There are no bad owners, only bad dogs

2004-12-05

Night of the Lepus

Isn't it about time for the airing of the grievances? Yeah, I thought so.

Yesterday I wrote what I considered to be a moderately entertaining entry, but I couldn't share it with the 4 of you who care because the cocksuckers at the virgin megastore had a problem with their network, which ate my entry. May I suggest that this is what happens when your tech people are 17 years old and were hired for their encyclopedic knowledge of the hits of Take That? (For those of you out of the know, Take That is a Pop Idol-spawned boy band that produced Robbie Williams.) (If you don't know who Robbie Williams is, just thank whatever higher power you believe in and move on.)

Anyway, because I am an idiot and the television is frequently referred to as "the idiot box," ...well, you see what's coming.

If you've never seen the documentary "Spellbound," go rent it now. It's hilarious, mostly for the presence of one child who is so weird that I'm sure I'll end up working next to him someday. I don't know if he's severely ADHD or just severely odd, but this kid is fascinating. Anyway, the documentary is about the National Spelling Bee. Spelling bees are not a British tradition, but, like we keep ripping off reality tv show ideas from them, they stole the concept of the spelling bee for a game show featuring children National Spelling Bee-style. The differences are that it's in front of a lot more people and involves a lot more stage lighting, making defeat even more humiliating than it would be under ordinary spelling bee circumstances. Ergo, many children cry. A lot.

But that's not the funny part, you sick bastard(s). The funny part is that the other night when I was watching this due to circumstances beyond my control, there was a kid on there that had the "R sounds like W, L sounds like W" speech impediment, and I am absolutely certain that the adults were fucking with the word list in order to highlight this. His first word: Honorary.

The rules: Pronounce the word before you begin to spell and after you finish spelling.

The kid: Honowawy. Haitch-Oh-En-Oh-Aw-Ay-Aw-Wy. Honowawy.

The next word: Religious

The kid: Wewigious. Aw-Ee-Aw-I-Gee-I-Oh-You-Ess. Wewigious.

And this went on for a while, because he was spelling everything right.

Another kid, about 12 years old, male, was given the word Menopause.

He looked like he was about to start crying, asked for the word to be repeated, then spelled it correctly.

I kind of expected his next word to be Clitoris.

I have recently been thinking about all of the critter-related misadventures I have been party to, and I started trying to remember both a)how many times I have been to an emergency room for an animal-related injury, and b)how many times I have actually feared for my life due to a critter. There's very little overlap in the two groups, meaning that I am usually too stupid to be scared when I really should be.

First ER visit (animal-related): Animal shelter. A hamster, thinking that the good life lay somewhere outside the bars of his cage, broke out. Since hamsters and other rodents were kept in the same room as cats and kittens, this was probably not a good choice. However, he did survive the cat room and escaped into the office area and took up residence in the heating vent behind my desk. For days and days we tried to catch him.

As time passed, so did a lot of urine and hamster poop. The heating vent behind my desk started to smell like the monkey house at the zoo. One day, I saw him in there. If I reached my hand in, he would be cornered. He would also probably bite me. I did what all stupid people would do when they're sick of their work area smelling like hot, baked rodent urine. I reached in and grabbed him. And he, of course bit me. I could have dropped him, but he would have gone right back in there, leaving me bitten and stinky. So I held on until someone got a cage. Then I went to the emergency room to see if any of the 36 bite wounds on my right hand needed stitches. They didn't, but the doctor thought the whole thing was pretty damned funny.

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