Circuit City´s 2-Year Warranty

So it´s been a while since I´ve posted, but this time it wasn´t due to spring, forgetfulness, or indifference. Al contrario, I have been raring to post, but my computer was sequestered by Circuit City. Apparently a shifty-eyed man claiming to work for Circuit City gave my mom a paper promising that the moribund computer would be fixed within days. Then, that date having come and threatening to go with no return phone call, much less a returned computer, it became apparent that Circuit City a) has a Derrida-ean "constructed" understanding of the term "promised by" and b) does not know how to operate their own phone system, much less a computer. I listened as my mother spoke to people in 2 continents and every single department of Circuit City EXCEPT the computer department in tones ranging from desperation to fury to aphasic sobs. Weeks passed, our only contact with the computer came through a FedEx number wrested through hours of negotiations which revealed the computer to be making journeys across the country, returning to Brooklyn every few days but leaping off to new and better pastures whenever my mom hurried to try to sweep it away from Circuit City´s porous clutches. Apparently the Circuit City "2-year warranty" refers not to the amount of time the computer is covered for repairs, but rather the length of time that a single repair takes.

So it took a month. And then, to add insult to injury, when they finally sent it back, do you know what they had the gall to suggest had been the problem???

PET HAIR IN THE HARDWARE.

First of all, I´m denying everything. How do they know it was "pet" hair? And even if it was, how does that immediately implicate me? Because I´m the only "pet" (and I reject the term) here? Circumstancial. Do they have eye witnesses who can testify that no other pet entered this apartment in the entire 2 year period my mother has owned this computer? And, as they say in Spanish legal circles, caso negado que fuese--how long have I been telling everyone who will listen that if they made a dog-friendly keyboard, I wouldn´t be forced to thwap my paws all over the keyboards trying to type, which in certain circumstances could conceivably and completely justifiably cause a few hairs to slip between the keys!?!?

I´m shedding just thinking about it. I´d better stop if I want this post to see the light of day.

Sopapilla, my ass!

Wow. I just read mom´s last post. She has really lost it. Sometimes I think I should just quietly walk away...I tell myself she needs me as her last tie to sanity, but when I read posts like that, I wonder if I´m not just tipping her over the edge.

Food made useful

Hello--Dale here.

So it´s been a year or more since I´ve posted, which is pretty much par for the course for me for any sort of writing project or long distance communication. If anyone out there who I haven´t written in a year is reading this....sigh. I should be writing you right now. Instead, I am wasting embarrassingly large chunks of time with my new hobby, which for some reason I find endlessly entertaining: calling my dog all sorts of exotic food names.

First of all, let me make it clear that I am the farthest (furthest?) thing from a foodie possible. I don´t find food to be particularly a source of pleasure, and the foods I do like are individual ingredients--I am a strict segregationist in the kitchen--and once I find a food I like, I am more than happy to eat that food every day for the rest of my life. So, in other words, I am not big on the exotic complicated foreign dishes (to my great dismay, because I desperately want to be culturally open and adventurous).

That is, I wasn´t big on the exotic complicated foreign dishes until I discovered their true use--nicknames for my dog! I´m sure you all have pet names for your...well, pet, but I bet that you make do with a few standbys (¨Fluffybutt,¨ ¨Waggles the Wondermutt,¨ blah blah blah) which have long lost their sparkle and now just serve as substitutes for the regular old name. Most of the joy of nicknames is inventing them, and the fun ones to invent are both linguistically pleasing and in some way represent the essence of your pet. Well if your pet is a small, solid and spunky--boy are you in luck! You see, every culture has their own dense cheese/meat-wrapped-in-starch concoctions (note to self: restaurant idea!). Go ahead, read the following out loud in the vicinity of your animal and try not to smile:

"Whose my little potato knish?¨ ¨Who´s my favorite gnocchi?" "Come here my sweet chalupa." ¨That´s mommy´s pierogie!" "Who´s my empanada?" "Gooood pan-fried dumpling!" "What a sopapilla!"

Go on, scoff. You know you´re going to try it...or immediately order take out.

