Tag Archives: grammar

Pets Redux

4 Feb

February 4, 2011

Terriers are cute dogs, and smart too. Too bad they clash with the decor.

 

In honor of the Jasmil Kennels and Cattery in Lower Halstow, near Sittingbourne, in Kent, England, (whew!) I  republish one of my classic blogs in hopes that for God’s sake, somebody learns something.

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Pets. Everyone has them.

Teachers have teacher’s pets. You know, the kids who, even when the rest of the class is stoned or asleep, they’ll have an answer and keep you from yelling at everyone else. You like those kids. (Except when those Junior Mr.-Know-It-Alls don’t stop asking annoying questions. Then you want to kill them.)

Congressmen have pet projects. They’re those pork-barrel filled legislations designed to put a lot of money in the pockets of some powerful lobby, not to mention the Congressmen, that have no use at all except to waste budget money that could be spent on better things, like a committee to determine whether pro-wrestlers use steroids. (Well duh.)

Most of us have pet peeves, those little things that bug the shit out of us until we want to rip our hair out or drop a piano on someone or claim the dingoes ate the baby. (Yeah, like that happened.) One of my numerous pet peeves is the expression “could care less.” UGH!!!!! Let me explain. If you could care less, then there is a certain level of caring present, which could conceivably dip even lower. What you mean (and yes, I’m talking to you!) to say is “I couldn’t care less.” Because if you could not care less, that’s it. You can’t get any lower. It’s rock bottom. So stop saying it or I’ll sic the dingoes on you.

However, what I’m talking about today are actual pets. You know, those little living things with fur or fins or feathers, scales, whatever. Or if you’re lucky enough to own a chimera, fur and feathers.

Before we get started, let’s make it clear- there are some bad pets out there, things that should not be pets under any circumstances. Here is a brief list:

GOOD PETS                                                  BAD PETS
Dog                                                                  Mongoose
Cat                                                                    Buffalo
Fish                                                                  Swine
Bird                                                                  Condor
Hamster                                                         Chupacabra

Here is an example of why it is a bad idea to keep a pet buffalo, taken straight from one of my favorite news sources, News of the Weird:

In Salem, Wisconsin, an 1800-pound bull that had been treated as a pet killed its owner as he tried to take it to slaughter one day after the bull trampled a farmhand to death. Said the grieving owner, “You can’t trust a buffalo.”

Indeed. Words to live by.

“But Mr. BTR,” you ask, “what kind of pet is right for me?” Thanks for the question. I love it when people leave the important questions of their life to me. It makes me feel like a big man.

The pet that’s right for you is a very subjective question. In general, if you are allergic to cats, don’t get a cat. If you sleep late and never go out, don’t get a dog. If you have friends who think its fun to dump beer into the fish tank, then by God don’t get fish.

What you should get depends on your needs. Why are you getting the pet? Want a companion? Get a dog. Want to keep a box of poop-filled sand in your house? Get a cat. Want to be annoyed by seeds tossed all over the room? Get a bird. Want a pet you can flush? A fish is right for you.

When I was a kid my brother and I had two turtles. We loved them. We’d take them out of the tanks and watch them crawl around on the floor. We’d take out our toys and pretend the trucks were racing the turtles. We loved them. We were kids. We were stupid. Turtles are bad pets. They don’t do anything. They are slow and you can’t pet them- they can’t feel it though their shells. And they live forever so you are stuck with them, unless you drop them down the sewer to fend for themselves, uh, like I heard people do. Not that I did that with my turtle.

I had a cat named Spencer when I was young. She was great and I loved her. She developed a tumor on her spine and she was put to sleep. It was very traumatic. Let’s move on.

After Spencer I had a dog named McDuff. Don’t know why we named him that, it just sounded good. We had fun with him, we walked him, we took great care of him, but ultimately we had to give him away. There were two little problems.

1-     McDuff would bark and howl when he was alone. We did whatever we could. We left the TV on, we left the radio on, we left recordings of us talking on, we played a tape in the VCR of us when we were out. Nothing worked. Of course, this wasn’t a problem for us. The barking was all when we were out. McDuff was pretty silent when we were there, but the neighbors had a little problem.

2-     We could not housebreak McDuff. We’d walk him for hours and hours, stop at every tree, every hydrant, watch him sniff everything in existence, and still the dog would crap on the rug as soon as he got upstairs. We read all the books, talked to the vets, nothing worked. This was a problem. Eventually the combination of noise and crap got to be too much and he had to go. (For the same reasons, some of my students will have to go too.)

I also used to have a fish tank. Fish are calming and nice to look at, provided you buy interesting fish. I had some very beautiful fish and they were nice in their tank, until they got the Ick. I am not making that up. Ick is a fish disease and it is short for icthyosomethingIdon’tknow. It is some kind of fungus that looks like white spots on the fish, and once it gets in your tank forget it. I lost all my fish and had to sterilize the tank and everything in it. I never knew how it got started but I was sure I ended it. Until the next group of fish caught the Ick. So the tank went out in the trash.

Pets are wonderful for so many reasons. In fact, there are so many reasons that I won’t list them here- they’re just too obvious and it would be beneath you to read them.

Just remember that having a pet is a big responsibility. If you don’t pay your phone bill it’ll get cut off, but you can still get it turned back on. If you don’t feed your pet it will die, and there is no coming back from that. (Unless your pet is a Buddhist.) And frankly, a dead pet is more trouble than a live pet. They smell. They attract flies. They have to be dumped on someone’s doorstep and then what about the money you wasted on the leash, bowl, and getting the thing spayed? Take it from me; it is a good idea to keep your pets alive.

