Slim Monday.

Not too much to write for you today, my dear friends -- yesterday was exceptionally busy, more so than I had expected. Normally I can at least plan out what I'd like to post for the following day, but I never had the chance. Here's the story:

1) Got carried away working on the new novel yesterday morning. Sooooo close to finishing the first draft I could taste it. Two more chapters. But then duty (church) called. Sometimes it is a big help to get interrupted when writing, because when I'm close to the end of a large project I have a powerful urge to rush through it. That makes for sloppiness, confused thoughts, and errors, Plus, when I have to stop working, I have time to think more about what I want to write, and that usually makes it better. I've been in love with this book for months, and it deserves to get completed correctly.

2) Church was great -- the new pastor was firing on all cylinders, with a powerful homily on the parable or (not the resurrection of) Lazarus. So don't go stepping over any poor old beggars outside your door, now.

3) Had a wonderful time with some dog pals. Friends of ours from the dog park invited us over for a BBQ, and the weather was perfect for it. Not jump-in-the-pool perfect -- the water would have been in the fifty-degree range by now -- but sit-outside-until-seven perfect, which for autumn in these parts is amazing. Of course they also invited our large fuzzy friends, Tralfaz and Nipper, and our pups were on their best behavior. Which does not mean they were perfect; "best" is a relative term. The whole thing ran later than I had expected, but when you're having fun you don't want to break up the party, even if it is a work night. And the food was great; I ate a steak as big as my face, and now I feel like it's the morning after Thanksgiving. We'll be skipping breakfast today.

I hope your weekend was delightful as sunny as well. If not, then I hope Monday will be kind to you.

Washing the dog.

Little dog Nipper, who is only just over a hundred pounds, is pretty well behaved at the groomer and can get a bath and haircut, no problem. Big dog Tralfaz, who is larger, has gotten panicky there, and the last time we tried to bring him in he displayed such powerful anxiety that they could not do anything with him.

Most groomers really don't want to work on dogs as big as Fazzy. Hell, I don't either. He'd never bite, but he will try to run, which can still hurt you, and could hurt himself.

But regardless, I have been in charge of bathing him until such time as we can find a groomer willing to work with him. My wife is in charge of giving him trims. She keeps his fuzzy feet from looking like old-man slippers, gets the knots and tangles off him.

Here are the steps I follow for giving Tralfaz a bath. Maybe you'll find it useful if you have to bathe a 130-pound dog.

1) Change into old clothes. Yes, an 1906 cutaway suit and spats would be nice. Failing that, old T-shirt and sweats and socks that look suspiciously like a hole is fixing to bust out. And boots.

2) Set up porch. Towels, bottle of water, showerhead attached to the hose (make sure the water in the hose is not hot after being in the sun). Move flower pot -- we don't want him to come back dirtier. Shampoo. Scissors for any surprise tangles. Grooming leash (a.k.a. choke collar). By now the dog knows something is up, but fortunately he is too big to hide.

3) Bring out Scrubby mitts too, and the new dryer, and treats, and mesh sponge, and brushes, and comb. (This dog needs more product in the shower than my wife does.) Then try to brush out as much loose hair as possible. My dog manufactures hair like General Mills manufactures Cheerios. This part could take a while.

4) Take dog down to yard to pee and maybe -- yes, score! Get that poop out now so that he will be able to keep that behind clean as long as possible.

5) Remove collar, flea collar; put on grooming collar. Wet down the dog. Dog does not appreciate getting wet. I thought dogs liked getting wet?! Not this dog. Starts trying to pull away from grooming leash, which is tied to porch and may bring down the whole porch roof. Tries to shake off water. This is why I wear old clothes.

6) Shampoo dog thoroughly, from neck to tail, as directed. This is like bathing a 130-pound toddler who hates baths. Keep at it. Remember: He stinks. We're doing this for the health of his skin and coat and the fact that he has to be around others tomorrow and we don't want them to faint when they smell him. Once he's somehow all soaped up, get at the tender bits with the Scrubby mitts.

Now we pause for this commercial and distasteful message. Friends, I receive no sponsorship from the makers of Scrubby, but I endorse them strongly. These disposable mitts contain their own gentle soap, so when you get them wet you can clean your canine chum with them safely. You don't even have to rinse them off, just wash and dry. They could replace bathing entirely for small dogs, but I think my guys still need a bath. However, they are excellent for getting up around Tralfaz's face, down around his Mr. Winkie, and especially around his butt, where the hair sometimes collects (distasteful part) dried poop. The Scrubby allows me to dampen that hair and (usually) remove it with no pain to him, then dispose of the cleaning mitt in the trash. Sadly, this time I pulled at the hair too hard and he freaked out. That's on me, not Scrubby.

Where were we? Oh yes:

7) Calm down freaked-out dog with a treat.

8) Rinse, which is more water and he still doesn't like it, ensuring him in happy voice that it's almost over (which comes across as the "blah blah blah Ginger" of Far Side fame, no doubt). When it looks like the soap is gone, turn off the water and let him shake to his heart's content.

9) Dry off with approximately 87 towels.

10) Brush the damp hair; remove more loose hair. Try new dog hair dryer with attached brush. Find it getting stuck in his hair. Call wife urgently.

11) Try to make self useful as wife demonstrates that the hair has to be combed first. Bring in damp towels; start load in laundry with bleach or Lysol Laundry Santizer. (They're too wet to burn.) Throw away old Scrubby. Bring in showerhead, shampoo, etc.

12) Marvel at how dry the Mrs. got the dog, who is looking happy and clean and very, very tired now.

13) Walk baby dog Nipper, who is extremely jealous at this point.

14) Go hide somewhere until the pain wears off enough to take your own damn shower.

Apologizing for this one already.

Bran new day.

One of the things I enjoy about Mr. Breakfast's Cereal Project is its dedication to defunct brands. It's basically a crowdsourced clearinghouse of information on breakfast cereals that have come and gone since Quaker started playing with his Oats. (I apologize to all members of the Religious Society of Friends for that stupid joke.)

And you can also make your own cereal box on the site.

Olde-tyme cereals that have gone to the Great Bowl in the Sky include a lot of newer ones that were released as a tie-in to a movie or TV show, like the Superman and Batman cereals I reviewed on this very blog. Others are brands are like Product 19, released to great fanfare and promoted for decades, but never quite as big as the food companies hoped.