Orthographic reform

Perhaps one of the reasons more dogs don't blog is that the human keyboard is not designed for the larger or furrier paw. A Newfie or OES is pretty much going to have to get someone to help out with the typing, and since they can't confess to their owners their full comand of English (or whatever language they grew up pretending not to speak), they either have to hire a smaller-pawed dog (and if there isn't one conveniently in the household, it's awfully hard to manipulate your human into letting in a random Chihuahua every evening for an hour or so) or succumb to hegemonic silence. Obviously the only solution is a new, non-anthropomorphist keyboard, but until we dogs manage to take over the Dell plant (and it's so hard to coordinate these takeovers without the damn computer. Talk about about a perfect system of oppression!), I have a temporary solution. Humans, in fact, have already developed this to adjust to the difficulties of typing with their weird spindly fingers on cell phone and Blackberry keypads.

If you read human blogs, you're probably already familiar with LOL, BTW, WTF, and ROFLMAO, to name a few. What we dogs need is some acronyms which properly express our own common sayings. BTW is fine, but LOL, for example, makes no sense in dogspeak. We don't laugh out loud. We bark, but BOL is redundant--what is the point of barking to yourself? To express amusement, I propose TMHTTS--tilting my head to the side. WTF is okay for anger/annoyance, but I think a more canine-accurate expression would be FSOE--fur standing on end. As for ROFLMAO, we have the laughing problem again. I've seen plenty of dogs ROFWTB (rolling on floor wiping their butts), ROFSTHTSS (rolling on floor scratching that hard to scratch spot) and ROFDATR (rolling on floor demanding a tummy rub), but I can't imagine too many instances where one would need to communicate these to the reading public. Any suggestions from the doggy public for a better substitute?

Finally, we definitely need a quick, convenient way to explain the abrupt end to a post, extended posting silence, or shift into unintelligibility. Teenagers have POS (parent over shoulder)--we have HCH (human coming home).

I'd love to read your comments--those of you who can fit your pads onto the keys. Hopefully we can work out a solution for the bigger breeds soon, but hopefully this will make it easier for those of you on the cusp.

OK, TAFN, BTYL (bark to you later)!

Where does the time go?

So apparently I got distracted and suddenly a year and a half went by without me posting. That´s the thing about dogtime--the whole 7:1 year ratio gets a lot of press, but really dog time can´t be mapped onto human time. Sometimes one human year is seven dog years, and sometimes a year and a half in human time goes by in the time it takes to chew a good bone and catch up on the neighborhood smells. I´m sure I´ve lost all my impatient human readers by now, if I ever had any. Dog readers, if you feel like it, you might give your owners a wet nose in the ankle (kneecap or crotch, depending on you altitude) to let them know that I´m back online, although if my owner is typical, they will just misinterpret the whole thing and, depending on their mood, either find it adorable, a sign that you need to go for a walk, or go off on some tangent about how they have work to do and those are new pants...I don´t know, I never listen past the first part. But whatever, I´m not writing for the humans.

I´ve complained here before about the anti-dog policies of the New York subway system, but don´t even get me started on airlines. Rosa Parks complained about having to give up her seat on a bus? I´m all for the civil rights movement, but hello? Imagine if she had to get stuffed into a bag, or locked in an unventilated, unheated, luggage compartment? Grrrr...gets my hair up just thinking about it. But my point here was not to focus on the negative--nope, I think I may have found the solution! Check this out, from the London Telegraph:

"An Australian paraglider and his pet chihuahua were left dangling from a tree more than 100 feet above the ground after a joy flight went horribly wrong. Paul Hansen, 42, strapped four-year-old Emma to his chest in a simple cloth sling and launched the paraglider from Warburton, near Melbourne, about 5pm Friday, but became entangled in a tree shortly after take-off."

Okay, so clearly it didn´t work out quite as planned, but I see no inherent structural problem--especially since my mom is surely much smaller and more aerodynamic than this Paul Hansen guy (and why would I need to bring her anyway? Maybe I´ll just go paragliding on my own and leave HER in the kennel!). Anyway, if this doesn´t fly, as it were, do I hear any support for a walk on Washington? And this time, the leashes are off!

