I had thought to go see "Brokeback Mountain" on Thursday but it was so unnecessarily cold that I did not venture from the house. Friday Kal invited me to dinner but when she called I was already in thermals and fleece and shivering over a bowl of chicken soup and disinclined to acquiesce to her request (one of the male figure skaters used music from "Pirates of the Caribbean"). Instead I stayed home and watched "The Aristocrats," except I had to switch over to the news while I finished my dinner, because if I didn't puke from the nauseous humor, I certainly risked choking and spitting with laughter, and that's just not pretty.
Saturday morning Kal invited me to go to a dog show. I went, because though it was 5 degrees at least the sun had the decency to be out. I guess last year she and her friend...um, Koa, because he spoke on KOA (a radio station with three call letters? That's even wronger than call letters beginning with K) in what is now my new favorite story about him...discovered it. She and he and boyfriend Neal and I went. They assured me nothing was sacred and the point was the mocking. We mocked the people, not the dogs, doing the agility course, and we clapped when dogs successfully navigated the see-saw (that first paw past the fulcrum is obviously scary) and laughed when a dog overshot the entrance to the tunnel and face-planted against the lip. We wandered through the judging area and I pulled my scarf over my eyes and or hid behind Neal's hood when French poodles were in my line of sight. The horror. While we sat in decades-old seats (before Usans got so uniformly fat) and watched St. Bernards being judged, Koa considered which breed, if he had to be raped by dogs, he would choose. I suggested a smaller dog as less painful. He was leaning toward the St. Bernard, because they would give the best cuddling. He really needs to see "The Aristocrats."
KOA had asked him to speak about übersexuals, selecting him by randomly calling local colleges GLBT offices until someone turned up. KOA is a conservative mostly-talk station, and the topic was the latest buzzword, übersexual. The host asked him whether he thought Rush Limbaugh was one. "Have you heard that word before?" Koa interrupted himself to ask. No, but I live under a rock, I admitted. "Neither had I," he assured me. He said on KOA that no, Rush couldn't be because he doesn't meet the word's three main criteria of being cultured, treating women well, and taking care of his body. Then the host asked if he thought the term would last, and he said no, the only lasting contemporary coinages, he thought, would be "metrosexual" and "santorum." The best part of this story is that the local talk show host apparently didn't know the latter term and asked him about it; he said he couldn't define it on the air so the host suggested to his listeners--this was during rush hour, lots of listeners, to the station that airs Rush Limbaugh's show daily--that they google it when they got home.
My ongoing question--less amusing than Koa's, but such is my fate--is the Colorado Kennel Club's justification for the sign at all the show's entrances: Only AKC dogs and registered service animals were permitted. Why? I understand the possible threat to a bitch in heat, but, let's hope, most pets, mongrel or not, are neutered, and unintended mating by an AKC-registered dog of one breed to a bitch of another still would result in mutts. Unintended mating within the same breed can’t be desirable either. Bigots.
Judging and valuing a dog by its conformance to physical standards, instead of by its petfulness, loyalty, or actual usefulness in its appointed field, is ridiculous and abhorrent anyway (yet there I was, forking over a $3 admission fee to further the cause, yea me). It's wonderful how I can shunt those principles when I get to see lots of St. Bernards and mastiffs and blue heelers and border collies and merle-coated dachshunds and Portuguese water dogs and Rhodesian Ridgebacks and sheepdogs and Bernese Mountain Dogs and Irish wolfhounds (or Scottish deerhounds: I can't tell the difference at a glance) and Great Pyrenees and Gordon Setters and Clumber spaniels and bull terriers (I called them all Bodger) and even a Komondor, which I might never have seen in the flesh before. An owner--a groomer? a handler? another other fucked-up aspect of these things is how many budgets (not households) a dog is split (not shared) among--cut his eyes at me when I observed too loudly to Neal as we passed a grooming area that Bedlington Terriers look like sheep.
In the afternoon, AEK and I went to see "Transamerica." I am shocked, shocked that such filthy ideas are portrayed on film: in Phoenix, lawns of Kentucky bluegrass! bordered with saguaro cactus! Outrageous! Morally bankrupt.
Then she made dinner for me and MDD, a crab chowder that I think I could make. I copied the recipe. We'll see. Sunday I cooked one of my standards, a broccoli-tomato quichesque, and thought that pine nuts would be a good addition. I tried to toast them in a saute pan, as AEK had for her salad, but there was no visible effect on low heat and they burned as soon as I had my back turned (that right there is the Thing That Goes Wrong with my culinary efforts). Instead of whole pine nuts charred on one side, therefore, the quichesque has ground charred pine nuts.
I fed it to RDC when we got back from the airport Sunday night and he liked it. This makes me feel deceitful* because I am certain that had RDC seen the nuts, he'd've wanted them omitted or substituted with a different batch; also it makes me grin, grateful to know that sometimes he really cannot detect the pea under his mattress, and that reassures me.
*Deceit:deception::receipt:reception. "Deceit" wants a p. Silly language.