Here are some weird, doomed cereals that are listed in the Project:

Indiana Jones Cereal (2008)
Millenios (1999) (yeah, really)
Donkey King (1982)
Grins & Smiles & Giggles & Laughs (1976) (Ralston)
Freakies (1973) (clearly hippies invaded Ralston)
Corn Crackos (1967)
Tutti Frutti Twinkles (1965)
Concentrate (1959) (sounds painful)
Popeye Puffed Wheat (1949)
Ranger Joe (1939)
Heinz Rice Flakes (1930s) (Heinz made cereal!)
Elijah's Manna (1904) (caused an outrage)
Force (1901) (also sounds painful -- but its mascot was called Sunny Jim)
Granose Flakes (1895)

The history of American culture since the 19th century is echoed in its breakfast cereals.

I think every child born in the United States ate some kind of cereal growing up, even if his or her parents were policing the sugar or there were concerns about gluten or allergens. And since we tend to be nostalgic about the things of our youth, we can all enjoy the Cereal Project's brilliant year-by-year Cereal Timeline, where you can see what cereals were introduced the year you were born.

Of course, I was born the year that George Carlin (in cartoon form) appeared on a cereal box. Yes, I am referring to Bill & Ted's Excellent Cereal.

That's right, I'm 29. Again.

Fred's Pet Rescue!

Move over, The Dodo -- here comes The Fredfred!

All right, well, maybe it wasn't quite as dramatic as all that, but it was considered a good deed, anyway.

Tuesday night I was walking Nipper around the neighborhood when he stopped and looked back. Behind us was a golden retriever, smiling. I don't know how long he'd been trailing us, but there he was.

He was all by himself, but he had a collar on, so I thought be might be one of the dogs at the corner we had just passed. The guys did the usual sniff & greet and then mixed it up with some Puppy UFC -- hard on me, since my dog lunges like a puma and weighs almost as much. Plus, we were right in the middle of the street. It's not a busy street, but there's no sidewalk. So I had to try to wrestle them to the lawn nearby, while trying to remember if I'd seen that dog before. And no, I had not.

He was very friendly, though, so I pulled him in to give him a pat and have a look at his tags. The owner had put his name on it, and a phone number, and even his home address -- and it was clear across town, in an old cottage community, four miles away! Could he have gotten that lost? He did have a bunch of burs stuck on his coat, which I first thought were ticks.

I alerted the Mrs. to the situation, then dialed the number. I was informed by the Verizon recorded lady that the owner of that line was not available and thanked and hung up on.

Now I'm thinking this sweet puppy is owned by some crackhead who didn't pay his phone bill and probably doesn't even know his dog is missing.

My wife came to meet us with another leash, and we led the little guy and our guy to the house. She suggested we call our vet, have the dog scanned for a chip -- if the dog had one it might have updated information. The vet's office was still open for half an hour, so I called and asked if we could bring the stranger in; they said okay. So I loaded him into the car and off we went. (He was not shy about jumping into a strange SUV.)

While I was stuck at a light I had the thought -- maybe there's just a problem with the guy's phone? So I texted the number, asking if he had a dog.

He called me within a minute.

As it turned out, my call couldn't get to him because he was clear across the country. His elderly parents were dogsitting the pup in their home, not two hundred feet from where I found him. He gave me their address and called his folks while I turned the car around.

His mom was grateful. Turns out they were playing in the yard with Golden Boy when he spotted a deer and ran after it into the woods. They'd been stomping through the underbrush looking for him since; meanwhile he'd popped out on the street and found me and Nipper.

So all's well that ends well. It could definitely have gone the other way, since when we found the dog he'd crossed a street with a blind curve frequented by idiot drivers.

I'm glad to have brought the pup home, and I hope the parents were able to think of a way to keep him there until their son returned.

It's always nice to be able to do someone a favor. All the same, I'm glad we didn't have to hold on to the little guy ourselves. Two dogs is more than enough to handle here. I am happy to do a favor, but not that big a favor!

Fred's Book Club: Divisive Sci-Fi.

Hello, kids, and welcome to our Wednesday feature, the Humpback Writers' book club, named for the fact that it's held on Wednesday. No camels involved, at least not until we do some H. Rider Haggard books or something.

This week we have a book I adored as a teenager and read again last year:

When I was a kid I read all the science fiction I could grab, from my dad's dusty collection to the school library to what I could find in the local used-book stores to what I could afford in the new-book stores. Doing so was a great education in the history of the field, as I read widely in books from the thirties through the eighties.

Robert Sheckley became a particular favorite, because he had something that most other writers of SF did not have: a real sense of humor. I read a lot of his short stories, which were collected in paperback editions like Untouched by Human Hands and Citizen in Space, but Crompton Divided was the first novel of his I read. I was maybe fifteen at the time. Boy, was it an eye-opener.

The thing about Sheckley is, he was a real sixties counterculturalist, and if you've ever seen films like the 1970 version of The Corsican Brothers or the infamous 1967 Casino Royale, or the celluloid nightmare that is 1968's Skidoo, you know what they did with heroic stories. And while original, Crompton Divided is a heroic story that's been given the hippie treatment, even though it was initially published in 1978.

Alistair Crompton is a successful perfumist on Earth, a man known for his single-minded dedication to the position of chief tester, making expensive scents from rare and alien elements that are hallucinatory in their power. What his coworkers at Psychosmell do not know is that Crompton is only one third of the man he was. As a child he was a violent schizophrenic, and the only hope to save him was to split his personality into three and put the other two portions -- the violent, angry one and the groovy, pleasure-seeking one -- into artificial bodies and send them to live in colonies in space, leaving the analytical Alistair behind. Sometimes the personalities of the patients who undergo this radical treatment are able to integrate successfully later in life, but never at Crompton's age. Still, he knows he is a shadow of what he should be, and he is determined to make himself whole.

Crompton steals priceless samples from his company, sells them to the Freesmellers (Illegal) Guild, and goes on a quest to find his other thirds and integrate them into a single human being. All he needs to do to reunite is locate the other guys somewhere in the crazy galaxy and make contact -- but it only works if the other guys want to rejoin Crompton... and if the boss of Psychosmell doesn't destroy Alistair first.