Away in a manger

It's been a nice few weeks off. I've spent most of it trying to shake off this double consciousness I'd acquired, trying to get back to my non-analytical doggie worldview. (Okay, it wasn't that hard.) But it hasn't been all bones and blankets--I spent a few hours following up on the project I started during NaBloPoMo: a cursory glance at that Christian tradition humans get so hung up about this time of year. As I think I made pretty clear with my post about the creation story, I'm not a believer in this whole anthropomorphic Christianity thing. But I thought that maybe I should give the New Testament a try, and what better place to start than with the Nativity story.

I do see an important moral lesson in the story, but once again, it's not the one humans have gotten out of it. In fact, they've pretty much interpreted the whole thing backwards. They act like the fact that Mary had to give birth in a manger, surrounded by animals, was some big hardship, a last resort. "No room at the inn"--strike the violins. Now let's look at this objectively.

Human childbirth: normally excrutiatingly painful, long, lots of maternal and infant mortality, etc. etc. Human nature: often petty, cruel, vindictive, greedy.

Animal birth: easy, quick, safe, neat. Animal nature: usually good, humble, compassionate.

Jesus's birth: easy, quick, safe.

Jesus's nature: good, humble, compassionate.

Do we not notice some similarities here? Don't we think the logical conclusion is that what set Jesus up for all his good works was the fact that he was born among sheep and sheepdogs? I don't know about founding a religion about this guy, but I certianly see some public policy implications. Fewer OB-GYNs, more OES's!*

*Old English Sheepdogs.

The examined life

So, we come to the end of a month of nonstop posting. I'm glad I did it, because I had a lot of ideas accumulated from 8 years of existence and it was good to get them out, but I have to say that the biggest thing I've gotten out of this experiment has been an appreciation of what a horrible idea it is to blog every day. Blogging every day means you have to have something to write about every day, which means that every moment is spent analyzing, thinking, phrasing, and it's so exhausting that you miss the fun of just being. I was so worked up about not having anything to post yesterday that I almost walked right past an abandoned chicken wing! And once I spotted it, I was so caught up in thinking about how I was going to work this into a moral lesson for the blog, I hardly remembered to enjoy it.

Maybe it's because they are so sadly deficient in most of their sensory organs, but humans in general spend way too much time thinking. Particularly overeducated, citified humans like my mom. One of the great pleasures of being a dog is that you can just turn it all off--in fact, turned off is our default. Days go by in smells, and sounds, and veeerrry long dreams full of lambchops and 24 hour off-leash parks, and tummy rubs...and you don't have to think about what each smell means for the future of the planet, or what each tummy rub signifies in the interspecies dialogue. It's good to think about these things every once in a while, but really, I think once a week is sufficient. Constantly thinking just gets you stressed and grumpy and you miss out on having any experiences that would be worth thinking about, that might really produce some good ideas.

So one more piece of advice to the humans out there--one more suggestion from across the species divide: let the ideas, the posts, come to you at the pace that they want. One a week, max. The unexamined life might not be worth living, but the overly examined life isn't living at all.

Everything was illuminated..by me!

What do you know--checking out the Times website and guess who has an op-ed-- not just an op-ed but one of the "most e-mailed" stories--saying exactly what I've been saying about human and animal relationships AND dog parks (okay, so I didn't quite tie them together. But it was implicit). Yes, Mr. Greatest-New-Writer-To-Grace-Planet-Earth Mr. Jonathan Safran Foer himself! Actually, it's a very well written and thoughtful piece, even if he failed to cite me. I'm just grateful somebody is getting the word out.

He notes that by closing off-leash hours (still being debated here in NY), humans further separate themselves from the world of animals. I quote:

"In the course of our lives, we move from a warm and benevolent relationship with animals (learning responsibility through caring for our pets, stroking and confiding in them), to a cruel one (virtually all animals raised for meat in this country are factory farmed — they spend their lives in confinement, dosed with antibiotics and other drugs).

How do you explain this? Is our kindness replaced with cruelty? I don’t think so. I think in part it’s because the older we get, the less exposure we have to animals. And nothing facilitates indifference or forgetfulness so much as distance."

He goes on to say that humans learn from animals that "living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table." [Brief aside--you are the only party literally "at the table." Everyone else has to wait under the table. The table in itself is anti-animal!]

