If Petting Others' Dogs Is Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Right
If you have a dog, I will pet it, with or without your permission
Like some of you, I’m just back from a protracted Fourth of July break, having participated in lots of Fourth of July-themed-activities: I watched fireworks on a beach, hoping the unruly brats kicking sand on our spread would set their bangs on fire with sparklers. I got in a musket fight with some British guys behind a Wawa. I grilled and ate so many Nathan’s hot dogs that I nearly turned into a meat tube. (Straw-boater-hat-tip to Richard Shea for his honorable mention of me on ESPN’s hot-dog-eating contest, and to my old pal, the incomparable Jim Swift, for alerting me to it.)
If you’re a new subscriber here, I realize you probably expect me to hold forth on the current political disarray, as I did last outing, and will likely feel compelled to do over many more weeks in the coming months. Disarray has, for a good while now, become our new national normal. Many Democrats seem to have just arrived at the alarming conclusion that without intervention, they’re on the cusp of re-nominating a guy who is older (Joe Biden: invented 1942) than synthetic rubber (invented 1943), or the transistor (invented 1947), or the Wurlitzer jukebox (invented 1948). While Republicans are plagued by self-doubt about nominating a felonious seditionist who……..am just kidding! Jonestowners never doubted Jim Jones, even as they were bellying up to the Kool-Aid/cyanide bar.
But we’re not going to do politics today, even if we kind of just did, because as I said from Day One, we always reserve the right to zig when everyone else zags. That’s why we call this thing of ours Slack Tide and not Flood Tide. It’s healthier to breathe once in a while rather than just continuously gulping incoming water. Instead, we’re going to talk about something that transcends politics, something much more important: the glories of copping feels off of other people’s dogs.
I was reminded of this, upon my return from getting tanned-ready-and-unrested, when a friend sent me this clip of the great Ricky Gervais (an atheist by inclination, though everyone’s entitled to be wrong now and then) holding forth on God’s most perfect creatures: