Gladware isn’t just for sandwiches anymore

When I thought my dog had a UTI, I had to take a urnine sample to the vet for testing. They said, “Have her pee in a cup and bring it over.” Sounds easy until you stop and think about it, doesn’t it? How do you get a forty pound terrier to pee in a cup?

The answer is – you don’t.

You have to use Gladware instead, because the surface area it covers is much greater.

So I chased poor C-bear around the yard, and when she stopped to squat, I put the big gladware container where it needed to be for collection purposes. It was at that moment I knew that all those people who said that dogs are not able to express emotion were unequivocally wrong. Callie whipped her fuzzy head around and gave me what can only be described as bitch-face. If she could have barked out “what the F***are you doing, you crazy-ass woman?”, she would have. She stood up and raced to the other side of the yard, and I chased after her, gladware in hand. She repeated the nasty stare twice more. Finally, the mission was accomplished.

So then I put the lid on the container, got in the car, and scooted over to the vet. I tried to look as cool as possible while carrying in a big plastic container of pee. It’s hard to do, but I am pretty sure I accomplished it.

They did what they needed to do, prescribed antibiotics, and gave us a teeny, tiny, test tube-sized container for her post-medication “sample.” While I was pondering how on earth anyone expected me to use such a small thing, the vet tech came out with my empty gladware container.

She asked me if I wanted it back.

I actually did the cartoon head shake, where you shake your head back and forth really fast to somehow get a better understanding of what you just heard.

Apparently, some people want their dog pee containers back

You can’t use the gladware for the same collection purposes again due to contamination. I guess you could wash them out and put a sandwich in there or something. Oh god, ew.

I can’t imagine ever being in a place in my life where I would be one of those people. There have been times when we haven’t exactly been rolling in superflous millions, for sure.

But we have never, ever been at the point where we needed to REUSE a gladware container that was once a receptacle for pee. Never. Ever.

If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll always have enough money for clean gladware containers.

My dog is a rock star

Go here.

She’s at the top of the second column. Sure, it’s a puppy picture, but don’t we all look better when we were younger?

Who am I kidding. She rocks that beard all the damn time.

Curse you, vile ragweed!

I blame the allergies for the fact that I have absolutely nothing of any value to say today.

For those of you who want to help the stranded hurricane animals, there is a now a canine livestrong-esque collar.

Come on, you know Fido and Stinky face peer pressure to be hip down at the dog park. All the cool dogs are doing it…

Also, I would like to state that I am so glad to see that the Honda Element is slowly taking over Richmond. I saw five today.

That’s all folks. It’s off to Dallas till Saturday for business and a semi-vacation.

Barry Gibb

If you have not seen this clip from Saturday Night Live, watch it immediately!

When you have collected yourself, go here.

I am pretty sure you have to download the clips, but I swear it is worth it.

Also, I confess to not watching the entire benefit concert, but I did see Garth Brook’s cover of CCR’s Who’ll Stop the Rain. That struck me as a song that might be just a bit inappropriate. Because the answer is, um, no one.

If you can find a clip of Celine Dion on Larry King, check it out. She may be thegreatestsingerintheworld, but she’s just a teeny bit off.

A moment of unexpected levity

In my incessant flipping between cable news channels, I came across Larry King last night. I generally avoid him as much as possible, as I have a fear of suspenders. However, Aaron Neville was performing. I stopped to catch it.

I am a terrible person for what I am about to say, but: What the fuck was that?

I know he was singing out of pain for his city, which is noble and wonderful.

My intent is not to detract from that.
To poke fun at it is wrong. I know this.

However, I can’t help it.

The facial contortions? The strange swaying? The falsetto and face tattoo? It was bizarre. It had a totally unintended comic effect, and I cracked up.

I know you did, too. See you in hell.

Just a thought

This may be an unpopular opinion, but you might want to consider giving to non-distaster related charities at the moment.

In the fervor to help the victims of the hurricane, people don’t give as much to the organizations that would normally get the funds going to the Red Cross or other organziations.

Don’t get me wrong, the people affected by the hurricane need as much support as they can get, but other charities do important things, too.

Just a thought. Please don’t send me hate mail.

But if you want to help save some of the animals affected down there, go here.

Anderson Cooper: Reporter, Voice of Reason, Ass Kicker

I have loved Anderson Cooper for a very long time. Since Channel One. I loved him on when he anchored the weekend news and filled in in the morning on CNN. I love Anderson Cooper 360.

And now, I love him even more.

Read the transcript. Even better, watch the video. Let us all join him in a massive calling of shenanigans.

Seriously.

Back when we first got my dog, we would praise her profusely every time she successfully pooped in the yard. The goal was to make her think she had done something special in order to encourage her to make the pooping go on outside. There we stood, in the cold of February, shouting hurrahs as as she cranked it out. We congratulated her as if she had just cured cancer. In reality, all she did was take a shit, but now she has come to expect it every time craps. Should we fail to applaud her bowel movements, oh, the looks we get. And then, afterwards, she trots back in the house, totally oblivious leaving me to clean up her smelly pile of stink.

All this political post-disaster glad-handing and ass-kissing is exactly the same as my cheerleading of my dog’s crapping. No one has done anything special or out of the ordinary that deserves congratulations, but it happens because it is automatic and expected by some (my dog and politicians, respectively.)

Somehow, in the end, after the cheering and clapping and way-to-going, all that is left for someone else to clean up is the same steaming pile of shit that was there in the first place.

When Fidel Castro is the voice of reason, you know something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Wow.

Maybe if the president’s advisors broke down what was going to happen into a color-coded threat system, things would be better.

My question is – Where is he? Why isn’t he giving national addresses and press conferences? Why isn’t he pissed?

I want him to take some freaking responsibility for the chaos that has ensued. I don’t care who you want to blame, local goverment, federal goverment, state government – I think the theoretical leadership buck stops with him.

He’s the one who appointed the director of FEMA, who apparently could not adequately plan the junior prom, much less a massive disaster response.

He’s the one who, in the panic that ensued after 9.11, merged everything into the Department of Homeland Security. (If this is how secure our homeland is after a semi-predictable natural disaster, I shudder to think of the response to a random, unexpected terrorist attack.)

He’s the one trying to pass the blame buck to the governor of Louisana, and the Mayor of New Orleans. They have no experience with massive disasters.

He shouldn’t send Dick Cheney to monitor the situation. There cannot possibly be anything more pressing on the presidential plate than this.

I want him to get off the golf course, wipe that shit-eating smirk off his face, put on some damn fishing waders, and stand in the middle of a flooded, stinking, corpse-riddled street and proclaim to the people who have lost everything that every resource the country has is behind them.

I want him to find that megaphone he was so fond of using atop of post-9.11 rubble and start shouting at people to get their asses in gear.

But I guess wearing waders in a smelly river of muck doesn’t exactly have the same photo-opportunistic ring to it as does standing atop a pile of smoking rubble or wearing a flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Yikes

After three days of watching non-stop coverage of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, we don’t want to see anymore, but we can’t look away. Both of us tried really hard to watch something else last night, but Aaron Brown kept calling us back.

The first day, it was just morbid curiosity..everyone loves a trainwreck, someone said. The coverage almost had the feel of entertainment to it for a lot of people – pop some popcorn and watch the drama unfold. I can’t say it was any different at our house. News junkies both, we sat on the couches and flipped channels incessantly. Anderson Cooper fell in a mudhole, and I laughed. People tried to save a sea lion. Grateful survivors pledged to rebuild from shelter parking lots. Larry King interviewed politicians without actually getting any information from them. Homes were damaged, but surely those people left town before it happened. Downed trees, sure, but the waters were recedeing. A few poor souls got rescued from a rooftop. Typical, normal hurricane coverage, with the grave concern in Jim Cantore’s voice being the only small indicator that something was amiss. It felt almost normal to me, the few days of non-stop coverage, then things would be back to normal, with reports on Iraq and missing teenagers and the latest news of Brad and Jennifer.

But things got worse. Waters inexplicably rose along with the number of people missing and dead. What had a day before been the normal hysterical news coverage that comes when a hurricane hits changed into something else unimaginable. There were stories of lootings and shootings and people trapped in attics. Hospitals with no power – patients on life support dying. People choosing which of their children to save, families swimming through feet of muck to the saftey of – a highway overpass? A leaking, flooding sports arena? What?

I couldn’t wrap my brain around the enormity of the situation until I saw a picture taken from a helicopter at night. In a drowning, pitch-black city, there were tiny dots of light, what looked like dozens, even hundreds. People trapped on their rooftops trying to to signal helicopters with flashlights – in a major American city two days after the hurricane had come and gone. Why didn’t they evacuate? Couldn’t they evacuate? Exactly how many of them are there?

And then, criticisms started coming. Why weren’t people more prepared? How do you evacuate an entire city? Where was FEMA? Why weren’t there more national guard troops restoring order? Don’t the people who stayed deserve it? (That one I couldn’t believe.) Why wasn’t anyone collecting bodies? How many people are dead? What about the looting? Taking food and water and clothes is understandable. I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing if I was in their place. But flat-screen TVs? Microwaves?

Perhaps some of the criticisms are warrented, but no one could have possibly expected all of this. It’s a never ending catch-22 – you can’t get help into the city until the waters are out, but until the waters are gone, you can’t get help into the city. And round and round it goes with no solution.

Concerts are being arranged, money is being donated. And thank your heavenly Kabbalah stars, Britney Spears is praying for the vicitms. I am sure that the American People will come together and help – for a few weeks anyway, until the rest of us get back to normalcy and the novelty has worn off. Soon enough, attention will turn to other things…rising gas prices, the war, the next hurricane. Newschannel ratings will drop and they will move on to the next missing teenager. We will shake our heads and say how horrible it is, and blink it away like a bad dream we had in the middle of the night. And maybe by then, when we have gotten over it, all those questions will be answered and there won’t be anyone left on rooftops. But I doubt it.

So I feel like it’s only fair that I keep watching while I can, horrifying though it is. No one who is actually living this can turn their heads. They can’t blink away the nightmare.

They certainly can’t change the channel, so why should any of us?