Hear, hear. And pretty mucher right here--turns out Foer and George (his dog) live around here and are daily visitors to my beloved Prospect Park! I may have sniffed the butt of the dog of the biggest wunderkind to hit literature since...well, since the last wunderkind to hit literature.

Barking in a vacuum?

I've gotten a lot out of blogging every day, and I'm glad I've been able to put my thoughts on paper regardless of whether anyone is reading them...

At least that's what I was telling myself, but then today I read the latest post at dooce.com about how her dog ran away for a day--no worries, happy ending--and she had over 50 responses (in less than 24 hours!) from concerned/relieved/sympathetic/ empathetic people...and I felt a little sad about my own lack of reader response. I understand that maybe my dog readers don't want to respond because they're nervous that their owners might see that the "helpless" animals getting a free ride on food, rent, and love are actually smarter than most of Congress...but you human dog lover blog commenters, does NOBODY read my blog? (Btw: dogs. You can post anonymously, or as Rover. Fear not.) What about Blue, the cat who used to write? Yes, look how low I have sunk: I am beggging for comments from cats!

Hello? Woof? (I can't believe I'm about to say this) Meow?

Oh those golden years

First of all, a beautiful picture. Prepare yourself, it's very cute, and you may be tempted to go out and kidnap three small children and a dog without reading the story behind it. But there is a story. So: one, two, three:



Still with me?

Now I can't speak for the human puppies, but I am personally responsible for Lindsay the Golden Retriever's continued existence. Were it not for me, those children would be sobbing inconsolably with a picture of dear, departed Lindsay, or trying to play with a hissing cat, or the frozen turkey carcass, or who knows. But I gave Lindsay the will to live.

It all happened the summer before last. I was with mom in California, housesitting for Lindsay's mom and dad (also the parents of one of the small children, I can't quite tell which). I'm not sure how old Lindsay was at this point, but she had given up. If it weren't for a faint, doggy odor, I would have thought she was a rug. The usual combo of arthritis, upset tummy, malaise, lack of appetite, loss of desire to socialize etc... that signals a doggie on her four last legs. On her last side, with the four legs arthritically splayed out on the floor. But I knew that she had two young children who were not ready to lose a best friend, and a dad who was pretty neurotically attached to her too.

There was no way I was going to appeal to her with reason or with gentle encouragement. She would have to be annoyed into action. I began by eating her food. Followed shortly by sleeping on her bed, getting walked while she stayed home, chewing her toys, and protesting vigorously whenever she was being patted. When we did go out to walk together, I made sure to completely tangle her in her leash, and to every now and again "accidentally" step on her tail. She said nothing. She endured. I kept it up. I knew I would eventually find the straw to break the Retriever's back.

Finally, at about day 6, it happened. I was just sauntering by as she lay sprawled out in the hallway, and I made a casual comment about going to flirt with the Lab next door, and she snapped. In the history of dogdom, there has probably never been a recorded case of a vicious Golden Retriever. Saying you've been bitten by a Golden Retriever is about as believable as saying you've been shot by Gandhi. But I did it. Arthritis, schmarthritis, she leapt to her feet and went directly for my throat. (Whoever made up that crap about the Retriever "soft mouth" has never had one tearing for its neck. Probably the same guy who named the softball). She kept coming and coming--if it weren't for my amazing dexterity (and yes, ability to yelp for my mom), my life-giving intervention might have been more life-giving than I had planned. But mom stepped in, and we sorted things out. Divided the house in two and didn't talk for the rest of the week, but the cure had worked. She was like Rosa Parks on the bus. She was not going to take this lying down anymore. She did not want her children to grow up in a world where a Chihuahua could come into your home, eat your food, chew on your bones, and go unpunished. And she never found out it was all part of my plan.

Lindsay, if you're reading this--you're welcome, and in lieu of flowers, please send turkey leftovers!

Peacable kingdom, my hindquarters

I read through the literature that the Jehovah's Witness people brought by yesterday and now I see where the whole discrimination against animals things starts from. Or how far back it goes, at least. So according to this pamphlet, in the beginning of the Bible it tells how God made the world and all the creatures, and everyone got along perfectly and had plenty of food--no scarcity, no predators and prey, no diet dog food. (Accompanied by this obviously photo-shopped picture of lamb and lion nuzzling. Well either photoshopped, or that lamb's very last picture. I hope its family gets serious residuals).