It's a great, really sixties plot for a science fiction adventure, and Sheckley has a lot of fun with it, making some terrific gags about humans in general and their antics in space -- and his sense of humor undermines the story at every turn. As an absurdist, he loves to build up suspense and throw it away. I didn't see this as a teenager, but it's true. Crompton's quest is exceptionally dangerous and difficult, with many scary twists, but Sheckley kills the tension almost every time for the sake of a gag. He even inserts himself as a cameo on the exotic planet, Aaia, where Crompton's hedonistic personality, Edgar, lives:

As Crompton passed through the main gate, he saw a lean, intense-looking man in blue jeans and black-rimmed spectacles sitting on a stool and working away on a portable typewriter on his lap. Crompton stared at him with amazement, and the man looked up and said, "Yes, what is it?"
     "I'd like to know what you're doing," Crompton said.
     "I'm writing a novel," the man said, typing as he talked. "This dialogue goes in, of course. My detractors accuse me of mere fantasizing, but I put in only what I see and hear."
     "It seems to me --"
     "Never mind," the writer said. "No line of dialogue beginning with 'It seems to me' ever turns out to be amusing. Perhaps I should deliver a set speech at this point. There are several delicious ironies that perhaps have not occurred to you to date. For example --"
     "I hate sentences that begin 'For example,'" Crompton said.
     "I was going to rewrite that, actually. 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself -- I am large, I contain multitudes.' How well old Whitman put it! The peculiar relevance of that conception --"
     "I must be going," said Crompton.
     "Good-bye," the writer said. "It's been a short scene, but a snappy one."

And by the way, Aaia, which has a kind of seventies California feel, is as loaded with sex and drugs as any teenage boy might want to hear about. You can see how this kind of stuff might appeal to a guy hoping to misspend his youth.

So I have to say that while I still admire Sheckley's ideas, his ability to build up the story, his wild imagination, and some really A+ jokes, I was disappointed in revisiting the novel. It's a time capsule of his era, and more dated in that regard than most of the more staid SF from the forties and fifties. However, it does have a wild, psychedelic ending, which has something interesting to say about what it means to be a human being in full.

I had to purchase the book again, by the way, getting an edition for the Kindle, because I had not owned it in decades. I had raved about it to a friend and insisted he read it, a friend who was not into SF but knew The Silmarillion forward and backward, and all he ever did was make fun of the title and lose my copy. Never lend a book to a friend who isn't eager to read it. In fact, never lend a book to a friend if you want to keep it at all.

P.S.: Sheckley's best known book has to be The 10th Victim, which began life as the story "The Seventh Victim," and was made into an Italian film in 1965. I've never seen it, but as sixties assassination films go, it has much to recommend it, mainly Ursula Andress.

My happy place.

Over the years I have read a lot about the benefits of meditation. Getting calm, getting centered, finding inner peace, all that crap. Sounds good, right? But it's always eluded me. 

Usually I just fall asleep. Maybe meditation only works for people who sleep well at night already. That seems unfair, since one of the supposed benefits of meditation is the ability to sleep better at night, so if I can't meditate unless I already sleep well then I really am hosed.

Then again, if it's putting me to sleep, maybe I should count it as a win after all.

One of the other big problems I've had with meditation is that annoying advice to envision someplace peaceful and calm. Like what? 

The beach? Hot sand, rip currents, sand fleas, tourists, sunburn, seagull poop. 

The forest? Ticks, wasps, hikers, ATV riders, bears.

The lake? Chiggers, Jet-Skiers, giardia, more sunburn, more ticks. 

The mountain? Snow, ice, wind, falls, avalanches, bears. 

Let's face it, nature is a terrible place to find peace. Something is always trying to eat you. Have a look at the friendly neighborhood rabbit in your backyard. How relaxed does he look?

How about someplace in civilization? The library, the park, the church? No -- they have people. You can't meditate around them.

Okay, so my happy place is my home?

No, because if I'm home I should be working, or cleaning, or fixing something, or paying the bills, or doing the dishes or the laundry, or tending to the dogs, or blah blah blah wah wah wah.

Then it struck me. Finally, I knew my happy place, the place I could envision to find an atmosphere of peace.

A nice, clean hotel room.

Hotel rooms, when they're in buildings that are built soundly and are bug-free and clean, are some of my favorite places on earth. Since my career has not required a lot of travel, I associate them with vacation, not work. They are the cool, comfortable place after a day on the Interstate.

I'm not looking to do anything in the room, neither naughty nor nice. I just want to be there. To enjoy the A/C, the free ice, knowing that if I need anything it's a phone call away. The bathroom is clean and I didn't have to clean it. The bed is made and I didn't have to make it. No animals, no kids, no bosses, no neighbors I'm sick of, nobody. Sturdy walls to keep out the noises of others. Chain and bolt and "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door. TV in the sole control of moi. Comfy chair to read in. Quiet, no responsibility, nothing that needs to be done, nothing to try to attack or crap on me.

Keep your mountaintop vista, your rolling surf, your cool glade. If I want to picture a place of solitude and peace, I'm going to imagine a well-kept hotel in a small town with cool air and quiet hallways. Ommm....

Dead wood.

Well, here we are, the first day of autumn, the autumnal equinox. Surely "equinox" is the coolest word for astronomical events on the calendar.

On Saturday I had a job to do that I'd been avoiding all summer.

When we moved into the house, bright young things full of hope that we were, there was a new tree planted in the front yard. It died. I replaced it the following year with a dogwood. That died. I replaced that the following year with a thundercloud plum. That has survived.

The thundercloud plum is a pretty tree with small leaves that start the season pink and turn a dark purple. It's looked so good on the front lawn every spring and summer, and I say to myself with no little pride, I planted that. I, city boy, from a borough where people cut down the trees and put up umbrellas, I planted that tree and it didn't die. And every year it makes me smile.

Last year, late in the summer, though, I noticed that it looked kind of thin.

Sure enough, some major branches had no leaves. The rest of the tree looked good, but those limbs were dead. Small bits snapped right off. These were mighty branches in the center of the tree, and they were dead as doornails.

I was going to have to prune.

I put it off all year, but as we approached autumn I knew I would have to take action. Once the leaves had fallen it would be tough to tell the dead from the living. But cutting off the dead limbs was going to leave a big hole in the middle of the tree, like a guy going bald from the part. And I didn't have the right kind of saw for the job, just hacksaws and a big crosscut saw and a circular saw. Last Friday I stopped in Home Depot for something else, saw the saws, and knew the time had come.

Saturday, the ax fell. Well, not the ax, but you know what I mean.

From plum to prune.

I hope it bounces back in the spring. From what I'd read, pruning was the only hope to prevent termites, promote health in live limbs, and preserve the structural integrity of the tree. I guess we'll find out in eight months how it went.

And that brings us to Life Lessons with Grandpa Fred: Autumn is not a time of new beginnings, like New Year's and spring. Autumn is rather a time of old beginnings, which makes no sense, but stay with me. Our lives, like our trees, may require some pruning to keep healthy. Too much junk in the house? Get rid of it. Bad relationships? Walk away. Unsightly blemish? Ooh, better see a dermatologist. It's all part of living, and a sad part, yes, but we can be stronger and healthier if we face what's causing trouble and remove it.

That's all for this episode of Wise Words from a Suburban Gentleman. Tomorrow we'll be back to our regular stupidity.

What's for brunch?

