                 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. Lam is the medium for this message. Lam 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 Lam are cats. Lam is smaller and more active than Barn.
Barn is Lam's brother. His mother's name is Echo. Lam is a Thai word
for 'sharp'. Lam has sharp claws. His ears are bitten in places. Lam'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.

    Lam is more interested in games than his brother. Barn is lazy. He
is fatter than Lam, 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.

    Lam 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. Nong Sao 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 Lam 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 Lam 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 it is not uncommon for members of the public to
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
state 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.

                          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.

                           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 Palastine, 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.