Plus two humans (who, of course, the human Bible assumes to be superior to the rest of the creatures, so complicated that God took as much time to create them as all the other species combined. This for a species that smells and hears about as well as a pile of poop and needs shoes to walk outside.) So anyway, the animals are having a royal old time, and then the HUMAN eats an apple she wasn't supposed to, and suddenly the lamb is in the lion's digestive track and the dog is on a diet. God explains to the humans that suffering and sadness and death and eternal scarcity will be the punishment for their transgression--but who transgressed here? If God wants to smack the humans on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, or make them get sick and die, then fine: he set the rules, they broke them. But what the heck did the lambs and the dogs have to do with any of this? How is this fair?

Don't get me started on Noah's Ark...

Dale here:

Have the Jehovah's Witness people noticed the irony of the fact that, at the very moment they knock on my door to hand me (at 9AM Saturday morning) the pamphlet with the beautiful sunny peacable kingdom picture on front, promising an Eden where the lion will lie down with the lamb, they have turned my just-moments-before calm and peacefully sleeping Chihuahua-Corgi into a hysterical, barking mess? It would be hardly less appropriate if the cover of the pamphlet read "Heaven: Where Nobody Wakes You Up at 9AM on Saturdays."

REVIEW ME!

So there's this person that's going to review all the blogs starting with "P" and based on my crack deductive skills, I think tomorrow might be my day. (She did "O" today). So I was trying to come up with a witty yet deep, wicked yet touching, poetic yet direct insight which would totally blow her mind (and make her not notice the two missed posting days, NEITHER OF WHICH WERE MY FAULT!! --see post on Nov. 19 for explanation of missed post on Nov. 18, and Thanksgiving I couldn't post because my mom was at home all day and didn't leave the computer unguarded, plus I was busy plotting ways to sneak into non-vegetarian neighbors' apartments and snatch their turkeys--no luck--and in the process got knocked out from the second-hand tryptophan fumes)...

Where was I? Oh yes, so I wanted to knock this reviewer person's socks off (which reminds me--why socks? Is there something wrong with your pads, people? Or are you just embarrassed by your lack of paws?) but I realized that, in the end, I am a dog, and therefore have at my disposition a weapon more powerful than any discursive strategy. I have....

The look.

Please. Please like my blog. Please.



Come on. How can you say no to that? (My mom sure can't--hence the love handles!)

Well, I just read mom's post, and despite the fact that it's based on more erroneous assumptions about my intelligence and understanding than she thinks I can count (because I'm sure she assumes that dogs can't count)...despite all that, I am touched by the sentiment.

You're welcome, mom. And thanks to you too (although NOT for the Thanksgiving celebration. To all dogs waiting to be adopted: make sure your prospective owners are not vegetarians!)

Dale here:

So I'm a day late with the Thanksgiving-with-a-capital-T (why did I just specify that? I wrote a capital T, didn't I?) post, but I don't believe there's any time restriction on just a regular old giving thanks post. In general I don't quite see the point in directing ones' thanks to anyone but the person/animal one is thanking...I know most people take time to thank God, but it just feels wrong to me to thank God (who I don't particularly believe in, but that's beside the point--I would feel this way even if I did) for my friends, or job, or family...because it seems to me implicit that if God/god is giving me friends, job, and family for a reason, then it is for a reason that all the people who are without friends, jobs, and family in the world are being punished for some reason. And I can't accept that--I have done nothing to deserve my immense good fortune and well-being that they have not. If there is a god/God who doles out such things, then it is according to a logic far beyond what I can understand, and I highly doubt that the familiar rules of "please" "thank you" and "your welcome" probably apply in that logical universe.

So I prefer to thank the people for whom I am grateful directly and knock on wood for the rest.

But, there is one exception. How do you thank your dog? I try to tell Sancha every day, I try to show my love and gratitude for her existence in every walk and biscuit (and I try to balance these out, or else I would have the world's only 150lb Chihuahua)...but it's all of no use, of course. She appreciates the walks and biscuits, I'm sure, but doesn't understand the appreciation that comes with them. She can't know how much--despite the evolutionary and practical evidence to the contrary--I depend on her, am sane because of her, function because of her.