Hello, food fans! Do you like to eat food? So do I! It's what's for brunch!

So let's see what's on the menu this morning!

Well, I see autumn is in full swing with the folks at Yoplait:

I do recommend the Special Batch Limited Edition Pumpkin Caramel Oui. If you buy it in 2020 it will have gone bad. Quick, eat it now! Shove it in your face!

I am less enthusiastic about Silk's Oat Yeah! product, an oat-milk yogurt (oh, sorry, "oatmilkgurt"). I have nothing against fake milk on principle, and I like oats in cookies and as cereal, so I said sure, let's use the coupon and try it.

The one I got was mango flavored. And it was watery and bland, although the mango bits were nice. I guess you can only milk an oat so much. However, the product was chock full of smugness: 

No bad vibes! You won't feel sorry with your oats! Unless you focus on the fact that Silk is owned by agri-giant Dean Foods, which makes plenty of cow's milk products. Obviously this kind of thing doesn't leave me with "bad vibes," but your vibes may vary.

On to the cereal!

Regular readers (known far and wide for their patience and goodness) will recall that I have been monitoring the developments of peanut butter cereals closely.  I must break the news to you -- I have found the very best peanut butter cereal I have yet tried.

Peanut Butter Chex is basically Corn Chex with peanut butter flavor, and it's great. Good PB flavor, not too strong, not too sweet, mixes well with the corn. No review yet from Mr. Breakfast, but one commenter noted that it made great puppy chow -- which makes sense. Dogs love peanut butter, and could probably eat this cereal. Plus, Chex cereals were first made by Ralston Purina, the former animal food manufacturer that branched out into human cereals. However, what she probably meant was not chow for puppies, but the snack also known as Muddy Buddies. I would not be surprised if the whole idea of this cereal was to make awesome Chex Mix, and sure enough there's a recipe on the back of the box.

Maybe you don't like cereal. Maybe you like baked goods with your brunch. Well, warm up the microwave, Ethelbert, because here it comes!

Last month I just had to try the exceptionally bizarre Flapjack Unleashed product by Kodiak Cakes -- essentially pancake-in-a-cup. I decided to go back to try their bizarre muffin-in-a-cup, and I did. Same deal, you add some water, mix thoroughly, nuke briefly, and instant food. And this came out pretty well too, although it didn't just pop out of the cup like a fully-baked muffin. Some spoonage was required.

For microwave baking, this stuff is really nice. Tastes like a muffin, with the texture of an oven-baked muffin. Although the price in my local market may bring pause. Muffins don't usually retail for two bucks unless they are something special.

Finally, for those of you who want to eat pie for breakfast but can't excuse eating a Hostess Fruit Pie at your age, we have Lago's Crostatine Ciliegia.

A pal showed up at a meeting with a bunch of these Italian delights and I managed to snag one. Really good. Light, flaky pastry, delightful cherry filling, not as gooey or sweet as most American fruit pies. Goes really well with a good stiff cup of black coffee. Lago also makes one with a Nutella-like chocolate-hazelnut filling, which I hope to find one day before the doctor makes me stop eating like this.

So that's brunch! Wow, I'm stuffed. Time to waddle back to bed!

Fail-safe.

I used to drive to the office. The drive could be a hassle, but the place was pleasant. Good old-fashioned cubicles, none of this stupid and counterproductive open-concept office nonsense. You could actually get work done. The company seemed to like it. They had painted one of the conference rooms with custom-designed company images, and a couple of years later painted another to look like a forest. Really nice job, too. Painters worked on it for weeks.

A short while after the forest went up, a rumor started to swirl that we were pulling up stakes and moving closer to the main New York office, in midtown Manhattan.

"No way," I said. "They just painted a whole freaking forest in 7B!"

Six months later I started taking the bus to midtown Manhattan and riding a subway from the Port Authority to the office.

My commute became longer and more annoying and more expensive.

The forest did not save me.

Sometimes when you tell yourself there is an ace in the hole, a fail-safe, that you're protected and can relax. Probably the classic example is "The Germans will never cross the Maginot Line!" Well, yes and no....

Some fail-safes work very well. I've always admired the ingenuity and courage of Elisha Otis, in coming up with a simple but effective device to stop an elevator from crashing and for testing it in public with his own personal life. Even now, elevator mechanic is a risky job. It's like being an auto mechanic if the car has to be driving around while you're propped at the engine. I've seen an elevator crash from the lobby to the cellar while someone was working on it, but fortunately it was a short fall and he was okay. It's not always the case.

Other fail-safes are only so-so. We're told this year that the flu season is looking like a doozy, so get those flu shots. On the other hand, recent years' shots have had pretty poor effectiveness. It's easy to understand why, the flu vaccine being an annual guessing game, but it doesn't make us more confident in it. I may get the shot, but I'm not going to march onto a ward full of flu patients afterward if I can avoid it.

I guess the point is, safety measures are great, but we always must be careful about relying on them too much. In the case of the flu shot, other commonsense precautions like hand-washing, avoiding infected people, and not licking subway car handles are important to follow as well. In the elevator -- well, there's nothing you can do if you're on the elevator and it plunges like a rocket to the subcellar. Pray.

Of course, if the escalator gets stuck, stay calm and wait for help. Better safe than sorry.

Friday thoughts.

Just some pics and observations for a Friday.

----

1) I remembered seeing this headline last year:

"Marines Quietly Lower Combat Training Requirements To Help Female Officers" (HotAir, 2/20/18)

And now I've see the new Marine tent!

Just a joke, guys, let's not play rough now....


2) You know what this fella needs? He needs to put some mulch around the base of his tree. That's what this guy needs.

Nah, that's not enough mulch. It's not up to the lower branches. Better get some more.


3) I think I've finally found my spirit animal:

I will draw the inner strength of this magnificent beast as I nap meditate on its power.


4) I was visiting a pal and we were in turn visited by a late-summer evening stick bug.

When I saw the way the picture came out on my phone, I realized that this was no ordinary stick bug. This is a noir stick bug.

He was probably working a case. I didn't want to get in his way. No one likes to get slapped around by a stick bug.

My name is Phil. Phil Phasmatodea. I'm a private eye. And a stick bug.

All he needs is a tiny little fedora.

----

That's about all I have today. Hope you're coming up on a fabulous weekend, the last of the summer here in the northern hemisphere. As I type this it's 48 here in the scenic Hudson Valley, a crisp morning that smells like Christmas. Here we go....

Frozen.

Fred's Book Club: Say What?

Welcome to the Humpback Writers portion of our week, the day we celebrate writers who are probably not hunchbacked, but whose books are being looked at on Wednesdays. Yeah, it's a stupid name for a book feature. And you can quote me on that.

