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Thursday 23 June 2011

I'll Clean The Cat's Bum Till The Cows Come Home

Although it may look as though I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, I haven’t really, I just haven't been able to decide what to write about.
I originally wrote a piece last week about secret ALP plans to establish a ‘weather’ slush fund once the carbon tax is introduced.
The tax will of course provide a mechanism by which Government’s can control the climate, which for those non-scientifically minded among us also includes what climate scientists sometimes refer to as ‘weather’.
It is balmy ‘weather’ that the Government is planning to hoard in a slush fund to be used for pork barrelling marginal electorates before the next Federal election.

Anyway, I was all set to post that expose, but then I realised that it was International Mens Health Week and I should do my civic duty to help promote that worthy initiative.
The problem was that I don’t think it is a worthy initiative at all, given it probably has the same impact as the other few hundred officially sanctioned ‘weeks’ on the calendar ie; none.
There are so many of these ‘weeks’ around these days that they all sort of blend into the background noise.
(Interestingly, this is national Sterilize Your Pet month. There is a nagging thought that there is some sort of ephemeral connection between Mens Health Week and Castrate Your Best Friend Month, but what it is I can’t quite put my finger on.)
My feeling is that any marketing firm worth its salt would forget about trying to flog a ‘week’ – especially when the focus is mens health, I mean, who cares – and piggy-back off an established event.
“Tired of getting dad socks and jocks? Why not get him a prostate examination for Father’s Day? A finger up the date will make your dad your mate!”

On balance, there was probably justification to take a stroll down that road, but then I was distracted by what was going on in Federal politics, what with Julia Gillard putting Tony Abbott into a “high dungeon” in response to the senate and house of reps voting to condemn the Government’s tag-and-release asylum seeker deal with Malaysia.
The irony in banning live cattle exports to Indonesia, while simultaneously insisting that live asylum seeker exports to Malaysia was a winner would have been lost on nobody but ALP tactical genius Bruce Hawker, Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen. 

(Is it just me or does anybody else, watching this Government at work, get the eerie feeling that they are watching a Danny Kaye movie in which the bumbling idiot is mistaken for the super spy or the real king?
The vessel with the pestle …or whatever it was. The only problem is they have got the casting all wrong. Wayne Swan should be playing the lead of bumbling idiot – shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.
Its either a Danny Kaye movie or the Government is based on a script in which the entire company leadership is wiped out at a stroke and the cleaner, the office boy and the slightly mentally deficient lift-operator, hatch a plot to impersonate the real leaders and run the company.
The only jarring note in the scenario is Bruce Hawker; what the hell is Senator Palpatine doing in a Danny Kaye movie? Still, you’ve got to hand it to Bruce – for a Sith Lord to maintain his disguise for so long is a great effort.)
Anyway, Gillard says the 800 lucky punters shipped off to Malaysia will have identity tags which will shield them from oppression, but will they be micro-chipped in case they get lost?

Which question finally brings me to the topic of pets. (Actually, it doesn’t, but as segue’s go it is probably as good as it gets).
It wasn’t really wondering what Gillard would look like in that jester’s outfit, but a trip to a corporate box to watch Hawthorn play the Gold Coast Suns on Saturday which led me to this point.
There are certain social mores associated with being a guest in a corporate box; you don’t molest the waitresses, you don’t chase a dozen salmon sandwiches with another dozen free Crownies then open a window to spew the lot over the punters in the cheap seats and when a senior corporate type politely asks what you did on Friday night you don’t say: “I cleaned my cat’s bum”.
For a start this could be misconstrued as a confession to perverted sexual proclivities best left on the psychiatrist’s couch or defence lawyer’s interview room.
At best it will probably generate in your interlocutor a fixed smile, a polite nod and a mental note to self to not only delete this idiot from the invitation list but to instigate an immediate review of the true value of doing business with his company.

The problem is, I WAS cleaning my cat’s bum on Friday night.
And why was I doing this, you may ask?
Because he is too lazy to do it himself was part of the answer. The others are that he suffers from an extreme form of hirsutism which means that shit sticks to his fur like, well, shit to fur and the thought of licking it off was probably a bridge to far.
Everybody knows that shit stinks, but cat crap is in a special category of olfactory offence. Little wonder they dig a hole to bury the stuff.
It is just one of the joys of being a dedicated pet owner. Along with regularly cleaning the dog’s bum, carrying the other dog up to bed every night - because he keeps injuring himself falling UP the stairs – cleaning up another cat’s fur ball-induced projectile vomit and paying a king’s ransom in vet bills to keep DeathWish, our third moggy, alive.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware that life could be infinitely worse, after all we could have children. If given a choice between being shackled to a gaggle of parasitic ankle-biters – who will be brainwashed by a succession of card-carrying socialists disguised as teachers - holding me to ransom for the rest of my life until they can strong-arm me into an aged care home or spending the odd Friday night wiping the cat’s arse, I’ll take the shit-duty every time.

Many is the time I’ve been accused of anthropomorphic tendencies, but I’d rather be the sort of person that spends his Friday evenings cleaning his cat’s arse than the sort of person that spends his Friday nights torturing cows in an Indonesian abattoir.
Which is all I really wanted, now that I think about it, to say in the first place