Today in Grace History: Late Submission Wins Pun-Based Pet Name Category

Today was my last day at work.

Also, today was the day poor Spotnick lost his crown to the new front-runner in pun-based names, his presence in the original competition non-existent for the sole reason that he had not yet been run over by an ATV and brought in to the clinic...

Didgeri-Don't.

Here, Beowolf.

I've always loved naming things - I was one of those kids - and I love a good, weird name.

Unfortunately, when I got my current cat, a moment of misguided charity and uncomfortable-ness made me decide to keep the name Rosie after an adult handicapped lady told me that she named her and then kissed the top of Rosie's head.

I regret this decision now.

That woman absolutely does not remember my cat and has probably named at least three more cats Rosie since then. I should have changed it to Jennyanydots when I had the chance. 

All personal regrets aside, one of my favorite things about working at the vet is hearing some of the crazy pet names. People who name their dogs Bella and Buddy seem so dull, although I do acknowledge that saying that makes me a huge hypocrite. Anyway, since I'm leaving my job soon to focus on school, I decided to indulge my curiosity and compile a list of the best of the best pet names and give them awards by category.
Enjoy.

Best Full Name

Second Place: Harvey Wallbanger (Canine)

First Place: Thadious Hoppington (Rabbit)

Best Food-Inspired Name

Second Place: (Tie) Kielbasa, Pork Fried Rice

First Place: Pou Pon (Feline)

Pets Named After Celebrities, In Order from Worst to Best

Charlie Sheen

Dale Earnhart

Bruce Lee

Bill Nye

Freddie Mercury

Best Names with the word "Fat" in them

Honorable Mentions: Fat Boy, Fat Head, and NINE pets named "Fatty"

Second Place: Fatapuss (See also "Best Puns")

First Place: Fat Bastard

Classiest

Honorable Mentions: Sinbad, Siegfried, Octavius

Third Place: Toulouse

Second Place: Hildegard

First Place: Alowycious

Best Descriptive Names*

Third Place: Fussy Butt

Second Place: Toe Licker

First Place: Tuna Breath

Honorable Mentions: Mustache Louie, One-Eyed Jack

*Fun fact, all winners in this category are cats.

Most Baffling

Third Place: Mr. Thumbs

Second Place: Oy

First Place: Pubert

Surprisingly Cute Names

Toggle

Segway

Velcro

Sequel

Jenga

Sandman

Malarkey

Best Puns

Third Place: My-Newt (Species said "Other," so I'm assuming it's an actual newt.)

Second Place: Catty Wompus

First Place: Spotnick

Worst Puns

Third Place: Maybullene (English Bulldog)

Second Place: Tie Deeogy (D.O.G.) and Shinopi (She No Pee)

First Place: Semper Fido

Honorable Mentions: Vincent Van Cat and Purrsilla.

Awesomest

The Wolfman

Snicklefritz

Robespierre

Beowolf

Avogadro

Megatron

Danger Kitty

Most Hilarious 

Mr. Noodle

Uncle Salty

Boobie

Spanky

Poop, Pooper, Poopie, 

Poopsie, and Poop Stain

Proud Mary

Spleen

Totally Inappropriate Names

Three-Way Tie: Osama, Hitler, and "Sexy Cat."

Animals with Best-Suited Names

Honorable Mentions: Hound named "Messerschmitt," Cornish Rex named "Nefertiti," and a French Bulldog named "Mavis."

Third Place: Doberman Pinscher named "Jebidiah"

Second Place: A dachshund named "Schnitzel"

First Place: (And I'm completely serious about this) A one-eyed basset hound named Whiskey Joe. (I've actually met Whiskey Joe, he looks like he just got back from snoozing on a front porch in the background of Fievel Goes West.)

Some fun statistics to wrap everything up:

- There are 11 orange cats named "Hobbes"

- 2 cats named "Crookshanks" and 1 actual rat named "Scabbers"

- 16 Cheechs, 1 Chong (I don't get it, either.)

