Abstract
In 1988 a machine which defied the laws of gravity was proposed. The idea takes advantage of the two well-known maxims: if you drop buttered bread, it always lands butter-side down, and falling cats always land on their feet. Thus it was proposed that maybe we can strap buttered bread to the back of a cat and drop it, and have it hover indefinitely due to both sides trying to land face-downwards. The purpose of this talk is to show both theoretically and experimentally that cats indeed do land on their feet and buttered bread does generally land butter-side down, due to the simple rotational dynamics involved. Besides the cat trying to lick the butter off of its back, there are some obvious problems with the idea of joining the two together to create the so-called anti-gravity machine.