Ah, the Science Men. Remember when they asserted, absolutely positively, that if you were an animal, then you had no brain, and you could feel no pain? Seems like only yesterday. That's because it was.

But, these days, some of the Science Men, they are starting, dimly, to perceive, as through a glass darkly, that when it comes to understanding the animals, they understand nothing at all.

Like cats. And physics. Some Japanese Science Men, they have now learned that cats know physics. And that they've known physics a lot longer than have the humans. And that they know physics better, too.

Saho Takagi, from Kyoto University in Japan, and colleagues shook boxes in front of the cats with and without a rattling sound. They also flipped over the boxes, only some of which yielded a dropped object.

Of the scenarios the researchers employed in the experiment, the rattling boxes that yielded an object and the silent boxes that did not yield anything complied with physics. The rattling boxes that did not yield a falling object and silent boxes that yielded an object defied the laws of physics.

Takagi and colleagues observed that cats tend to stare longer at rattling boxes during the experiment, which suggest that they correctly anticipated the presence of an object based on the container's rattling sound.

The felines also stared longer when a turned over box yielded unexpected results that defy the laws of physics.

I have decided that I want to be a Science Man. I want to have a Lab, and a Grant, to rattle boxes for cats, and then write a Paper.

This is of course not the first time that cats have been involved with physics, and boxes.

There is, for instance, that noted thought experiment known as Schrodinger's Cat. Which posits a cat in a box who is both alive and dead. No way to know. Which one. Till you open the box.

Most people, they think this experiment was thought by the physicist Erwin Schrodinger. But here, as pretty much everywhere, most people, they are wrong. Because the experiment was, instead, thought by Schrodinger's cat.

I can't remember if I've mentioned in this space that Schrodinger's Cat is now quantum entangled, and thus is both alive and dead, both here and there.

Anyway, it's true.

I can't remember, because I was in a Schrodinger box. No way to know. Whether I mentioned it or not. Until you open the box.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCVzT2MkpGo]
Some different-one Science Men, they have determined that if you are a human, and you eat the fast-food, it will curdle your sperm, and rot your eggs, and thus you will not be able to have any of the children, to then, also, eat the fast-food.

[T]he team found that people who eat fast food tend to have significantly higher levels of certain phthalates, which are commonly used in consumer products such as soap and makeup to make them less brittle but have been linked to a number of adverse health outcomes, including higher rates of infertility, especially among males.

"Phthalates," that sounds like something that comes from Cthulhu. Demon seed.

It's shit that's in fucking plastic. Why is it in the soap and the makeup, much less the fast-food?

The reason people who eat fast food seem to have much higher levels of potentially harmful industrial chemicals is unclear. But it's easy enough to guess: the sheer amount of processing that goes into food served at quick-service restaurants.

The more machinery, plastic, conveyor belts, and various forms of processing equipment that food touches, the more likely the food is to contain higher levels of phthalates. And fast food tends to touch a good deal more of these things than, say, the food one purchases at a local farmers market.

This is like the rat-hairs in the Americans' hot dogs, or the fire-retardant the Chinese spray onto the pet food. Except worse. Because demon-people, they are chanting "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," as they layer on the phthalates, all over the fast-food.

In Consuming Passions, Peter Farb, who is now dead, though not from phthalates, he explained how the fast-food places, they are basically, these days, the churches, for the Americans.

The plethora of fast-food restaurants such as McDonald's typify the change in eating habits. That they are antiseptic, depersonalized, a gastronomic atrocity, as critics have complained, is basically true.

Some critics have declared that the fast-food restaurants have caused changes in eating habits, but it seems more likely that they simply reflect the fundamental changes that have taken place in society as a whole. Traditional social rituals have declined, and the new rituals that are replacing them—rituals based on automobiles, television, technology, and efficiency—cut across previous religious affiliations, ethnic loyalties, and class allegiances.

A meal at McDonald's can be looked upon as having some of the character of a social or religious ritual. Rituals occur in designated places, marked by distinctive emblems such as the cross above a church, and at prescribed times, such as the sabbath. For a patron of McDonald's, the eating rituals occur under the Sign of the Double Golden Arch and at the prescribed times of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ritual is also characterized by words and actions that have been prescribed by people other than the current performers of the ritual and that have been codified in some revered text, such as the Pledge of Allegiance or the Bible. The employees of McDonald's who take the orders and deliver the burgers, fries, and shakes display a behavioral uniformity that is prescribed by the originators of McDonald's and codified in the 360 pages of its standardized Operations Manual. Those responsible for carrying out the ritual have been trained at the McDonald's analogue of a seminary, known as Hamburger University, in Elk Grove, Illinois.

