Never Better; Shock the Puppy

posted at 11:01 am
on Jun. 9, 2000

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My boss at work, when ever someone asks him how he is, he smiles and says “Never better!” He’s a real optimist.  As the web site project stretched and stretched and stretched, I started to detect a sinister undertone to his reply.  Never better, never better.  I’ve decided I have no idea what he means.

The good news is, it’s possible, and note the keyword POSSIBLE, that you’ll get more of these now that the Variety web site has launched.  It’s at http://www.variety.com/ ; I’m at home before 10, and that’s a welcome change.

My friend Josh found a quiz on the web that determines your superpower.  Mine was super speed, though I was hoping to get time travel or perhaps stock investing.

What’s your super power?
http://www.emode.com/emode/tests/superpower.jsp

My sister Nicole has a new puppy.  It’s a chocolate lab.  The dog is a really handful, as all Labradors are.  They’re really frisky and playful in a “come here doggy and take your Ritalin” kind of way.  My sister works nights, and gets home at about 1 a.m.  The dog works days, starting at about 6 a.m.  The cabin where my sister lives has no dog-proof fence around it, only a low stone wall on the beach side, and a thicket on each side.  Cinnamon (which I think is a cool name for a chocolate lab) is too damn friendly, and tends to lope off down the beach, black tail disappearing over the low, snow-covered wall.

So my sister bought one of those electric invisible fences, the ones called MuttStop or RoverRein or Electric Cerberus.  Cinnamon wears a high-tech collar powered by 200 AA batteries.  When she goes too close to the perimeter defined by a long wire stretched around the yard, the collar makes a high pitched beeping noise.  If she gets even closer, the collar give off a mild electric shock, the kind you get like when you touch your tongue to the terminals of a 9 volt battery.  I mean, I’ve never done it, but my friend Judd has and he turned out fine.  He’s now a puppeteer.

Anyway, the fence does its job most of the time.  But when there’s something _terribly_ tempting on the other side of the fence, like some dogs playing down the beach, or a squirrel that, collarless, sprints into the next yard, well, the dog just goes for it.  She runs right through the warning bell, through the shock zone, twitching all the while, and bursts out the other side, liberated from her cybercage.

For my sister, who spent all this money on the fence, that’s a bummer.  But even worse is that the dog has no equivalent imperative to come back through the Danger Zone, no matter how much my sister calls.  So at least once a day, Nicole has to tromp out in the snow and either carry the squirming, jolted dog across the no man’s zone, or remove the dog’s collar (and if that’s not courting disaster...) or put the dog on a leash and get her moving up to fence-crashing speed.  And all these things just increase the dog’s tolerance to the BoltBarrier’s zaps.

Anyway, the dog’s a lot of laughs, and my sister as well.

Another sister, Virginia, just finished reading Macbeth for her high school English class.  “What a lame ending!” she said.  “Everybody dies! What’s up with that? You think Shakespeare could have done better!”

Some things to ponder until next time.

You don’t meet too many people named Goliath these days.

Or Pokey.

There’s a lady at my office who has been trying to throw away her garbage can for a week.  It never gets taken away.  You put it in another garbage can, they just pry them apart.  You put a label on it, they throw away the label.  I suggested she use the paper shredder.

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Feeling All Grown Up

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Goodbye Mr. Teeth