"Bad Habits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

Fish and Green Cheese

Tropical fish are not much better. My wife and I went through a fish period, during which we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tanks and pumps and filters and chemicals and special plants and special rocks and special food. We had enough tropical-fish technology to land a tropical fish on the moon. What we could not do was keep any given tropical fish alive for longer than a week. Just as soon as we’d pop one in the tank, it would develop Fin Rot. Medical science has developed no cure for Fin Rot, so our fish would languish around among the fish technology, rotting. We were constantly buying replacement fish. Whenever one of us would leave the house, the other would say: “Don’t forget to pick up several tropical fish.” I have no actual proof, but I strongly suspect that these fish were manufactured in Chicago.

The most popular pets are dogs and cats. Now when I say “dogs,” I’m talking about dogs, which are large, bounding, salivating animals, usually with bad breath. I am not talking about those little squeaky things you can hold on your lap and carry around. Zoologically speaking, these are not dogs at all; they are members of the pillow family.

Anyway, dogs make good pets because they are very loyal (NOTE: When I say “loyal,” I mean “stupid.”) I once wrote a column in which I said dogs are stupid, and I got a lot of nasty mail from people who insisted, often with misspelled words, that dogs are intelligent. Perhaps from their point of view dogs are intelligent, but I don’t want to get into that here. I’ll just stick with “loyal.”)

Yes indeed, dogs are loyal. Here is an example of how loyal dogs are: When two dogs meet, they will spend the better part of a day sniffing each other’s private parts and going to the bathroom on any object more than one inch high. Talk about loyalty.

Cats are less loyal than dogs, but more independent. (This is code. It means: “Cats are smarter than dogs, but they hate people.”) Many people love cats. From time to time, newspapers print stories about some elderly widow who died and left her entire estate, valued at $320,000, to her cat, Fluffikins. Cats read these stories, too, and are always plotting to get named as beneficiaries in their owners’ wills. Did you ever wonder where your cat goes when it wanders off for several hours? It meets with other cats in estate-planning seminars. I just thought you should know.