Speaking of which, we have another nonfiction gem this week: 

Garson O'Toole is a lone voice crying truth on an Internet of stupidity, and out of gratitude I bought his book. It has a place of pride on my desk, and I use it and his Web site, Quote Investigator, frequently.

Why? Because writers are stupid and lazy.

I've done a lot of fact-checking in my editorial career, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the number one variety of false information that one encounters is not political fabrication, scientific misinformation, or spurious historical anecdote, but rather the humble quotation. I would guess that at least 75 percent of the quotes I have encountered in magazine and popular books are either made up, misattributed, misquoted, or just insane. Yes, political information is often skewed into error by bias (to say the least), and scientific studies are complex and often misquoted for sensation, and historical anecdotes are as poorly researched as anything, but quotations are so omnipresent, so easily thrown about in that swamp of e-ignorance called the Web, and so easy to get wrong, that they make up the bulk of misinformation in the world.

O'Toole seeks to set the record straight.

Certainly a good book of quotations is helpful for the task. For classic quotes you can find older versions of Bartlett's famous book online for free, and it has never gone out of print; a good library will have an unabridged version. And there are a number of more contemporary books of that kind available. I have the third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations on my desk right next to O'Toole's book.

But where O'Toole earns respect is by taking popular quotations, all memed up and scattered to the winds, and runs them to earth. Many of them have been misquoted in newspapers and magazines for decades. Sometimes there was an original quote that was just dumbed down progressively by writers until it is virtually unrecognizable. He follows the trail like a dogged detective, going through sources popular and unknown, to find the original quote if it can be found, by the original speaker if he can be found, and show how it got mangled into its current state.

Here's an example I literally pulled out of the book at random:

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song."

Can't you just see those words superimposed over a stock photo of a canary? Your college student or grandmother posting it on Facebook? But who said it? Was it a Chinese proverb? Was it Maya Angelou? It's one of the few that haven't been attributed to Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, or Winston Churchill, I'd wager.

O'Toole spends ten pages (including end notes) tracking this thing down, through the varieties that the idea had seen in print, including William Hazlitt ("the thrush ... does not sing because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or criticized. It sings because it is happy..."), Lord Tennyson ("I do not sing because I must,/And pipe but as the linnets sing"), newspapers, religious books, Up With People, Lou Holtz (!) ... and finds that the quote as it appears should be attributed to children's book author Joan Walsh Anglund. This is hours of work for a single line of verse; this is real scholarship, not like the "fact-checking" that happens at some of our well-known print institutions.

O'Toole should get a Pulitzer, and teach classes in this stuff to the know-nothings at J-school.

You know what kind of writers are the absolute worst about wrong quotations? Without question: authors of self-help books. The people who want to tell you how to change your life are the people who can't be bothered to double-check a stupid damn quotation in a reputable reference book. What does that tell you?

Worse, I'll bet they don't care. I've worked on such books and sent notes back to the editor, frequently with links to O'Toole's blog, and I would bet a hundred bucks that not a word of the misquotes would be changed. Because the self-help authors have no interest in the truth. Which is just what you want from someone telling you how to live your life.

Those creeps get rich while Garson O'Toole toils at the endless pile of misquotes, a supply of stupidity large enough to fill the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I don't know if he even sold enough copies of the book above to entice the publisher to contract for a sequel.

Let the quoter beware! Or as Socrates said, "If you see on the Internet that your mother says she loves you, don't believe it." And you can quote me on that. 

Lament of the minor leaguer.

Follow your dreams and the money will follow.

This September Sunday the promise is hollow

Hernandez from Ecuador put out our light

Before a small crowd on a drizzly night

To finish the game, the season, the year

The hopes and the dreams of my baseball career.

Eight years of riding from hamlet to town

On an old Greyhound bus always set to break down.

Don’t want to go home, be constantly nailed

As the great high school slugger who went forth and failed

The hours of drills, the endless repeats

Of the coaches’ instructions and cleaning of cleats

A game made of numbers, run black on white page

My number is up now -- because it’s my age.

I guess I can tell them I went out to try

Arrived at this parking lot, watched my dream die.

Oh, pick up the bat bag and get on the bus.

Somebody won today, but it wasn’t us.

Puppysitting.

I'm writing this on Sunday morning because I may not survive to Monday.

We're puppysitting today.

Friends of ours have asked us to mind their sweet little girl puppy, a pup well known to our two knucklehead boys, until the evening. And we love her and we're happy to do it.

Everyone has just settled down after two and a half hours of play and weirdness.

This is another case where language helps, where being the "talking animal" is a big advantage. We couldn't explain to any of the dogs what was happening and help them prepare. We couldn't ask the visitor if she was hungry, needed to go pee, or anything. And they're all weirded out by the whole thing, as much as they love being together. Heck, she's been here before, and we've all been to her house -- but it's the first time she's been with us without her owners. So all the canines are confused.

I mean, when I was a kid I was sometimes dumped places for babysitting purposes, but I could usually understand what was going on.

Well, okay, there was one time when I, being the youngest, was left at the house of friends I didn't personally know well or like much, and I knew I'd be at the mercy of the three kids. Mom dropped me there early -- I think she was accompanying the older offspring on a Scout trip to West Point, two hours north. So, a long day. Worse, it was summer, and they started early, so when I was dropped off the other family's kids weren't even up yet, and I am pretty sure no one knew I was going to be there. To this day I still remember that awkward, almost sickening nervous feeling of sitting in the sunken living room, waiting for the kids in the house to wake up.

The rest of the day was a blur, and I guess it wasn't too bad, although I was a bookish boy and bad at sports and didn't fit in with any of the others or their neighborhood friends. But no one hit me and I didn't hit anybody and didn't go home in tears, so I suppose it was all right. And I know these days, when all the adults work and people live far from family, that children go through this kind of thing all the time.

Wow, I'm surprised I got enough peace and quiet to write this much, although I was interrupted at the end of paragraph five, when junior dog Nipper was accidentally awakened by guest doggette Michelle (Ma Belle) and barked his fool head off, scaring everyone.

Signing off now, to be continued after the comical emojis below.

--Fred, 9/15, 11:15 am

🐶🐺🐾🐩🐕🐋🎇🎪🏡🚑🚒🚓

Update:

Well, it's Monday morning, and Michelle went home with her folks last night, unharmed and cheerful. It was a tiring day because the guys were so excited that they barely got any doggie downtime, as usual. We're all running slow this morning. As my wife noted, it was the first time since Nipper was a puppy more than three years ago that we had to constantly watch for a dog to do something destructive.

