Word: cats
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...suffering heavy losses himself. His response to that peril is about as close as Seventh Avenue ever comes to a beau geste: "I suppose we could have taken a much calmer approach to the Longuette, but that isn't our style. We approach everything like a tiger, not a cat...
...rebellion against something. During World War I he went so far as to send his self-severed trigger finger to President Wilson as a protest against war. His art was stable: colossal statues, with sweeping elliptical lines, were done in stone and metal. His themes ranged from a black cat named Tombstone to the soaring Peace at San Francisco's airport; but his favorite was St. Francis of Assisi, whom he did in about 150 versions, including a monumental St. Francis of the Guns, inspired by thousands of weapons, turned in to city authorities after Robert Kennedy...
...years it has been a favorite cruelty of children to tie cherry bombs to cats' tails. Now the Rand Corp.'s "Soviet Cybernetics Review" reports an intricate variation: Russian scientists, says Rand, are studying the feasibility of training a cat to pilot air-to-air missiles to their targets...
Theoretically, a severed cat's brain might be educated to recognize and respond to a set of optical impulses and transmit signals to guide a missile onto its target. Or, cheaper still, a cat called Yossarian might be trained to twitch a certain muscle if a target he had learned was not centered on the cross hairs...
There are other cases: the Russians have trained descendants of Pavlov's dog to carry mines to tanks. During World War II, a Swede trained young seals to carry limpet charges. They were rewarded with cream-a classic mobilization of guns and butter. Skinner regards the cat stratagem as overly complex but theoretically possible. "The only trouble is," he observes, "that cats get airsick...