The Dog Doesn’t Die

Before we get down to business being silly, here is an important announcement: Eddie’s tube is out! Yay! If that doesn’t make sense, see the previous two entries.

Today’s silly stuff deals with the concept of flight, or failure to fly, or reasons not to fly.

This illustrated story of office workers saving ducklings is pretty funny, and cute as well. In fact, it comes from Cuteoverload.com . Ducklings can’t fly. They can plummet off the side of a building, and they can waddle, but they can’t fly. Fortunately, there were people around to help these particular ducklings survive the plummeting and the waddling. Let’s hope the ducklings grow up to be smarter than their mom.

Rabbits normally don’t fly, but in Denmark, bunnies do take to the air in the sport of show jumping.

Finally, David Owen writes about a fantasy airline. It won’t cost you $50 to read about it, although he’d probably like that very much.

We are overdue for some silly stuff!

First, do your pets get enough exercise? Sure, you take your dogs out for walks, but what about your cats? Have you ever thought about getting them a treadmill? Yeah, me neither.

Maybe the reason cats don’t exercise so much is because cats are existentialists. Do existentialists exercise? I doubt it. They do mope, however, and existentialist cats are particularly good mopers.

Finally, are you female? Of a certain age? At that very special “time of life”? And awake at night? Then you have insomniac sisters. Extra points if your name is Judy.

I have a lot more to write about my dad’s passing, and I have two books to review, but I think it’s time for some levity. At least I need some levity. So here is another piece from my old humor files:

HOW TO KEEP A HEALTHY LEVEL OF INSANITY IN THE WORKPLACE

Put a chair facing a printer, sit there all day and tell people you’re waiting for your document.

Arrive at a meeting late, say you’re sorry, but you didn’t have time for lunch, and you’re going to be nibbling during the meeting. During the meeting eat 5 entire raw potatoes.

Insist that your e_mail address be “zena_goddess_of_fire@companyname.com”

Every time someone asks you to do something, ask them if they want fries with that.

Send email to yourself engaging yourself in an intelligent debate about the direction of one of your company’s products. Forward the mail to a co_worker and ask her to settle the disagreement.

Page yourself over the intercom. (Don’t disguise your voice.)

Name all your pens and insist that meetings can’t begin until they’re all present.

Make up nicknames for all your coworkers and refer to them only by these names. “That’s a good point Sparky.” “No I’m sorry I’m going to have to disagree with you there, Chachi.”

Schedule meetings for 4:14 pm.

Encourage your colleagues to join you in a little synchronized chair dancing.

Send email to the rest of the company telling them what you’re doing. For example “If anyone needs me I’ll be in the bathroom.”

When in conversation, no matter where you are in the office, mutter, “I think my phone is ringing” and leave. Go get a coffee.

Develop an unnatural fear of staplers.

Compose all your e_mail in rhyming couplets.

Include a personal note on every email you send. “On a personal note, I’m feeling a bit tired and grumpy today.” “On a personal note, I’m pleased to announce that I got my highest score ever on Tetris last night.”

Put decaf in the coffeemaker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.

There’s a lot of stuff going on this week that’s keeping me from blogging. However, I didn’t start this site just to abandon it, so I went into my old folders of “stuff” and found this gem sent to me by a friend in 1997. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but it sure sounds like it might be!

Anyway… here’s a letter from the Smithsonian Institute when this man  sent them one of his ‘major finds’.

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Paleoanthropology Division, Smithsonian Institute, 207 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20078

Dear Sir:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents “conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.” Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the “Malibu Barbie”. It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings.

However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to it’s modern origin: 1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone. 2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids. 3. The dentition pattern evident on the “skull” is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the “ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams” you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that: A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on. B. Clams don’t have teeth. It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results. Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation’s Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name “Australopithecus spiff-arino.” Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin. However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard.

We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the “trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix” that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe

Curator, Antiquities

Radical Prunings: A Novel of Officious Advice from the Contessa of Compost is told in the form of a hilarious gardening advice column written by the main character, Mertensia Corydalis. Mertensia is opinionated and in possession of a very dry wit. She also has a much softer heart than one might think, but Abbott takes her time in revealing that side of her narrator, as she also takes her time in spooling out a clear plot line. This extremely funny book, one of my favorites, is MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers and would be entirely safe but for the preventable demise of a few fish.

Mertensia is wise enough to understand the need to train her dogs, Jasper and Jennelle, while at the same time not expecting them to think like people. When Jennelle does something that is destructive from a human point of view, Mertensia allows that Jennelle, being a dog, was thinking like a dog and was therefore blameless. Mertensia also advocates on behalf of birds, mice, bugs, and butterflies. And it was a rare page where I didn’t laugh out loud. I heartily recommend this book.

