Saturday, May 1, 2010

Parlin Merkins' Mild Kingdom

If you're thinking 'sounds familiar and yet...' you've already gotten the point. I don't have pets-I feed squirrels, and used to feed birds, but I don't have pets (and haven't for many decades).

Cutting across a parking lot just the other day as a short cut back to where I work, passed a gun barrel grey Sebring with a sticker on the rear seat left passenger window, in the corner, that read 'my cat is one in a million'. As I walked past the car, light reflecting off the windows shifted and I could see what looked like prints from a small nose, some smears possibly from a tongue and could also make out paw prints all right around the decal. Perhaps the cat thinks it pays to advertise. Now I'm wondering if the person who drives the car even realizes what his cat is up to in the back seat. Where did the cat have the decal, in its mouth or perhaps in its ---EWWWW!

You never see cats stick their heads out the window of a moving car, only dogs. I've never understood why dogs do but cats don't but in the spirit of you should learn something new everyday (even if it's only to avoid this url), here's an answer for you. And in a related, though I'm not sure to what, development, we had a news story recently of a woman charged with stealing people's pets and selling them to others. I worked on that previous sentence for a bit to no avail-it's the story, not the words that are goofy. I wonder what house pets make of all that 'this is my dog and that's my fish' rigmarole. I guess as long as you can build a fire, you're at the top of the species.

I watched a family of geese, we call them Canadian Geese, I have no idea how we know that, eating grass-I mean chowing down on grass. Pate as cows, amazing-but if we could breed cows that laid eggs and gave milk, so much for goose liver (or Goose Gossage, for that matter). I mention the grass eating because near where I work there's a nine hole golf course (sad, innit? It's like a one bucket basketball court or two bases and a home plate baseball field.) called Goose Run because there are flocks (herds? schools? prides?) of geese everywhere, eating the greens, and pooping willy-nilly (your mouth smiles as you say that word aloud, you cannot help it).

"Run" wasn't the first choice as part of the name but no one wanted to explain why a word that started with an "S" and ended with "h-i-t" was on a sign children could read (I'll bet the Sylvan Learning folks would've appreciated that incentive). I figure if they just pave the golf course, the geese will go someplace else. It would give us more space to park cars with cat decals. Of course, then we'd have to worry about hairballs.
-bill kenny

No comments:

Re-Roasting a Christmas Chestnut

I tell this tale every year and will continue to do so even as they lock me away in the home. I've taken to calling it:  Bill's Chri...