I was just in a conversation in which the old joke came up about strapping a piece of buttered bread to the back of your cat so that you can create a perpetual motion machine.
Then I got to wondering how anybody ever thought of the idea of buttered bread always landing on the buttered side when it falls. I mean, once the bread falls to a dirty floor, does it really matter which side of the bread lands? Were you planning on eating the bread anyway?
I suppose you might, if you're an adherent of the 5-second rule. But I also suppose that whoever thought up the idea of the bread landing buttered-side down must believe that the butter somehow decreases the 5-second rule to a short enough time span that you can't recover the bread in time for eating it.
Which I guess is why, for insurance sake, you should always strap your bread to the back of a cat before buttering it.
3 comments:
I have never heard (nor do I understand) about the buttered bread and cat, but for buttered (or, at my house, peanut-buttered and/or jellied) bread to fall face down, the problem isn't the loss of the item you are eating. The problem is that jelly face-down on the floor is an exponentially greater mess than if it had landed jelly-side up, which it NEVER does. But it makes my dog very happy to wander into the kitchen immediately after just such a mess.
1. Cats always land on their feet.
2. Buttered bread always lands buttered-side down.
3. Therefore, if buttered bread is strapped to the back of a cat with the buttered-side facing up, and the combination is dropped, the combination will hover above the floor, spinning perpetually, while each side tries to position itself for landing.
Sarah's mention of the dog makes me wonder why no one ever names their dog "Hoover".
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