But Michelle didn't, aside from grabbing the odd shoe or towel. I'd been inspired to take her for a good walk, which she enjoys; exercise usually helps dogs relax. Work out the nerves. And my wife and I did have a lot of fun with the herd. The weather was great and we all sat on the porch for quite some time.

We'd be happy to sit for Michelle again. She's a sweet little lady, except when she's trying to puppy-fight in the house with Nipper. Who knew girls were so good at starting fights? Well, everyone, I suppose.

Wise words.

"Max, Grandpa doesn't have much time. Hurry down. He wants to see you."

Sure enough, Grandpa had taken a turn. He lay in the hospital bed white as the sheet, the only color on the old man from his big brown spectacle frames and the little blue dots on his gown.

"Give us a minute," he told everyone else, and shooed them out with shaky hands.

I knelt by his bed. "I'm here, Grandpa."

"I know." He sighed. "There are some important things you need to know, Sam."

"Max."

"Max, yeah. I knew it was one of those three-letter names."

"Uh-huh."

"With an A in the middle."

"Like Pam or Tag."

"Right. So I-- Tag?"

"Short for Taggart. Anyway, I'm here. Max."

"Who the hell names his kid Taggart?"

"I don't know. I had two of them in my high school."

"Dumb first name."

"Okay, fine. You wanted to say something?"

"Yeah, Sam, it's important."

"Max."

"I'm not Max, I'm Ralph."

"No, I'm Max, not Sam."

"Of course you are. Who's Sam?"

"I don't know."

"Then why do you keep bringing him up?"

"Ah... no idea."

"Must be related to your friend Taggart."

"Undoubtedly."

"Max, I have some words of wisdom before I go to the Great Beyond."

"Yes, Grandpa."

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, Grandpa."

"You don't look ready. You didn't shave."

"It's the modern look. Looks rugged."

"Really? In my day we killed Commies and built skyscrapers and we all shaved. Now you sit at a desk and play with toys and you don't shave."

"Yeah, I guess."

"Rugged. Huh."

"Okay, I'll shave."

"Good. But that's not the wise words."

"Okay."

"Here they come."

"Great."

"Listen closely."

"Righto."

"It's... don't go cheap on the toilet paper."

"...."

"Well?"

"That's it?"

"What? It's important. You're a young man, you want to save money and get ahead, but I'm telling you, you go cheap on the toilet paper, you'll regret it."

"I see."

"You think the roll is cheap, but you have to use twice as much of it."

"Right."

"It makes a mess."

"Yeah, that's--"

"And sometimes it feels like it's sanding down your hinder and you wind up walking funny."

"Buy expensive toilet paper. Got it."

"I didn't say to go spending all your money on toilet paper, I just said don't go cheap."

"Noted."

"No need to max out your cards on TP."

"That would be silly."

"There's no need for gold-plated toilet paper."

"I suppose that might be a little uncomfortable anyway."

"Not absorbent, no."

"Yeah. Okay, well, Grandpa, thanks for the wise words."

"Oh, sure, Tag, that's fine."

"I'm Max."

"Oh, yeah, that's right. Tag is Sam's brother."

"You bet, Grandpa."

"I love you, Max."

"I love you too, Grandpa."

I left to summon back the others, but in the minute I was gone, Grandpa had passed away.

On the way out of the hospital, my dad asked how I was holding up. "After all, I've lost a father-in-law," he said, "but to you that's a blood relative."

"Yeah, Dad. I'll miss him."

"What was the advice he wanted to give you?"

"Uh... I'm not sure if I should tell anyone. He seemed to want that to be between us." And Sam and Tag, maybe, I thought.

"Sure, son, I understand. Well, I hope it wasn't career advice. He was a wonderful guy, but he always had terrible luck in business."

"Really?"

"You bet. He told me once that he had a big deal ready to go, but had to secure a loan from the bank. Well, for some reason when the meeting came he waddled into the meeting room like a crazy man and the loan fell through. Can you believe it?"

The public.

"It's just amazing to meet you! I've been admiring your work for years!"

Night mares.

Had a bad dream that woke me up the morning of September 11. Not sure if it had anything to do with that anniversary.

One part, the fun part, had me leaving an office to go to the stadium to see the Giants play. It's not the first time I've had a vivid dream that conflated sports with work. In this dream the stadium was much smaller and cozier than any real football stadium, but the Giants were losing, just like in real life. I decided to go home, but first I had to cross the stadium attached to that one; it was like a three-ring circus, one stadium after another (not unlike the old Meadowlands, which had Giants Stadium, Brendan Byrne Arena, and the Meadowlands Racetrack, except these were attached). In that next field was a horse race, and it was horrible.

This was no round-the-track-once race; the horses had to go around and around hundreds of times, like Indy drivers, and of course it killed them. But they kept going. My exit required me to walk right across the track, where by now the running horses were reduced to mere skeletons with bits of flesh and gristle. Someone complained about the smell.

Well, that was a fun thought with which to wake up.

I'm glad I don't go to a psychic. "Skeletal horses? Oh my stars! Doom! It's DOOOOM!" Well, maybe not, but it couldn't be good.

What causes these things? What was in my mind that brought that particular stew of images together?

I think about the things that had been happening that week: football season kickoff, work stress, anniversary of 9/11, the birthday of a childhood friend who died. More: I was reading a war book, working on a mystery novel, checking a soccer book for children. Scenes from real life? I don't live in Death Valley, where we all know picturesque animal bones are tastefully laid out in the sand. Nor do I attend Hogwarts, where the skeletal Thestrals pull the wagons. And I haven't been to a Giants game in decades, and I've only gone to the horse track twice (Meadowlands once, Saratoga once).

But who knows? Dreams are so hyper-personal that we may not even know ourselves from what parts of our large experiences, many thoughts, and complex personalities our dreams are getting data. My wife has heard that the people in your dreams may be faces you saw only in passing who sparked no conscious memory. But wouldn't anyone who pops up in dreams have had to have been committed to long-term memory?

And why do we even dream anyway?

According to sleep guru Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., writing in Psychology Today, "While some scientists posit that dreaming has no direct function—but instead is a consequence of other biological processes that occur during sleep—many studying sleep and dreams believe dreaming serves a primary purpose."

He goes on to list six possible purposes:

1. memory processing (consolidation of learning and short-term memory to long-term memory storage)
2. extension of waking consciousness, reflecting the experiences of waking life
3. working through difficult, complicated, unsettling thoughts, emotions, and experiences
4. responding to biochemical changes and electrical impulses that occur during sleep
5. consciousness uniting past, present, and future in processing information from the first two, and preparing for the third
6. self-protection by the brain to prepare itself to face threats, dangers and challenges

It's interesting, but also interesting that after so much time and study we really still don't understand dreams.

