Tag Archives: funny

On Pig Orgasms, Praying Mantis Porno, and Pedantry

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I love the Internet. I love the Internet so much that I try not to remember the world before we had constant access to information at our literal fingertips, because as much as I love libraries, before the Internet it was quite difficult to find an answer to a question like “do pigs have half-hour orgasms?” in under thirty seconds, and I feel like we ought to be justifiably proud in our achievements in this area. The bizarre reproductive systems of animals should be information we can access in the blink of an eye, by god!

Unfortunately, this glorious system has its downsides, particularly if you’re on Facebook or if you have a gullible relative who sees fit to forward you any email which has clearly already been forwarded at least twenty times. Because our ability to share information at lightning speeds means we also have the ability to disseminate completely false information with equal rapidity. Sometimes even with greater rapidity, because what’s easier than hitting the “share” button and watching all those “likes” roll in? (It’s sort of like playing with Monopoly money, except you can’t even buy imaginary assets with it.) Why would anyone complicate this process by Googling to find out whether what you’re sharing is accurate?

This is on my mind in particular this morning because of a chain message that’s been making the rounds on Facebook which has been making my inner fact-checker twitch, and since my Googling didn’t turn up any handy collection of clarifications on these points, I thought instead of a featured creature this week, I’d run down this list for my own satisfaction. Because I kind of can’t help myself. So, here’s the entire text that’s going around Facebook, and then we’ll address each point one at a time. Doesn’t that sound like a fun learning experience? I thought so too.

A pig’s orgasm lasts 30 minutes. (O.M.G.!!!) A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death. (Creepy. I’m still not over the pig.) The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male’s head off. (Honey, I’m home . What the…?) The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It’s like a human jumping the length of a football field. (30 minutes. Lucky pig! Can you imagine?) The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. (What could be so tasty on the bottom of a pond?) Some lions mate over 50 times a day. (I still can’t believe that pig …quality over quantity.) Butterflies taste with their feet. (Something I always wanted to know.) Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump. (Okay, so that would be a good thing.) A cat’s urine glows under a black light. (I wonder how much the government paid to figure that out.) An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. (I know some people like that.) Starfish have no brains. (I know some people like that, too.) Polar bears are left-handed. (Talk about a southpaw.) Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure. (What about that pig? Do the dolphins know about the pig?)” – Unknown

So, there it is. I expect that many of these will turn out to be partially true, and I know some are not really correct at all, but we’ll see what we can find, and we’ll certainly all be better informed at the end of the process.

Awwwww yes, this is how we do it in Denmark. Girl, I’mma inseminate you so good.

A pig’s orgasm lasts 30 minutes.
As far as I can discern, this item is possibly true but somewhat disingenuous. I can’t really find any research that indicates 30 minutes as average rather than the absolute upper range of time for pig sex, but also because it implies that both parties are having a similarly good time, like pigs are having amazing tantric sex or something. We can assume that this 30-minutes idea is based on a boar’s ejaculation, which really can go on at great length (5-10 minutes seems to be an average, though 30 minutes would certainly seem possible with multiple ejaculations) and can produce a staggering half-litre of fluid. Good lord, pigs. In her TED Talk “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm,” Mary Roach discusses an interesting fact on why we ought to also be concerned with more than just the boar’s pleasure: pig farms in Denmark have found that when artificially inseminating sows, they can prompt the sows to produce more offspring by sexually stimulating the sows while they’re being inseminated. (The five-point stimulation plan for sows is seriously hilarious. Just watch the TED Talk, it is so worth it, I am not even kidding.) It’s not all bad for the sow, at least; while it’s fair to assume that she probably doesn’t enjoy the sex act with quite the vigor that the boar does, she at least gets something out of the deal, since her clitoris is in fact located inside her vagina, and thus she does get to experience an orgasm herself, which is more than many poor women of our own species can say. So I’m going to call this item partially true, but exaggerated; the sex lives of pigs are undoubtedly fascinating, but a half-hour orgasm seems to be more of a remarkable feat than a regular event.

A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death.
True, but this factoid underestimates the ability of cockroaches to keep creeping us out even after being decapitated, because nine days is nothing. They can, in fact, continue to live for weeks after losing their heads. They don’t breathe through their heads, nor do they bleed out the way mammals do, nor do they need to have a brain for the body to continue functioning. Starvation would eventually spell the end for a headless cockroach, but if they’ve had a good meal recently, pre-decapitation, the body can keep on for quite some time, moving around and reacting to touch. And if that wasn’t creepy enough, the decapitated head can go on about its business for some hours, too.

Here we have a male praying mantis, enjoying himself some copulation, with his head still attached. Whether he managed the dismount without being eaten is not noted. (Photo by Zwentibold, used under Creative Commons license from WikiCommons.)

The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male’s head off.
Totally not true. While female praying mantises do  sometimes cannibalize their mates, it certainly isn’t the case that mating isn’t possible without decapitation. The origins of this misconception are most likely a series of old studies in which scientists observed female mantises devouring their mating partners, but later studies didn’t offer up the same results; in fact, it’s likely that the females in the original study were stressed by laboratory conditions or were not fed enough. How frequently the males perish when mating naturally in the wild is difficult to say, because the disturbance of being observed seems to have a serious impact on the behavior of the mantises in question. The incidence of sexual cannibalism in mantises seems to still be a subject of some debate among entomologists, but apparently males are able to recognize when they stand a risk of being eaten and are suitably cautious, while a female who is well-fed before mating will usually show no interest at all in biting anybody’s head off. It is true, however, that even once a female has bitten his head off, the male’s body will continue to mate with her — more vigorously, even — despite his state of headlessness. He probably learned that trick from the cockroaches.

