Getting a Pet? Get Creative!

Zimbabweans might be a very creative people but when it comes to the issue of choosing pets, the creativity grinds to a halt and makes a quick getaway out the window. I mean seriously, just how many households have anything else other than the same light brown mangy (whatever species it’s called) kind of dog in their yard?

I am not an animal expert, but I sure as hell know there are a whole lot more options out there that can easily replace the darn dog. I have two suggestions:

A personal favorite is the cat. This might not go down well with lot of Zimbos who choose to associate the cat with the dark elements of the world. A cat, especially when black, screams ‘witchcraft!’ To me though, a cat screams ‘Supercool!’

The essence of cool

I love this guy for a number of reasons. First of all, you do not own a cat: he owns you. Now this is not as bad as it sounds: it simply means that you will need him more than he will need you. He owns the house: weaving through the rooms, sleeping on the sofa, chilling on the roof. He can sleep all day and stay out late.

This dude pretty much takes care of himself.You are expected to feed him, but if you don’t, he survives anyway. He's also smart enough to maintain a strict routine on personal hygiene (something even some humans cant manage to do).  Oh, he also catches mice, and his nine lives can come in handy when you don’t want to worry about any living creature falling off the roof or something.

Contrast this coolness with the dog. The dog is like one big baby. He constantly wants your attention even when you really want to just chill out and be left alone. He even makes you feel guilty for going out the yard to throw out the trash when you leave him inside. Ignore him, and he sulks. He spends a good part of the day running around, or wanting to run around, and chasing around his own tail. I mean, how cool can you be if you find entertainment in sticking your head out the window of a moving car, sticking out your tongue out, and proceeding to grin sheepishly?

The second animal is the cow. I’m not joking, and don’t look at me with that strange questioning stare until I argue my case. First of all, I am not the only one who thinks this a great idea. Let me just give you three fans for this viewpoint:-

Bill Bryson: "To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect."

The Hindus: Get into India and you will see 30% of the world’s cows in this place. These guys exchange cows as gifts, build bull shrines and generally love to have them around. In fact, there are more cows in India than America has dogs and cats combined. The only problem is that the Hindus leave out the killing and eating part, which I consider to be the most fun part of keeping a cow.

Isn't she just cute?

The Maasai Tribe: These guys are from somewhere in East Africa. They love cows so much that their tradition has a simple rule that neatly takes care of any cow procurement complexities – ‘All Cows on Earth Belong to the Maasai Tribe as God Given Property.’ Now that’s cow obsession!

If all these guys think the cow can be a great pet, well, why not us? Of course you will need a shovel to deal with all the dung on your verandah, flower bed and lawn. But let it not deter you, because all that dung can be used as bio fuel such that you never have to worry about ZESA woes again. Perfect.

So guys, give the poor light brown mangy (whatever species it’s called) dog a break and try out the alternatives. Well, you don’t necessarily have to take my suggestions (though I consider them to be pretty good and creative), you can try out your own as long as you dont resort to the poor brown mutt.

What You Should Really Be Reading These Days

No, not politics. Its too depressing, and nothing ever seems to change in that arena. Not scientific breakthroughs either, everything's always changing. In a few years time, there is going to be scientific  breakthroughs to disprove today's scientific breakthroughs.

You should be reading humour instead. There are certain authors who always lift me up no matter how rainy the day gets. This article has two of them.

I can only give you a few quotes, otherwise I'd get sued.

Douglas Adams

Now this guy was just plain nuts. He died in 2001, and the normal thing the family should have done was donate the whole of his grey mass to scientists. They probably didn’t (which is just as well, I guess, because they probably wouldn’t have figured out what made him tick anyway). My favourite Douglas Adams quotes:

"I'm so great even I get tongue-tied talking to myself."
~

"I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis."

~

Marvin, my favourite character in some of Douglas Adams books

"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
~

"The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." 

~

"Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys outside and they want to discuss this script for 'Hamlet' they've worked out." 

~

"His mouth started to speak, but his brain decided it hadn't got anything to say yet and shut it again. His brain then started to contend with the problem of what his eyes told it they were looking at, but in doing so relinquished control of the mouth which promptly fell open again. Once more gathering up the jaw, his brain lost control of his left hand which then wandered around in an aimless fashion. For a second or so the brain tried to catch the left hand without letting go of the mouth and simultaneously tried to think about what was buried in the ice, which is probably why the legs went and Arthur dropped restfully to the ground." 

~

"It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs." 

~

"He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." 

~

"Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off." 

~

"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." 

~

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." 

~

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"

Bill Bryson

My first encounter with this guy was a book called Mother Tongue. It talked about the history of the English language and some other crazy stuff about the English language, and it was funny. I don't think any else can talk about the history of the English language and some other stuff about English and still be funny. Excerpts from his numerous works:-

"Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding." 

~

"To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect." 

~

"I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it." 

~

"There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone cacll from the frankly interesting." 

~

"If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like." 

~

"In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: ‘This Door Is Locked for No Reason’." 

~

"At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English."

~

"in my day the principal concerns of university students were sex,smoking dope,rioting and learning.Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available."

I had to split this post into two articles: being well aware of how short the attention span of the internet surfer really is. For the other two authors who really know how to tickle my funnybone, come along with me to What You Should Really Be Reading These Days (Part 2).