More on dogs...

I was buying a bone for my dog. He gets one plastic bone, and when he finishes with that one, I buy him the next. He doesn’t really like other toys. This is a blessing—you can’t overindulge a dog like that.

The store also serves as a short-term boarding place for pets. A couple brought in their huge monster dog (looked something like this); he was scheduled to board for ONE DAY next week, and they wanted to introduce him to the environment so that he wouldn’t be traumatized when he came to spend his day there. The owner had already been in to check the place out, but now they wanted their dog to see it.

I don’t think I showed that level of concern for my girls when they were going off to school for the first time. They never got a chance to visit before hand. It was more like: “Here’s the school. Have fun. See you later.” And my dog? “Here’s the kennel, Ollie. Have fun. See you next month.” It’s not as if I’m going to ask his opinion or anything.

Informal Surveys

I asked people to call in and tell me which dog breed made for the best all-around pet. The long-awaited winner? The American Water Spaniel. I’m waiting for CNN to call. I have a few sound-bites for them to write down: if an AWS were in the White House now, we wouldn't be having all these problems! Or: a deep cocoa in color, deliciously sweet in nature, the perfect dog for a chocoholic!

Enough. The point is the study was unscientific, the sample was biased, the results tainted. But it doesn’t matter—I covered my bases by calling it an informal survey, right?

So did Ms. Stewart when she once again took in letters about which American city is the most “well-mannered,” and then announced her “informal” results. Now, I can well believe that Charleston is indeed at the top of the heap no matter whose survey you’d employ (though if I were them, I'd rethink that slogan: "Charleston--where history lives!" since it wasn't always such a polite and well-mannered history). I’ll even acknowledge that I know nothing of second-place Peoria – it may be charming in the extreme. True, a subject of ridicule in literature and song, but possibly very well-mannered. But New York and Chicago – in the top ten of polite? No way. Ms. Stewart has just given “informal surveys” a bad name.