The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It’s like a human jumping the length of a football field.
False, I think? Most of the sources I’ve found say they can jump about 200 times their body length, which isn’t as impressive, and isn’t a terribly accurate measurement either. On average they can manage about 13 inches with a single leap which is still pretty awesome, if only they weren’t such horrible, horrible little creatures. Biomechanically speaking they’re pretty mind-blowing though, as this article on BBC Earth News explains:

It was known that the energy to catapult a flea over a distance up to 200 times its body length lay in a spring-like structure in its body.

But scientists did not understand how they transferred this energy to the ground in order to jump.

High-speed footage now reveals that the secret lies in the way fleas use their hind legs as multi-jointed levers.

This “lever-effect” allows fleas to drive their feet onto the ground, and the sudden release of the “coiled spring” hurls the insect forwards and upwards, scientists report in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.
True. This inadequately explains how rad that is, because their tastebuds are distributed all over their bodies, so they’re sort of like a giant, swimming tongue. Which really is a great argument for why we probably shouldn’t dump so much crap in our rivers, it probably tastes awful. Save the waterways, people. For the sake of the catfish.

Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
Okay, before we even get to the frequency of mating I want to point out something about lion mating, which is that the male lion’s penis is fucking barbed. Barbed. I mean Jesus, what is this shit. Animal kingdom, why don’t you do something for the ladies for once? Why is nature all about screwing the women over? As far as the fifty times a day claim, they saved themselves on that one with “some lions.” Average is apparently 20-40 times a day so I’d imagine some overachievers manage fifty times a day. They must be exhausted when they’re through, and the lionesses ought to be rewarded with like a spa day at the end of it all.

The female lion does not appear to be amused by this shit.
(Photo by Bob Fabry, used under Creative Commons license, from WikiCommons.)

Butterflies taste with their feet.
True fact, in fact. When butterflies are trying to figure out where to lay their eggs, they can tell just by landing on a leaf whether their eventual caterpillar offspring would find it delicious. It’s probably a time-saver, since they don’t have to sit around chewing bits off of leaves like they’re sampling wedding cakes. It’s probably kind of a rad superpower to have, until you landed on like a manure pile or something. But it’s not quite as impressive when you consider that during chrysalis they turn themselves into a cell soup and then make themselves into an entirely new organism. What is this witchcraft?!

Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump.
Apparently it’s true that elephants can’t jump; they just aren’t built for it, and it wouldn’t help them escape predators when instead of jumping they can just trample you to death. But any statement that claims “X is the ONLY animal that…” automatically makes me suspicious, and saying that elephants are the only creatures in all the animal kingdom that can’t jump is simply too broad a claim for me. How about snails? Clams? Sloths? Starfish? Jellyfish? Blobfish? It’s difficult to find any definitive statements on which animals may be physically incapable of jumping since so many of them simply don’t jump, ever, because it would be pointless and also silly, but I do think assigning the sole honor of a non-acrobatic life to elephants is going to too far. Speaking of silly, if you’d like to see what it might look like if elephants did jump, you can watch this lovely animated short of an elephant on a trampoline. Just tell everyone that it’s for science.

A cat’s urine glows under a black light.
This is true, and actually kind of handy if you’re trying to rid a house of the horrific odor of cat urine. However, it’s not that terribly interesting a fact because it’s also true of many other fluids, both animal and non-animal in origin. Human urine will also glow in damning brightness under blacklight — as Chef Ramsay often likes to demonstrate — so I don’t know what makes cats think they’re so special. A UV light may also reveal traces of semen, blood, saliva, or sweat, and many objects and substances will fluoresce under UV light for any number of reasons, but these include petroleum jelly, laundry detergent, tonic water, and all sorts of other boring things. It does look good on crime shows, though.

Baby, you got such big beautiful eyes that allow you to see predators from a great distance thus ensuring your longevity and the continuation of your damn fine genes.
(Photo by A. Kniesel, under Creative Commons license.)

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
True! This is not so much a statement on the ostrich’s intelligence — though they aren’t renowned for their remarkable brain power — but rather on the environment in which it is most suited to survive. While its eye-to-brain ration isn’t that bad in comparison to other birds, try not to think of it as incredibly small-brained so much as incredibly large-eyed (the largest eye on any land vertebrate, apparently); the size of its eyes (each is about two inches in diameter) gives it great long-range vision, combined with the heightened vantage point of its long neck, helps it immensely in its quest to not be eaten and die a horrible, horrible death. Which frankly seems like an admirable pursuit to me. (And while we’re on the subject of ostriches, I hope everybody realizes by now that they don’t actually hide their heads and think you can’t see them. That myth was probably started by Roman “historian” Pliny the Elder, who as far as I can tell spent most of his writing time drunk off his ass because nothing that jerk says is ever true.) Ostriches get kind of a bad rap, let’s be honest. Everybody thinks they’re stupid and we find it hilarious to watch people ride them, but just for perspective’s sake, you should know that they can run faster than you, the male ostrich has a scientifically important 8-inch phallus, and they are pretty much epic kickboxers. So I’m just saying, laugh all you like, but I wouldn’t fuck with an ostrich because they will mess your shit up.

Starfish have no brains.
Not entirely true, and not very fair to the starfish. True, if you were facing an army of zombie starfish and you were trying to destroy their brains so they couldn’t feast on you, you might have a hard time knowing where to aim, but really I don’t think zombie starfish should be very high on your list of things to worry about. In essence, a starfish’s entire nervous system acts as its brain, which if you think about it is kind of awesome. Let us take a moment to just appreciate the humble starfish, okay? Because starfish do not need to take this bullshit. If you cut off a starfish’s arm, it can grow a new one.  They can grip onto things using their very own adhesive chemicals, so basically they make their own glue. They don’t need to have sex to make babies because sex is so totally passé. They have their own internal hydraulics to move around with. When a starfish is hungry it doesn’t have to eat things smaller than its mouth — instead it can devour shit like clams and fish — because it can eject one of its stomachs and turn its prey into delicious prey-soup. That’s how badass they are. So let’s give a little respect to the starfish before they decide to join the jellyfish army and put an end to us all, okay?

