Ingredients:

• one washing machine
• one pair of leather falconing gloves
• one unspayed male cat
• one unspayed female cat on heat
• three or four slabs of beer
• a dozen or so blokes

Invite your mates over and consume at least half of the beer. Do this rapidly. Catch the female cat and put it in the washing machine. Add male cat. Close lid.

Set the water level to extra low and the wash cycle to extra dirty cottons, something hot and steamy. When you begin to hear the sounds of kitty sex, start the wash cycle.

Drink more beer, and sing along with the cats as they go on the ride of their lives. If the washer becomes unbalanced during the spin cycles, stop the machine, put on the falconing gloves, and rearrange the kitties so that they are balanced again. Restart the machine.

Should your female cat still become pregnant, this is also an excellent way of inducing a kitty abortion without having to pay for a veterinarian.

I was reading this afternoon when the cat jumped up on my lap. Not long passed before I let loose with a ripper of a fart, a sure leftover of my bean-filled lunch. But the cat seemed unaffected. I could sure smell it. But the cat just sat there on my lap, contentedly licking away at its private parts.

Could it be that cats only smell certain flavors of farts, the way dogs can only hear certain pitches of sound? Perhaps my fart simply wasn´t on the cat’s wavelength. I perceive a money-making opportunity here — just as dog whistles are made to annoy our canine companions with a ridiculously high-pitched shriek, so too it must be possible to create an artificial fart smell that only affects cats.

The Pied Piper of Hamlin had it all wrong. If he had simply isolated the correct smell of fart most objectionable to rats, he could have rid the town of rats (and cats) by simply eating the correct combination of foodstuffs for lunch.