There is a dog park in Nova Scotia, Canada, which is enforcing a new, quite sensible rule: No Barking Allowed.
The campaign has been very successful. When the dogs enter the park, they immediately suppress their urge to bark. Apparently, it is quite something to see. Unfortunately for the dog owners, their pets bark their heads off all the way home to make up for the enforced silence.
Emboldened by the success of their barking ban, the organizers of that endeavour are now taking their zeal to other locations with the hopes of halting vomiting in hospitals, laughing in children’s playgrounds and singing in churches. Thank heavens we have concerned citizens, also known as retired busybodies with nothing better to do, to deal with these nuisances.
As for me, there is a flock of Canada geese that fly directly over our house twice a day and their honking is driving me mad. Therefore, drawing inspiration from the Nova Scotian barking patrol, I am working on erecting a great big sign: No Honking Allowed.
What kind of a day did you have yesterday? Better or worse than this guy’s?
Walter “Snowball” Williams, 78, woke up in a body bag at a funeral home in Mississippi. He had been pronounced dead the night before but when they went to embalm him, he started kicking like crazy in the bag.
So much for not having a snowball’s chance in hell.
The coroner had an explanation. His pacemaker likely stopped working and after he was bagged, it started working again at some point.
I am not a doctor, coroner or embalmer, but if this actually happens, might it not be a good idea to check a guy’s pacemaker before you plant him?
Good old Snowball. I hope he outlives the coroner and all the employees at the funeral home.
Give ‘er hell, Snowball. You’ve gotten a second chance!
I was in the offices of a bank today and noticed something funny. Behind the smiling tellers at the long counter were a number of big windows, must have been eight or nine feet tall. About four of them.
The vertical blinds were drawn on them all so no one could see out – or in. But in front of the windows were three huge flatscreen TVs, all connected so that they sort of operated as one big screen, with images able to appear on all three at the same time. I don’t know how that works but then again, I don’t know how marshmallows are made so I’m easily impressed.
In any case, the photo that appeared across all three screens was a lovely shot of a blue sky with white clouds floating in it. And I thought: “Why not just open the blinds and let everyone see actual sky and clouds.”
But what do I know about banking? (See marshmallow mystery above). It’s the strangest thing to me, now, how businesses are using expensive flat screen TVs as wallpaper. I guess you don’t have to use as much glue that way.
I wonder who invented the marshmallow and who came up with the name.
I often get asked how I made my fortune. It is an honest question non-wealthy people pose, and it doesn’t bother me at all to explain the path I took from rags to riches.
I left home at eighteen with seven cents in my pocket and the clothes on my back. And over the next five decades, through hard work and guile, I managed to amass more money than I can count. Someday I will write a book detailing how I did it but for now, I will share one little secret.
You might think a man of my elevated status would never need to go to a grocery store but Warren Buffett still drives his car through the drivethrough at McDonald’s so it’s important not to lose the common touch. Another thing about the elites I run with is, far from being tightwads, we like to spend, sometimes with wild abandon.
In the store today, I saw a sign advertising three bags of potato chips for four dollars. That seemed like a bargain but here’s your first wealth tip: It is no bargain at all if all you want is one bag of chips, which is all I wanted (and one more than my doctor wants me to have). So, I ignored the bargain and bought only one bag. It cost me $1.34. If I had taken advantage of the special sale, each of the three bags would have cost me only $1.333333333 (to infinity).
So, yeah, call me reckless, but having made my fortune, my plan is to spend every red cent – literally, in this case, one cent at a time – before I die. As you can see, with my wild abandon ways, I am well on my way to achieving my goal.
I threw out the rule book and spent .777777777 of a cent (to infinity) more than I needed to, he said with a satisfied look on his face.
Nothing’s simple any more. You hear it said. So do I. You might, in fact, have heard it from me. I’m usually saying it. People of the jury, I present as my evidence, well, just about every aspect of modern life.
It doesn’t matter what you go to buy, or to eat, or to watch in a theatre. Saturday, at one of these big movieplexes, a friend and I stood gawking for 15 minutes before the popcorn stand, weighing all the various options and packages priced for value. Bargain hunters from way back, we took our time and came up with what we think, but still aren’t sure, was the best buy.
Has anyone’s life improved as a result of having all this variety pumped into it? I don’t know. I do know that simplicity is as quaint a notion as table manners, modesty and diplomacy.
Witness my main piece of evidence. When I was a kid on the farm in the 1830s, our black and white TV got three channels. We picked up the broadcast signals from these local stations by way of a space-station-looking aerial on the roof of the house which we controlled by an electric “rotor” in our living room. Amazing science.
