Performance Booster

Your unknown pleas have been answered, yes, they now make sport nutrition bars… for dogs.  And if that’s not bad enough (hint, it definitely is), they also make two formulations, you know, for before exercise and then after to refuel.  

Remember, these are FOR DOGS.  Animals that are often known to eat dead animals, inedible objects, and even their own shit.  Just so we're all operating under the same assumptions.  

I would try to make fun of this, but really, it's hard to make this seem more absurd than the product's website does already:

http://www.proplan.com/supplement-dog-food/sport-adult-refuel-bar/
http://www.proplan.com/supplement-dog-food/sport-adult-prime-bar/

But my favorite part is the product reviews, especially from "Liz". For the recovery bar, she writes:

one of my dogs plays for a hour with ball its with panting and can cool down faster.

And for the pre-activity bar, she expounds:

my dog love and buy it again for the dogs. one of my dogs can play ball for hour.

No, I know I should mock someone's grammar, especially as my own little corner of the internets is no doubt rife with errors, but when your lack of understanding of simple sentence structure makes your writing border on incomprehensible it becomes less of a grammar nazi issue and more a matter of not using a discernible language. 

Let's start with the first review, shall we?  The sentence starts off reasonably enough, though the lack of capitalization is a personal pet peeve, I do recognize in these times of mobile devices I need to let that go.  I'll even gloss over the "a hour" error, as maybe they pronounce it with a hard H sound in Liz's dialect.  But then we come to the real train wreck of this review: "with ball its with panting".  Yes, we're all dumber for having read that.  Thanks Liz.  Then, in a stunning finish, Liz makes us question what, exactly, she gave her dog and how, precisely, she discovered this dry, room temperature bar helped it "cool down faster".  I am envisioning a very rigorous testing protocol with multiple studies to isolate for the many variables in order to come to this stunning conclusion.  That or Liz is just full of shit.  I'll leave that conclusion to you.

Moving onto her second review, we're immediately confronted with the idea that Liz's dog buys these again for the dogs.  Stunning!  I mean, these bars are obviously imparting some astounding mental acuity to these canines.  I think Purina should be touting these benefits, even over the "taste dogs love".  After this astounding revelation, Liz kind of mails in the rest of the review, ending with a fizzle rather than a bang.  So one of your dogs "can play ball for hour" (notice Liz's solution here to the whole a/an conundrum, just cut the article out altogether), whoop-de-fucking-doo Liz.  Hmmm, in reading this together I am wondering if Liz understands there are timeframes other than a(n) hour.  I would like to think so, but I have my doubts.  

But my biggest issue is not with the reviews (not even Liz) but with Purina itself.  Is anyone else troubled by the naming convention of these bars - "Sport Adult Prime/Refuel Bar" as it leaves open the possibility of non-sport (relax, revive, de-stress, immunity boost) and non-adult (adolescent, puppy, newborn, elderly) bar offerings?  Personally, it makes me quite uneasy.  Though if they come out with a "Revive Puppy Immunity Booster Bar" I expect some sort of royalty.  I think a box of bars would be fair, god knows I could use some immunity boosting.  

Happy Easter

Well, the Easter Bunny visited Kiki in the night, so we've got that part of Easter down.  The whole religious/Jesus/God side of it... not so much.  

See, my dear, long-suffering wife & editor came from a family with a Buddhist mother and a Protestant father, so she viewed Christianity as the thing that made you go somewhere with Dad every Sunday morning vs. Buddhism which allowed her mother to stay home alone and have some peace & quiet.  

I came from a father who grew up Catholic in Europe, experiencing religion in cathedrals that had seen generations come & go, kingdoms rise & fall, ideologies flourish & die, and then he came to the United States where we have a church that  is almost 12 years old!!!!!  Needless to say, he didn't find religious rapture in institutions that had yet to hit puberty.  My mother was raised Southern Baptist, with a central theme of people are sinners, women are sinners, you, Jean-Clare, are a sinner.  Thankfully she recognized that this form of religion is less an aid in life and more of a bully, and distanced herself from it and organized religion in general.  

Thus Kiki is, I guess, being raised without religion.  I won't say atheist, as that indicates an adherence to a belief system almost as strong as most religions.  It's a sort of sciency/loosely buddhist framework, informed at times with lessons from George Carlin and She-Ra.  

Writing that out makes me realize how batshit crazy it sounds... but then that's probably the indication of a good religion, isn't it?  Do you think the guys writing "How blessed will be the one who seizes your young children and pulverizes them against the cliff" (Psalm 137:9) were thinking how logical that was?  Well, dear reader, count yourself lucky, you may have just witnessed the genesis of a new religion!  You can call yourself a disciple if you want.  Or Pope, for that matter, I don't really give a fuck.  And we just found our central tenet! 

My name is...

In our parenting efforts we have tried to instill a sense of independence, strength, and creativity in our daughter.  4 years into this, I'm starting to think that may have been a bad idea.  We now have a daughter who prefers to be called "Aduna" over her given name of Akira (a.k.a. Kiki).  Though, to be fair, it could be spelled Adoona.  Or, most accurately, when asked she informed me that it's spelled "33221" so what the hell do I know?  

