A Show for a Goddess

THE WORLD OVER A Show for a Goddess Pasht (or Pussy) is a powerful cat-goddess credited by ancient Egyptians--and by a few modern ones--with seeing all, knowing all, and observing human affairs with the somewhat malicious humor common to felines. Last week the world's minor crises, persisting amid its major preoccupations, presented quite a spectacle for Pasht (if she was still watching).

In Czechoslovakia, the Red regime complained that overeager soccer players were threatening to wreck the five-year plan "with their determination to excel at all costs, even to the extent of injuring other players." Announced Defense Minister Dr. Alexej Cepicka: ."Our soccer players are still playing in order to win, and not to prepare themselves physically for the defense of their country. This bourgeois filthiness has got to stop."

In Britain, the Times of London raised its editorial eyebrows in cold disapproval to note that electrical consumption in the United Kingdom rose 6% when an estimated 4,000,000 Britons turned on their radios and televisions to follow the Robinson-Turpin fight. The Times reproved its fuel-short readers, "it meant a consumption ... of about 70 tons of coal."

In Sweden, a Stockholm justice fined a young sailor and his love for kissing in public, on the grounds that such open display of affection constitutes "obnoxious behavior repulsive to all public morals."

In France, strikes threatened 1) the mind--teachers refused to grade exam papers until they got a pay raise; 2) the feet--Paris taxi drivers, mostly as old and decrepit as their vehicles, struck when threatened with physical examinations that would ground the wheeziest and most shortsighted; and 3) the stomach--butchers refused to sell meat until the government raised price ceilings. One butcher killed himself, leaving the explanation: "I cannot accustom myself to the satanic clientele in this district."

In Korea, Seoul police broke up a protection racket which sold immunity to enemy air attack by pretending to chase away the evil spirits that ride in Communist planes. The racket's take: $3,000.

In Egypt, the editor of a Cairo weekly, Akher Saa, sent two reporters scurrying to check reports that the population of a village 125 miles south of Cairo turned into cats every night. The villagers soon set the reporters straight: it was only children under 14 who turned into cats in Sakelta. Soon after the children are tucked in each night (said the villagers), the youngsters become rigid, their breathing stops, and their souls take the shape of cats roaming the streets. "I called one day on Grocer Ahmed Khawaga and asked for some free candy," recalled one kiddy-cat named Ibrahim El Tayeb, "but he refused me. So that night I sneaked into his home as a cat and ate up his wedding dinner." Egyptian psychologists said it was all a hallucination. Some of the villagers, however, preferred to think it the work of Pasht, having some fun.

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