Today, in the city, of course, my TV-watching options are much more varied although my family and I have not signed up for all the channels money can buy. For 22 years, I have had a pretty good arrangement with my cable company. They’ve run a wire into my house, I’ve plugged it into my TV, they send me a bill for this luxury every month, and I pay it. Every year they send me a letter saying, sorry, but we have to charge you more for your service. I pay it. I don’t see any other cable companies banging on my door, so I have no choice.
Now, in my feeble mind, the simplicity of the relationship between me and my cable company goes like this: If I don’t pay, they take the wire away. Not hard to understand.
But this week, I received in the mail an “Important Notice of Changes” to my cable service. “As part of our ongoing effort to improve customer service, we have simplified the terms applicable to our various services.” I opened the document and it fell out before me like a scroll Julius Caesar might have read from. On that parchment are typed 5,493 words (I did a computer word count) defining the new relationship between my cable company and me.
Somewhere, a lawyer is basking in the south sea sun at a beautiful resort paid for with the money he or she charged my cable company to write to me with all these simplified terms.
There are 52 sections in the document and most of them seem to more or less define what awful things will happen to me if I don’t live up to the agreement.
Okay, here’s a little nugget: “We may assign or transfer the Service Agreement or any of our rights or obligations hereunder without your consent. The provisions of Sections 8, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 and any other provisions of these terms which by their meaning are intended to survive termination. These Terms have been drawn up in the English language at the express request of the parties.”
I am baffled as I believe I am a party and I don’t remember expressly requesting this, or anything else, with the possible exception of being left alone.
Here is the most I can put together from all I’ve read so far. If I don’t pay them, they’ll take the wire away.
If I was writing the Simplified Terms, I’d reduce the 5,493 words to about 12: If you don’t pay your bill, you will lose your cable signal.
Words a TV-addicted couch potato like me can understand.
Our cat Mario is 18 years old and getting kind of creaky. He has trouble going up and down stairs. So another family member regularly picks him up and carries him up the steps from the basement to the main floor to ease his journey.
Sometimes, I see him sitting at the bottom of the steps, meowing, telling me to pick him up and carry him upstairs. I don’t do that as I am not 18 and I’ve become a little wobbly on the steps myself. I imagine the disaster if I was carrying him squirming under my arm and trying to get upstairs, the two of us inevitably ending up in a horrible mess on the basement floor.
This morning, as I started to climb the steps, I could see he wanted a lift. Reluctantly, I had to reject his plea again and I started my journey upwards. I am not going to admit that I’m moving a bit slowly these days but as I reached the landing before three more steps to the kitchen, I saw Mario zooming past me like an Olympics speed demon.
I don’t know what to conclude. Either the cat is pretending he can’t climb the steps anymore or I am pretending I can.
Our little dog Toby is 13 pounds of fun and fury. He’s a poodle and smart as, well, a poodle, which, next to the border collie, is the second smartest dog of all the breeds. So I have heard. And after 10 years of living with this little dynamo, I believe it.
Every time I take him to the groomer, she finishes off his bath and haircut by tying a fresh new neckerchief on him. He looks cute as a button when I bring him home, all freshly trimmed, and with his new scarf around his neck. His latest one is bright green with white polka dots.
The other night, the poor little fella suffered a wardrobe malfunction. I was sitting on the couch watching TV when he jumped up beside me with his kerchief in his mouth. He laid it down carefully beside my leg, and looked with great concern directly at me. It was his “do something” look I am accustomed to seeing several times a day, but this time was different. He has a whole mess of toys and plays with all of them on a regular basis but he never plays with a scarf that has fallen off, which they tend to do now and then.
This seemed to be the scenario. His neckerchief fell off which apparently upset him. He then put it together that if he brought it to me, I would probably put it back on him again. He got his wish.
The other thing that intrigues me is how well, after the past decade, he and I communicate with each other now. He has a variety of barks that all mean different things. And a whole repertoire of looks that he gives me depending on whatever need he has at the moment.
One look Toby has never given me is one of anger.
What I have learned over the years is that he has certain needs and he has become very good at letting me know what they are. And those needs do not just involve food, water, exercise, play, fresh air and sleep. There are other things that also require attention. Such as love. Several times a day he sticks his nose and then his whole head under my left hand (never my right, I am left-handed) because he wants to be petted. He also brings me his toys, hoping I will play with him.
And when I dress him in his sweater to take him for his walk in winter, he sticks his nose through the hole just like a toddler would and his legs through the legholes. During a thunderstorm, he follows me around vibrating and frightened, wanting me to pick him up and comfort him. He crawls into bed with me and dives under the covers.
We talk about godsends, without remembering what that word means. Toby was meant to come live with us, that I know. One Monday morning, I found myself with an unexpected $400 in my wallet. That night, we went to a breeder to size up her latest litter of puppies. Our son and daughter fell in love with the smallest one. I asked the woman how much it would cost us to take him home. She said $400, of course.
When we returned to pick him up two days later, she asked us what we had named our puppy. My daughter had chosen the name, Toby.
