When Cats Fall

Great interest was excited by Sugar, the Boston cat who survived a 19 storey fall from her home. The BBC has looked into the question of how she managed to survive this great fall and whether cats generally are resilient to drops from great heights. This appears to be a matter to which scientists have applied some attention. Unfortunately, moral squeamishness and possible public relations issues have prevented this important matter from being investigated by throwing a series of cats from ever higher windows. Instead they have had to rely on statistical evidence from emergency vet surgeries in cities with high windows from which cats can fall.

What is striking is how high it is possible for cats to fall without suffering fatal injury. Sugar seems not to be the record holder in this regard – while she fell 19 storeys onto grass and mulch, another cat fell a staggering 32 storeys onto concrete but survived with only a chipped tooth and a collapsed lung. The statistics from the vets revealed that 90% of falling cats survived, with only 37% needing emergency treatment to save their lives.

The reason for the cats' survival is simple enough. The animals evolved to live in trees, where the occasional fall is going to be a fact of life. Their bodies are designed to slow their rate of descent and then to cushion them on impact with the ground. So a fall that would definitely kill you or me leaves them with a good chance of survival.

But before you start sending your own cat out on a skyscraper ledge, perhaps to start hanging onto the hands of a clock or suchlike, beware. Scientists report that cats like Sugar are very lucky to survive such a fall and that many suffer terrible injuries from their unplanned descents. Even those statistics of a 90% survival rate are not as good as they look – they do not include the cats who were immediately killed on impact, and they may not include those cats who were injured so badly that they were taken to a vet to be euthanased. And the figure for "survival" may mask cats who lived on after their fall but who suffered horrendous life-changing injuries. As Dr Jake Socha is quoted as saying at the end of the article: "The lessons learned: screens, please, on the windows".

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The Murder Castle

Rick Geary
The Beast of Chicago (2003)

This is not a record, it is a book. And it is a book with pictures in it – a comic book, from a series entitled A Treasury of Victorian Murder. And it is about H. H. Holmes, an American mass murderer who may have killed as many as 200 people in one year. Maybe I should stop talking about it now so that people do not think I am the kind of weirdo who goes on about serial killers.

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jihad

Muslimgauze
Mussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass (1999)

The Gauze ought to be the greatest band ever, with their mix of electronic stuff, vaguely Arab traditional instrumentation, and radical Islamist sloganeering, but they end up sounding rather dull and unexciting. Fortunately Mr Gauze is no longer with us, so I will not have to fear his retribution for saying this, though armies of jihadis are no doubt already plotting my doom.

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Pandagauze

Cor blimey mate, get a butchers at those curtains!

I was in London recently, where everyone talks like that. I did surprisingly little of a musical nature. Well, I met some friends in a café and had the recurring conversation about how I really ought to engage with the music of Steely Dan sometime. I visited some record shops but nothing caught my fancy and I was conscious of having a mountain of new music to try and absorb, so buying anything else was a bit less than appealing.

But I did follow an old friend and quaffing partner to a concert event in Islington. I resolved to follow him to this event, which was taking place in the upstairs room of a swanky enough pub similar enough to that Lexington place where we saw Oneida. When I arrived, Kat Flint was just starting. She was something of a folkie and played an endearing version of modern folkie music, with other musicians. If you like that kind of thing she would be worth investigating.

Then we saw The Unrecorded. They were interestingly experimental but not in a way that stopped them being immediately appealing. They included bass playing (with impressively threatening lines) as well as a variety of synthy keyboards and stuff. And drums. And they had a woman doing vocals who was doing that sampling herself and singing over it thing. It felt a bit like Fursaxa fronting an experimental rock band, which would obviously be the best thing ever. The self-sampling made for an endearingly avant-garde quality, while having a load of musicans there as well stopped things falling into that predictable self-sampling pattern of doing a succession of songs that simply build and build in complexity.