Polar bears are left-handed.
That is just fucking ridiculous. What do we think polar bears do with their time, anyway? It’s not like they can hold a fountain pen. They’re not out there on the polar ice practicing their fastball. They don’t even have hands. God, why are we even having this conversation? Okay, here are actual facts: there is no science to support this idea, nor has anyone managed to hunt down whoever started that stupid rumor and kill them with a trained polar bear, more’s the pity. (It was probably the asshole Pliny the Elder. That guy’s definition of “facts” was “shit I made up because I was too busy doing other stuff to actually learn anything.”) In fact, the only research I could find on the subject indicates that injuries seem to be more common to the right forelimb, which might indicate more of a tendency toward right-pawedness, or might indicate nothing at all because that study is actually about vitamin deficiencies in captive bears so who the fuck knows. In case you’re secretly harboring any other ridiculous ideas about polar bears, Polar Bears International actually has an entire page just about myths and misconceptions regarding polar bears, so please read it. You will find it enlightening and fascinating, and if you don’t, you can instead go watch this video of a baby polar bear riding around on its mom’s back and experience a drastic reduction in your stress levels. Because I’m sure that you, too, feel frustrated and annoyed by the persistence of stupid made-up “facts” about polar bears.

Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.
So. Patently. Untrue. This is so untrue it makes me sad. Like, if the first item on this list were completely true and pigs actually had glorious 30-minute orgasms you’d think they’d be having sex for pleasure too. In fact, all sorts of animals have been demonstrated to have sex for what we would call pleasure, which for simplicity’s sake I will call non-reproductive. Just about every permutation of sexuality and sexual behavior that has been seen in humans has also been documented somewhere, somehow, in animals. Bisexuality, orgies, self-stimulation, homosexuality, heterosexuality, autoeroticism, stimulation with objects, rape, sex with dead animals, prostitution, fetishism, the list goes on on and on and on. Literally. This Wikipedia entry on animal sexual behavior is a pretty good place to start if you’d like to have your mind blown. Since dolphins are particularly mentioned here, I feel like it’s also my duty to point out that a dolphin’s idea of pleasure usually involves gang rape and sexual slavery. They also enjoy long swims near the beach and some nice infanticide.

But since we’re talking about sex for pleasure, let’s talk specifically about bonobos. Because how in the name of all that is holy can you talk about sex for pleasure without talking about bonobos? Bonobo chimps have sexual practices for every occasion. There’s sex to say hello or to resolve conflicts or to say I’m sorry. If they find an awesome new food source they’ll have a celebratory orgy. Bonobos are not at all monogamous and don’t particularly care what age or gender their sexual partners are, either. Aside from all the homosexual contact, which clearly is not for purposes of reproduction, they also enjoy all sorts of sexual positions that don’t result in offspring, either. They enjoy kissing with tongue and oral sex and occasionally the males like to do something called “penis fencing.” Yeah, it’s really called that. I won’t link you to any of the youtube videos with bonobos having enthusiastic and undoubtedly pleasurable sex, but I’m sure you can find them on your own, if you’re so inclined.

And it’s not just sex, either. We like to think of animals as slightly mindless and driven by their various urges for survival and perpetuation of the species, but I hope we’ve all realized by now — particularly since science is providing us with solid proof — that all sorts of animals engage in all sorts of behaviors just for the fun of it. They have rich, complex lives of their own, and it’s not like they stop existing when we aren’t watching, so let’s all just take a moment to get over ourselves.

And sure, maybe my idea of fun is exhaustive Internet fact-checking, which is decidedly less exciting than a bonobo’s idea of a good time, but I hope that you’ve found this excursion into pedantry entertaining, and I do hope you’ll think about doing a little research of your own the next time you feel inclined to hit the share button this kind of bullshit. I mean Jesus, how could they forget about the bonobo orgies? Fucking amateurs.

Driving Along the Twisted Road (or, Why Everything Is Better With Fisticuffs)

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“In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.” – from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

I love conflict. I love messy entanglements, vicious fights both physical and verbal, estrangements and inner struggles, war and strife, murder and mayhem. I love damning secrets, shadowy maneuverings, sibling rivalries, forbidden romances, fistfights and poisonings. There is nothing I love more than a good old fashioned dust-up, either literal or metaphorical.

I also have a book on my shelf called The Coward’s Guide to Conflict, because in my own life I hate every single one of the things I’ve listed above. (I haven’t read that book yet, by the way. It sounds too confrontational for me.) I am completely ill-equipped to handle any sort of squabble. If two random people on the train start having an incredibly mild disagreement, I’m mortified.

Gentleman 1: I say, old fellow! You’ve just bumped my elbow, wot.
Gentleman 2: Oh dear me, I’m dreadfully sorry old chum, but I daresay you needn’t take that tone with me. Perhaps we should discuss the matter over tea.
Me: Oh god please let the train crash and kill us all, I can’t handle this level of animosity.

If people I actually know are having a full-blown argument, forget it; it’s like watching your parents fight, and I’d rather run away to Tibet to become a yak-herder than even have to witness it. I can’t even blame parental drama; mine weren’t together anymore by the time I was born, and as far as I remember nobody else in my family was the type for full-blown fights either (we seemed to have a preference for cold wars, or possibly I just ran away at the first sign of trouble and just never actually witnessed any fighting first-hand). Maybe there just wasn’t enough strife in my household when I was a kid; I never learned how to cope. At the first sign of incipient conflict, I freeze up like a startled rabbit and start singing Soft Kitty to myself.

