Cats

First of all, I want to say that I am very much a cat
person. Dogs are okay, but cats are very definitely my pet of choice. They are
much better to cuddle up to, much more suited to relaxing with, and by and
large have an elegance and faux-independence which I find very pleasant to be
around. Unfortunately my flat is just too small and too close to a main road
(and too rented) to make it an adequate feline domicile, but someday I will
live somewhere suitable, and I look forward to sharing my space with a cat.

However, I have a minor issue with cat owners and,
specifically, with photographs of cats. It is simply this:

Cats are not cute.

It is not in the nature of cats to be cute. They are
elegant, (mostly) dignified, inscrutable, and almost without exception
eminently strokable. They are also venal, vicious, and amoral and utterly
self-absorbed. They are not cute. To me, “cute” implies love, harmlessness, the
ability to reciprocate affection, and possibly a certain helplessness. And big
eyes and furriness. And often an oversized head, but the physical options
aren’t important right now. So, let’s go back to the behavioural stuff:

1. Cats do not “love”. Except inasmuch as it will get
them food. That’s a fairly shallow and contingent type of love. In a human or a
dog, such behaviour would be despised. If you doubt this, consider what happens
when you put a cat in the same room as a small child. Many dogs can be trusted
with children. Most cats, on the other hand…
2. Cats are not harmless. They have claws. And use them.
Mostly on their owners (see point 1).
3. Cats do not reciprocate affection. They like being
stroked. They have no idea you like it too. You are just a feeding stroking
machine, and if you stop feeding or stroking, you will be dumped instantly.
Catch them young, and you can train them to accept a little bit of manhandling,
but that’s about it.
4. Cats are pretty helpless. I concede this. But you try
telling that to a cat (see point 2). And since they are in denial about it, it
doesn’t count.

So, since cats don’t conform to any of my ‘cuteness’
criteria, I contend that they are not cute. And since cats are not cute,
photographs of cats are, logically, not cute either. This is doubly so when you
think about their physical characteristics. The default cat expression is
Inscrutable, which they only swap for Pissed Off. They have hairy bottoms. They
are impossible to train to any useful activity (fetching slippers, putting up
shelves, etc) , which either makes them independently-minded (non-cute), or
stupid (also non-cute).Their default activities are Sleeping, Pooing, Hunting,
and Playing with Maimed Things, only one of which could be considered remotely
cute, and every single animal in the world does that, even the really really
un-cute ones.

What I find worrying and suspicious is that photos of
cats have multiplied and spread on the basis of this ‘cuteness’ myth. Sometimes
I wonder whether the internet is a cat invention to get more photos of cats
transmitted into outer space.

Anyway: with this piece of indisputable logic, I hereby
excuse myself from having to coo over pictures of other people’s cats. QED.

Actually, having written all this, I went to the bother
of actually looking up a definition of cute, and I may have to eat my words,
because one of the definitions of cute was ‘obviously contrived to charm’. This
sums it up rather well, I think. Cats have done very well out of contriving,
rather obviously, to charm. Also, don’t forget they carry a virus which makes
them smell attractive and depresses your ability to judge danger.

And I just realized I posted this to the message board. That's gonna get me into trouble...

The Internet

The power
of the internet can, I think, best be compared to having a million anally
retentive maniacs at your command, who
have anticipated all your possible desires and already fulfilled them. There
are two problems: the first is to find the correct anally retentive maniac, and
the second lies in working out exactly what he thinks you desire, and exactly
how he has warped it to fit his own fiendish agenda...

Morlocks

I've
been
thinking about H G Wells’ ‘Time Machine’, and the Morlocks and
Eloi that the Time Traveller meets. They’re both meant to be
caricatures of humanity. So I asked myself,
which one are you? - expecting that the answer would be 'well, a bit of
both'.
But the answer I came up with was pretty unequivocal.



I'm a Morlock.

My work
is extremely Morlockish: making addons for OEMs to bolt onto machine
tools,
that's lower-level Morlock, deeply subterranean stuff. The natural
assumption
is to think that your hobbies and pastimes when you're away from work
balance
this out... but when I started to think about it, I found my hobbies to
be
pretty subterranean too. My hobbies more closely resemble a Morlock
downing a
few jars with his buddies, than any arty farty Eloi rubbish.

So
then I
thought, well, hey, who the heck are these Eloi anyway, and why should
I want
to be like them? And the truth is, as HGW pointed out, that they
weren't very
palatable creatures. My own simple theory about the Morlocks and the
Eloi is that it's all about technology: the Morlocks understood it, the
Eloi didn't. The
Morlocks devoted their lives to running it, and in return, the Eloi
offered up
a sacrifice... no, wait - better to say that they paid a
subscription fee to be able to continue using the service. The Eloi
didn't
bother forming meaningful relationships - what's the point, when the
person
you're talking to might not be here tomorrow? There was no empathy, no
caring,
no soul. They were as beautiful and vapid and amoral as butterflies.

And
that's the deeper meaning, which didn't really strike me until this evening -
it's a moral one. BOTH sides had abandoned any sort of human morality, by
entering into their subscription fee arrangement.  BOTH sides were, by OUR lights, evil and
stupid. And, of course, both Eloi and Morlock are very much alive and well and
living with us in the Twenty-first century. More so, even, than they were in
HG's time.

Technology
has moved on, and with it, the ethical questions that we struggle with have become
more imposing. The point is, it’s when people put their heads down and work
that they are at their most Morlock-ish, and bad things start to happen.
Morlocks are the ones who design land mines, and nerve gases, or environmentally-unfriendly
SUVs with child-killing bullbars on the front. We solve the problems we’re equipped to solve – the technical ones – and we’re
so busy with them that we forget that we’re living in the shadow of a much
bigger, scarier ethical question. Repeat this too many times, and we become selfish,
parochial, narrow-minded, amoral. All in all, I'd say the world is getting more
and more Morlock-like.

So what's
a poor Eloi to do? Well... stop being an Eloi, would be my suggestion. I’m not
entirely sure whether HGW meant the Eloi to represent the upper classes - a
social system which doesn't exist in quite the same blatant grasshopper-and-ants
way that it did in the early Twentieth century. But... the Eloi hadn't just
given up on technology - they'd given up on each other, and they'd given up on
understanding the Morlocks. They really didn't have much going for them except
a skin-deep sort of beauty. Their real strength lay in the simple fact that
they weren't Morlocks. And in my opinion the only triumph available to
them was in getting the Morlocks to understand that there was more to the world
than other Morlocks. The only happy outcome would be one in which relationships
could once again be formed. That way information flows and empathy grows. The
problems don't get easier, but the perspective of those trying to solve it can
be widened.

It's
interesting to speculate whether, unlike the hero of the novel, a time
traveller from the Twenty-first century might decide to try and save the
Morlocks rather than the Eloi.