Comic Strip of the Day: Friday Funnies

We’ll start this week’s Friday Funnies with Dogs of C Kennel and a tip for anyone thinking of adding a pup to their life.

It’s kind of ironic that a strip set in a dog shelter would make a gag about purebreds, but they do occasionally show up there. I’m generally supportive of the move to adopt, though my dogs have nearly all come from breeders, a couple of them purebred adoptions.

The good thing about purebreds is that you are more likely to get what you were hoping for, and that’s where both the punchline above and my tip-of-the-week come in: You should read the terms and conditions, of which this website is the most accurate I’ve ever come across.

She covers 180 breeds and is right-on in her assessments of the ones I’m familiar with.

One difference between good breeders and bad breeders is that a good breeder will not quite try to talk you out of a pup if you’ve never had the breed, but will certainly make sure you know what you’re getting into.

My favorite example is from the Basenji Rescue and Transport group, which has a collection of hilarious good-and-bad stories about a breed that poses some significant challenges.

There was a fellow who brought his basenji to the park a few times and the dog was fun and full of energy and loved to play, but each visit ended up with the guy running off after his dog. I haven’t seen them in a year or so and I hope it’s because he has learned that you really can’t trust basenjis off-leash and not because the little fellow ended up under a tire.

By contrast, the shelters can be overly cheerful and optimistic in placing a dog, which is phrasing it nicely.

There was a guy who, as his first dog ever, had been given an adult akita we suspected was in the shelter because she was suspicious, unfriendly and combative.

Several of us worked extensively with the poor, overwhelmed owner and he also hired a professional trainer, but finally he, too, stopped coming to the park.

The rule used to be not to purchase a pup unless you could meet both parents, and then it became one parent and now people are adopting dogs from Southern states and Puerto Rico that they never meet until the truck pulls up.

I’ve seen it work out well. I’ve seen it work out not so well. And I’ve known people who wound up with dogs you never see at all because they are too sociopathic to take out in public.

RTFM.

 

On a more humorous note, this Dog Eat Doug reminded me of a beagle mix we had who was an extremely accurate canine meteorologist. On the Front Range of the Rockies, you often don’t see storms approaching, because they come in behind the mountains, which are only 10 minutes to your west.

However, if the dog suddenly started shaking and then vomited on the kitchen floor, it meant we’d have thunderstorms in 20 to 30 minutes.

“Humorous” in retrospect, I meant.

 

Juxtaposition of the Old Farts 

(Monty)

(Pardon My Planet)

I’m so old that I remember when Cracker Jack toys made it worth buying Cracker Jack, which was edible but kind of nasty, except for the peanuts. Now they sell it in bags, not boxes, and the toy got cheapened to the point where I’m not sure there even is one anymore, which leaves the question of who is buying this crap?

There aren’t a lot of toys in cereal anymore, either, but it may be that the companies realized only the most spoiled kids bought cereal they didn’t like for the toy. At my house, we had a rule: One sugared cereal, one plain cereal open at a time and no toy until the box it came in was empty.

Back then, all jeans were relaxed fit and, in fact, when, in jr high, tight chinos became a thing, I had to do some begging before I finally got my parents to stop making me wear what my friends referred to as “Dumbo ear pants.”

If you had to get change from your pocket, you had to go in with two fingers and tweezer it out between them. The joke was that you could tell which boys were Jewish, and, while that was an exaggeration, the fact that the fad coincided with miniskirts was genuinely problematic.

I suppose today that, if I had a pair of those chinos, I wouldn’t need the compression socks. Either one would be just as easy to get into and just as comfortable.

 

Juxtaposition of the Traumatic Dreams

(Heart of the City)

(Reality Check)

Heart didn’t even have to mention the word “combination” to trigger my anxiety.

It’s the last day of school and we have to clean out our lockers, only I forgot my locker combination so long ago that I can’t even remember where my locker is, only that it’s full of stuff I really need to bring home.

It’s a ridiculous dream, because, in real life, my combination senior year was an easy 36-0-36 and my locker was two from the end, right by Cathy Kyer’s, upon whom I had a massive crush, and that didn’t matter for part of the year, since being near the end of the row meant that, at the end of the school day, my girlfriend could pull me back out of the teachers’ eyesight for a strictly forbidden display of public affection.

My locker reality was the best part of my life, so I have no idea why the locker dream haunts me.

By contrast, I don’t have the student dream because I lived it in college. I skipped the second meeting of a seminar, and, when I went back the next time, the room was empty. They’d moved.

So I threw everything in the car and moved to Colorado.

Traumatized? Hell, I was liberated.

I still have the underwear dream regularly, but the older I get, the less it sparks “OMG!” and the more my dream reaction is, “Well, I guess I should do something about that.”