Wimsey"s Blog: Dairy of a Manhattan Bloodhound #257

Entry #257

April 13, 2012

Hello Everyone, it’s me, Wimsey, coming to you from the always fabulous Upper West Side of Manhattan where men are handsome, women are beautiful (at least those not wearing Hound clothes) and Hounds are exceptionally annoying. Especially one giant Hound in particular. But before we go any further, I am sorry to announce that there will be no blog post next Friday owing to a schedule conflict. But I should be back and in form the following week.

Anyway, things got off to a typical start around here on my Sunday walk with my human Maria and her friend Elizabeth wanting to visit the northern part of the park and me wanting to visit the southern part (more benches with abandoned food items and more bottle-toting tourists). I won’t say who won except that it wasn’t them. It never is. And it’s been a typical week in other ways—one in which I’ve done everything from shoving my nether regions over the rail of a tree pit to poop on a bunch of daffodils that had been growing there (NB: cleaning poop off flowers is not easy) to yelling at the FIOS guy who I suspected had designs on my squeaky shark. Sadly this altercation earned me 6 hours of FIOS installation penalty time tethered to Elizabeth which turned into 6 hours of FIOS installation penalty time for Elizabeth as she was tethered to me and was unable to escape my need to be scratched, my need to wipe my drool on her pants and my need to use various bits of her as a pillow.

And speaking of drool (and when are we not?), the weather has still been too cool for Elizabeth to model the bargain, too tight cargo pants that she only got to wear once—both of us are eager to show off my cargo pant drool, hair and mud collage to Maria who very wisely is sticking to more drool-forgiving jeans. The state of my humans’ usual appearance is such that when they actually get dressed up and go out without me (a very rare occurrence I might add) no one recognizes them. Elizabeth escorted a shelter dog to the ASPCA’s Bergh Ball fundraiser last night and the elevator guys and doormen in her building just stared at her like “who are you?” When they realized who she was I am sure they were puzzled as to why, if she could look like that, she looks like she usually does. The answer of course is that if she looked like that, she wouldn’t look like that for very long in my presence. All part of the joys of taking care of me. But everyone always recognizes me even when I am sporting one of my coats or my fancy collar for Easter and that is really the only thing that matters.

And speaking of recognizing people, I was perambulating in the park on Tuesday when I heard shouts of ‘Wimsey! Wimsey!” (Notice that there are never shouts of Maria! Maria! Or Elizabeth! Elizabeth!) and who should come trotting into view but our friend Sandy who we met at Westminster when I was benched next to the very beautiful Houndess, Phoebe. (I earned my reputation as a ladies man at a subsequent show when I finished up my once around by shoving my nose up Phoebe’s butt). But it was quite exciting to see Sandy again—she works near Central Park and had decided to take a walk in the park and was wondering if she would run into me.

And suddenly there I was! So I drooled on her face and demanded a cookie. But Sandy is very familiar with such Houndly behavior –she and her husband live with three bassets and a young bloodhound who is just starting his show career. I am sure he will do very well, since unlike me he apparently doesn’t concertize in the ring and try to date the female Hounds.

Anyway, I also paid a visit to one of my favorite statues—if I can’t get close to actual poultry in the park at least I am permitted to interact with the inanimate variety. But unlike the Alice in Wonderland statue nearby, that of Hans Christian Andersen is not swarming with excited youngsters. I am sure his stories would be more popular today if he had followed the advice of one of my Danish ancestors, Torvald Wimsey, and changed the content slightly:

The Wimsey Book of Danish Fairy Tales

The Emperor’s New Clothes: An emperor with a lively Hound commissions a new set of clothes because his old ones have holes in them and are covered in what he hopes is just drool. However, the weavers he commissions can’t bear the thought of what will happen to their magnificent garments once the Imperial Hound gets a hold of them. So they tell the emperor that the suit they made him is magical and only visible to individuals who are not stupid or incompetent. The emperor has a bad moment when he realizes that he himself can’t see the new clothes, but the suit is so comfortable that he buys it anyway. As he is parading around a little boy too young to know what happens to those who thwart delusional emperors cries out that the emperor has no clothes. The boy is admonished by his elders that of course the emperor has no clothes; he has a Hound.

The Little Mermaid: A young mermaid saves the life of a handsome prince (why are there never any so so looking princes, I wonder) and wants to become human so she can marry him. Everyone, including the wise Sea Witch advises her against this since she will have a short life span, won’t be able to talk, will have painful feet and will turn to sea foam if the prince doesn’t marry her. None of this dissuades her. But then she finds out that she will have to live with the prince’s large, stinky Hound who steals food, raids underwear drawers and sleeps in the bed while snoring and making bad smells. She then decides that perhaps being a mermaid isn’t such a bad gig after all.

Thumbelina: A peasant woman gives a farmer’s wife a magic barleycorn seed in exchange for food. A flower grows out of the seed and out of the flower emerges a tiny Hound. Unfortunately the tiny Hound acts a lot like a big Hound and pees on the bushes, rips up all the flowerbeds, digs holes and messes with the garbage. But the Hound is very cute so no one minds.

The Ugly Duckling: A beautiful Golden Retriever gives birth to a litter of puppies but one of the puppies is not golden and fluffy, it is brown and wrinkly. All the fluffy puppies despise this little intruder and think he is ugly. Then the puppies grow up and the fluffy puppies are not fluffy anymore. Nevertheless they learn their commands and do all kinds of useful things like jump into freezing water to retrieve ducks while the wrinkly puppy, who is now even more wrinkled, learns how to ignore all its commands and do all kinds of non-useful things like jumping into the heated swimming pool to chew up the floating rafts. Then the retrievers realize that the wrinkly puppy has grown up into a Magnificent Hound who steals pot roasts from the refrigerator instead of waiting to be fed a few cups of kibble by his humans and who does exactly what he pleases and very little that pleases anyone else. But everyone likes him better because he is so cute.

The Princess and the Pea: A toxic bachelor prince says he wants to marry but somehow manages to find fault with all the nice women he meets. He also says that he has no way to verify that the women really are princesses oblivious to the fact that most men don’t want to marry princesses for a host of very good reasons. To make matters worse, his mother nags him incessantly and says she despairs of ever having grandchildren. Then one stormy night a very wet woman appears at the castle and the mother decides to test how much of a princess she really is by putting a pea under 20 mattresses and featherbeds. A real princess, she reasons, would not be satisfied with anything that is less than perfect and would complain about it the next morning. Sure enough the princess candidate bitches about something hard in her bed that has bruised her. While this could have had something to do with that pesky pea or the wild sex she had with the prince that night—toxic bachelors being quite partial to wild sex before rejection—the real reason was the fact that the prince’s Hound is also quite partial to sleeping on mounds of cushy mattresses and featherbeds and kept thwacking her with his giant paws so she would scratch him all night. The prince chooses to believe it was really the pea and marries the woman because the woman is hot in the sack and never married princes pushing 40 are suspect and he wonders where else would he find a woman who would let his Hound sleep in the bed with him. Also he wanted to get his mother off his back.

Well you get the idea. Anyway, this week I got to do a spot of shopping at Unleashed, always a favorite stomping ground of mine.

The thing about shopping in a pet store is that you can do all kinds of obnoxious things and the staff have to be nice to you and feed you cookies and pretend that you don’t smell. It’s no wonder that I am always dragging my humans thither. And speaking of other venues where I get to be obnoxious, my brewery, Baying Hound Aleworks, (www. baying-hound.com), is having a party on the 27^th and 28^th of this month at their facility in Rockville, MD to celebrate the launch of their golden summer Kolsch style ale. There will be food and fun and possibly me. If scheduling permits I may make a personal appearance on Saturday. Of course this has set off the usual frenzy of searching for suitable rental cars and hotel rooms and the recurring dilemma of whether or not to tell “pet friendly” but sizist hotels that the canine in question is of a rather robust size or to just show up with me and hope we don’t get booted into the street.

Stay tuned.

Well I think that is all for this week. Tomorrow is another Anal Gland Inspection Day where fingers get stuck up one end and compensatory turkey down the other but I do get to see all my friends at the vet office, which I always enjoy. And it’s supposed to be something like 80 degrees on Sunday and I am trying to convince my humans to carry a shade umbrella for me but so far they have been resistant to the notion. I can’t imagine why.

Until next time,

Wimsey, a shady character