“That’s funny,” said the breeder. “That was his grandfather’s name.”
Ten years ago, not long after Toby arrived in our home, I retired. With my wife at work and the kids in school, I was alone at home all day. I needed, and found, a buddy in our funny wee dog. The Universe had come to the rescue yet once again.
A couple of weeks ago, on the Internet, I noticed a good deal on a very large capacity thumb drive. So, I checked it out.
Since then, and it started immediately, on every page I surf, there are large gaudy ads for little tiny thumb drives.
Before that, I went searching for an inexpensive but good-quality set of headphones. Ads by the dozens for those followed my search. It didn’t matter what content I chose to view – music, news, commentary. There the ads were.
Before Christmas, I looked for a really good and not cheap audio recorder I could chirp my songs into. I can’t remember as far back as I’d like to but this has been happening to me over and over for years. Sometimes I don’t mind it as the ads keep me tuned in with the latest technological toys, but mostly, they are a nuisance.
So here is my plan to liven up my surfing.
As my polka dot bikini bathing suit is frayed and looking terrible, I am going to do a search for new bikini swimwear. As it seems to be mostly young women who wear these things, I foresee many enjoyable hours of surfing (ironic, eh) ahead of me this winter.
I don’t think much could go wrong with my plan but if the authorities do show up at my door, I promise to go quietly.
Note to all serious junk collectors: here is a sign you have the sickness bad. You are parked at the far end of the second-hand store parking lot enjoying a coffee. Your eye catches, in the distance, their big green garbage bin. The lid is open. The bin is full.
And sticking out atop that pile of refuse are four perfectly good plastic lawnchairs. “What the hell?” you exclaim to no one.
Briefly, you consider driving over to the bin and loading those tan lovelies in your car. These are chairs someone didn’t want so they gave them to the second-hand store. And that store didn’t want them!
But you want them.
Somewhere there is a hotline, or ought to be one. Sadly, you leave, remorsing over what might have been. Your quality of life will have to remain in the moderate position for another day.
But take heart. There is always the local dump. You are still fond of the perfectly good bookshelf you retrieved from there one day, right from under the massive sign, Absolutely No Scavenging Allowed. You assumed, maybe incorrectly, that what was meant was it was illegal to steal that sign.
You even thought at the time, “I could use a sign like that.”
It isn’t right to get a chuckle out of another person’s accident but sometimes, it can’t be helped. Like the mishaps shown on America’s Funniest Home Videos. A person falling off a boat into a lake or flying off a trampoline into a kiddie pool is funny, but for me, the humour often resides in the effort the person went to to create their own misfortune.
So, using scraps he found in the garage, a kid builds himself a ramp to ride his bike over. He tries it out and the ramp breaks or something else happens to land the poor schmoe on his head and wearing his bike like a pair of metal and rubber overalls.
This is what I laugh at: When a person goes to great lengths to create their own disaster. The funny thing about it is that, of course, he didn’t know all along that that was what he was preparing or he would have stopped shortly after he started. It is his innocence and ignorance of what is about to befall him that makes me chuckle.
This winter I have spent many cold overnights, on one occasion till 7 a.m., building three skating rinks in our backyard. The first two melted away, the third still lives. On the far side of the rink is a shed, in which sits a variety of shed stuff, including our portable firepit assembly – stand, pan, webbed top, etc.
On Sunday afternoon, I thought it would be an excellent time for a mid-winter fire to lift the spirits. So I hustled across the slippery ice, opened the shed door, and lifted the whole firepit contraption which, while not very heavy, is pretty awkward. Now, I could have left the shed, turned right and tromped through the snow, around the rink and to the backyard patio where we usually hold our fires. I could have. But that was the long way around. The short way, a much more sensible route, was to leave the shed and walk straight across the rink to the patio. This is what I did.
And this is what my feet did, halfway across the ice. They flew up to meet the sky. My head flew down to meet the ice. And the firepit, now curiously heavier than I had previously thought, flew down to meet my chest, shoulder, arm and stomach. Before it did, of course, it separated into four different parts, the better to pummel and puncture my suddenly prone body.
Now this is what I imagine. An old squirrel, sitting in our treehouse all winter, watching me make these big patches of ice and having no idea why I was doing this. Then looking on as I spread-eagled on my creation with a big black firepit crushing down on me as I lie there. I would not have blamed the little critter if it had let out a chuckle or two.
After all, I had worked so, so hard to doom myself to this fate. I was limping a lot due to a sore hip from tromping down all the snow for these rinks. Now I have a lame arm and shoulder to go with the hip. Fortunately, they are on the same side of my body so when I walk, I only moderately resemble the hunchback of Notre Dame.
This rink thing is working out just great! I don’t have any video but do you think AFV will give me the $10,000 if I just describe the whole affair to them?