And of course she can't read this blog either, but it doesn't feel wrong to "vent" my thanks here. I can't tell her directly and God doesn't seem appropriate--so I split the difference and found the Internet.

Continuing with my post from two days ago, about things humans would learn about themselves if they took two minutes to look at their relation with animals. This is pretty heavy serious stuff--I'll be thankful and positive tomorrow, but as much as it's nice to stop and give thanks (and eat dropped turkey), humans mess things up so much and then ignore the mess they've created that somebody has to point it out.

So this comes from the book I mentioned a few days ago, "From Baghdad with Love" about a dog rescued from Iraq. The nice part is the dog being rescued from Iraq. The bad part is the thousands of dogs killed, starved, and left to die in Iraq. But even the dogs who are incredibly well taken care of--in terms of dollars spent per paw--are effectively destroyed. Listen to this description of the life and prospects of a Marine dog (used for sniffing explosives, and I guess sometimes for torturing suspects).


"The military working dogs' elite status hurts them in the end. They aren't like other dogs, and since the canine warriors can't simply be debriefed, they have nowhere to go. If a military dog becomes physically unable to perform his tasks in the field--usually when he's about ten years old--a veterinarian deems him "nondeployable"...Many of them are deemed nonadoptable....Nonadoptable. Maladjusted. Apt to attack small children on playgrounds... These are the dogs whose entire lives centered on carrying out orders to perfection, who were so devoted to the military, they obeyed to the death. These were the most faithful, dependable, patriotic dogs of the lot, so they're handed "final disposition" papers and euthanized.."

Okay, obviously that's a crime and an outrage in itself. But for my human readers: HELLO! And you're surprised that soldiers who come back--who are trained exactly like these dogs, to follow orders to the death, to feel no fear, to a life of constant violence and vigilance--don't adjust well to civilian life? Post-traumatic stress syndrome surprises you when even dogs, who are million times more well adjusted than humans, can't handle the military, much less war?

Why do you think Bernese Mountain dogs are so friendly? NO SWISS ARMY!

Someone in Brooklyn city government must have read my both my post about the relative lack of change in the aerial environment (see Saturday, November 11) and the sad state of lighting in the park. The last few days, I noticed strange new lights up in the air, all around the neighborhood. (Dogs don't see color the same way as humans, but we are very sensitive to light. Plus in one spot there was a weird semi-dog-like creature, which, after careful scrutiny turned out to be made of plastic, accompanying one of the light displays. Looked like a Great Dane with the better part of a tree tangled in its ears). Anyway, I didn't pay much attention.

But today, we go outside to the park after sunset and : lights, everywhere lights! It was so exciting and beautiful! I don't know how they did it or why, but between the smells on the ground and the lights in the air, I almost didn't know what to do! I take back my criticism last week of the park authorities...I mean, it still puts my fur on edge when I think of the jerk who drove into the empty (except for a few fellow dogs, trying to get a romp before sunset) park at 4:48and blasted via loudspeaker that "IT IS NOT YET 5 O'CLOCK. ALL DOGS MUST BE ON LEASHES. IT IS NOT YET 5 O'OCLOCK!" Please. Get a life. Go write tickets to the fleas or something if you're so worried about animals off leash that bite viciously. Or at people who DRIVE THEIR GIANT 96 HORSEPOWER POLLUTION-SPEWING TRUCKS ON THE GRASS. If you're concerned about park quality of life, that is. Grrr...

Sorry. Anyway, what I meant to say was that I have forgiven all this. Because some attentive and sensitive soul in the park hierarchy must have read my blog and taken the trouble to illuminate the whole area closest to my apartment so I can see after dark, and not just with boring old streetlights (you've peed on one, you've peed on them all), but with glorious colors and blinks and flashes. Now I can get my snacks, socialize, exercise, and see great art all at the same time. It's like having a gym, a museum, a restaurant, and a bathroom all in one. What a gift... they should create a holiday and do this every year!