Maybe my inability to handle that sort of thing in my daily life is why I’m such a junkie for it everywhere else. If there’s one thing that I want from my entertainment, it’s conflict. I want the characters to be struggling with themselves, with each other, with their environments and their societies and possibly with giant radioactive jellyfish from the deep. I want them to be fist-fighting cougars and experiencing all sorts of heart-rending angst and wrestling with their inner demons or their own personal arch-enemies. Conflict is a great way to poke your characters and provoke a response, and of course the response is the satisfying part; that’s where we learn what our characters are made of. We figure out who they are — and become invested in their lives — by seeing them freeze or fight back. If Romeo and Juliet had successfully hidden their relationship and eloped to Las Vegas and been blissfully happen together until they were old and grey, that play would’ve been boring as hell and furthermore, we wouldn’t have really cared about either of them. The meat of the story is in what happens when everybody else finds out about the secret forbidden love affair, and how our heroes react to it all. (In Romeo and Juliet’s case, of course, they reacted by being overdramatic emo teenagers, and look how that turned out.)

Spoiler alert: They totally both die.

This issue of conflict is, I believe, why it’s so impossible these days to find a good romance film. I love romance movies, the sappier the better, so my standards are not unusually high. I have, in fact, watched Chasing Liberty more than once, though mostly that was so I could look at Matthew Goode. That movie at least has a bit of conflict as an obstacle to our heroes’ love, though mostly it’s just Mandy Moore throwing endless hissy fits. But contrast that with Leap Year, another romance movie that I watched just for Matthew Goode (damn you, man), and you begin to see the problem.

See, Leap Year should’ve been a sure thing. It’s got Matthew Goode and Ireland and I’ve liked Amy Adams since she did Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day (Lee Pace for the win!). But mostly Matthew Goode in Ireland, okay? Two gorgeous things that look gorgeous together. Only the trouble with the whole concept is, there really aren’t any obstacles to our characters becoming romantically involved. Sure, she’s got a boyfriend she’s trying to reunite with so she can propose to him, but in these sorts of films the boyfriend is always a bit of a tosser and the relationship is always devoid of human warmth, so you can’t figure out why our girl wouldn’t just go for it with the hot Irishman in the goatee. (Except in those cases when the current partner — who is eventually going to be dumped by our romantic lead — is quite a nice person and overall gets shafted, and then you get distracted by what a couple of dicks the “heroes” of the film are. For an example of this, see Colin Firth in The Accidental Husband. It’s not even remotely a good movie, but it does have Colin Firth and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in it, so. Now if they’d made Jeffrey Dean and Colin the two romantic leads, that would’ve been a whole different and much more interesting film. TAKE NOTE, HOLLYWOOD.) Lacking any substantial reason to keep the movie going for the next hour and a half by keeping our lovers apart, the writers seem to default to artificially creating conflict by making the two romantic leads so obnoxious that even the viewer can’t stand them.

“Hey there, I’m hot and we’re in Ireland, you want to hook up?”
“LOL nah, I haven’t showed you all of my personality defects yet. Before we can get to the snogging at least one of us has to suffer a hilarious concussion and there have to be a few jokes about sex and/or bodily functions.”

(Oh, and lest I give you the mistaken impression that Matthew Goode only does films that are moderately to severely dreadful, I’d like to encourage you to watch A Single Man. His part is rather small on screen but is the center of the whole plot, and it’s just a gorgeous, heart-rending film in general. Also, it made me cry like a tiny little girl. But if that’s not your sort of film either, then surely you liked  him in Watchmen. SURELY. ILU, Matthew Goode. Call me.)

For an even better example of this phenomenon of hard-core lack of anything compelling happening, you could try watching the worst romantic comedy I have ever had the misfortune of viewing, namely The Back-Up Plan. Or, you could stab yourself in the eye with a rusty spoon. The latter would probably be less painful. The thing is, in our modern world, when you take two single and unrealistically attractive people who live relatively normal lives and are not secretly werewolves or engaged in centuries-long familial blood feuds or whatever, there really just aren’t that many reasons for them not to make it work. Sure, relationships fail all the time for a ridiculous variety of reasons, but when it comes to our entertainment we’re generally not interested about a story of boy meets girl where they meet and rather painlessly get together and then discover that ultimately they’re just not compatible because one of them leaves wet towels on the floor. When it comes right down to it, you’re going to need just a touch more drama than that.

(At this point I feel like I should maybe apologize to people who loved Leap Year — I know you’re out there — because god knows we all have those movies that we love even though logically we shouldn’t, but if you really genuinely loved The Back-Up Plan, then I think YOU should apologize to ME.)

Luckily, we have plenty of types of conflict to make our characters’ lives more interesting, even if we don’t necessarily want to introduce any of those forms of conflict into our own existences. (Existensi?) The generally accepted classifications that I learned in school were Man vs. Self, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Society, Man vs. Man, Man vs. God and Man vs. Machine. The really juicy characterization comes in when these are used richly and in combination. Take The Avengers, for instance. Bruce Banner — perhaps better known as The Hulk — is a classic and quite literal example of Man vs. Self, because the thing he’s most afraid of and struggles with most is himself. But he’s also got some serious Man vs. Man (with the enemy and with his own allies) and Man vs. Machine going, on account of the faceless alien invasion and all that. You could even call some of his struggle Man vs. Nature, even though the wild beast he’s fighting is a part of him. (There’s also an added element of Man vs. God, and I’m pretty sure we all enjoyed how that turned out. Well, everybody except the god in question.) And that’s just one character in an ensemble of other characters who are just as richly drawn. I’m pretty sure when Joss Whedon was making this film his big decisions were which conflicts to cut out because he had too damn many good ones, rather than trying to think of some contrived problem to shoehorn in to liven things up a bit. (I find that, as a general rule, things never need livening up when The Hulk is involved.)

If your story is lacking in conflict, maybe you should outsource the job to The Hulk. Just tell him to smash and watch as he creates a multitude of glorious explosions, plane crashes and other catastrophes for your entertainment.

