When a cat is dropped it always lands on it’s feet and when toast is dropped it always lands butter side down. Therefore if a slice of toast, buttered side up, is strapped to a cat’s back and the animal is then dropped, the two opposing forces will cause it to hover, spinning inches above the ground. If enough toast laden felines are used they could form the basis of a high-speed monorail system….. and then this email received a reply from one of it’s recipients:
I’ve been thinking about this cat/toast business for quite a while. In the buttered toast case it’s the butter that causes it to land buttered side down: it doesn’t have to be toast as the theory works perfectly well with Jacob’s crackers. To save money you just miss out the toast – and butter the cats. Also should there be an imbalance between the effects of cat and butter there are other substances that have a stronger affinity to carpet. The probability of carpet impact is is determined by the simple formula:
p = s * t(t) / tc,
where p is the probability of harmful carpet impact,
s is the stain factor of the toast covering substance, which is an indicator of the efficacy of the toast topping in permanently staining the carpet. (Chicken Tikka Masala, for example, has a very high ‘s’ value while the ‘s’ value of water tends toward zero.)
t(t) and tc indicate the tone of the topping and the carpet.
The value of p is strongly related to the relationship between the colour of the carpet and the topping as even Chicken Tikka Masala will not cause an obvious, damaging stain if the carpet is the same colour. So it is obvious that the probability of carpet impact is maximised if you use Chicken Tikka Masala and a white carpet,
in fact this combination gives a p value of 1, which is the same as as the probability of a cat landing upon it’s feet. Therefore a cat with Chicken Tikka Masala will be certain to hover in mid air, while there could be problems with buttered toast as the toast may fall off the cat causing a terrible monorail crash. This will result in nauseating images of royal personages visiting accident victims in hospital, and politicians saying it wouldn’t have happened if their party had been in power as there would have been more investment into cat-toast-glue research. Therefore it is in the interests of public safety and sanity if the buttered-toast-on-cats idea is scrapped and replaced by a monorail powered by cats smeared with Chicken Tikka Masala, floating above a rail made from white shag carpet.