Us: We are going to the Bookstore! Do you guys want to come?
Children: NO! (They didn’t even look up from their computers.)
Us: If you’re sneaky, you may get to see your Christmas presents!
Beta: I don’t want to see them. If I do, they’ll turn into underwear!
Us:
Beta: I know that’s not true, but I don’t want to risk it.
Category: Fluff
Make Like A…
I’m gonna make like General MacArthur and be right back.
[Meghan looked at me when I said this, and quipped “So you’ll be back from the store 3 years later and after most of us are dead?”]
I Am a Turd Burglar
I am my dog’s personal turd burglar.
Most nights I take Butter, the dog, for a walk around our neighborhood. It’s good for her and it’s good for me. As a responsible citizen I clean up after her. I wouldn’t want to step in another dog’s waste, after all, so I don’t inflict it on my neighbors. I wish everyone else were so considerate — most are, not all, but that’s a different topic.
Butter isn’t very regular. Some days she craps three or four times in the span of our walk (about 45 minutes to an hour), other days there’s not a single bowel movement. If I could choose which days would be more feculent I would pick garbage night so that I wouldn’t have to carry the bags very far, but I don’t get to choose so sometimes I wind up carrying around a lot of purloined stool.
She pees a lot too, but that seems to go alright because I don’t hassle her about where she makes water and I certainly don’t go back for it. But her manure is fair game for pilfering, and it’s mine, all mine.
I think Butter has a vague idea that we do our business in the bathroom instead of outside. I find the dichotomy interesting, actually: a dog’s bathroom is outside, in the open. If a person made them defecate and urinate inside their house, and other people found out, that person would be considered weird (and probably a bit filthy) and no one would want to go visiting at their home. The flip side of that coin is, if I am caught soiling the ground outside I could be arrested for disorderly conduct and possibly charged with other offences — even if I do it in the bushes and offer to scoop everything into this nice little baggy I brought with me.
When it comes time to make doody I imagine Butter’s internal monologue goes something like this:
“uhh… hold on… ohohohoh uungh… ahhhhhhhhhhhh
“oh I feel better, time to kick it away and clean up —
“why is he yelling at me to stop? Doesn’t he like clean —
“ugh no he’s fiddling with the rustling things again. He’s going to —
“oh gawd yeah he’s picking it up again. Why do you have to make it weird?
“dude.” Looks at me reproachfully. “If I drop a deuce in the house you yell at me. I do it out here and you insist on bringing it all the way home with us. What’s up with that?
…
“gawdammit everywhere I sniff it smells like my poop now. How can we search for everyone else’s scat if all I smell is my own?
“You’re a moron, did you know that mister?”
And so it goes. From her perspective I stalk her in order to plunder her excrement and keep it for myself. I think I confuse her a little, but not too much because she’s not that smart.
Humans, on the other hand, supposedly are smart. We recognize that dogs are a paradox.
She might be the smart one, though. After all, she gets free room and board, and a personal turd burglar.
Leaf Blowers
Leaf blowers are the vuvuzela of autumn
Muzak in Market Basket
Van Halen’s “Yankee Rose” playing in the supermarket.
I’m getting old.
Cars
“The sixties were good to you, weren’t they?”
— George Carlin
Now I really get it when Sarge says “The sixties weren’t good to you, were they?” to Fillmore (voiced by Mr. Carlin) in Pixar’s ‘Cars’.
The Last Ringbearer
I was reminded over the weekend about The Last Ringbearer while talking with my buddy Sam, who likes The Lord Of the Rings but had never heard of TLR.
The tl;dr version is it’s LOTR as told by the losing side. I enjoyed LTR more than LOTR because it provides more context to the events – the political manoeuvring and intrigue, about-faces, and a far more rational explanation for why the battles portrayed in LOTR are so important.
The original is in Russian, but the English translation is “non-commerical” (the translator’s words) and is free. It can be found at http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/270570.html where the translator provides backstory for why TLR exists and why the translation is free.
Chicken Parmesan
Chicken Parmesan is the ultimate insult. You beat a piece of chicken to a pulp, then dip it into the guts of it’s unborn young before roasting it. Alpha as fuck.
Percy Jackson And The Drunken Bacchanal
I have a new drinking game for listening to Percy Jackson. We’ve been listening to the book series (as read by Jessie Bernstein) when we take car trips together.
I now cringe every time I hear some combination of ‘my’, ‘dear’, and ‘boy’, or hear a totally inappropriate (non-serious) verbal response to an emotional situation. Sometimes the enunciation of some words is downright pedantic and rather awkward.
If I weren’t driving I would take shots to make it more tolerable (and certainly get plastered in the process).
Spring Is Here
A sure sign that spring is here: spring peepers. They’re making a racket tonight.
Fortunately they never seem to wear out their welcome.