By sheer random happenstance, just as I was deeply pondering the nature of conflict and how much I hate pretty much any movie with Matthew McConaughey in it these days, I stumbled across a series of writer’s workshops being put on by a local library. The first talk, by local fantasy author Paul Genesse, was all about conflict: why every story needs it, and how to find it without forcing it. (You can find Paul’s presentation notes over here on his blog if you’re interested.) Paul gave a great presentation and we had some terrific insights from the audience as well. I picked up a few great pieces of advice I hadn’t heard before, and was particularly intrigued by the extremely strong opinions some of us had about what qualities in the face of conflict make characters either heroic or utterly intolerable. It seemed we all quite vociferously agreed that characters who let situations push them along, rather than acting to create their own destinies, are pretty much too irritating to be borne. Paul summed it up rather well this way:

Conflict means letting your character make choices. The stronger the character, the more difficult the choices.

The rest of my notes are, I’m afraid, less eloquent. Paul was discussing at one point what sorts of things don’t actually work in creating conflict… like making characters argue for no good reason. (Are you listening, Leap Year? ARE YOU?! I will punch you.) He also brought up my favorite point of writing ever, which is that we can best reveal who our characters are not by giving extensive descriptions of them at every opportunity but by putting them in uncomfortable situations and letting them sort it out. I might have transcribed his thoughts a bit unfaithfully though when I wrote a reminder to myself that read, “When writing lots of exposition, kill yourself.”

See? That’s a great example right there. I could’ve just written a straight-up description of what Paul told us, but instead I added a little Woman vs. Self drama in there. I’m just trying to keep it real. Now if you’ll excuse me, all of this talk of conflict is getting to me, and I think I need to go find a shark so I can punch it in its face.

My Dog Trudeau Makes Some Seriously Poor Life Choices

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My dog Trudeau is kind of an idiot. I say this with all possible love and affection, but seriously though.

“I don’t know what you mean. I am ALL CLASS.”

Case in point. Trudeau is kind of dog-aggressive, meaning that sometimes he gets on just fine with other dogs and sometimes he is a colossal tool. This makes my life difficult primarily because it’s generally impossible to tell, when Trudeau reacts with excitement to another dog, whether he wants to play with it or beat it until it pees itself. Also, since Trudeau weighs in at 110 pounds, he can be a little hard to handle when he decides to get in touch with his inner bastard. As a result, he’s simply restricted from getting anywhere near other dogs, which clearly drives him crazy and doesn’t help the problem, but what the hell, dog? You’d be able to indulge in all the glories of the dog park if you weren’t such a son of a bitch.

I guess if you’re a dog this could be like… the canine equivalent of Chucky? Or clowns, maybe.

We’ve been working long and hard on his ability to listen to me rather than flipping his lid, but still, he is a dog. It’s not like I can just explain things and expect him to be rational. I thought at least his issues were rooted in some form of genuine dog behavior voodoo until the other week when we were passing a vendor’s table at a street fair. The guy had a stuffed German Shepherd toy on his table to show off the collars he was selling.

Trudeau caught sight of this completely fake dog and went full Cujo. I have never, in all the time I’ve had him, heard him bark and snarl and generally just go ape-shit the way he did over that stuffed toy. I’m pretty sure we gave the booth vendor — who had his back to us at the time — a heart attack. His life probably flashed before his eyes.

Once I’d dragged Trudeau away from the offending plushie, I said, “What the hell, dog?! THAT IS NOT EVEN A REAL DOG YOU JUST WENT INSANE OVER.”

And he said, “What? That was totally justified. He said something about my mom.” Or at least, that’s what I imagine he said. It’s sort of what he said with his eyebrows. I don’t actually think my dog talks to me. Honest.

Still, sometimes I think his general psychopathy is the least of his problems. A few days ago I took him for a walk on the local parkway, which runs along a sort of small swampland and is generally just choked with weeds and gnats and kind of nasty river grasses. (It’s actually not always a pleasant place to walk and it’s kind of covered in graffiti for some reason but whatever, it’s close to home and well removed from Utah’s insane drivers.) Trudeau chose to divert himself by eating vegetation, which normally I don’t mind — I feed him greens myself and I think variety is important to a dog’s diet, plus eating grass seems to be an important part of settling his stomach when he’s feeling not-super. But normally he’s eating a few handfuls of grass here and there. This time he chose to eat weedy seed-heads. You know, the kind that sort of look like wheat, with essentially big spines on them? The kind that look profoundly inedible? Things sort of went like this:

Me: Oh my GOD, dog, STOP eating those things! You are going to puke them back up and it is not going to be pleasant because they are practically BARBED.
Trudeau: You’re not my real mom! *noms*
Me: This is not going to end well for either of us, you realize this.
Trudeau: These are SO GOOD! *noms* Let’s take some home! We can grow our own! I’ll poop the seeds out and we can start a GARDEN, lolz! *noms*
Me: I hate you, did you know that? I wish I could just let you walk home by yourself so nobody would know that we know each other.
Trudeau: I don’t know what you’re so upset about. *pukes*

He waited until we were at the farthest point from home, of course, and then he started throwing up seed-heads, one seed-head at a time. We’d take ten steps and then he’d start hacking like a twelve-pack-a-day smoker, and leave behind a little puddle of vileness with a single sprig of vegetation at its center. Walk ten steps, repeat. When we finally got back to the river again, I let him eat swampgrass for a good five minutes, which finally settled his stomach, but that really could’ve gone either way… it could’ve just caused him to puke even more violently for the next twenty minutes. These are the kinds of choices that our dogs drive us to.

Trudeau is known for his poor food choices, though. He once chose to sneak a drink from a pasture drainage ditch while I was busy re-tying my shoelace, and took a nice big drink of brackish, standing manure run-off water. (That didn’t end well.) The photo below was taken his first time at the ocean, and as you can see he is drinking huge mouthfuls of seawater, presumably because his previous mouthfuls of seawater made him thirsty.

