Here is a list of animals I wish I could have as pets.

1 - Llama
    Llamas have the prettiest eyes of any quadruped, bar-none. No one can deny this. Plus they have lips like fingers and therefore can play the banjo if properly trained and so inclined.
    Lastly, their poop is a fairly inoffensive collection of pebbles–much like rabbit droppings–and they naturally attempt to poop in the same spot each time, making for easy clean-up.
    I could keep him in my back yard. Whenever I feel blue, I could go stare into his languid eyes and slowly draw my grandmother’s silver, filigreed brush through his luxurious hair.

2 - Goat
    Goats have sideways pupils, are surefooted, are not picky eaters, and are usually very friendly if raised from a kid. They sound like Fran Dresher, which makes me think of Spinal Tap whenever I feed one of them; this is a happy memory for me and one which I can only reproduce by remaining in close proximity to a goat.
    I don’t like sheep, however. Their coats are messy to deal with and they attract cartoon wolves.
    A goat could live in my garage, and I’d feed him only the best kitchen waste in return for his undying love and gratuitous bleating.

3 - Bat
    I don’t want a vampire foxbat. I want one of the little, cute kind of bats we get in Michigan. Bug eating fellows what can comfortably fit in a lady’s brassier, I would keep mine in my car. His glove-compartment guano could provide me with the saltpeter I so desperately need as well as a bug-free car interior. Someone once told me that bats all turn left as they leave the cave; in my mind this makes them natural NASCAR fans. I won’t hold this against them*.

4 Chicken
    So stupid that they’ll be fooled into tasting the same inedible limestone pebble multiple times in a row, a chicken is nature’s Rob Schneider**. I would like to train one to fall asleep in my lap while I watch television, and to possibly steal Cheetos and corn chips from me.

* Can’t be much worse than a relatively colossal breast. Imagine a boob the size of a house. Now imagine you are strapped against it with a couple dozen square yards of premium sail-cloth. Depending on what you’re into I think it might be more traumatic than being publicly slandared as a NASCAR fan.

** Admit it, when you think of Herr Schneider your mind centers immediately on the cloaca.

    You may have heard the good news: the restaurant that popularized if not actually originated the Crap-On-The-Walls style of theme restaurant is out of business.

    You are probably at least as happy about this as I am. But, unfortunately, my plans to celebrate this happy occasion were cut short as I learned yet another reason Michigan is a depressed state:

“The trickle-down is that half of the Bennigan’s in the country close - that’s the bad news,” Hansen said. “The bad news is thousands of people lost their jobs today. The only good news is that none of them were in Michigan.”
-Tri-Cities Business Review

    So franchise owners are free to continue operating as Bennigan’s, polluting the food supply with deep fried ham sandwiches covered in jam, while all of the corporate-owned establishments are mercifully closed, increasing the nutritional quality of the American foodscape by default.

    Sucks for us, but still a good day to be an American on the whole.

    I used Google maps to locate my nearest Bennigan’s. I won’t eat there, no, but I’ll drive by and wonder where they’ll get replacement crap for their walls.

    A certain peddler of faux-Italian meal pies from my area of the globe, a merchant whose name rhymes with ‘Vittle Cheivers’, has a commercial in which the final frame asks us, the viewer, to imagine ourselves about to be devoured by a ravenous family of four.
    Forgive the quality of the picture, it was taken by my cell phone directly off the cathode ray tube that occupies the viewing shrine in my home.
    Pictures like this have a universal quality in that an observer is forced to regress to the point of birth and think back on what innocence they have lost in the intervening years.
    This nuclear family, salivating at the prospect of consuming our be-pepperonied and cheese-riddled bodies, is as close to an analogue of your hospital delivery staff as any you’ll encounter in Western culture. Only, in a delivery room you would be looking out from the womb towards a panoply of nurses and obstetric doctors instead of gazing helplessly from a cardboard box next to a landfill-bound jalapeno pepper. …either way there would likely be much drooling and licking of chops from the principals involved in the endeavor.

    So it is that on this, my 36th birthday, I find myself pulling this picture from my collection and, with a single tear running down my scrubby cheeks, I slowly caress my lcd panel. How I long for those simpler days when the youngest child would seek to pick my mushrooms off while his sister burns her chin on my scalding hot mozzarella. I get this way every June 7th.

    Happy birthday to SafeTinspector (that’s me). buon appetito!

    Correct me if I’m wrong, friends, but I’m pretty sure popcorn wouldn’t work if it weren’t whole-grain.

    Also, they felt it necessary to footnote the fact that the 0% Trans-Fat is only on a per-serving basis. Meaning that, perhaps, enough servings of 0% may equal some other percentage than zero, a mathematical limb I’m not willing to climb on. It won’t hold my weight on account of all the hot buttered popcorn I’ve ingested.

    The people designing this box, do you think they intended the packaging to be anything less than ironic?

    Perhaps they honestly thought a selling point of microwavable popcorn is the fact that the popcorn is still structurally sound.
    And trans-fat free as well! But considering the bucket of butter-flavored grease the popcorn is packed in I think the trans-fat free brag is as meaningful as a bottle of vodka proudly proclaiming itself free of antifreeze.

    After arcane shenanigans involving mysql command line interface (I tricked WordPress into thinking my database was vintage 2.1.x and then let it re-run the upgrade) I have re-enabled the categories within SafeTinspector. And while this allows me to specify categories once again, it did not restore them. They are all lost.

    But now I fear that these nuggets of precious data, with entries such as “suck”, “foot”, “stench” and “tax accountancy”, will be lost to time and posterity alike. If you or any of your friends or relatives have unexpected pain, stiffening of the joints and/or arteries or come upon piles of unexplained moneys or excrement please let me know.

    I hope we all survive.

The object shown above is a horrible cookie.