Mickey Hadick

Amongst men, if you want to pick a fight with another man, you should enter the room in anger and throw something at him. Other acceptable forms of the invitation to fight are the two-handed push to the chest, the finger poke to the sternum, and insulting his mother.

This formal invitation is often seen in movies, and is most famously done in Westerns in a bar. However, the fight frequently escalates into a shootout, and so it is not recognized as being a fight, but rather a gun fight. Of course, to invite someone to a gun fight, you need only throw your poncho over your shoulder and rest your hand on your holster.

The following do not qualify as official invitations to fight, and may be safely ignored by the invitee without loss of dignity:

• A one-handed push to the shoulder (you can turn with the push and back away).
• A slap in the face (no sissy-fights please).
• A chest bump (what is this, the NFL?).
• A vehement stream of insults (I'm rubber and you're glue.)

The following forms of invitation are for street fighting:

• Spitting
• Sucker punch
• Any form of weaponry from handgun to candlestick or beer mug (see gunfights, above).

Street fighting, of course, is not bound by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and may be met with a chair over the head, a knife in the back, or a knee to the groin (preferred).

These used to be unwritten rules, but are codified here for posterity sake.

Labels: standup

We have a cat and two dogs. The cat is new, and was brought into the house as a kitten, and now it thinks it is a dog. At least, it hangs around with the dogs and is not bothered by their dog-ness. The cat still uses the litter box, so that's cool.

The dogs are trying to hump the cat lately. We think the cat has just matured enough to enter its first estrus cycle. What am I doing with an un-spayed cat, you ask? I ask that myself, as we paid $250 for the procedure to have the cat fixed.

Why did you spend $250 on a procedure that should cost, at most, $80? I asked my wife the same question. She couldn't answer, but here is her version of the events:

We paid $50 as a deposit on the cat's spaying. We were given a coupon for the service to be done at the Riverside Cat Hospital. My wife took the cat there expecting to pay no more than an additional $50 beyond the deposit. However, after the procedure, she was presented a bill for $289. They also requested we bring the cat back for follow-up procedures.

Why would your cat still have an estrus cycle after a costly procedure like that? I can only assume those dumb-ass veterinarians tied the cat's tubes, rather than remove the ovaries. Can you not just imagine the joy the vets feel, preserving the cat's hormonal balance while still preventing over-population. For a service like that, of course you charge far more than one would charge for a simple spaying.

What makes this so deliciously painful is that it's not even the first time something like this has happened to us in regards to cats. But that will have to wait for another blog post.

Labels: mistake, story