He will also eat anything that is thrown at his face, and simply assume that it is edible. He’s a very trusting soul. Usually he won’t bother to smell or taste it, he’ll just shovel it down his gullet. I’m pretty sure if I threw a chainsaw at his face he’d swallow it. Actually, we could possibly turn that into a sideshow act and maybe he’d earn his keep for once. Lord knows he’s not going to acquire any other sort of gainful employment, unless you can count “being a total knob” as an occupation.

If you enjoyed this post, I would like to offer you some additional recommended reading. You might enjoy my previous post about the day I threatened to develop psychic powers just so I could destroy my dog remotely, but I also want to very seriously recommend both Texts From Dog (every moment of it is pure genius) and Hyperbole and a Half‘s blogs titled Dog (in which the author administers an IQ test to her dog) and Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving, in which the Simple Dog discovers she’s magical and can make food, and the Helper Dog has a nervous breakdown. Both of these authors are seriously genius and I hope you will enjoy the ever-loving hell out of them. While you’re doing that, I’ll be over here, giving my dog Trudeau this IQ test…

It’s Just Like the Road Warrior, Only with Minivans

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The thing about driving in Utah is, it’s kind of like taking a detour into Bartertown. Sure, you were just minding your own business, driving along the back roads of the American west, maybe treating your dog to a nice vacation and doing your best to improve the lives of feral desert-dwelling children, and then suddenly you find yourself in a Thunderdome cage match, fighting to the death under the approving gaze of Tina Turner.

All of what I just said is absolutely true, except for the part about Tina Turner.

It’s possible that you came to this land on purpose, or that it wasn’t worth the hassle to drive around it on your way to somewhere else, or that your ancestors’ plane crashed here and you don’t know how to escape. I suppose it’s not far-fetched that anybody would come here on purpose; certainly Utah is jam-packed with natural splendor, if you’re into that sort of thing, and Mormons, if you’re into that sort of thing, and apparently a growing number of vegan eating establishments, if my newspaper is to be believed. But the trouble is mostly that it’s packed full of Utahns. And for reasons that nobody can quite explain, they insist on driving to places.

The minute you hit that border, mark my words, it is going to be like The Lord of the Flies up in here. One minute you’re driving along in a civilized fashion, using your turn signals and gallantly allowing traffic to merge, and the next thing you know you’re passing on the right, you’re squeezing into spaces that only Mini Cooper drivers could contemplate before, and you’re using the broken fenders and blood-stained seatbelts of your vanquished foes to create your own personal body armor.

Hey, nobody’s going to blame you. Once you’re across that border, all bets are off, and it’s up to you to protect your car and your family of four and the dog and your extensive collection of Journey cassette tapes. And if that means mounting a harpoon on the roof of your Subaru or ripping out a grown man’s throat with your teeth while hanging out the window of a vehicle doing 75 miles per hour on the highway, then so be it.

To give you the best chance of surviving your foray onto Utah’s practically post-apocalyptic roadways, I would like to offer you some important rules to live by.

1. Every other driver on the road is your enemy. Show them no mercy.
This is the first and most important rule. You might think that lady in the minivan with ten kids in the back is just some soccer mom hauling pretty much the whole team to a match, but in reality those hooligans are her road gang and they are prepared to bathe in your blood. Always remember to screw the other guy before he can screw you; it’s every man for himself in the arena, and as we all know, two men enter, one man leaves. Of course, that doesn’t mean that other drivers won’t form alliances in order to screw you over harder than a single man could do alone. These roadways are full of roving gangs of minivans and they are not afraid to Mormon roadblock you.

2. In order to deter attack, you must engage in displays of dominance.
You stand a better chance of surviving if other drivers are too frightened to fight you. This is why you must engage in ritual displays that will intimidate other drivers. The way in which you drive can send a strong message; for instance, if you always drive with a distance of only 0.2 microns between your front bumper and another vehicle’s rear bumper, it’s sort of the equivalent of humping the other driver’s leg while chanting, “Yeah, you like that, don’t you? Who’s my bitch? Who’s my good little bitch?” By refusing to allow other vehicles to merge in front of you, you signal your unwillingness to be mounted. Should you choose to decide to drive in two lanes at once rather than picking a single lane, this is a lot like lifting a leg and marking your territory. You get the idea. By engaging in subtle — and completely unsubtle — displays of dominance, you will demonstrate to other drivers your willingness to destroy them and to violate their spouses. This will also help you to identify which of the other drivers on the road will challenge you — they’ll attempt their own dominance displays in response — and which ones will roll over and piss themselves.

3. Predictability is the same thing as kill-ability.
An enemy who can anticipate your movements is an enemy who can effectively target you. This is why it is essential to keep your movements unpredictable, and actively practice misdirection. Never use your turning signals, except when you are not actually turning. Have you encountered a roundabout? Treat it like a four-way stop. Actual four-way stop? You go when you decide, not when the law dictates; hell, roll right through that bad boy, or refuse to go even when it’s your right-of-way. Traffic light out? Just blast through there as fast as you can, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Train coming? Flip a U-turn across the tracks; an oncoming train is a great way to shake pursuers, if you manage to survive. I know because I saw it in a movie once. I think it had Vin Diesel in it.

4. Take every opportunity for clever concealment.
Of course, you’ll be wanting to cut other drivers off as much as possible — as we’ve discussed, if anybody’s going to be doing any leg-humping here, it ought to be you — so it’s important to practice concealing yourself on the open roadway. When beginning to overtake another vehicle, spend as long as possible in that vehicle’s “blind spot,” that area where you are nearly invisible thanks to your disappearance from the other driver’s rearview mirror. Imagine yourself as a lion on the savannah, creeping up on a helpless baby gazelle. You may also find it helpful to conceal yourself by finding a large vehicle — like a camper or eighteen-wheeler — and driving so close to the bumper that it looks like you are in fact being towed. It is the perfect camouflage, particularly from police, and though it may seem dangerous to be following that closely at highway speeds, I’m sure you’ve seen The Fast and the Furious plenty of times, so you’ve got this.

5. Posted signs and road markers may be misleading. Do not trust them.
We all know that posted speed limits are merely meant as a challenge and that lowered railroad crossing arms are just an excellent opportunity to teach your car how to jump hurdles like a fine show pony. But road signs and markers in Utah add an extra layer of complexity that will keep you second-guessing even as you’re trying to engage in open combat with your fellow drivers. There may or may not be a sign to let you know that your lane is about to end abruptly. You may be rerouted into a single slow-moving lane for months by construction signs which never actually yield forth any construction. (More the fool you if you accept these delays by following the directions of construction signs. They’re not the boss of you.) When it rains, you are entering a special bonus round in which the lines on the road completely disappear and you are free to occupy as many lanes as you possibly can at any one time, while engaging in a billiards-like driving strategy where instead of simply turning the wheel to direct your vehicle to the appropriate off-ramp, you merely careen into the vehicle next to you and use the rebounding force of the impact to propel you in the right direction.

I know what you’re thinking. Utah? The reality can’t be that hard-core. Those people are known for their ties and their interesting ideas about marriage, not for their murderous road rage. Surely the drivers are worse in places like New York or Boston or Los Angeles. (Little-known fact: Drivers in LA are intense but you can rest assured knowing they’re all stunt drivers.) And it might be true that drivers elsewhere are more aggressive, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any drivers who pay any less attention to the road than Utahns. I think maybe it’s because they’re expecting God to protect them and also they had a very poor science education. They don’t realize that two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. Oh, and also, they want to kill you and use your sun-bleached skull as a football. I’d wish you luck, but honestly, I have to drive here too, so now that you know how to survive your next foray into the Deseretdome, I sincerely hope that you’ll stay out of my way because otherwise I will have to destroy you and everything that you love.

A Serious Matter of Attribution

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I have a problem with Johnny Depp.

Now, before you lynch me, I should point out that my problem isn’t actually Johnny Depp. Just like this quote, which has been circulating around Facebook often enough to make me homicidal, also has little to do with Johnny Depp.

Yeah, I made my own version of it just for this blog. Why? Because I’m particular about typography.

I have nothing against Johnny. I’ve quite enjoyed him, from Scissorhands to Sleepy Hollow (although his Wonka was a little too psychopathic-pedophile for my tastes). It’s just that this type of misattribution drives me absolutely around the bend, which is why despite the fact that most people probably never get tired of looking at Johnny Depp, I have grown so annoyed just by the sight of his face that I want to punch someone. This is just another reason why I shouldn’t be on Facebook at all, I guess, but I am, so rather than froth at the mouth and post gentle correction after gentle correction on my long-suffering friends’ walls, I thought I should just blog about it.

You see, that quote up there, the very lovely and profound quote about that most fascinating emotion, isn’t Johnny Depp’s. They’re actually lines he spoke, in character, for the film Don Juan DeMarco. As such, they probably shouldn’t be attributed to Depp but rather to the character, since it’s screenwriter Jeremy Leven’s Don Juan and not, in fact, Johnny Depp who has so eloquently waxed poetic about life and love. You savvy? (Heh, see what I did there?)

By way of illustration, allow me to demonstrate how easy it is to make Johnny Depp look like a complete idiot and/or psychopath by attributing to him some other lines from his characters.

When you attribute quotes that actually come from ALICE IN WONDERLAND’s The Mad Hatter, Johnny starts sounding like maybe he needs some rehabs to go with his tea.

Or you could use this quote from the title character in ED WOOD to make Johnny sound like a transvestite. Transvestites are often both awesome and fun, but Johnny might still be pissed if you shared this around on Facebook without checking to find out whether he himself is in fact a transvestite. (Don’t be modest, he like totally reads your wall EVERY DAY.)

Or you could use this quote from Raoul Duke of FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS to make it sound like… well actually, he probably is rich enough that he could make girl-on-polar-bear action happen if he really wanted to. If I were him, I would instead import a polar bear, train it to carry me into battle, and outfit it with its own suit of armor and possibly a small cannon. But that’s just me.

You see my point, I’m sure. Of course, Johnny isn’t the only person to suffer from this misattribution malady. (According to my spell check I just made up the word “misattribution.” Screw you, spellcheck.) Every line ever uttered by any character in any play written by Shakespeare tends to be attributed as simply, “-Shakespeare.” By this logic, Shakespeare must’ve been a Danish prince stranded on an island while trying to murder his Moorish rival while going mad and wandering the wilderness with his fool, and a lot more besides. He was a very busy man. A similar conundrum makes crediting the screenwriter or author for a character’s quote problematic; writers do not necessarily share their characters’ opinions, though they do put words in their mouths. The safest bet then, if you’re looking to attribute a quotation for a character, is to attribute the quote to the character by name, and also cite the work in which that character utters the line. That way everything’s nice and simple, and people who are intrigued by the sexual shenanigans of polar bears even know where to find more information on the subject! It’s a win-win!

So, just in case you’ve found yourself to be terribly inspired by that slightly abridged opening quote — you know, the one from Don Juan DeMarco? — and you want to share it on your Facebook wall, I want you to know that because I’m such a giver, I’ve made a new version of it for you. You’re welcome. I’ll be posting it on my page if you’d care to share it and help me stamp out rampant misattribution on Facebook. I won’t even ask you to change your profile picture to a cartoon character or post that you’re going on a vacation you aren’t actually going on. Sometimes it’s super-easy to do the right thing.

A post about the day I threatened to develop psychic powers just so I could destroy my dog remotely

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Don’t be fooled by this face.

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Look, I understand: he’s difficult to resist. I know he looks all innocent and angelic. He’s using those eyebrows on you and he’s totally working it and all you can think is, “Aw, what a handsome fellow! He’s so well-behaved and charming!”