Let me start by saying that I love, love, love Christopher Moore. Some of my friends find his writing a bit over the top, but I think he’s great! So needless to say, I enjoyed A Dirty Job immensely. And it is Mostly Safe for animal lovers. Moore’s absurdist style makes it hard to take the occasional cartoonish violence very seriously, though some of his books have a message. Fluke, for example, is about the need to protect marine life, and in Coyote Blue, Moore advocates for Indigenous Peoples’ rights more effectively than any article or white paper I’ve ever encountered. (And given the nature of my job, I encounter a lot of that stuff!)

A Dirty Job is about death and our inability to deal with it. Making that funny is quite a trick. The book starts off with a human death, and it’s rather sad, actually. Most of the remaining casualties are pretty comic, but not that first one. Anyway, in terms of animals, Bummer and Lazarus are dogs loyal to The Emperor of San Francisco (just trust me on this), and one of them is rewarded for intrepidity towards the end of the book. However, another character has trouble keeping pets alive for a while, given certain powers that take a while to sort out. Those pets aren’t really given much discussion, and they are briefly mourned. Then the hellhounds show up. The hellhounds are indestructable and the epitome of canine loyalty. They’ll eat anything. As one character says “Okay, you’re hellish beasts from another dimension, and you like toast.” A named pet dies in the middle of the book, but we don’t learn much about him and, in typical Moore fashion, he is briefly mourned. Past that, I can’t say too much, except that the dogs are prominent among the good guys.

I highly recommend this book.

Last week, I came across three things I wanted to post on this blog. And now I find that two of them are sweeping across the Internet. So there’s no point in waiting, I guess. I also have a brief message of encouragement for those of you who land on this site looking for info about diabetic pets, but that’s at the end.

Have you seen the extremely popular YouTube video, “An Engineer’s Guide to Cats” yet? If you haven’t, you eventually will because it is all over the place. You can watch it now by clicking on this link. You’ll be glad you did, because it’s quite funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4

Have you seen the creepy video of the guy stuck in the elevator for 41 hours? No, the video is not 41 hours long, it’s about 2 minutes. It’s worth watching. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/04/21/080421_elevators/?yrail

Accompanying the video was a well-written article, which is not being passed around the Internet quite so much. I read the article in a hard copy of The New Yorker, a magazine I dearly love. It explains all about poor, trapped Nicholas, as well as discussing elevators in detail. They’re safe, they’re more complicated than you might imagine, and they generate much of their own power, kind of like a hybrid. Here’s the link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_paumgarten?/yrail

And now we’re all caught up. I had planned on putting up a book review tomorrow and some diabetic cat success stories later on in the week, but I’ll have to revisit that schedule now. In the mean time, if you’re one of the people drifting in to check out my periodic references to diabetic pets, here’s the bumper sticker version: Yes, it can be treated, and no, it’s not hard. You can do this and you’ll be glad you did. Giving 2 shots a day to my diabetic cat, Eddie, takes about 5 minutes total, and for my trouble I have kept him alive and in very good health since Sept. 2004. More on this at the end of the week or beginning of next week.

It’s gloomy out, I’ve had better days, most of my friends have had better days, maybe we’ve all had better days. So it’s time for some silly stuff!

This short video shows why we love Stanford University for its many contributions to technology, society … and cat toys!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNUHeMM_GpQ

My 87-year-old father has this Disney-esque view of the animal kingdom, where all wild animals want is to be our friends. What can I say? He’s 87. It’s a little late in the game to change his mind, and at this point, why try after failing for decades? Anyway, this Weezer video was produced by Spike Jonze, but it could have been written by Dad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hyoszso38E

Finally, my friend Marsha had a disagreement with her otherwise delightful husband, Elliott, who accused her of making up her memory of The Banana Man. Trust me, no one could think they remembered something this absurd without having seen it. Thanks, Marsha, for digging this up and passing it along. Captain Kangaroo presents The Banana Man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et6Jt2YX44o

Or month. Or year.

As you can tell by the name, Avienne is into birds. Big time into birds.

Unfortunately, she is in serious need of some cheering up. So in the comments section below, I have placed a whole bunch of bird-related YouTube links. Some of the birds are funny, and some swear. Maybe she can borrow one of the swearing birds and take it to the people who need to hear what Avienne herself is too polite and sensible to say.

I am failing to zip through this week’s book at the usual speed, unfortunately. Right now, I will note that several of the characters make me think of Monty Python’s Upper Class British Twit sketch, only without the humor. And that sketch is brilliant!

So, without further explanation, here is Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch. Enjoy!