Dogs

I don’t watch the news. It makes me angry. It depresses me. Plus, I used to work at a news station and I know that what is considered “news” really depends on how slow the day is. But I don’t want to be totally uninformed, so I try to get my headlines off of Yahoo. It’s amazing how informed you can be by simply logging on to Yahoo’s main page right before you go check your e-mail. All sorts of headlines await you there. And as you know, you don’t need to read much beyond the headline to get the news.

Because Yahoo is 24 hours a day they are sometimes hard-pressed to come up with things that are worthy of Top Story status. Sometimes there is just nothing going on. Take for instance the fact that the other day I logged on and saw a picture of Oprah. Next to her picture was a quote from her saying something like, “I felt like I’d been stabbed in the chest (maybe stomach (maybe heart (definitely torso area))).” When I saw that I thought, “Oh dear, Maya Angelou is dead! Or some other old fabulous black person. Maybe Sydney Poitier. Let me click and investigate further.”

Then when I clicked I was led to a story about Oprah’s damn dog dying. Seriously. This is how famous this woman is. Or how slow a news day it was. Can you think of anyone else on the PLANET that would get a headline on the front page of Yahoo because their DOG DIED? Please. This woman is really just living in her own world of fame and fortune and god-like status. “Publicist Person, my dog died. I’m going to need you to write up a press release. Possibly even release some pictures of me looking very sad.”

Today I saw a great headline on Yahoo: Hollywood’s Pigeons to Get The Pill

I don’t know for sure, but isn’t there a war or something going on? You know, people dying and being blown up and slaughtered in the name of Jesus and freedom? Or something? I dunno. All I know is that you shouldn’t let your dog eat rubber balls and the pigeon poop problem in Hollywood warranted the attention of several people and committees and possibly even some scientists. Ahhhh, America.

Because I too am very famous, I will let you know that my dog still has a cone on his head and he is still not happy about it. He is less happy about the fact that I removed the cone for about an hour tonight and then had to put it back on. My friend, who is his vet, said that he was probably okay to be cone-free, so I took it off. But after a week of not being able to lick and bite wherever he wanted he went a little crazy. I feared that me may not stop until he had completely removed all of his private areas.

The saddest part of all is that when you walk a dog with a cone on his head people assume that the cone is because he is a biter. Then all of a sudden instead of, “Oooooohhhhhh, what a cute puppy!” I get, “.....” That “....” is accompanied by sideways glances that don’t quite make eye contact with the animal. My poor cute puppy has been branded a crazy biter. Which coincidently he became, this evening, when I removed the cone. The people giving him the sideways looks shouldn’t be worried, the worst that is going to happen is he might obsessively start biting his dinger off.

Put that on Yahoo.