That’s what he wants you to think. He wants you to be impressed by his easy-going and affectionate nature. He’s trying to draw you in, and when you make the mistake of thinking that “adorable” is the same thing as “trustworthy”… well, then he’s got you.

Then when you least expect it, he’s gone.

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A couple of weekends ago, we had a pretty good snow storm here. I spent most of my Saturday doing chores around the house. I took Trudeau with me to check the fencelines, because we have electric fencing all around our little pastures and dry lots, and the strands tend to sag pretty alarmingly when the snow clings to them.

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At first I had Tru clipped to the leash that I’d looped around my belt, but it wasn’t terribly comfortable for either of us. It’s hard to get any work done when you’ve got a dog attached to you and he makes it his mission in life to step in front of you every two seconds and then stop dead. Or just suddenly jolt off in another direction, because all he really wants from life is to eat snow. (It wouldn’t exactly take an experienced wilderness tracker to follow Trudeau’s trail in the snow: just look for the giant paw prints punctuated every few feet by a huge bite-mark in the snow.)

So, to enrich both our lives and prevent myself from ending up on my butt in the snow, I let Trudeau off his leash.

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I was prepared, mind you. I’ve been here and done this with Trudeau before, and I know very well that without proper incentive, his understanding of the word “come” is conditional at best, in addition to the tragic medical condition he has which causes him to be occasionally inexplicably struck deaf. This is why I had a comprehensive collection of hot dog bits in my pocket.

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To give him credit where it’s due, the Sasquatch actually did great. We did a complete circuit of every fenceline on the place, shaking off the snow and checking that none of the strands were down. Tru didn’t stray more than ten feet from me, and he came when called every time, (because he knew me for the god I was, the all-powerful dispenser of hot dogs). We hauled more firewood into the house, cleared the snow from the top of the backyard trampoline, shoveled the front walk and the back deck, fed the barn cat, filled the stock tanks, then did another circuit of the fencelines, this time adding flags of vinyl taping at intervals to make the fence more visible for the horses.

It had been hours and hours, and many a piece of hot dog had passed between us, but Trudeau is a traitor, and he doesn’t understand these things that are supposed to keep us together, these bonds of love and processed meat. We were flagging the fenceline at the road, and he started to slip under the fence, and I made the designated sound that meant, “Don’t you dare, you little son of a bitch, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth.” And when he didn’t seem to find that convincing, I shouted, “Trudeau, COME!” in a tone of voice which is not to be disobeyed.

He stopped just outside the fence, and turned to look at me as if weighing up his options: the freedom of the open road versus the lure of hot dogs. His love for me versus the fact that somewhere out there, he might find new and interesting animals to chase. Maybe some that spray smells or shoot needle-sharp spines! What incredible adventures awaited him out in the snow-white world, if only he could throw off the shackles of his oppressor and his heroin-like addiction to hot dogs.

He stared at me for what felt like a long moment, completely ignoring another command to come, and then, clearly mistaking himself for Cool Hand Luke, he bolted.

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I tell people that I started running for my health, and to keep my dog exercised, and because my toe shoes make it incredibly fun. These are all true, but sometimes I have to admit to myself that the most useful aspect of working out is that I’m better able to chase my dog down and destroy him.

It’s not that I get mad that he disobeys, it’s that I don’t react well to animals attempting to cause me heart attacks. Sometimes I’m a worst-case-scenario sort of person, and the moment something goes wrong with my dog, all I can think is that he’s going to be hit by a car or attack another dog or find himself drawn into the international arms trade. I worry.

Trudeau headed straight across the (thankfully not terribly busy) road and down one of the gravel side streets. I sprinted after him, and quickly encountered a driver moving very slowly down the road, obviously having just passed my dog and looking disapproving. I trust that by the manic and murderous look on my face, they can rest assured knowing that we weren’t just out for a nice weekend stroll.

Coming up the road, I got to experience a heart-stopping moment of panic when I realized I couldn’t see Trudeau anywhere. He’d disappeared that quickly, and he could be anywhere. There are mountain lions in the area, and I don’t expect they’d invite Trudeau over for poker night. I might never know what had happened to him; he might simply vanish, never to be seen again.

I had just long enough to consider every possible nightmare scenario and how I was so going to kill the recalcitrant beast when I found him, and then my idiot dog wandered back onto the road from the bushes he’d been studiously sniffing, and he caught sight of me, and his expressive eyebrows took on an expression that was less, “Ha ha, freedom!” and more, “Oh, shit.”

“Trudeau, come.” I didn’t shout it this time, I growled it. My tone of voice implied that if he did not obey, I would be coming over there to personally rip his throat out with my teeth. There was a suggestion that I would enjoy it.

And he came. He came practically on his belly, and he threw himself at my feet as if to throw himself upon my mercy, and I chanted to myself, “You can’t kill him for coming, you can’t kill him for coming,” and I had to just let it go. Because he came. Too little and too late, and I hate to see him groveling but also, every part of me was experiencing the instant relief that came from being able to touch him and knowing he wasn’t gone. He came, knowing full well that he’d done something very, very wrong, and I was so happy about finding him before he’d gained any real distance, before he’d had a chance to hitchhike to Mexico or take up the life of an itinerant sheep-farmer in Argentina.

So I petted his stupid head, gave him the last of the hot dog, and told him he was a good boy even though it was a horrible, egregious lie. I clipped on the leash that I had wisely kept attached to my belt, and we went home to finish flagging the fence, and pretty soon I even let him off the leash again, because he seemed to realize now that I was serious about the “if you ever try that again I will develop psychic powers just so I can kill you with my mind” thing.

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Then I took him back inside, and I shucked off my layers, and we went into my room and I made him snuggle with me as punishment. We sprawled out on my bed and I tried my best to hug him to death, and I buried my nose in the soft, sweet-smelling fur at the top of his head, and was very glad that he hadn’t made it to Argentina.