I was giving the Beetle–not just a car, and not even just a Volkswagen, but a car-show winner that I’ve called "my pride and toy"–the usual weekly inspection in the garage when I discovered, to my speechless horror, that a large strip of vinyl was missing from the right running board. Around the tattered edges were what looked like sharp tooth marks. Next to the parked car, within certain chewing distance, was a sausage-shaped, black-and-brown mutt named Curly.
I’m not a dog person, although everyone else in this household is. Dogs to me are like little boys–noisy, frisky, and smelly. And unlike boys, dogs bite. I discovered this to my great surprise–the kind of wide-eyed astonishment that precedes the flood of tears–at the age of 10, when I was naïve enough to believe in bromides such as "Barking dogs don’t bite." (My neighbor’s nursing mongrel most certainly did; she’d never heard of the saying.)
I never had a dog as a child; my only pets consisted of guinea pigs and white mice, who promptly consumed each other. In my 20s we had a tiny turtle named Boris, who waddled off one fine day into the cracks of the metropolis and has probably since prospered into the Godzilla of the sewers–that is, if a dog didn’t recognize him for a crunchy snack sometime in 1976.
I prefer the company of cats–of one cat, specifically: my marmalade tabby Chippy, whom I’ve given carte blanche to devour and destroy anything he wants in the house (except, implore the womenfolk, their tortoise Persian Charlie, whom Chippy has taken to terrorizing as a means of dealing with feline boredom).
Chippy’s actually more charming than I make him out to be. The only non-living things he willfully savages are two rattan bookshelves he’s designated to be his scratching posts. He’s the only cat I know who likes nibbling on corncobs; the mere aroma of corn drives him berserk, and I’ve taken to leaving him a few kernels on the cob to munch on.
Come to think of it, there’s an awful lot of munching going on in this house and in this universe. I guess my Beetle never stood a chance beside that tethered pooch.
A site called The Hearing Center had this in its Q&A:
"Q: My dog ate my hearing aid. Has this happened to anyone else?
"A: It happens all the time. Dogs seem to like the waxy taste of hearing aids and delight in chewing on them. We have had patients who have had cats play with the hearing aids, batting them around and chewing on them. Recently we fixed a pair of hearing aids that had been partially eaten by a mouse! The mouse had chewed the battery doors off and had eaten part of the case. The message here is to keep your hearing aids away from animals when you take them off for the night. Most hearing aids come with comprehensive warranties that cover everything, even damage by pets and loss, so your audiologist probably will just smile and get you a new one (assuming you have kept your warranty in force)."
A man named Jeff at dataflight.com posted one of the Web’s most enduring stories (and this is no urban legend, folks–you can check out the pictures for yourselves):
"Yes, it is true, my Weimaraner ate my new Pilot Professional [handheld computer]. I left the house for only a minute. She went into the bedroom, nabbed the Pilot off the nightstand, walked back to her lair, and had lunch. There were only scraps left of the leather case.
"She was very contrite when I came back home, but I couldn’t figure out why until later that evening. I was looking for the Pilot when I suddenly remembered her guilty looks earlier in the day. I found the Pilot, or what was left of it, in her doggy bed.
"I have to give it to USR [manufacturers of the Pilot]. Her teeth punctured the back of the case, and she broke the glass screen, but she didn’t puncture or tear the plastic that covers the screen, so no glass got out.
"Maybe the picture would make good desktop wallpaper. It’s not much good for anything else. We’ve changed her name from ‘Fax’ to ‘The Wicked Beast.’ Just look at her. What do you think?"
[I think that if I were a dog and you named me "Fax," I’d make lunch of your Pilot as well. Calling me "The Wicked Beast" will endanger your Mercedes-Benz.]
A student at Temple University lost something far less expensive but far more embarrassing to the dog:
"I was home from school on Christmas break last year and I had an intimate night with my girlfriend at my family’s house. After finishing, I disposed of the used condom in a tissue and threw it in the wastebasket.
Unbeknownst to me, our dog got into the wastebasket the next day, proudly walked into the living room and laid the used condom on the floor in front of my father and stepmother. It was as if he had retrieved a toy and expected them to throw it so that he could show off once more. But, instead, my father took a hard look at it and said to my stepmother, ‘Well, at least I know he’s practicing safe sex.’"
"I was intrigued by your [piece on] typography. I didn’t know you had a keen interest in graphic design. May I know your top ten favorite typefaces, both roman and sans serif? In your opinion, what do you think are the 10 typefaces that you will never go wrong, in terms of legibility, readability, elegance,and overall panache? Personally, I like Times Roman, Bookman, Helvetica, Futura, Avant Garde, and American Typewriter.
"What do you think of the psychedelic faces of the ‘60s, the posters in San Francisco announcing rock events at the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom [featuring] bands such as the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Co., Cold Blood etc.?"
Well, Auggie, many thanks for your message and your questions. I’m no expert in typography, let’s make that clear–although I’m what you might call an avid consumer and user of fonts, given the publishing jobs I get involved in. My own favorite fonts would include Garamond, New York, Book Antiqua, Times Roman, and Berkeley for serif fonts, and Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, Charcoal, and Futura for sans serif. I’m sure there are other, better-looking fonts out there–but I don’t know them and maybe I don’t need them.
One’s choice of fonts also has everything to do with the material they’re supposed to carry and the context in which they’re supposed to appear. The fonts of the 60s and the 70s–remember Arnold Bocklin and the elephant-footed letters of Peter Max?–were very much a generational statement, an expression of the exuberance (or, if you prefer, the mellowness) of the age. The letters weren’t easy to read, but instant legibility wasn’t the point; it was style and, yes, panache.
The same thing’s going on these days, with cutting-edge magazines like Wired employing splashy layouts with bright metallic colors that can actually be a pain to aging eyes like mine. I guess I’ll be sticking to Time, Newsweek, Macworld, and the occasional Harper’s or New Yorker–which is no reason for anyone else to do the same thing, if you like your fonts hot and spicy.
Another reader is asking why the Aquino Center at Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac–which I featured a couple of weeks ago–is open only in the afternoons, 2-5 p.m. Monday to Saturday. A truly world-class museum, suggested J.P. Fenix, would typically be closed Mondays for maintenance and open the rest of the week, even in the mornings. That’s certainly true of most museums I’ve visited abroad, but I’m told by people associated with the Aquino Center that they’re actually still in a "soft" trial phase while they recruit more staff members and improve on what the Center can offer its guests. It’s a large place and still very much worth visiting if you can make their current hours, but I’m sure that it’ll be more visitor-friendly soon.