds directly to any single spoken
word by a little growl and a back shuffle. The behaviour is quite
taxing at times.

    Polly has had two periods since October. The last episode lasted a
whole week.

                            DRAW THE LINE

    Cats and balls. Football for the men, tennis for the women. Venus
and Sereena Williams the role models for a female cat. After a bit of
throwing and retrieving I set the last game, and came to the computer.
Polly's attention seeking behaviour became a miaow, and she ran in and
dropped the ball from her mouth onto the stained & dingy sleeping bag
laying on the floor. Polly has previously carried bits of catfood and
even excrement into the room, but this is a first sign of such directed
behaviour.

    When Polly learns skills she is the best teacher for her kittens.
That means that I just hang in and tell my friends she is the mother of
the smart cat breed. Her isolation in a tower block is next stage to
Mars voyage. Test calcium metabolism drugs on the cat to stop deep
space bone loss and all that.

                        FEBRUARY 2003

    The bone loss problem is more urgent now. NASA has just lost its
second space shuttle, Columbia, which burnt up over Texas after an
otherwise sucessful mission. Getting back to earth is a problem.
Anything falling from orbit normally burns up, and that is life saving
protection for us all in the normal run of events. The space shuttle
and other re-entry vehicles are meant to survive a fall from orbit, but
the space shuttle needs many expensive ceramic tiles on it's leading
edges to prevent overheating.

    The last words of the mission were 'Shut the door'.

    The history of Mir shows that humans can survive long in the cramped
conditions, and overcome considerable mishaps including fire and
collisions, but entry and exit from orbit are incredibly expensive at
up to twenty thousand dollars per kilo.

    Many people start to question the ethics of manned space flight.
There are certain obvious questions. Are men the right stuff? The
Columbia carried a couple of women. Are astronaut weight limits right ?
It would surely make sense to select small people. The large people
will say that human muscle power is essential on deep space
construction projects, and so you must have large people to do the
heavy work.

    Is it ethical to spend such large sums on manned space flight ? It
might be if space exploration were to become a substitute for war, but
the whole space-shuttle program was designed to be compatible with
military needs. Aero-space industries are typically the apex of the
military industrial complex.

    Putting cats into space would be a step away from militarisation.
Cats are cute pets here, but it might be quite bad if the spacemen make
contact with a civilisation which had evolved from a species which had
suffered from being hunted by cats.

    The bible story of Noah is a sort of inspiration. Anyone could
question the veracity of the story, but the business of keeping and
preserving species has survived, although we appreciate some of the
threats rather better. Cats are useless creatures from a practical
point of view, but keeping cats happy and fit in space is a challenge.
The bible does not say how Noah financed the venture. One has to assume
that the prophet did not borrow money and offer to pay interest, since
the bible is meant to be a book about a god that thinks financial
systems based on interest rates are pure evil.

    Tourism seems a valid way of financing space flights, and the first
passengers have paid to get into orbit via Russian launchers. The seven
deaths will not deter tourists.

                        MARCH 2003

    Polly has been on heat again. That's just hormones so it's not so
bad as long term obsessions. Her keeper is worse. The library sent a
couple of cards indicating the arrival of two books via an inter
library loan. These two books are the classical works on the Zeta
function by Titchmarsh and Edwards. Titchmarsh's work dates from the
1950s and Edwards's book was printed in 1974.

    The axis x=1/2 in the complex plane is the center of a long strip.
There is a hunt for a mouse in this region. Mathematicians are looking
for a root of the equation Zeta(s)=0 which does not lie on this axis.
The search has been on for a hundred years, during which the manned
landing on the moon has become history.

    The books both cover very similar material. The work of Hadamard and
De La Vallee Poussin, done in the late 1800s is important in both
books. The invention of computers stimulated the hunt, but it seems
likely that the computers are no real help.

                    JESSY THE CAT

    Jessy is a little black and white cat, and she lives in the Beer
Engine, a pub in Sheffield. On Sunday nights they have music, but there
are also people who congregate there to play Go. On the last two
occassions when I arrived Jessy often greeted me in the street. We both
seem to have the same attitude to pub music. It's not enthrilling. "Ce
n'est pas delirant" is a better phrase. The story is that Jessy goes
with the pub. Jessy was sitting under the owner's vehicle when I left
tonight. She miaowed and I opened the door of the pub to let her in.
She seemed to know what she was doing.

    Later that week Jessy went missing.

                CAT TELEPATHY

    A few days ago someone died within view of this flat. Polly became
agitated and clawed at the curtains. I drew these curtains back a
little and saw emergency vehicles and police around the tramline nexus
close by. Poly had been miowing and she had drawn my attention to the
incident which was either a suicide by laying down on the tram tracks,
or a victim of a violent street robbery left to die.