- 5 Goobers and 8 Boogers

Moral of the story: It really doesn't matter what you name your pet, you're just going to end up calling it "dumbass" all the time anyway.

Leave Amanda Alone

Ah, the early 2000's. I vividly recall one of my very first ventures onto the internet - this was before I frequented the "Polly Pockets" website to play awful G-rated games - it was on our now-rustic family PC and I went to amandaplease.com, because Penelope Taynt (who I later learned was Amanda in a wig - 10-year-old mind blown) told me to. Then I sat in the office chair for an hour waiting for a 30-second clip to load and doing absolutely nothing else. I was so happy. I got to watch this pixel-y little video of their parody of "The Brady Bunch," the one where Alice is a man in drag. I was mousy and socially retarded and had all of the defining features of pre-pubescence as well as somehow, tragically, size 10 feet. Those were the days.

Remember "What I Like About You?" What a good show. How in love did you fall with Henry when he said that he'd propose at the dump?

The thing about Amanda was that she was an icon for the rest of us. She was unique and funny and true to herself - that was the best thing about her.

Now, see, my webcam does not work in the sense that it does not record video properly. All I end up with is a video of myself getting increasingly faster with audio that stays at the normal speed. Otherwise, I would have put on a long blonde wig and rolled around in my sheets dramatically. Alas, technology fails me and I must stoop to the written word and deprive the internet of five minutes of me trying to achieve the most flattering webcam face-angle and admiring my own hair.


Leave Amanda alone.

As the Season 2 Finale of "Sherlock" taught us, what the press reports is not necessarily true. Now, to clarify, I'm not saying that Amanda didn't throw a bong out of the window of a high-rise,* among other things - there's just no way for us to know the whole story. (Although any story with a flying bong is usually at least entertaining.)

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind today instead of the online exam for my last summer course. As much as I'm predisposed to harshly judge people who pierce their cheeks, (WHY DO PEOPLE DO THAT???) I hope Amanda finds her way and that I never have to hear her rap.


*Note: Add "hit by falling bong" to Worst Obituaries Ever list.

Is that rigor mortis, or are you just happy to see me?

My first real pet was a guinea pig. Three guinea pigs, actually, all of whom were equally useless creatures. The first time I ever set foot in the vet hospital was when one of them - a white, red-eyed little bastard - got a weird anus rash and we took her to the vet so she could pee down the front of my legs in the exam room. Anyway, there were three of them - Pokey, Taffy, and Flash.

Taffy was the Bunnicula doppleganger, Pokey had the appearance and personality of an elephant turd, and Flash was small and black and as it turned out, short-lived.

I was somewhere around 9 years old. Flash got sick very suddenly. I found her lying on her side in the guinea pig pen, twitching. My parents had me hold her for a few moments until she kicked it, although I don't recall the exact moment. They put her in a shoe box and put the shoe box in the garage to wait for the ground to be less frozen so we could bury her. 

The whole time the shoe box sat in the garage waiting, (a total of three or four days) I found myself strangely, magnetically drawn to it. My morbid curiosity was practically leaking out my ears, but I was socially aware enough to know that it would probably be unacceptable for me to fondle my guinea pig's corpse in the presence of others. I nursed that creepy sense of suspense and secrecy for all that it had while I waited for an opportunity to privately spend time with a dead thing for the first time ever.

When my parents were gone, I went out to the garage, took out the shoe box, and opened it. She was dead, all right. A dead guinea pig. I touched her fur - it felt the same, but the skin beneath it was cold and firm. I examined her still-open eyes, her mouth, her paws frozen in position as if she was running. I touched only her fur - I wasn't quite brave enough to do anything more. I put her back and went inside.

Over the next few days, I would sneak away to look in the shoe box. I thought of the creepy little visits as spending time with my pet, the concept of body v. soul foreign to a 9-year-old. 

