I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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City Cat in the Country My wife and I are not the only ones who are adapting to a new country. Our cat, Sweeney, has also had to make some adjustments. We acquired Sweeney after some neighbors of ours in NYC found him on the street, hungry, wormy, and with a broken leg. The daughter of the house named him after her favorite preschool teacher, Mrs. Sweeney, so the name has nothing to do with barbers, pies, or the theatre. Sweeney didn't get on with the cat of the house, and they asked around to see if someone else in the building could take him. We could and did. He was clearly a pet; he is socialized, not feral, and all that. Our best guess is that he was at an upper storey window, saw a bird go by, and leapt - with unfortunate results. We have seen him lunge at closed windows, so the hypothesis seems reasonable. As a result, we never opened windows very wide in our apartment, and in all ways tried to keep Sweeney an inside cat. He thought that was OK. At least, we think he thought that, he didn't actually say. Now, however, he's in the middle of a place with a whole new variety of sights, sounds, and smells. And windows in the UK don't have screens. We've run cords around some of them so that they can open, but not wide enough for him to get his head through. We've also become very careful about leaving doors even slightly ajar since he has proven himself a skilled jailbreaker. We still don't want him outside unsupervised, since he's an indoor cat, and has shown himself to be none too bright when it comes to finding his way home - he managed to get lost in our apartment building at least once before we moved. At the same time, he desperately wants to go outside. Or at least he thinks he does. So we have come up with a plan. As you can see, it involves a harness, a leash, and a length of parachute cord. He tolerates the harness pretty well, and we can tie it off to the conservatory door, which means that he can explore while we sit inside with a cocktail, or work in the garden. After all, it only seems fair that he should have an adventure, too - just like his thumb-monkeys. Luddite'sLog, 6 June 2014 © 2014 Jeff Berry

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