Sitting in the living room in a mellow, late-afternoon mood, with low beams of reddened sunlight streaming through the windows, many thoughts occur to the Old Curmudgeon. The most persistent one is, boy, is it time to clean the living room. My gentle gaze alights on clumps of cat hair clinging to the top of the walls, up near the ceiling.
I start to wonder how cat hair gets up there, but then I see, brilliantly illuminated in the sunset light, wispy little tufts of cat hair, gently floating up through the dusty air. How in the world does cat hair do that?
And then the truth strikes me. Cat hair has anti-gravity properties.
It’s the only reasonable explanation for how a cat can instantly levitate from the floor up to the top of your china cabinet. Clearly a cat can voluntarily change its weight from very heavy, when it lands on you while you’re sleeping in bed, to less than zero, when it is coasting through the air on the way to, say, a Vertical Cat wall shelf (<== note plug). This probably has something to do with which direction the cat licks its hair while grooming. After all, do you keep track of the direction?
Clearly, if we could train cats to turn the anti-gravity on and off, we could train them to come when called, so that’s impossible. But scientists might be able to figure out how to switch on the anti-gravity, and then we would have a use for all of those tons of loose cat hair we sweep up each month!
Imagine a huge bag of nylon filled with loose cat hair (and household dust, which is inseparable). Under the bag is an air-tight gondola with two astronauts in space suits. In the clear light of a Florida dawn, teams of scientists switch the polarity of the cat hair and the “balloon” rises into the sky. Next stop, Mars!
It makes you proud to be a cat-owning American!