My experience of forced detention this weekend brought to mind something I'd been thinking about for a while. I've read--and completely believe--that one of the surest predictors of human adult criminal behavior (and one of the most common elements of the biographies of all serious human criminals) is cruelty to animals. Child psychologists take cruelty to animals as a very serious and important sign that something is very wrong.

Why don't humans realize that their behavior to and with animals in ALL spheres of life is a very good indicator of their larger problems with each other? And that it is impossible to act one way with animals and another with humans. And that it would be a lot easier to fix problems with human society if the very behaviors which caused these problems were not completely accepted with animals?

1) My mother is all up in arms about the Guantanamo detentions, writing letters, signing petitions whatever. Fine. I agree. But then she goes and sends me to the kennel with nary a second thought? And thinks that inventing some euphemism like "doggie hotel" can mask the true nature of this imprisonment? And whenever anybody calls her on it, defends herself with how well they treat me, all the food and toys I have, bla bla bla. True--but irrelevant. All of this can be given or taken away at the whim of a cranky kennel worker, there are no outside observers who can verify the conditions, I have no access to a lawyer, press, or communication with the outside world when inside (see my post from Friday for the lengths I had to go to just to post one lousy, inoffensive blog!) And if those Guantanamo detainees complained about being harrassed by dogs!--try being in a room with a wheezing Pug, a horny bulldog, and a farting Dacshund for two days! If that isn't torture, then I don't know what is!

2) Racism. Humans wring their hands about how to stop it, decry it in public soundbites, protest that they would never be racist...and then go and pay $500 for a purebred dog, have its ears clipped to conform to some imposed standard of beauty, and prostitute it to other "pure" animals in order to pad their bank accounts? Hello? Any hypocrisy here? Don't you think that looking down on a mutt, or a purebred whose tail might Dog Forbid be a millimeter too long keeps those discrimination muscles in practice? I should point out that NO dog--from mutt to Westminster champion--harbors any of these human-imposed prejudices. We do not distinguish between ladies and tramps. But we suffer no end at all levels of doggie society (what do you think it does to my self-esteem to know that my adoption was only half the cost of the "purebred" in the cage next door? If you poke us, do we not bark the same?) There is a woman at the dog park whose dog is half-Basset/half- Beagle--could not be more half-and-half if you took a computer program and merged the breeds like they do with celebrities on Conan O'Brien. And yet, even in the face of textbook Beagles and Bassets who so clearly do not look like her dog--or rather, look like exactly half like her dog--she maintains that she has a purebred beagle (presumably so as not to recognize that she paid $500 for a "mutt.") How can that level of self-delusion and obsession with appearances not spread into other aspects of her life?

Anyway, I'm just saying. Humans: take a look at yourselves. And then at your pets. Compare. Contrast.

So it's over.

I'm out. Missed the post yesterday (and am down to six minutes in today--hope I can type fast.) But the obstacles I had to overcome! How many of the other bloggers in this contest were forcefully detained, dragged against their will to a place of detention, and kept in a room without access to internet for 48 hours? And even despite all of this, managed to break several layers of security to post from the very computer of their detainees?

I think there has to be some extenuating circumstances amnesty for this contest. I'm going to keep on blogging and bark my case if necessary at the end.

Update: out of kennel, back with grandma and mom, had a great walk and was allowed in several trendy shoe stores, including one in which the proprietors fed me. Plus I found two large chunks of chicken and a hamburger on the way home. Cruel detention largely forgotten/forgiven.

Okay, this has to be quick, because I have snuck into the office here at the kennel (and no mom, you don't fool anyone when you call it the "dog hotel"), just so I could stay in the contest. What a day of ups and downs. The downs you can probably imagine--the kennel? BY MY OWN MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER??! Actually, it's not so bad here, and I've talked to a bunch of the guys and got some input for further blogs.

The highlight of course, was grandma's arrival. I was so thrilled to have the family together again. I'm all in favor of nontraditional parenting arrangements, but there is something to be said for a two-parent unit. You can get one to feed you and then pretend to the other one that you haven't eaten, for example.

Oops, I hear the night shift guy coming back this way...gotta log out. Really, you'd think mom could had least find me a kennel with decent internet access.