Whatever they are, I wouldn't mind so much if my brain would just stick to its usual stupid themes -- work and walking around places and hotels. No more animated dead, please, stupid head.

Dogs and dudes: Opposites?

It occurred to me the other day that dogs take about as much time deciding where to poop as people do deciding what to eat. At least the dogs don't let all the cool air out of the refrigerator while they're thinking.

We think of dogs as our natural pals, whether we just chose to be that way or whether God provided them as our helper and companion, however you want to see it. Three legs in the animal kingdom and one leg in ours, as C. S. Lewis described them. But that one leg has made all the difference; unlike cats, which we all know tolerate captivity rather than crave humanity, dogs as we have come to know them do not do well in the wild. Most dumb house cats will live perfectly well as feral cats, although they will be a menace to everyone else; our dogs need us for survival. I suppose it's because cats are useful to us at the one thing that comes naturally -- killing vermin -- while dogs have been bred to do all kinds of wacky and specialized things that may not be useful in nature.

But my thought about the food/poop conundrum made me wonder if there are other things they do in an opposite way -- making dogs sort of Bizarro humans.

Here are some I thought of, starting with the one that sparked this idea:

🐶Dogs eat whatever is put before them; people take a ton of time to decide on dinner

🐶Dogs take a ton of time to decide where to poop; people use the nearest toilet

🐶Dogs nap all day; people are lucky to get one nap, and young people fight the idea like crazy

🐶Dogs are covered in hair and pay it no mind; people have relatively little hair and pay all kinds of attention to it

🐶Dogs love to run; most people do everything possible to avoid running

🐶Dogs object to baths; people generally enjoy them

🐶Dogs love powerful odors; people usually rear back from them

🐶Dogs hate fireworks; people like them

🐶Dogs love to pull on ropes; people try to avoid jobs that require this

You could easily make the argument based on these important facts that dogs and humans are opposites and thus incompatible -- or that opposites attract, and so dogs and humans complete each other. Or you could look at our mutual love of cheese and bacon, our dislike of going to doctors, and our interest in sports (hunting, Frisbee, tennis balls) and decide we're indistinguishable.

As with so many things in life, our lives and our collective life, sometimes it's hard to understand how we got here, wherever here is, except in the most general way. However we did, I'm glad we have our canine pals along for the ride.

Fred's Book Club: Throwback Thursday.

The new Joker movie has been getting lots of accolades, but I don't particularly want to see it. Some people are calling it subversive. I can only approve of subversion in a true dictatorship, and even then I can never approve of the idea of someone killing for fun and glory. To hell with that, to the hell it came from. We saw it 18 years ago today, in spades.

Which is why this week's Fred's Book Club focuses on one of my all-time favorite novels,  rare in that I've read it more than twice, and every time through I love it even more. I mean G. K. Chesterton's thrilling, baffling, and wonderful The Man Who Was Thursday, first published in 1908.

My wife finds Chesterton a tough read, even though he never wrote long (my Penguin edition comes in at 184 pages), but I know what she means. He's an English writer of very contemporary observations, meaning that his universal focus is tied to the commonplace, that is, England of 111 years ago. He assumes his audience will understand all his references, but of course we don't. Even a simple word like "suburb" is rather different to a modern American than it was to him, let alone his comments on particular neighborhoods in the city of London that have changed tremendously. Furthermore, he was a philosophical writer, which means that a lot of what he notices are interior to the main character's point of view, which sometimes requires work to understand. He either grabs you and convinces you to follow him or not. Either way, this novel is a ripping good yarn.

What's the story behind that fantastic title? Without giving too much away: Our hero, Gabriel Syme (who looks a lot like that portrait of Herbert Everett used for the above edition), is enticed by a devilish modern to join his cause -- that cause being anarchy, the terrorist mission of 1908. Their secret headquarters is packed to the rafters with bombs and guns, and they are eager to destroy everything and remake the world. The anarchists are led by seven men, each code-named for a day of the week, and the leader is Sunday. Syme decides he must infiltrate the group, becoming the man who is called Thursday.

And then it really becomes strange.

The book's subtitle is A Nightmare, and indeed it has many nightmarish aspects; time and space are distorted; villains wear strange disguises; weather changes in unnatural ways; getaways are made with balloons and elephants.

The edition I have features a brief introduction by Kingsley Amis, which surprised me when I bought it, Chesterton having been a fearless Catholic convert and Amis a notorious God-hater. And yet Amis loved the book, calling it "the most thrilling book I have ever read."

Syme is a terrific adventure hero, ready to face every kind of danger, but human all the same. At one point he realizes the only way to stop a plot is to deliver a mortal insult to the wicked Marquis, a superior swordsman who will be bound to duel him, and Syme just hopes to prevent his own death long enough to stop the plot. The duel begins, and:

... he found himself in the presence of the great fact of the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless common sense. He felt like a man who had dreamed all night of falling over precipices, and had woke up on the morning when he was to be hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the channel of his foe’s foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had felt the two tongues of steel touch, vibrating like two living things, he knew that his enemy was a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had come.
     He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into blossom in the meadow—flowers blood red and burning gold and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line. He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the world.

You can read the book for free at this link, thanks to the noble volunteers of Project Gutenberg. Or you can get the Penguin edition. I like the one I have, with the Amis introduction and an article excerpt at the back from Chesterton about the novel, but I'm not too sure about the current Penguin edition. It has an introduction by author Matt Beaumont, who seems to be another bad fit for the project. He is also credited with "editing" the book. I should hate to see what a modern author would do to "edit" a book from 1908, and I fear the worst.

Living with the shadow of Islamic terrorism still stalking the world 18 years after 9/11, and with masked idiots running with impunity on our streets as some sort of fascist anti-fascists (a neat trick if you can pull it off), not to mention a popular culture that loves killers and bombers, we probably need a book like The Man Who Was Thursday now as much as ever. It's a crazy, wild, even hallucinogenic book, but in classic Chestertonian paradox, its nightmarish insanity brings us a stiff dose of clarity.

📜📜📜

P.S.: I suppose one possible benefit of the Joker movie is that the black-masked know-nothings who are disturbing the peace might be inspired to start dressing like clowns, an outfit that would be far closer to their true natures.

And don't trust agents.

Offloading memory.

You may have see this cartoon making the rounds:

Maybe we should include the human brain among the aggrieved parties.

I have been racking my own dollar-store brain to remember what provider or computer outfit did the cell phone commercial some years ago in which a bunch of old guys in a bar are arguing sports trivia, and then a nerdish youth corrects them using information off his mobile phone. He astonishes the yahoos by pulling in the answers from the atmosphere. If you remember any details about it, please let me know. All I remember is that the young fellow had a face that looked like it could use a fist.

