General Chat

it is true that mice rarely reside where cats are in residence and that the two species are antipathetic .... possibly this has something to do with the cat tendency to use the mice as playthings before crunching them between their teeth.

I suppose a small terrier might be up for a mouse hunt but it is difficult to see the average somewhat overweight golden labrador going for it. I once has a beloved lurcher called Maxx who could certainly catch rabbits but never showed interest or even awareness of the mice.

Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) came to the conclusion that our world is in fact a simulation built by Slatrtibartfast and others (*) under the control and direction of THE MICE ... so one day we will pay heavily for the anti mouse tactics of our feline friends.

(*) crinklibits, Norway a recent issue of "The New Scientist" suggested that this may indeed be the case. Are the frequent brexit references to Norway linked in some way? Is T May a simulation as in MayBot? Will she star in the next series of C4 Humans (not) ?

13 is a lucky number in some cultures while most people refer to spiders in the vernacular rather than by the Latin name.

Humans deserve what they get. Recent news items include a guy swimming with crocodiles ( this seems to be a popular Australian rite of passage ), swimming with white and tiger sharks, putting hands into a tiger pen and complaining at the bite, ignoring mosquitos, not wearing beach shoes and treading on a weaver fish (Bournemouth). Despite the paranoia reports of human death at the hands of Shelob sized spiders are mercifully rare.

Does Brexit have to be included in every topic?

*sighs* @bored.com

'Brexit fundamentalists are the enemy within'.

{David Aaronovitch in The Times - 2 days ago. Rollo will be pleased I am following his recent recommendation that I should widen my reading material.} ;-)

Good choice Dermot - are you shelling out for the pay wall or skulking ?
Supercrutch may not be aware that the Times is broadly pro-leave though not in quite the same way as its brethren at the Sun.

So the article from the affable and erudite David Aaronovitch should give the brexiters pause for thought. In case Supercrutch is not a Times subscriber here we are:

David Aaronovitch
October 26 2017, 12:00am, The Times
Brexit fundamentalists are the enemy within

David Aaronovitch

McCarthyite it wasn’t. Joe McCarthy was terrifying — people killed themselves because of him and folk like him — but this was pathetic. The government whip’s letter to university vice-chancellors requesting a list of names of professors “involved in the teaching of European affairs, with particular reference to Brexit”, was never likely to elicit anything other than a brusque counter-invitation and then ridicule.

It was the reaction of a minister that gave me pause. Asked about it on the Today programme, Jo Johnson gave an almost laughable explanation. Chris Heaton-Harris had “long-term interests in the history of European thought” and was thinking of writing a book about it. Hence the letter.

I’ve written some books. One of the things you say when you’re asking for help, usually near the beginning of your request, is “I’m writing a book”. The other thing you might do if using Commons-headed notepaper would be to add the words “in a personal capacity”. Mr H-H did neither. Even so it took four attempts by the interviewer to get the man responsible for universities to agree the letter should not have been sent.

What is going on here? Why is a whip making such a fool of himself and why is the minister so afraid to call him out on it? Why indeed did several of Mr Heaton-Harris’s colleagues immediately support his request for information, or as one Leave campaigner put it (unaware of the book angle), his request that “academics disclose what they’re teaching in the interests of transparency”?

Indeed within hours one or two were even extending the scope of the inquiry to include what was being taught in schools. This prompted one teacher to respond that since “there is no national curriculum any more in academy schools we just burn the flag and sing the Ode to Joy until lunchtime”.

Things have not gone as the people who led the Leave campaign in 2016 imagined they would, have they? The vote unexpectedly won, joyous dawns breaking, a new prime minister with a new mantra. They live by a set of propositions: the EU wants a deal as much as we do; it’s in their interests even more than it is in ours; trade deals are easy. As though winning a vote to go to war was somehow the same thing as fighting and winning the war. Berlin will fall by Christmas: it must do, we voted for it!

Soon it will be 18 months since the referendum and we’re not through phase one. We’re arguing about how long a transitional arrangement will last, which will take us to a final agreement we haven’t even articulated.

Leaving is 20 times more complicated as even I had imagined

For a thwarted Leaver there are broadly two explanations for this failure: we were wrong about all that, or we were robbed. Human nature, fallen and self-exculpatory as it is, tends to favour the latter. In which case, who’s done the robbing?