Ritual is also repetitive and stereotyped, of a limited range, adhering to a largely invariable sequence. Day after day, year after year, burgers are sold at McDonald's with virtually the same catechism of requests and replies: "I'll have a Big Mac." "Will there be any fries with that?" "Thank you, have a nice day." The transactions at McDonald's express values esteemed by the modern North American society: technological efficiency, cleanliness, service, and egalitarianism. At a McDonald's, people find exactly what they have come to expect. They know the liturgy, and what pecuniary dues they will have to pay; they have found the comfort, the security, and the reassurance there will be no surprises that are among the benefits of any ritual.

The French, they have different rituals. That is why, when they tried to put up a McDonald's in Milau, Jose Bove, he leveled it with a bulldozer.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2DqAUA9lRw]

If you are a human who is Eeyore-inclined, bummertude your beatitude, today is a day, that you may revel in mourning. As it marks the day, when the days, they begin to get shorter. All the way, into December.

For me, it is a day of relief. It means that, day by day, minute by minute, I can begin to get some sleep.

See, there is this cat. And, every morning, there is this Very Important ritual, in which he insists on going out. At dawn. And not dawn, as in the Real. But dawn, as he perceives it. Which is generally 30 minutes earlier. Than dawn, in the Real.

That is when he begins his beguine. Of excavating. My sleeping skull. With his claws.

My scalp, it is so routinely, ritually excavated, that I sometimes think of hiring this cat out as a miner. And when his excavating, it is accompanied by operatic wails, I think I should hire him out as a musical miner. For I have not heard miners, emit sounds with such volume and intensity, since those Welshmen, there in the true-life documentary film How Green Was My Valley.

Sometimes I can brush him off. Until the actual dawn. Sometimes not. Sometimes I just get up in the pitch-black, and watch him opera all over the house, thinking I might as well be a monk, up and about at such an hour. Until, mercifully, there comes the actual dawn in the sky. And so, he can then be let out.

By now, a normal person, s/he is pounding the keyboard, expostulating: "Why don't you just put in a cat flap, you freakin' idjit? Then he can let himself out."

No. We can't do that here. Because of the Dangers.

And also because of the other cats. Who cannot go out. Ever. For reasons I cannot here disclose, as their privacy is protected by HIPAA.

And he must go out. Generally not for long. Just long enough for the ritual check over His Land, and to pretend he is Totally Wild.

Also, there used to be this book, when my daughter was wee, that she and I would read together, about a depressive rooster, who felt he wasn't enough appreciated, for crowing each morning, which is the only reason the sun rose, and so he left off the crowing, and thus the sun didn't come up, and then all the animals were sore afraid, and they rushed to the rooster, and apologized for their inattention, and then the rooster went out and crowed, and the sun then so rose, as it should.

Well. This cat. The Welsh miner skull-excavator. He claims, that he, now, is this rooster. That if he doesn't go out at the dawn, the dawn, it will never proceed, to the day.

At first, I was skeptical of this. But then I performed a Science Man experiment: I kept him in. And, sure enough, there was no day.

And so now, each day, he goes out. At the dawn.

Both he and I know it is a complete fiction, that he needs this dawn-day ritual, of me letting him out. For he is perfectly capable of going out on his own. He is not bound by space and time, and so could slip through a wall, easily, if he so chose. Physics, he is so beyond that, he doesn't even notice it. I have photographic proof of this, of him shifting in and out of space and time, in a series of images I call "The Googly Set." One is rendered here, up above, and over there to the left.

I suppose I could turn these photos over to some Science Men. But then they would want to Study him. This would involve the poking, and the prodding, and no doubt much worse. He wouldn't have that. And neither will I.

Dawn, these mid-June days, around here, it is about 4:45 a.m. No decent creature arises at such an hour. Maybe if I were a Stamper, and were going to spend the day logging a hillside, such an hour would seem acceptable. But I am not a Stamper. And we are not logging any of these hillsides.

Each year, as we near the summer solstice, I seriously consider moving this animal to Norway. Slartibartfast, he has told me of some cunning fjords he designed up there, so remote that Norway doesn't even know they are there. So I could move there without any nonsense about passports or such. He says some kindly fjord creatures, they would rise right out of the waters, and build me a house. I could just move right in. The sun, there, in far northern Norway, it rises really only about once a year. So, upon the annual dawn, I could let this cat out, wait an hour or so, let him back in, and be done with the whole ritual, for the next six months.

But then there is the problem with this other cat. Who is allergic to cold. It can be 70 degrees, and he will be lying there in front of the gas heater, willing me to turn it on. He could never endure Norway, this cat. Recently, we had a nice little run of rain here, a break in the heat. This cat, he went and sat before the wood stove, staring at me with The Eyes. Which are more plaintive than anything that ever came out of the Keanes. Rain: fire. That's how he figured it. That's his ritual. I told him he had a brain disorder. And then I went ahead and built a fire anyway. Because I am a drowning man. And so I can full see him.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szhdooptf7Q]