Ellen, Iggy, and the great dog wars of 2007

by John Stallings

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware of the dog wars our country has fought recently.

First we had Michael Vick & his horrendous treatment of dogs, (he’ll be thrown under the jail for several decades) & then we had Ellen DeGeneres & her doggy dilemma. Ellen’s puppy evidently couldn’t bond with her cat so she gave him to her hair dresser’s children. This wouldn’t do & upon hearing of this unilateral move by Ellen the dog authorities came in “guns a-blazing” & took the dog away from the children.

Now Ellen has a melt-down on her T.V show, has gotten all verklempt, (Yiddish term for breakdown) has taken to bed with the vapors & can’t even do her show. Hopefully she’ll survive this awful onslaught against her sanity.

While I’m at it, in other national news, there’s the story of a cat that started a fire & a dog that put it out. Honestly, I heard about it this morning. Evidently a cat knocked over a lantern setting a house afire & a black Lab was able, through quick thinking of some kind to get help. Shades of Lassie!

What else is there? Oh, in other news, somewhere in our great nation a Coca Cola man & a Pepsi man got into a fight in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Evidently they were both in the process of delivering their products to a Wal-mart store & clashed in the parking lot. I don’t know how the duel manifested but in my mind’s eye I see them shaking their drinks real hard & spraying each other with foam. My fondest hope is that this one will show up in a T. V commercial & soon.

The one good thing about all this news is that its at least taken our news people’s minds off Brittany Spears’ unmentionable problems. Seriously, & I hope no one misunderstands this; I would have actually hoped someone, somewhere in the country would fall in a well, had I known they would be rescued with no harm done, just to get something serious back in the news.

Yesterday my friend Bud Hedinger asked on his talk show why Americans seem to be so apathetic about the important issues of the day. I don’t think the word is apathy as much as it is “dumbfounded ness” if that’s a word.

Maybe the talk show guys are right & they’re trying to “dumb us down.” The ironic thing to me is all this happens the same week that Iran threatened to fire off 11,000 missiles the second after we take a shot at them. Not many news programs carried that.

And someday our great-grandkids might ask us, “What did you do during the great dog wars of 2007?”

John