Assumptions: Assume that if you drop a buttered piece of toast, it will fall to the floor butter-side down. (You could say this was a certainty, overlapping somewhat with Murphy’s Law.) Also assume that if you dropped a cat from a second floor balcony, the cat will land on its feet.

Question: What if you attach a buttered piece of toast (butter side up) to a cat’s back and tossed them both off the balcony? Will the cat land on its feet, or will the butter hit the ground?

Answer: Did you know gravity is a metaphysical property…that we don’t know what gravity is? Sorry, that’s actually another question. Anyway, the answer to the question above has opened an interesting world of physical behavior in much the same vein as quantum mechanics, which is to say crazy obscure. The laws governing the fall of buttered toast dictate that it must land with the butter-side down. Equally strict laws concerning feline aerodynamics result in a cat never landing on its back. Obviously, the combined construct – a cat with buttered toast on its back – indicates that Nature would have no way to resolve the conundrum.

Therefore, the buttered-toast-cat combination simply does not fall.

This, as we have learned, is the secret of anti-gravity. A cat with buttered toast on its back, when tossed from a balcony, will quickly settle at a height where the various laws at work in its twisting effort to put paws down and the butter-earth attraction are in equilibrium.

Most civilized species of the galaxy use this principle to drive their ships within planetary systems (where gravity exists, of course). The humming noise recalled by most of those who sight UFOs is, in fact, the purring of multiple fat, happy, and buttered-toasty cats.

However, there are problems with the power of this conundrum. If the cats should become hungry and eat the toast from their back, the effect will be cancelled and the interplanetary vehicle will be marooned or crash. This outcome may be avoided by using a collar that prevents the cat’s mouth from reaching the level of its back. Then there is the problem of steering. As everyone knows, steering cats is even more difficult than the management of programmers; however the solution to the problem is similar in both cases.

Programmers can be given proper orientation with the use of freshly baked pizza. No programmer can resist the smell of pizza and will instinctively move toward the source of the aroma. Similar effects can be obtained with cats using fresh fish. The placement of the fish guides movement of the cats for directional steering. Supplying fish will also completely avoid the problem of hungry cats eating the buttered toast.

In such ways the ineluctable forces that surround us and bind us are used to their greatest effect.