HOW TO TRAIN OLD DOGS

If you’re just an average Joe and you like your dogs and you want to eat with your dog around, but do not like the eyeballing and begging and snout attacks (dog gets under your elbow and pokes upward with a cold damp nose), simply purchase a bottle of hot sauce.

Even if you do not like hot sauce, buy one. Open it up and make sure it is pungent enough to make you wince.

When you eat , simply open it up and tell the mutt “You can have all you want.” Wave it around and smile. Let the dog smell it up close. This will get you very strange looks. Our dogs just sit there and roll their eyes upward and a body language styling of “oh, no not again!”

After many repetitions of this, the dogs will start to cringe if you posit a catsup bottle.

When we have visitors who stop over and have a meal with us, we give them the hot pepper sauce bottles. “I don’t use this,” they will say. “It’s for them, “ and we indicate the dogs. And we explain briefly.

It works for us.

EXPLAINING THE COMICS: GARFIELD

In examining the strip over a couple of years, and not laughing very much at all, let alone grinning, I decided there was another story behind the fat cat's unruly smugness and deceptiveness.

It deals with the "owner" of Garfield. Jon Arbuckle is actually a mental patient who is being mainstreamed into society and the dog and the cat are there as observers. I suspect they are wired for audio and visual effects as well. The blase view of John getting his head or hand stuck inside various objects like a jug of water or a toaster would be given greater weight were this view any different. And the matter of his clothing and his inability to tie his shoes. After glueing a cement block onto his head (or some damn such), help arrives off panel.

Jon Arbuckle--mental zero. Garfield--helper animal.

CONCERNING THE DOG IN THE PICTURE

Chickens can fly. If they’re motivated.

We had a spunky ball of fur named Constanza. She was a mutant Lhasa Apso, short haired and spent much of her early life in New York City.

On her arrival to the farm, she discovered chickens. Specificly, one hen that was spotted brown and white. She understood that this was what she wanted to do. She chased it. Of the twenty or so chickens , this particular one was the only one she undertook to give chase.

This went on for a few weeks. We had the chickens free ranging, but gave up on it. But the descision to end the free ranging happened a bit later.

And then one weekend morning, We went out to roam around the orchard, check on what was there.
We had the barn door open. The hen was out in the orchard. Constanza recognized the hen. She barked, she ran. The hen squawked, it ran, hopped and then it took off into the air, flying and fluttering about 200 feet and was trying for the barn. She managed to hit the top frame of the door (with a considerable auditory bonk), flopped down onto the ground and Constanza cornered her. The hen was exhausted. It lay down wings out and the dog came closer.

And sat on it. And waited for the humans to praise her catch. The hen wailed softly.


(free ranging chickens didn’t really make the eggs taste better, and they scratched up all the seeds we planted and roamed out into the road to see if they could get to the other side and were hit by trucks. )

CLOVERFIELD:

SPOILER. Everyone died. That's it, all you need to know.

Yes, the movie. I thought it was a bad movie, not worth a rental effort and not worth the aspirin needed in the theater. You could click onto the Amazon.com site for the reviews and people's negative reactions are pretty clear.

Hand held shakeycams in extended footage make me ill. EVIL DEAD, BLAIR WITCH, MAN OF THE YEAR...no thank you...the big wide screen with these made me ill.

Got another big problem. The guy "Hud" picks up a camera, "glues" it to his eyeball, and is running for the next hour Plus with bricks and wood and shards of plaster and other debris raining down on him and his friends while he tries to keep up. Memo: running around with a camera sticking to your face during an emergency situation displays poor survival skills. No wonder he died.

Monster: looks like a large knobby chunk of stump with ropey arms coming out of it.

REPTILICUS was scarier.

Good word of mouth sold a movie. Better luck next time.

AN AMEBA SEX CHANGE OPERATION.

Find the six differences.

On the subject of bricks: (to answer a question): That you may have mailed.

It is not that the senders left a return address... Many years back, during the Goldwater Presidential Campaign (1964, for you youngsters), one man with several hundred business reply envelopes, mailed about 300 envelopes to the Campaign Headquarters, each one filled with a piece of lead plate.

And placed his return address on all of them.

The campaign forwarded the bill to the mailer, alleging fraud in not complying with the requested proper use of the envelopes. That's all I've heard. I guess it must be where the current concerns have originated (see previous posting). And since it's not 1964 or nearby that date, I cannot really look up the incident, though I recall the origin of the newspiece was Arizona.