I briefly mentioned that the dog had eaten my TV antennae. This comment has elicited a few comments of it’s own and a question or two so I thought I would expand on it. Since the recent demise of Beadle I have two dogs residing at my house. There is DD; she is MY dog. I have had her for about 7 years. (with some shared custody with my parents, my sister, and Stephalapogous at various times when the Army sent me away from home. She is a Pit Bull Labrador mix. She is large, black, and intimidating as hell to those who don’t know her, those that do know her know that there is a greater likelihood of her beating you to death with her tail than ever biting you. She definitely inherited the Lab personality. Then there is the other dog, Zoe. Zoe was a stray who showed up at the house last year while Stephalapogous was renting my place. Stepha is congenitally unable to turn away an animal that looks sad. Zoe moved in. Zoe is white, has some form of Shepard and maybe some collie in her. Who knows? She is a grade A mutt.
Now when the temp gets hot as it always does in the summer here DD becomes the great digger. It is cooler in the earth so she digs in to stay cool. In one of her dig
ging she managed to open a way under the house. In so doing she peeled away the siding blocking and moved in to dig a hole directly under one of the AC ducts. When I came home she was happily ensconced there enjoying the cool. Zoe will also dig but that is not her great failing. NO, she is immensely curious about every thing and, not having hands, she uses her mouth to explore strange new things, things that move, or things that she steps on. This result in her eating a variety of things around the yard including but not limited to hoses, a wind mill, water pumps in the goldfish pong (how she did this without electrocuting herself is a great mystery since she chewed through the power cord too), sprinklers, a couple of clams out of the goldfish pool, and a variety of other things. Needless to say, once she got under the house what does she find but this strange cables running all over the place. She promptly explores them by tugging and pulling on them and OH JOY!, they move. She grabs and pulls. In so doing she rips the antennae cable out of the back of the TV and down through the floor the pulls on it until she manages to break it off. Luckily it broke where it ran under something or she probably would have pulled the antennae down. (Yes, for those who are just noticing this I did say antennae. I have no cable or satellite TV, just the big old antennae at the side of the house. The previous owners had had satellite set up for multiple receivers in the house. She found the main cable for that and ripped it out of the place too. So when I returned, there was a huge mass of cable in the front yard with Zoe happily chewing on it, and DD as previously stated planted under the house.
Now that I have told you that, I will expand and tell you this. Without TV reception I have been DVDing a lot. I just recently finished watching the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was a big fan of this program when it was on. To the point of actually getting a satellite connection primarily so I could watch it. (Well, it and the novellas on Univison, but that is another story) I was certainly not part of the target audience for the program but had really enjoyed the movie (although I disliked the ending) and quite liked the writing of the program. The second season of Buffy was, IMNSHO, probably the best of all of them. Spike was great, they had good plots, it has too much of the teen girl Angst that so many fans loved, Angel went evil which improved his personality and his posture immensely and then he got killed, and Spike makes a great speech on why he doesn’t want the world to end. (dog racing, Manchester United, and billions of “happy meals with legs”)
As I think of this program I am rather surprised that there wasn’t more controversy as things went along. I mean look, you had a variety of teachers in “inappropriate” relationships with students. (Not including the Giles/Buffy and the gang thing.) You had an adult male, Angel, having a sexual relationship with a minor child, Buffy, which is, as we all know, rape because no one under the age of 18 can EVER consent to sex with an adult. Later you have a heterosexual character changing into a homosexual character. (Don’t give me any of that “Willow was always a lesbian she just didn’t know it crap. She was way to enthusiastically heterosexual with OZ to be confused and wondering.) (She was also a much more interesting character when she was straight, although that might have something to do with the personality less lump they paired her with) The program was a veritable cornucopia of forbidden themes. And all done as a teen fantasy/adventure/romance show. Damn that Josh Whedon is a good writer!