I was visiting Flash one night when, in a sentimental moment, I tenderly reached into the box and picked her up. When I lifted her rear end, however, the rest of her kind of just lifted right along with it. It took a second for the horror to register, but I had a moment of terrible, terrible realization as I held her aloft - I was sitting in my garage, holding a furry black plank.  

Flash was not Flash anymore. It was both a tremendous growing-up experience, and in retrospect, a really hilarious situation. 

Sufficiently scarred for life, I dropped Flash back into the shoe box, put it back on the shelf, and ran inside to wash off all of the corpse bacteria that I could practically see crawling up my arms.

Now that my sense of soul v. body has developed, I can understand the reasoning from an 8-year-old - but it boggles my mind when adult pet owners spend unnecessary amounts of time with their pet's dead body. Due to what I now know is called rigor mortis, the aforementioned tendency also poses a significant problem to myself and the other veterinary assistants. Prime example - a challenge faced by myself and Little Dan.

There had been a euthanasia in one of the exam rooms that morning, and apparently the owners had spent several hours with the body afterwards. It's common to have to bag-and-tag a body a couple times a day, since the vets perform euthanasia and we have one of the only veterinary emergency rooms in the area. It was no surprise when Little Dan and I were asked to stretcher a dead dog back to the freezer. It was an old German Shepherd and he was already on the stretcher, so we quickly took him back and got out a bag. 

The trouble started when we began to ease the dog into the bag - he was immovable, and had stiffened into a position where his legs were splayed out in several different directions. Bagging the dog would've been an easy task if a) he'd been smaller or b) he'd been in a floppier and more bendable state, which he would have been for the first hour or so after his death. That window of opportunity had closed, however, and we were left with an impossibly rigid body and a bag that just wasn't quite big enough. 

I think we both knew that it wasn't going to work, but Little Dan and I were both fairly new assistants, so we kept our mouths shut, silently thanked the lord that there were doors separating us and our spectacle from the rest of the staff, and started by sticking the dog's upper half into the bag.

On the way in, the dog's frozen front paw caught on the bag and ripped a hole in it before either of us could respond. With a few muttered swear words, a sheepish apology to the dog, and some improvisation, we realized that the leg could not be bent without breaking it, so quickly got the dog back out and tried again.

On the second shot it seemed like the torso had gone in seamlessly. However, when I paused to pull the bag up over the dog's hips, I was greeted with a crusty snout sticking out through the hole previously created by the front paw. The situation continued more and more to resemble a slapstick comedy bit as we tried various ways to get the body bagged, our doggy friend's glassy eyes gazing back at us as if mocking our inadequacy. 

What we ended up with was two large red garbage bags and about a pound and a half of tape keeping the dog contained within them, the tip of a paw peeking out of the hole still. It was a huge fucking mess. 

In the end, appearance didn't matter - it was just going to be cremated anyway. But I'll be damned if that dog didn't put up a surprisingly fair post-mortem fight. 

The moral of the story - live adventurously, and give 'em hell once you're dead. Coincidently, I plan on that day being the first and last time I get punched in the boob by a dead dog. 

Grace's Guide to Intermediate Crossword Puzzles

A recent obsession with puzzles inspired

this guide, which, at first, may come off as shallow.

Before I finished creating one puzzle, my intellect tired -

Judgement-free, any clue about lotion is aloe.

Of Lena Horne and Edie Falco they're fond,

"Witherspoon" and "Zellweger" aren't hard to guess.

Exactly how many clues can reference James Bond?

My trivia knowledge falls short... I digress.

A fencing sword, F.Y.I, is "épée,"

and "parry"'s the name of said fencer's deflection

If any Great Lake besides "Eerie" comes into play,

Somewhere in New York, Will Shortz gets an erection.

There was once an explosive Italian named Etna.

Anything with sushi will be about eels.

If crime is involved, let me aid and abet ya,

As for fruit, know that "rinds" are synonymous with "peels."

