Dogs: Avoid Exploding Toilets!

I'm writing this because I saw an item in the news from Washington DC (it happened in a Federal Building) about a lady who was injured due to an exploding toilet. I'm sure most of you, when you see that sentence will think, "was there a terrorist attack at one of the government buildings?" The answer is, no there was not. It turns out that it was just one disgruntled toilet that caused the problem. This is why dogs do not use toilets. Sure, you can get a cat to use one, but we dogs have more sense. There is no way that we are going to be shot across the room by an unhappy toilet. There was an excuse about water pressure, and the people in the building have been warned not to use the facilities until they are checked out. I suppose that means that either the humans are using hydrants like us dogs or they are lining up at a nearby gas station. I hope they are using the nearby gas stations because those hydrants are for dogs. We mark them as our territory and we expect them to stay our territory. The humans probably wouldn't even bother to sniff the hydrant first to see if it has been marked or not. Humans are terribly impolite about such things. Anyway, I hope that there are no more toilet problems in Washington DC. Judging from the amount of excrement coming from the politicians, I'm surprised the toilets haven't fought back sooner.

Demon Flash Bandit (Staying Away From Toilets)

Barking--Simpler Than Most Human Words

Gas prices have been going up where I live which is probably true all over the world. In fact, as soon as a barrel goes up in price, the local gas stations start raising the prices. On the other paw, when the gas prices go down per barrel, it takes quite a while for the savings to show up at the local gas stations. Since it is always important to have a dog look into these kinds of situations, I decided I would check into it to see why the prices take so long to go down. I came to the conclusion that they don't come down very fast because the longer they stay up, the more money the owner of the local gas station brings in. Of course, I have to admit that I am not an economist so maybe that kind of common sense thinking isn't really what happens so it was nice to see that there was an item in today's news explaining why it happens. Sam Peltzman, a free market economist, studied this phenomenon, and he came to the conclusion that prices don't go down as fast as they go up so that the business man who owns the gas station (and possibly the distributors) can make more money. Most of the humans call this "price gouging", but the economists now call it "asymmetrical price adjustment". Have you ever noticed how the humans always manage to come up with a complicated sounding title to anything that they don't want to admit is happening? It is the same reason that some humans refer to giving a dog a bath as a "day at the spa". You can fool the humans with that kind of nonsense, but you can't fool a dog. If we have to get wet and get dog shampoo all over our fur, it is a bath. I don't care what you call it, most dogs won't like it, and that includes myself. If dogs were supposed to have baths, we would have been born with shower caps. If only dogs ran the world, it would be a much simpler place, and you would not need complicated words because a few barks would explain everything.

Demon Flash Bandit (Barks--Better Than Words)