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Jim Jones and the Sandinistas

19 Apr

April 19, 2010

No, “Jim Jones and the Sandinistas” is not the name of my new punk band but feel free to mock up an album cover and send it to me.

No, it is the title of another blog where I get all cranky, crusty, and curmudgeonly about the sorry state of the English language. (See that cool alliteration? That’s why I can beef about other people’s grammar; I know my shit.)

Anywho (way, whatever,) the first thing that flies up my nostril lately is the term “drinking the Kool-Aid,” as in “Wow, you must have really been drinking Omar Minaya’s Kool-Aid if you thought that John Maine could be a number two starter.” It does not, however, refer to Jimmie “J.J.” Walker from Good Times.

Generally, “drinking the Kool-Aid” means to fall for someone’s line of bullshit. It has become a fairly prevalent phrase, to the point that you can’t listen to an episode of Mike Francessa on WFAN without hearing him say it a couple of times an hour. The show is unlistenable in many other ways too, and the irony here is that the listeners have fallen for his line of bullshit, but that’s beside the point.

So why does it bug me? It bugs me because it casually trivializes the deaths of over 900 people.

From Wikipedia, also a pet peeve of mine, but let’s skip that for now:

James Warren “Jim” Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 death of more than 900 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the deaths of nine other people at a nearby airstrip and in Georgetown, Guyana.

Jones was a well-connected paranoid communist, who formed a commune to live in “pure socialism and communism.” He had some very kooky theories and managed to form a devoted cult around his strong personality. There were many allegations of vilolence and abuse within, leading to the shooting of a U.S. Congressman. More from Wikipedia:

Later that same day, 909 inhabitants of Jonestown,, 276 of them children, died of apparent cyanide poisoning, mostly in and around a pavilion. No video was taken during the mass suicide, though the FBI did recover a 45 minute audio recording of the suicide in progress.

On that tape, Jones tells Temple members that the Soviet Union, with whom the Temple had been negotiating a potential exodus for months, would not take them after the Temple had murdered Ryan and four others at a nearby airstrip.  The reason given by Jones to commit suicide was consistent with his previously stated conspiracy theories of intelligence organizations allegedly conspiring against the Temple, that men would “parachute in here on us,” “shoot some of our innocent babies” and “they’ll torture our children, they’ll torture some of our people here, they’ll torture our seniors.”

Given that reasoning, Jones and several members argued that the group should commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking cyanide-laced grape flavored Flavor Aid (often misidentified as Kool-Aid) along with a sedative.

Over 900 people died. Granted, they were over 900 wacky cult people with bizarre beliefs, but they were people nonetheless, and nearly one third of them were children. I don’t see the point in trivializing their deaths.

I’m just sorry that the good people at Kool-Aid were dragged into the whole mess.

The second thing that bugs me (in terms of grammar. There are a ton of other things that bug me.) is the term “fashionista,” as in a “soldier in the fashion war,” or “one who shops for fashion strongly and mercilessly.”

We’re talking about fashion here folks, so calm down. Ever see Fashion Week in NYC? Skinny models who look like they could use a good steak strutting down the runway, eyes glazed straight ahead, wearing coats that looks like they are made out of tin foil and straw, with what appears to be a stuffed kangaroo folded into a hat on their heads.

Yeah, we need that. Speaking as a guy, finding a clean sweatshirt somewhere in the closet is fashion enough.

None of that, however, is my real problem with the term fashionista. The suffix “-ista” means “one who works in the area of or represents or participates in.” Unlike the suffix “-ist,” it has a negative connotation. It usually refers to those with a “fanatical devotion.” Though it derives from Latin, it came into general usage with the word “Sandinista” in the 1980’s.

More from Wiki:

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Spanish: Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN) is a socialist socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas in both English and Spanish.

In March 1982 the Sandinistas declared an official State of Emergency. They argued that this was a response to attacks by counter-revolutionary forces.  

Under the new “Law for the Maintenance of Order and Public Security” the “Tribunales Populares Anti-Somozistas” allowed for the indefinite holding of suspected counter-revolutionaries without trial. The State of Emergency, however, most notably affected rights and guarantees contained in the “Statute on Rights and Guarantees of Nicaraguans.  Many civil liberties were curtailed or canceled such as the freedom to organize demonstrations, the inviolability of the home, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and, the freedom to strike.

All independent news program broadcasts were suspended.

The State of Emergency was not lifted during the 1984 elections. There were many instances where rallies of opposition parties were physically broken up by Sandinsta youth or pro-Sandinista mobs.

On October 5, 1985 the Sandinistas broadened the 1982 State of Emergency and suspended many more civil rights.

Time magazine in 1983 published reports of human rights violations in an article which stated that “According to Nicaragua’s Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the regime detains several hundred people a month; about half of them are eventually released, but the rest simply disappear.”

Isn’t it cute that here in America we can take such horrible abuse of civil rights and turn it into a nice catchy phrase for T.J. Maxx?

The problem with the English language is not with the English language at all. It is with the lack of knowledge, or historical background, of the average person. When a society gets to the point that mass suicide and “disappearances” become fodder for television commercials for cheap blouses, something is very wrong.

I’m doing all I can. I haven’t used the term “hyperizin’ ill-dunkification!” since February first.

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