I'm not the only one guilty of uncomfortable plurality -

"Ohios" and "Ahas" are good phrases to try

The Korean War had a whole lot of fatalities,

but all you must know: the guy in M*A*S*H is Hawkeye.

The elusive and oft-mentioned snake is an asp.

Turns out, nearly all actions can be re-done.

While music and art can be harder to grasp,

You'll likely see "oboes," or "aria," for one.

It's not "spheres," it's "orbs;" an urn, not a jar.

No matter what the planet will not be Uranus.

It might seem to you like they're stretching too far.

Jokes on you - this dumb poem is equally heinous.


G. S.

**Side note - I realized afterwards that this is now the second time I've rhymed "heinous" with a variation of "anus" in a poem on this blog. In my defense, not much else rhymes with "anus."**

Bag of Poopy Snow

I may have mentioned in a previous post that my job as a vet assistant can range from scrubbing in to surgeries to literally being a pooper-scooper.

While I get the most excited about scrubbing in, all of my best stories are about the latter.

It was the winter of '12. Poop-scooping was turning out to be slightly more pleasant in the freezing cold. On a hot August day, there's nothing worse than dripping with sweat, wearing scrub pants and holding a bucket of steaming dog turds. The fact that all of the turds were now frozen and consequently less pungent was a big perk. Also, being a veterinary hospital, there was an unfortunate tendency for the dog feces not to be solid in above-freezing temperatures.

What I hadn't anticipated was how quickly my garbage bag would become heavy. The added weight of the snow surrounding each turd began to make the job increasingly difficult as the garbage bag and I both strained under the weight, but I didn't want to go inside to get a second bag because my glasses would fog up and I'd look like Chandler in that clip they always show of him wearing glasses in a sauna during the introduction to "Friends." (You know you know the clip I'm talking about.)

When I was satisfied with my clean-up job, I dragged the feces-and-snow-filled bag over to the dumpster.

The dumpster was really full. In fact, it was overflowing - I guess the garbage guys had missed a day or something, because the mound above the top rim of the dumpster was at least six inches high. The top rim of the dumpster itself was about 3 inches taller than me; almost six feet. I briefly considered leaving the garbage bag sitting on the asphalt next to the dumpster so that someone else would have to deal with it, but come on. That's a dick move. It was my bag of shit, and I was going to dispose of it properly.

After assessing the situation for a moment, I decided to just go with the first logical option - use my own brute force. (Cue laugh track.)

This is how my first attempt played out.

After scratching my head and casually looking up at the sky in case anyone was watching, I decided to give it another go, but this time to swing the bag back farther to get more momentum. (So basically the exact same thing but with feeling!)

I very badly wanted to be in a comical fury. I recall yelling "Balls!" a few times while shaking the poop-y snow-water out of my hair. In the end I couldn't really be angry and this is why:

The Harris Defense Mechanism

(Pioneered by the illustrious Joss Whedon, followed religiously by me.)

"I laugh in the face of danger! Then I hide until it goes away."
    -Xander Harris, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I've been in a fire fight! Well, I've been in a fire. Okay, I was fired... from a fry cook opportunity."
     -Hoban Washburne, Firefly

"I dismembered a guy with a trowel. What have you been up to?"
     -Marty, Cabin in the Woods


I've never been great at handling scary stuff. I can deal with gore and psychological thrillers - in fact, those are the best, but I cannot handle suspense peppered with sudden bursts of horror - Paranormal Activity and shit like that. It took me a while to recover from watching "Insidious."

Like a classic idiot, I chose to confront this fear by going to "Erebus," the record holder for world's largest haunted house from '05-'09. My very first haunted house (haunted anything, actually) and I decided to go all or nothing. One year I heard that they gave you a free t-shirt if you could make it all the way through the four-story haunted house without leaving out one of the emergency exits.