Heaton-Harris’s target in this instance, whatever Mr Johnson’s literary diversion, was Remoaning academics. This elite part of the elite is being paid by the taxpayer (sorry, wrong century: by the feepayer, at least in part) to give a biased and frankly unpatriotic gloss on a vital national issue. Let’s expose them.

Another week the house journals of the Brexit movement will give great prominence to a bogus and statistically useless report claiming that the BBC has been biased against them. Or it’s the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, who was described by Jacob Rees-Mogg this week as an “enemy” of Brexit. Which of course means an enemy of the people’s will as expressed in the referendum and therefore (the polite Jake won’t say it but there’s plenty who will) an enemy of the people.

Or it’s Hammond and the Treasury. Believe it or not, at a time when much of business is already nervous and skittish, there are Tory MPs agitating for the prime minister to sack the chancellor.

Before PMQs yesterday David Davis appeared in front of the Commons Brexit committee. Earlier in the week there’d been an “Ooh Canada!” moment among some Brexiteers when Michel Barnier said he envisaged something like Canada’s deal with the EU being the end result for the UK. Confusing Canada’s trade deal with actually being Canada, they must have felt deflated when Mr Davis pointed out that, among other problems, Canada has no agreement on financial services. So no to that.

Mr Davis was also asked how far in advance of leaving the EU in March 2019 we would get a chance to look over the deal. He allowed that it was quite possible that the deal would arrive after departure.

Mr Rees-Mogg pressed him. Not about parliament’s right to have a vote prior to departure but on the “worry that if we get to March 2019 [a transitional deal will mean] we stay in the EU for a further two years”.

The worry! I have my views on Brexit and readers know what these are. Even so, listening to colleagues, friends in the civil service and in business, to negotiators and (sorry) experts, I am clear that Brexit is 20 times as difficult and complicated as even I had ever imagined. It will cost us however we do it, but do it badly and in a hurry and it will be incredibly harmful, not least for those “left behind” voters who backed it.

And yet here we have Bernard Jenkin MP, of the influential Tory European Research Group, writing three weeks ago that “there is no intrinsic reason why Brexit should be difficult or damaging”. He was urging Theresa May to stand against the Treasury. On to Berlin!

A report from the Henry Jackson Society was released this week looking, among other things, at why converts to Islam were more likely to become radicalised, and I found myself thinking of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. The first was unsure which way he’d jump till 2016 and the other didn’t want a referendum at all. And now they’re black-turban Brexiteers. We all have to suffer for their convictions.

Between them all they’re destroying the room for manoeuvre that the prime minister has. She daren’t cross them. They have a Remainer like Jo Johnson scared to call them out on their nonsense. Though there are precious few takers in Britain for their kind of Brexit, they still have the government and therefore the country by the cojones.

Mr Corbyn doesn’t mind. He hardly mentioned Brexit yesterday. He doesn’t have to fly to Europe to be photographed alone surrounded by mourning lilies. He goes down the allotment before appearing on Gogglebox to have a little twinkle. The Heaton-Harrises, the Jenkinses, the Rees-Moggs, the new Orange Order, “pickled in dogma”, suit him just fine.

For the rest of us they are a disaster. They, not boring Phil, are the true enemy within.

Rollo,
Getting back to the topic, it may be useful if you bothered reading a WHOLE SENTENCE before offering us your 'learned view' on cats and mice.
Gosh haven't the rest of us learnt a lot?
Did anyone else know cats chase and catch mice?

If you'd bother reading that whole sentence, you would have noticed, Dermot said RATS and mice don't live in close proximity

Buy hey, why bother when you can grasp an opportunity to patronise yet again, no, sorry, to state the bl**ding obvious, in a patronising tone..

Why do you insist on copying and pasting vast tracts of newspaper - don't you think, if we were interested, we'd look for ourselves?

Maggie, I only mentioned the 13 characters in that word because it seemed coincidental.

Is fear of anything us protectively copying fear we saw displayed by a senior ?

House cats sometimes bring a mouse into the house as a present :-D

The link with arachnophobia and the number 13 was interesting David - and related to spiders :-D

One of mine used to regularly bring rats into the house :-|
Fortunately, they were dead. I'd come downstairs in the morning to find the spine, tail and liver (sometimes the skull) in the middle of the kitchen floor!!

Fortunately, that 'habit' stopped after a while. I presume he'd decimated the local rat population :-D

Some years back my wife had a large ginger one used to catch rabbits :-0

My late Mother had an irrational fear of feathers....she was terrified of them.