As well as their own songs, The Unrecorded did a couple of covers – some folkie tune called 'In the bleak midwinter', a song called 'the deep blue sea' (or maybe it was by a band called the Deep Blue Sea, I am so out of touch with today's hip sounds) and a Radiohead cover (wait, come back!). But the overall effect was very impressive and I recommend them to anyone who likes interesting music.

They have a website.

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Lucky Cat Survives 19 Storey Fall

Silly cat Sugar managed to fall out of a window on the 19th storey of a Boston, Massachusetts building, tumbling somewhere between 45 and 60 metres to the ground. And she survived with no broken bones or cuts from the fall, with some bruising being her only injuries. The Animal Rescue League treated Sugar after her fall, reporting that cats spread out their limbs like flying squirrels when they fall, which can turn them into a feline parachute and slow down their descent. Even so, Sugar's survival is something of a miracle and her owner has installed a screen on the window from which the cat fell.

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Alone in the Dark Wood

Fursaxa
Alone In The Dark Wood (2007)

Ms Fursaxa is an interesting purveyor of strange music that manages to surf on the borders of psych, folk, avant-garde improv, and much much more. I saw her once at ATP and thought she was amazing, for all that I only caught her last song. It was one of those things where the artist builds a song by doing something, sampling it, then playing over the sample, sampling that, and so on. She seemed to do this far more impressively than the various chancers I have seen replicate the trick since then. This record is enjoyable enough, but I think she is maybe best appreciated live. She has a certain presence that lends a ritualised quality to the creation of her music, like she is some kind of hierophant working spells before us. But I will still listen to and enjoy this record. It too has its magic to work.

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Beaver Trap Plans Abandoned

Beavers became extinct in these islands some time ago but are now living wild in Scotland once more. There was a limited official programme to reintroduce them but many more have escaped from private collections – with speculation suggesting that some people may have deliberately released the dam building rodents without authorisation. This has predictably led to moaning from the kind of landowners who moan about things, and the Scottish government began to draw up plans to round up the rogue beavers. This programme has now been abandoned – the beavers would have been very difficult to round up and a programme to exterminate them would not have played well with the public.

There are now apparently some 300 feral beavers in Scotland. They are expected to spread over the southern and western Highlands, possibly making incursions into northern England. Beavers are understood to have positive impacts on the environments in which they live, though they may compete with anglers over fish stocks.

The unauthorised reintroduction of vanished animals to these islands seems to be a bit of a thing at the moment. As well as the beavers, wild boar populations have returned to Ireland and England. Now there is also talk of reintroducing the lynx and the wolf to Scotland, something that will strike fear into some and excite the imaginations of others.

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More Bear Action

Here are two bear cubs looking at a giant crow.

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Bears Discover Tools

Bears are well known for being large, fierce animals. It seems now that they might also be surprisingly intelligent. A brown bear in Alaska was seen recently picking up a stone and scratching itself with it, revealing that rudimentary tool use is possible for these animals. In some respects this is not completely surprising, as bears have quite large brains for their body size. However, they are relatively solitary and it had been thought that it was only social animals (like chimps, humans, or New Caledonian crows) who would have their intelligence boosted such that they would start messing about with tools.

At the moment it is not known whether this particular bear is the first ever to use a tool, or if it is merely engaging in behaviour that is not uncommon but not previously observed. Reports that the bear in question is training other bears and building a wooden town with human-sized cages have been hurriedly denied by members of the scientific community.
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Little Blue Penguins – Very Small But Very Fierce

The Little Blue Penguins of New Zealand may be small, and they may look like cute little fellows, but it turns out the males are all very fierce. The territorial birds are forever laying into each other and inflicting terrible injuries in an effort to gain status and impress the lady penguins.

Here a male Little Blue Penguin shows off to his mate after winning a fight.

The Little Blues also learn which of their fellows are the most fierce and are careful not to try fighting a penguin who could peck the shite out of them.

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