As Seen On TV! (Or how to earn more beer money)

Bum-crack sighting of the day: a woman bending over to bag her dog’s rectal offering (five blocks distant from Walmart).

This is an excusable sighting—even admirable in a community where many dog walkers deem dog-crap disposal optional. Take a walk anywhere blackberry bushes happen to grow and you’ll see the prickles festooned with sunken-looking plastic bags. It seems people take the trouble to bag the excrement but can’t stand the thought of holding the warm bags for one minute, and instead hurl them into the trees.

My mum uses poo-bag sightings to illustrate to the girls the responsibilities a pet entails. Both kids are desperate for a dog and swear they’ll assume full responsibility for anything it pushes out of its bowel, but…well. My mum wasn’t born yesterday.

My mum has owned and neglected enough plants and animals to know how good intentions work. Her childhood cat? Tolerated being carried around by the tail for only so long and then took off forever. Her gerbils? Bred rampantly until there were 27 of them inside one cage, at which point she sold some to a pet store, which promptly fed them to a snake. Her oxalis plant? Begging for water most days. My mother recognizes herself as a person who shouldn’t—really mustn’t—have a pet. She barely has the capacity to keep her own offspring fed and bathed, never mind an animal that squeezes steaming turds out onto the sidewalk and trots onward.

But for all those dog owners who have taken responsibility for their pets’ defecatory products: Must you launch the bags into the trees? Does it really come down to a choice between leaving dog feces on the ground and adorning the trees with them?

Maybe someone needs to invent a better dogshit-handling system. Seriously, the person who brings that item to market could get rich off Langley alone. I like to think the people who live here would rather not decorate the trees and bushes with caca, and that if a system were devised to minimize their squishy encounters with warm copros, they would pony up the $20 or whatever the price As Seen On TV is.

So come on, inventors. Let’s think of something to make our neighborhood less excrementitious.

Living life at 11

My Fellow Inebriates,

Everyone at my dad’s work recently took a psych test to define their top 5 leadership strengths. I know he won’t mind if I share his private results.

  1. LEARNER. People like my dad enjoy studying things even more than they like knowing things or being recognized for knowing things. They simply like digging through information. This is why it takes my dad so long to buy a bottle of wine.
  2. STRATEGIC. People like my dad are good at seeing through clutter. This is excellent, because we have a lot. We were actually on the short list for a Canadian reality TV show called Consumed, but my mum took mercy on my dad and didn’t send the show’s scout our very worst pictures of clutter, which meant they turned to other, apparently messier people. I think the show missed out on some pretty good reality TV subjects. My parents talk openly to bears, and I would have made sure to get in on the filming. My parents would have looked ridiculous. But as far as traits go, being STRATEGIC is useful. It means my dad can tolerate shopping in places like Winners, which my mum can’t. And he doesn’t mind having a ton of empties around, which means I have somewhere to curl up when I feel sad.
  3. ANALYTICAL. People like my dad seek objective reality and tend to challenge unfounded assertions. They are a real killjoy at Charismatic Renewal meetings, although they don’t mind funerals if there’s some booze around. They have to be really tactful at work or they’ll end up alienating people by constantly demanding proof of concept. And again, it makes them really slow in the liquor store.
  4. ACHIEVER. Achievers feel as though every day starts at zero. Funny enough, so do alcoholic bears.
  5. SELF-ASSURANCE. According to my dad’s confidential results, this is better than self-confidence. It means he doesn’t just exhibit confidence; he carries it inside. This is a quality that alcoholic bears do not possess. If I had self-assurance I bet I could find my package. But without self-assurance, I keep letting people mock me into believing it’s not there to find.

I wanted to do the same personality test my dad did for work, but would you believe it? It was a special test that could be done only once with a special code from a book my dad had to read first. What a racket! Somebody’s got a good money-making idea there: make a huge company buy thousands of books and force its employees into subscription-based personality testing, no doubt as a lead-up to some sort of team-building exercise orchestrated by the same people who sold the company the books. This is why I’m just an idiot bear, people. I don’t know how to think up this kind of shit.

So I did this free test instead:

Check it out! I got an 11. I always suspected I was living life at 11.

Nigel Tufnel

The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and…

Marty DiBergi

Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel

Exactly.

Marty DiBergi

Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel

Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi

I don’t know.

Nigel Tufnel

Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi

Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel

Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi

Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel

[pause] These go to eleven.

—This is Spinal Tap

ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE—Welcome in our fridge (although apparently a lot of things are)

My Fellow Inebriates,

If you want a beer in our house, you have to reach past a sample jar of urine in the fridge. It doesn’t need to be there, but a certain four-year-old is so pleased with herself for having produced it that no one dares remove it.

If my parents think this is a good way to keep bears away, they are wrong. To mark the fridge as territory, Miss V would have to let loose her number one on the whole appliance, not place a neatly sealed jar beside the margarine. Just saying, parents.

Who am I kidding? I don’t have any thumbs. I’m beholden to my parents. I get to sample beer when they do. Sigh.

Both kids are still sick, cuddled together under a blanket with yours truly trembling beside, hoping Gravol can thwart a vomit splattering.

On the upside, it did make for an easy bedtime last night, which left us bears and my parents free to catch up on Fringe, accompanied by a beer: ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE. My dad bought a few onesies this week, including Friday’s disastrous FRÜLI, in a bid to get out of our beer comfort zone and into some experimental territory. DEAD GUY ALE promised to be more of a beer than FRÜLI, and it certainly was.

We used the Reidel stemless glasses to get a good look at it. Slightly hazy amber, DEAD GUY ALE displays white foam and good lacing. The aroma is roasty, herbal, and slightly citrus with some yeastiness—very promising. The flavor jibes nicely: brisk and citrus with just enough carbonation; this ale suggests a mineral spring, flowers, possibly trying on dresses. The mouthfeel is reasonably substantial, even a little sticky. Hoppy bitterness punches through each sip, balancing nicely with the malt but perhaps not delivering the deeper caramel tones we generally favor at LBHQ.

There’s quite a lot going on in DEAD GUY ALE—a little too much for my mother, whose bandwidth of beer preferences is not terribly wide. She passed her glass over to my dad, who accepted it happily. For me it was like a game of keepaway—they didn’t pour me my own glass, peeps, so I had to do some ducking and weaving to get a share.

DEAD GUY ALE is interesting stuff. A little IPA, a little Bock—a 6.5% party in a 650mL bottle. Maybe not something we’d get again, but I’d certainly rather see it in the fridge than a urine sample.