Considering today's topic, it's funny that I have not been able to find the commercial using the search engines. The problem is that all the search terms I come up with lead me to current ads and other more popular (or promoted) content. But I remember that ad, because it struck a chord. We all know that human memory plays tricks, and that the Internet contains every bit of sports trivia known to man.

When that commercial first aired, the magic of the Internet had been in play for a while, and we knew we could use it to answer all things -- but not while getting hammered at the bar. You had to use your computer to access the Internet. Sometimes buffering was involved. Prior to the information age, the bad memory of drunks was required to bring forth data -- or, for the well-prepared innkeeper, the Guinness Book of Records.

That worthy book, which became popular far beyond its humble origins (the managing director of the eponymous brewery's argument over what game bird in Europe was the fastest), was a staple in bars and homes for decades. For sports fans who liked to argue there were books like The Baseball Encyclopedia. Now, especially when Internet access is as far away as your shirt pocket, we tend to leave our memory up to the World Wide Web. Memorization is, in other words, for squares. And maybe for good reason.

"If I could remember everything I ever read," a friend once said (while drinking), "I'd be God." Exaggeration aside, I knew what he meant. It is frustrating to realize how much we forget of what we read. The joy of encountering a remembered book anew is nice, but not worth the loss of all the information that falls out of our heads when we are doing other things. I'm reading a book about the Battle of the Bulge now, one that is well researched and so contains lots of German names, and town and other place names, and I forget who and what everything is. A Generalfeldmarschall might disappear for twenty pages, and by the time he reemerges I've forgotten which one he is. I'd rather have some memory of him than have to look him up.

For so many things, memory is optional -- Dr. Internet will see you now. But even for those of us suffering from CRS, reliance on devices to inform our memories doesn't seem like a good idea. Does memory improve with training, as Harry Lorayne says? If so, we are in trouble. We're using memory less, thanks to the very devices accused of shortening our attention spans. Maybe we are getting dumber!

It doesn't help that when we do look things up, we tend to go straight to Wikipedia, which is not exactly gospel truth.

Anyway, the kid in the commercial reeling off sports trivia at the bar and annoying his elders would get his comeuppance later when he discovered another thing the smartphone was good for: drunk texting. Good luck talking to your girlfriend in the morning, bub.

Punt.

Another September and another year I intend to spurn the NFL. They still have the same dumb commissioner; they still feature a workforce that thinks it can get away with all sorts of behavior that would get any other employee of any company in the country fired so fast they would be standing on the street with a cardboard box before they knew what was happening. And the NFL still treats its fans like suckers and idiots.

So, I'd rather be neither.

My previous years' boycotts was, I admit, eased by the fact that the New York Giants have been pretty bad -- 8 wins over the last two seasons. I wasn't missing anything. Some Giants fans I know are pretty excited for this season, and I have been told that they went undefeated in this preseason. There is nothing about this last bit of information that would excite me. The Giants were 5-0 in the preseason in 2014 and 6-10 in the regular season. If they're undefeated twelve games into this season, I still won't want to watch them.

When Major League Baseball shot itself in the tush back in 1994, doing what two World Wars couldn't do -- cancel the World Series -- they at least spent the next four seasons trying desperately to get the fans interested again. The NFL pisses off half the country, the half that contains most of its fans, and just assumes we'll fall in line if they wait us out. And they're probably right.

But I've realized that I'm busy enough without squeezing hours of football into my week.

I'm not so much angry anymore at the anti-American protests and the league's embarrassing response; I'm just tired of the crap. I have better things to do.

Another issue with Amazon.

Damnazon.

 I had a problem with an Amazon third-party outfit that I thought I'd share with you. It's gotten so easy to shop with Amazon that I often forget that they make plenty of mistakes, and they often work with some pretty dopey outfits. SuperpetLtd is one of those.

I ordered a replacement dog toy, for the dogs. No, not for me. (Sure, they're fun, but it was for the dogs.) Being that my dogs are large, they need big, tough toys that can take a beatin' an' a chompin'. We'd had one of these Chuckit Rugged Flyer toys in the past, and it put up with a lot -- in fact, the elements got to it (mold) before the dogs destroyed it. So I figured I'd get another one. Pulled it up on Amazon, placed the order. It was coming through a third party, but so what?

Or should I say, SAY WHAT?!

Instead of the large version, SuperpetLtd sent a peewee version, suitable for Corgis or Chihuahuas, the kind of dog that could fit entirely inside the mouth of one of my dogs. I double-checked to make sure I'd selected the right size. Yep, large. Okay, anyone can make a mistake; let's tell Amazon and they'll rectify it.

Here's where it got really annoying. 

Because it appears that SuperpetLtd is not in the United States, but in the freaking Bailiwick of Jersey, not information you could have gleaned from their Amazon product page.

Not from New Jersey.

When I told Amazon I wanted to make an exchange, because of SuperpetLtd's mistake, they dutifully passed the notification on to SuperpetLtd, which got back to me in a couple of days with a return label and an insincere apology that they could not provide postage.

So to get my money back for THEIR MISTAKE (let me emphasize, THIS MISTAKE WAS THEIRS AND NOT MINE), I had to pay the freight?

This, I said, will not stand.

Trying to actually get hold of someone at Amazon is, you may know, difficult. There's not even a link for an e-mail. (Here is a link to the contacts page.) I requested a callback and got one; over the course of twenty minutes of my workday time this very apologetic person tried to sort out the issue, as if it were something too complicated for words -- apparently the shipping window for this product had not closed, and no wonder since it was coming from a freaking ocean away; this meant that maybe it hadn't actually arrived yet, even though it had, so they apparently couldn't consider the order complete -- good God, what a mess -- and she told me that they would address it. Sure enough, a couple of days later, Amazon intervened and gave me credit -- not a refund, but credit -- for the amount of the purchase. Which somehow did not get applied when I made my next purchase, BTW.

And also BTW, when I attempted to lambaste the poorly named SuperpetLtd on the Amazon review site, they refused to post my review because it wasn't about the Chuckit product. Which I hadn't even used. Because it was an inappropriate size. Because SuperpetLtd screwed up.

All this over a $10 toy.

At this point I was going to be damned if I sent the thing back. I'm looking around for a non-annoying little dog to give it to. 

What I'm saying is, Amazon is good, but doesn't police its outside vendors that well, and seldom gives you information about them, so let the buyer beware. Otherwise you wind up losing your temper over stupid crap, you don't get a refund, just a credit, and you still don't have the blasted thing you wanted in the first place.

I'm going to try to shop at other sites more often from now on. Amazon has enough of my money.