Feather is an anagram of the fear.

exceptionaly MW I offer my short reply to yet another paranoid posting.
1 my remarks on cats and mice were humorous not serious - the whole thread topic is silly, so
2 theTimes has a paywall so unless you subscribe its content is unavailable in whole or part. In order that Dermot's link could be fully appreciated therefore I posted the whole piece. If you find a short article "long" just skip it.
3 most of the planet's population do not speak English but do have fears relating to snakes and spiders. Given that attempting to link such fears with spellings is illogical.

ends.

As far back as I can remember, I have enjoyed Tom & Gerry cartoons. Still do!

My own two cats, who obliged me to feed & nourish them for 14 years, were named after the cartoon characters.

During that period, the cat-flap had to be replaced twice due to wear & tare.

My lovely rascals kept me sane on many an occasion. :-D

Some say a cat is a replacement for a child...my wife has 4

Is that a replacement for a husband ?

No David, cats can't mend the washing machine or the car ;-) :-D :-D

The wishes and desires of children, regardless of age, are never changing always boiling down to money. Cats, mice and spiders though are inscrutable.

Snakes divide the world into the edible, the dangerous and the rest. Easy to predict their behaviour then and be safe. All indigenous populations where there are a lot of venomous snakes which regard humans as dangerous have worked out an accomodation with them.

Of course Europeans in Australia are not indigenous but feel that paranoia and destruction towards the local fauna by design or carelessness is ok or even funny. Sad.

Taking a hint from recent court decisions all Australian political offices should demand an ancestor resident in Australia before 1788.

Dermot, I replace my cat flap (well, the cats' flap, really, I'd hate anyone to insinuate that I used, say, after a night out) every 3 years - so you got off lightly! :-D

David - cat's rarely argue back like teenagers, so, no, not really a replacement for children :-D
As for a replacement husband? I CAN mend the washing machine and the car!
And I certainly don't need a replacement husband that I'd have to look after, stroke his ego and possibly be constantly 'mansplained' to!

Oh, and the sort who, when you ask them where the coffee is, then go off on some great treatise about how the coffee plantations were wrong, this country, that country etc etc - rambling on and on, enjoying the sound of their own voice, not bothered in answering the question - just full of their own self absorption.
You know the sort!

Not that my ex was like that - but there are a lot of the allegedly male gender like that

:-D :-D :-D

Coffee, by value, is the world's second most traded commodity and given the slow exit of oil likely to become no.1.

I spent a year as a tea and coffee trader at Hay's Wharf in London working in C19 offices long since gone. The experience was all good - I learned a lot about commodity and futures trading, how to roast raw coffee beans and judge value and so on. The biggest bonus was travel to remote places to look at the plantations and their ways and means. Even then treatment of workers and the environment were factors. Coffee has the huge advantage of being a viable cash crop alternative to cocaine. It would be even more viable if western supermarkets stopped using it as a loss leader (with other people bearing the loss) in the same way as they do for milk.

Meanwhile my morning bowl of Arabica coffee (the French have no use for coffee and tea mugs) is an essential start to the day.

Nuff said!! :-D :-D :-D

Off topic, does any ne know why the hostility between cats and dogs ?

A Russian legend explains the antipathy between dogs and cats by stating that the devil has tricked the dog and cat each into thinking the other has its rightful fur :-D

It could be because they communicate differently, also, dogs naturally chase smaller prey, as do cats - so the dog sees a cat as potential prey.
Some cats run, others hiss and fight back.

I had 3 cats. Two had never lived with a dog - the third one (Sophie) had been the neighbours cat (and then abandoned), but they'd had a dog as well as Sophie.
My daughter had a GSD/Collie cross dog, that had never lived with cats.
We actually had no problem.
Initially the cats would stay away - apart from Sophie, who would occasionally go up to the dog and swipe her (with her paw, not her claw), then, after a short time, they all tolerated each other in a relaxed way.
But the dog would still chase the neighbours cats out of the garden.

Actually, we also had two 'free range' guinea pigs at this time (potential prey for all of them!).
If the cats got too near, they'd get their paws nipped - they could easily have killed the Guinea Pigs, but probably left them alone because they smelt of us humans!.
As for the dog, a few stern 'NO's soon let her know how to behave near them.

I think the transference of smell is pretty important - that's how they suss out who's friendly, so stroking them all at the same time confirms who's in the group.

No Maggie, the cats like Arabica but the dogs insist on Robusta ;-) then they have money left for extra bones :-D