    The same sort of story may apply to Jessy. The landlord of the Beer
Engine has been having trouble with the brewery, and he wants to take
over another pub nearer to the center of town. Maybe Jessy knows this
is going to happen, and went missing on purpose.

                MORE ASTRONAUT TRAINING

    Polly's keeper is trying to write some programs for the computer
speaker. These programs twiggle the IO port settings for the PIT, or
programeable interval timer. The noise is really terrible and much can
be made to sound like speeded up tapes of common sounds played
backwards. Exposing cats and humans to such noises can be
disorientating although sirens, gunfire, and circular saws are also
common forms of noise pollution. It is interesting to observe the
reaction of the cat to various electronic noises. She is familiar with
both radio and TV as well as her keeper's voice.

                        MIRROR LIGHT

    Mick McManus picked up a CD which had been thrown away as litter on
this estate. He was playing with it, reflecting light from the table
lamp to the cupboard door behind Polly's feeding bowls. Polly found the
spot of reflected light exciting, and chased after it. It is also
common for people round here to play with their cats using a laser
pointer, but Polly's keeper disapproves of this because laser light
might damage the eyes if mis-used, or even by mere accident.

                        SAIFON CALLS

    Saifon called from Thailand. She wants to engage Hlam, Barn and
Polly in astronaut training. Three cats cooped up in a small flat is
just apalling. It will need another cat litter tray in the toilet under
the washbasin.  Hlam will get jealous of Polly. Polly's quiet life will
be over. It's a gamble. I should get my driving licence sorted out so
that I can drive to London and collect the cats.

                MAN PLAYS WITH DOG ON WHITE HOUSE LAWN

    President Bush was filmed playing with a dog on the lawn of the
White House in Washington. This was just part of the build-up to the
snatch of Iraq's oilfields. Tony Blair and George Bush reassure a
skeptical world that the war is a war about human rights, but their
speaches about Iraqi human rights have worn out already, just like
tiles on an obsolescent space shuttle.

                          APRIL 2003

    Polly pleases her keeper. We play together with white parcel string.
This seems more exciting than the green garden string. She really seems
able to carry off a two meter length when she wants a change of
activity. She did this trick twice last night.

    Because she is well fed it is hard to control her with food. However
she does like attention, and extra playing and petting seems a form of
reward. There is no punishment, although there are potential accidents
if she does something silly.

    Polly did not come on heat since the end of February. It could be
that she does come on heat, but in a very attenuated form. It's
different with her worm infestation. The glands on the sides of her
anus stand out as little black spots, and worms sometimes wriggle out
of her anus when I stroke her. In fact I see much of her back end when
stroking her, because she likes to sit facing away from me. All cats
seem to like being stroked on their haunches. Hlam loved it. Happy cats
do tend to lift their tails.

    The worms do not appear to cause Polly any problems, and the
medicine which kills the worms appears a weapon of mass destruction.
It's a synthetic, but in fact antihelmintic medicines are known from
ancient times. Copious draughts of wormwood are amongst the threats of
a jealous and vindictive God, to keep us in order. Modern science looks
at the immune system as a signal processing mechanism which can
distinguish between self and non-self. The worms are able to mimic
self, so they are not attacked by the natural defences. Disruption of
the worms' camauflage should lead to their demise.

    Pumpkin seeds are also listed in the Merck Index as an
antihelmintic. Pumpkin seeds are readily available in health food
shops. They are cheap. They can be mixed into the cat's food and the
cat will not reject the food. The question is how effective they are.

                        SYNCHRONISED CATS

    On Saturday I visited the drinks reception for the interdisciplinary
symposium on music at Leeds University. During this event I met Peter,
and we started discussing the sound experiences of different animals.
Peter seemed to know much about this, including the audible frequency
ranges for different animals. The discussion went on to cats, and Peter
started talking about two cats, and the way that they seemed to
synchronise themselves to different external stimuli.

    This was apparent with pendulum experiments I performed on Barn and
Hlam. They crouched on the shelf under the TV while I swung a pendulum
in front of them. They followed the movement with their heads and it
seemed very cute behaviour.

                        OBESITY CURE

    Modern pharmaceutical companies are all searching for anti-obesity
drugs. The World Health Organisation (WHO) claims there is a world wide
epidemic of obesity, with heart disease and diabetes as an expensive
consequence. Polly's tape worms seem to be the answer. Genetically
modified intestinal worms could solve this health problem. Some worms
actually cause obesity, so further research is needed.

                        CAN OF WORMS

    Dr Manson had worms named after him. These worms sometimes caused
grotesque swelling of the limbs by blocking the lymph glands. Dr Manson
did his work in China just after England had obtained important
concessions from the local administration by superior military forces.

    One hundred and fifty years ago imperialism required cures for
tropical diseases. The Panama canal could not be built without cures.
Natives rather than laboratory animals were often used to test
theories. Reed offered natives about $5 for natives to risk their lives
waering clothes or sleeping in beds previously used by deceased victims
of yellow fever.