My friend Ella is one of the only people who can get me to do stuff like this, so we went together. She's curvy, Latina, has shorter hair than I do, and people often mistake us for a pair of lesbians. More on her later. Fast forward to the two of us, having just turned in our tickets and been directed to a large open hallway.

We stood at the entryway, only able to see red fog ahead of us. I immediately resorted to my opossum-like instinct to freeze and curl up like a dead body. I would have paid twenty more dollars not to have to go in there. Why? Why did I think this was a good idea? Fight-or-flight kicked in and it's only because of Ella that I didn't instantly "Nope" the fuck out of there.

"No. No. No. No."
"Grace, come on. Just walk forward."
"NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo."

Our compromise was that we would stay there, glued to the wall and clutching each other, and wait for the next group to enter so that we could casually follow them.

What happened instead was, a dad and his two pubescent sons appeared and Ella and I immediately latched onto them like two very high-pitched and profane barnacles. I'm talking head crabs from Half-Life here, I don't think I was at any point not clinging to a handful of a 14-year-old boy's shirt.

As we entered the first floor of the house, I was doing my best to be quiet. It was agonizing. The silence was slowly killing me, every scare was a tiny heart attack. We were about two minutes into it when my Harris Defense Mechanism kicked in - I started talking and did not shut up until we got to the gift shop half an hour later.

For example,

The gimmick this year was that we were traveling through time; we were put in these "time machines" that seemed to double as an elevator-phobic's worst nightmare, and it went pitch black as the door was closing. I totally knew an actor had slipped in with us, I knew it. (Like how I predict the entire plots of movies... see "Albatross Soup.")

"There's a dude in here. I know it. There's a dude. He's right over by the door. Hello? Hello? I know you're there - FUCK! SHIT! - I know there's a dude over there. He's going to scare us. He's - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH SON OF A BITCH!" (I was right, of course.) "Okay, Hi. Thank you for scaring us. Nice to meet you. Have a nice day."

We scurried past an elaborate, gory operating room with a disemboweled nurse reaching towards us as we passed. "That's not very sanitary. This is how people get MRSA. Maybe you should mop before the next surgery."

To a mutant waving it's tentacles through a barred window at us, "I'm sorry they did this to you."

To my surprise and delight, some of the actors responded to my babbling. This crazy dinosaur noise came out of some guy who was on a scaffolding above us and I said, "How did he even make that noise?"
As we passed under him he hissed, "With my mouth."

Talking to and at everything that scared me, like the invaluable character in every Joss Whedon creation, was clearing my head and making the experience bearable. It began with Xander Harris, an essential member of the Scoobies despite his lack of obvious merit. The legacy was passed on to the beloved Wash, keeping the crew of Serenity grounded with his quips and nervous chatter. And then of course, Fran Kranz - who's basically every Whedonite-who-is-too-young-for-Nathan-Fillion's wet dream - graced the screen as Topher and then Marty, a champion for Xander Harris-es everywhere.

About a quarter of the way through Erebus, the employees began doing the classic haunted-house bit where they single out the most scared-looking person in the group and separate them from everyone else or make them go in the front of the group, et cetera. I naturally assumed it would be me, but to my surprise, I WAS WINNING AT THE HAUNTED HOUSE. Ella's silence and purposeful avoidance of eye contact must have been more notable than me vocalizing everything I thought, because time and time again, it was her. My stream of chatter must have come across as amused or deadpan, even though it occasionally crescendo-ed into hysterical screaming.

Also at one point one of the actors grabbed my ass, probably by accident because I'm pretty sure they aren't supposed to touch guests unless we touch them first.

Now I wish we had bought the picture taken of the five of us peeing our pants that they had on display in the gift shop. This would've been the perfect place to post it. Instead I flipped through the photos that were on the Erebus Facebook page and picked my favorite one.

Okay, one more.

"Aw, Honey, let's keep him."

God I love these.

The scariest part of the ordeal, of course, was driving through downtown Pontiac.