I did not know that it was even possible, but it would appear that the canine member of our household is highly prejudiced against black people. He normally gets excited when someone new comes to the door, but this was just completely over the top. Although there was no biting of the enormous black man, there was much baring of teeth and a whole lot of ridiculous clawing and scratching to get at him. He’s never reacted this way before, but we have never had an enormous black man come to our door either.

I should add at this point that the dog in question is a small Yorkshire Terrier named Howard. Howard thinks he’s a badass, weighs 150 pounds, and eats nails for breakfast. In reality, he’s a tiny brat who would probably get his ass kicked by Richard Simmons’s dog if indeed Richard Simmons has a dog. And let’s face it, if he does it’d probably be just as much of a fairy as he is.

I found myself thinking that the whole concept of a racist dog seemed a bit silly, so I decided to do some research. Lo and behold, it would appear that such things aren’t only possible, but common. I found an article at Slate.com that’s titled, “Can a Dog be Racist?”. In there, they have an interview with Dr. Nicholas Dodman of Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine wherein he states:

“Any behavioralist knows that dogs don’t like subsets of people,” he says, and though the most common subsets are broad—strange men or little children—”sometimes it can be quite specific. It could be tall men, or men with beards. It might be men who are wearing big shoes, might be as subtle as men who smoke cigarettes—which can be hard to pick up on—but it can also be black guys.”

Wow, it’s really true. Howard is a racist bastard. So what is there to do about this boiling pot of canine prejudice? Not being a racist myself, it’s a pretty awkward thing to deal with. It would be one thing if my name were “Bubba” and I drove around with the white sheets in the back of my pickup truck; heck, it’d be Bubba’s dream to have a racist dog. As it is though, I’m wondering if this is going to cause major relationship issues between old Howard and I.

The absolute worst part of the whole thing is this: Howard the racist dog, being a Yorkie, is mainly - that’s right - black! He’s a little brown and grey too of course, but for the most part he is black in color. This would at first seem to pose quite a conundrum, but I figure that he must be like Richard Pryor in that movie “See No Evil, Hear No Evil.” You know, the one where he plays a blind guy that finds out in the middle of the movie that he’s black? Maybe Howard doesn’t realize he’s being just a little hypocritical with all this racist behavior.

I found myself thinking that perhaps a little quality time with a mirror would set him straight and he’d then realize the error of his ways. Then I remembered that dogs are colorblind. As anyone who has watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” knows, there are a lot of colors that look like black when rendered in black-and-white. Take for example, the blood in the shower scene. What is obviously red comes out looking black as midnight. Because of this technical detail, I think it may in fact be very hard to convince Howard that he is indeed black. If pressured on this point, he would most likely claim that he is red instead. So much for leveraging hypocrisy as a means to disabuse him of this antisocial behavior.

At this point, I’m completely flummoxed on the topic of Howard’s racism. I suppose that I could look into a little canine sensitivity training, but I’m thinking that there aren’t probably a lot of resources for such a thing in my area. Without such an option, I am probably left to take on this task myself. This could prove to be a difficult task, indeed.

I will post more on this in the coming days, but I’m forming an idea that will expose him to that which sets him off so much in an effort to desensitize him to the racial stimulus. Perhaps with enough exposure, he will see the error of his racist ways and perhaps even come to accept himself as a black individual. More to come…

Today’s post isn’t actually this that you’re reading. Well, this is a post and it is being made today, but the real content you’re looking for is something else entirely.

Something else entirely being the newly-minted About page.

Click the link or look up above on the navigation bar for “About” and click that instead to read something of potential interest rather than this cop-out of a post that does nothing other than direct you to something else.

Now that I think about it, I feel somewhat bad for subjecting the front page to such an unexciting post as this one. I will therefore include some Knowledge so that you might be Edified:

How to Catch a Polar Bear

• First, go to a frozen lake. This is very important. Also, bring some peas.
• Next, cut a hole in the ice with a diameter of approximately one polar bear.
• You should then proceed to place peas around the circumference of said hole in the ice.
• Then you wait.
• Finally, when the polar bear comes to take a pea, you kick him in the ice hole.

If you don’t get it, read the final step over and over again until you do.

(Ed. Note: The more clever of you all will notice that meaning can be harvested from the title of this post by using the word “Thought” as either a verb or a noun. How badass is that?)

We think we’re so smart.

Guess what? We don’t know shit from shinola.

Think about it this way - if the Universe is made of shit, and everything outside of it is made of shinola, then the chances are that never having dealt with shinola (because remember, our Universe is just shit) will result in us being fully incapable of comprehending it. Therefore, any attempt to try and explain the nature of what’s outside of our Universe is pretty goddamn futile. Yet still, there are those that persist in their claims that they know what’s out there beyond our mortal knowledge.

[Read more…]

It spins like a whirling dervish but you better have superhuman reflexes if you don’t want the scrollbar to go flying past the good stuff on Page 3.

Firstly, the title of this post shall be your Grammar Lesson for the Day.  We use its when we intend the possessive (i.e. something HAS something else) and we use it’s when we really mean ‘it is’.  I am by no means a grammar perfectionist, but who am I to pass up a perfectly valid opportunity to educate the Youth of Today?

Now we spin onward to the topic at hand:  procrastination.  There are a lot of ways to define this concept.  My favorite is the following:

“Procrastination is that which makes moot the possibility that one can become a superhero.”

Seems a bit abstract at first, but think of it this way - most of us want to be better people, and the pinnacle of self-improvement is so purely embodied in the superhero spirit.  So why aren’t we all Masters of our personal Universe?

[Read more…]

Right on…

I am currently sitting in the LIBRARY of my alma mater. Ever wonder why they call it your ‘alma mater‘? My theory is the following:

1. People use words that they think their peers have never heard in order to sound intelligent.

2. A made-up word is by definition one which hasn’t ever been heard by anyone.

3. The smarties that thought up Universities decided that after they graduated and weren’t feeling so smart because they weren’t actively going to school, they could refer to the place they went with a MADE UP WORD so that they would sound smart as provided for in items 1. and 2. above.

4. Hence, therefore, the term ‘alma mater‘ doesn’t mean anything - except that maybe the person using it is feeling a bit insecure in their intelligence. This is, of course, fodder for a whole other post.

There you have it - QED. What, you don’t know what QED means? You sad, sad, education-less individual.