    In 2003 NASA revealed that a can of worms had survived the burn up
of the Columbia space shuttle. It appears that the bio-tech experiment
was a success. The smaller organisms survive catastrophe: indeed there
is much evidence to show that small organisms can adapt themselves to
survive in volcanic vents. The arsehole of a cat for ring worms and the
arsehole of a fiery planet for some weird creatures adapted to live on
sulphur.

    Sometime in evolution man learned to domesticate beasts and plants.
The biotech century promises the domestication of species made to our
desire: resistance to a certain commercial pesticide, perhaps, or for
apocalyptic terrorists a 100% kill rate mutation of anthrax or
smallpox.

    Extermination of a species has become a deliberate act. Officially
the smallpox virus was eliminated in the 1970s. The history of emerging
diseases has shown that total control takes time.

                        CAT TRAINING

    The keeper may try to train the cat, or the keeper may passively
await orders from the cat. When the keeper is drunk the cat has to
tolerate this. Cats are often more tolerant than humans and it is a
common observation that cats and dogs have a good judgement of human
character.

                        JUNE 2003

    Polly has been on heat again: two months since the last time. It had
been alarming to read an article on rec.pets.cats saying that a female
cat could come on heat every three weeks with two weeks off and one
week on.

    Now that there is another computer in the house Polly's area on the
tabletops is restricted. She can sit on a narrow ledge between the top
of the table and the computer, but she must walk across the keyboard to
get to the other side.

                        SUMMER SOLSTICE

    It's fly season again. This time I don't use insecticide. Polly has
chosen to eat more dry cat food, and hardly touches tinned meat, either
in paste, or jelly. There are few meat seeking flies this time, and
chasing flies is a sport for Polly.

    During the warm weather Polly eats less and lounges about. For the
most part she is silent. When I go in the kitchen she usually walks to
her food bowl and nibbles, but often she says nothing. She has become a
quiet cat.

    Last night I listened to some sort of religious and philosophical
discussion program on the radio where people were taliking about
whether animals had morality and ethics. Caring for the old and sick
was thought part of morality, and this has been observed in the animal
kingdom to a certain extent. None of the participants suggested that
some animals might be humans or for that matter angels in stages of
reincarnation. It is quite likely Polly would understand much of this.

    Polly has her places in this flat. The litter tray and feeding
dishes are included, but she also likes the chair in front of the
computer. There is also the carpet with the scratching post. Polly's
keeper visits certain places in Sheffield and the surroundings. Three
favorites are the General Cemetary, near Eccleshall Road; Win Hill,
near Bamford; and Eccleshall Woods, just off Abbeydale Road, near
Millhouses Park.

                        FLASH POINT

    Last night Polly knocked over the lamp on the table. The lamp had
been left on as usual, and Polly enjoys sitting near to a table lamp.
By accident the lamp fell onto the soft chair near the table. This is
the chair next to the cat litter tray, and Polly loves to scratch it.
In fact she had already gouged great holes into the fabric, and the
inner material was leeking out.

    The contact of the lightbulb with the chair started to create smoke.
I was dozing in and out of sleep, and already I knew that the recent
clear weather was ending because the sky seemed cloudy. There was no
bright sunlight. Suddenly I noticed the upset lamp. The bulb was still
alight, but off the table. That had happened many times before, so I
was not too worried, but I went to set things right. When I got closer
I realised that the chair was smoldering and as I moved the lamp it
seemed about to burst into flame. I immediately snatched the electric
plug out of the nearby wall socket in order to protect the laptop
computer, and then I rushed over to the sink and took the pan in which
I had over cooked rice the night before. The pan had been left to soak,
so I emptied much of the gunge, filled the tap from the sink and doused
the chair which was burning with two or three feet high flames by this
time. The chair lost a lot of spongey material which burned away, and
it required two saucepans to dowse it. When I moved it nearer to the
door I could see that it was ready to burst into flames yet again, and
a third pan was required.

    The chair is badly damaged but I will need to keep using it until I
find a replacement. Polly will still enjoy sitting there. The damage is
minimised although I took a necessary risk in reaching over the burning
chair to unplug the electrics.

    During the last few months I have been well aware of the risk of
domestic fire and explosion. Since the electric ring set broke down
after over zealous cleaning I have been frying things with camping gas
stove or hexamine solid fuel. The standard of manufactured goods here
in the UK is abysmally low. Political and business leaders claim things
are great, but most goods sold here are over priced and shoddy.

    People in England lack design skills. Capitalism ensures that
profits are more important than utility. British train services
are the large scale example of profits before utility.

                        INSECT SEASON 2003

    The hot weather in the UK is bringing insect infestations again.
This time it's greenfly which are attacking the plants. The mint has
been very hard hit recently, although there was no problem last year.




