Getting Impatient & Fidgety Now

The fascination with Calypso continues.  One woman came in this week and asked what breed she was, and when I said a Bengal she said OMG, you mean you’re allowed to own tigers in Australia?  No, I said, she’s a domestic cat.  But she looks like a little tiger, she said, are you sure?   I promised her I was sure that Calypso is actually a moggy and not a man-eater in the making (although you never know …).  And anyway, she clearly looks like a little leopard rather than a tiger.

She continues to terrorise the entire household, with all of us – humans and bigger moggies – covered in itsy-bitsy kitten-claw-sized scratches and I have yet another kitten-tooth-sized hole in my finger where she tried to accept a cat-lolly from me in the midst of a frenzied play session, and missed the lolly as she dashed past but got my finger.  As Doug says, she is 2kg of Bloody Maniac.

Our good news of the week is that the freight company called and said our shipment is definitely on track for a 6 December arrival into Brisbane.  Hurrah!  This year we should have our new stock well before Christmas. 

But meanwhile we wait.  And get impatient.  And squabble over TV shows.  What is wrong with Inspector Rex, I ask you?  According to Doug the show is just about some stoopid mutt doing improbable things, to the amazement of it’s stoopider human companions, and what’s more it’s in German which is even worse because then you have to concentrate while watching it.  And that just goes to show how little Douglas knows.  Inspector Rex is actually a Wonder Mutt, a Master Mind Mutt, an absolute Paragon of Muttdom.  And if only his handlers knew enough to say Schnell! Befestigen Sie die Eurozonen krise, Jungen (Quick!  Fix the Eurozone crisis, Boy) then the world would be a better place.  That’s how good Inspector Rex is.

By contrast, what a bore is Ice Road Truckers?  This is what I was forced to sit through instead.  And I swear the narrator on that show moonlights as a John Wayne impersonator.  If only he had said Howdy,Pilgrim, I could have been absolutely sure.  But he did mention that the trucks were going to Dead Horse (a classic western name) and he even said at one point that the trucks were locked and loaded (and how is that relevant to anything but guns?).  We’re talking the John Wayne of the cowboy movies, where his slow-but-every-word-correctly-enunciated diction seemed somehow appropriate, not the John Wayne of the Green Berets, where his slow-but-every-word-correctly-enunciated diction was just silly in emergency military situations.  His whole crew would be dead before he could finish warning them.  Plus he was waaay too old to be a Green Beret on field operations in any case.

But I digress.  Yes the Ice Road is indeed made of ice, and I for one would have to be paid an awful lot of money to drive on it.  Bits of this road are just Arctic Ice, with nothing but Arctic Ocean under it.  Personally, I like a bit of dirt under my roads.  But other than that, the show is a big yawn.  The trucks go up the road, the trucks go back down the road.  Except for Virgil (or whatever his name was, but a good cowboy western name would be Virgil).  Virgil was the only entertainment on the show because Virgil, while reaching for an unidentified item on his dashboard, drove his giant truck off the road and into a ditch.  A big icy ditch.  And he wasn’t hurt, so you were free to mock at his poor driving skills.

So then the question became:  What was Virgil reaching for?  This was conveniently skipped over by John Wayne, in his slow-but-every-word-correctly-enunciated diction.  But it was the only thing on the show worth paying attention to.  Why wouldn’t they mention what Virgil was reaching for?  Why the conspiracy of silence?  What could be so terrible/embarrassing/illegal that Virgil invoked his You Can’t Blab clause with the show’s producers?  Now I shall have to die wondering.  And yet, in keeping with the western theme created by the John Wayne impersonator/narrator, I like to think that the true story is that Virgil had already reached for the chewing tobaccy on his dashboard, and crashed off the road when he went to spit it out the window, only to realise that the window was shut because it’s dang cold out there on the Ice Road.  Now that would be stoopid.  You wouldn’t catch Inspector Rex doing anything of the sort.