3, 2, 1, Tomcat

Misocainea, hater of all new ideas, and I used to spend a great deal of time loafing around on the third floor of a rather sorry looking house in New Jersey. In fact, for a period of about six months, I lived in this house, in a tiny room on the same third floor. There were five of us who actually lived there, but at least 200 who made use of the building, in which the downstairs rooms comprised a private social club. For the time being, these matters will have to remain somewhat opaque.

At a certain point -- I'd like to think it was towards the end of the time I lived there, but I am almost certain it was not -- a cat became the sixth party to reside on the third floor. It was a contemptible cat. Unlike other cats I have known, who look at you deferentially, acknowledging your central role in their survival, this one glanced up with a combination of hatred and fear. It tried desperately to escape down the stairs at each opportunity, but never met with any success. If it had, it would have ended up in the soup for sure.

Misocainea might also be called a hater of new cats. Not all cats -- not the devoted, dog-like cats who know how to earn a man's respect -- just the upstarts. The prima donnas. The cats who cannot or will not appreciate the sheer luxury and ease of their tiny little lives. And so it was, in discussing our shared contempt for this obnoxious, pampered and mangy creature that we hit upon a fantastic idea.

Prudence might dictate that we keep such notions to ourselves. After all, the internets are rife with industrial spies and unoriginal thinkers, desperate to nick an idea that might be their ticket to easy street. But in the interest of developing this particular idea to its fullest potential -- fully projecting the project, we might say -- I will elaborate briefly here.

Our film would be called "Tomcat," although I suppose in this day and age such titles generally carry a subtitle along with them ("Tomcat: Neuter-itory", say). Its protagonist would be a common house cat, preferably a very young one, who is trained by the U.S. Navy to be a fighter pilot. There are all sorts of potential reasons for this: his owner was a pilot who was killed in battle, say; or a freak accident has given him exceptional vision and paw-eye coordination.

The plot would probably be formulaic. Tomcat's wingman would be shot down, sending him on a weeklong bender and nearly to his death. Finally, realizing his sworn duty to defend the United States and avenge his buddy, Tomcat would pull himself together to fight another day, emerging as a national hero.

But before worrying too much about the plot, there are a number of technical questions that must be addressed first. The original plan was simply to strap an actual, living cat into the cockpit of an F-14. This almost certainly would not work, and even if it did the effect would be less than stunning. So we'd either need an animatronic cat (what with recent developments in robot realism this presents only a financial hurdle) or, less desirably, a CGI cat. Surely some of the more intricate battle scenes would need to be computer-generated, but if at all possible we would prefer a physical cat sitting in the cockpit, even if it has to be a synthetic one.

If you think "Tomcat" will never get off the ground, consider that this was one of the better ideas that Misocainea and I came up with. Others included playing soccer with a disco ball, bashing the head off of a mannequin with a baseball bat, and a game (with no particular rules or aims) in which I threw full cups of beer at him while he scrambled around the room, protected by a semicircular piece of plexiglass he was using as a shield. We also devoted countless hours to planning various schemes by which we might smoke in academic buildings without being detected, killing innumberable lady bugs, and throwing tennis balls out of third story windows.