She has also informed us of our future pet choices.  It all begins when our current dogs die, all three of them, which according to her is going to be rather soon (two are ancient and the third, well, let's just say I hope Kiki's being silly and not foreshadowing a serial killer future).    

First we'll be getting a cat.  Then a hamster.  Then it starts getting more unusual.  Next we'll have an iguana.  Then we're getting a parrot.  At some point she also wants a "trained" dog, because ours are fucking uncontrollable and annoying as hell.  That's the one choice I'm fully behind, although when she says trained, she is referring to a seeing eye dog we met at dinner one night, whereupon she decided she wanted one too, because it would help her "do the dishes, clean up my toys, and cook dinner", so I think she should probably be prepared to be disappointed.  

I did get her to agree that we have to wait for each pet to die before we get the next (because I'm the parent so I'm in charge here.  Okay, I get a vote.  Granted, she gets 5 votes to my one, but I worked hard for my one vote).  

But joke's on her, because given her current age and the expected lifespans of our various pet, she'll be about 30 when she gets her iguana and, depending on how well she cares for it, could be well into her forties when she gets her parrot.  

At that point I'll be nearing 80, so assuming I even still have my mental facilities and am not just entertaining myself by watching the drool puddling in my lap, I will be old and crochety enough that I can refuse to help watch her parrot.  

Because parrots, despite what my daughter and wife may say, are horrible fucking pets.  If I want to have a flying buzzsaw, well, I'd go to Amazon and buy such a thing.  I have free time (plus Prime!) so would have it quickly.  But at least my drone/chainsaw hybrid would be relatively short lived, surely meeting it's demise against a ceiling fan within a matter of minutes, while a parrot lives forever.  Fine, they may not live forever, but so far no one has kept one for it's entire life, either getting rid of the damn thing or being found dead with little beak shaped pieces missing from their face, so no one knows the lifespan of a parrot kept in captivity.

But, given that my daughter (a.k.a. 33221) is also in charge of naming the animals (strangely, I lost that vote 5 to 1), I am curious just to see what the hell this procession of pets is named.

The first rule...

So, the wife and I went to a Halloween party this year, dressed as Daniel-san and Cobra-Kai from the karate kid.  While there, and perhaps also inebriated, I had the following discussion with a friend:

Friend: "Sweet costumes!  I always wanted to take karate as a kid."

Me: "Totally, me too."  (Apparently, when drunk I become a laid back surfer dude from the 80's)

Friend: "Ha, we should take a karate class."

Me: "Totally.  Tubular!"  (Okay, I may not be remembering the conversation verbatim)

Anyway, the next day I sobered up and forgot about it.  However, being that my friend has both 1) a better memory and 2) a better ability to follow through on ideas, I discovered an email awaiting me on Monday with a list of karate studios in town.  Turns out one of the places, and the one he was leaning towards, is about 1 mile from my house.  Figuring if I backed out now my friend would go on to become the next Bruce Lee while I would muddle through life, struggling to become the next fat, old Stephen Seagal.  I knew I couldn't back out now.  

So, I found myself talking with Master Lee (or Jet, or Chan, or something).  Is that racist?  Yes, it is, but since my wife is half Japanese, it is impossible for me to be racist.  Now you may disagree, but it's a fact, just ask the internet.  

Anyway, the master informed us that by signing up for three years of classes with him we would be black belts. This seemed fishy to me, because how did he know I was not some Karate prodigy who would fly through the rainbow of belts in two months time? Conversely, how did he know if I lacked the coordination to even dress myself and in three years I could only hope to master tying my white belt around my gi so I did not expose myself during warm up stretches? But I settled myself, figuring he was just confident in his extraordinary abilities as a sensei and took him up on his offer to watch the adult class starting in a few minutes.

Watching the disciples file in, I was ready to be amazed.

The fat guy is a red belt? Awesome! I've never seen a 300+ pound man pull off a spinning reverse flying head kick.

The teeny little housewife is a black belt? I can't wait to see her execute the five finger death punch!

So, to be fair most of my knowledge of the martial arts come from the Karate Kid franchise and Mortal Kombat video games (I was a bit surprised by all the flammable materials in the gym, but I guess they save the fireballs for outdoor training sessions).  However, even with lower expectations I was not prepared for the total and utter shit show that was to come. The big fat guy? Literally couldn't get his foot above knee level when he kicked. The housewife had to hop five times to complete a roundhouse kick. I watched a guy practice with a Bo and hit himself in the leg four times. And through it all, the master made his rounds, "teaching" and "guiding" this helpless mess of a class.

As I watched this collection of unskilled middle aged schlubs wheeze and pant their way through a succession of simple and poorly executed exercises, I realized that this master was only a master of lies, rewarding those who simply paid their money and served their time with a progression of belts, the adult version of the "Participation" purple ribbon. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, in a time when every kid is a "winner" it is only natural that their parents would come to expect the same thing for themselves. Pathetic.

So I signed up for the three year course. You can just start referring to me as "master" now, you know, to get used to the terminology. "Ninja" and "super badass kick master fu" are also acceptable.