Friday, May 28, 2004

Hello, Mr. Chip!

Glad to see everyone enjoys the comments feature. Unfortunately, it seems that unless you have a Blogger account, you are compelled to post comments anonymously, but you all seem to be working around that. Thanks for complying with my request for overall grammatical correctness. I did not mean that I will split hairs over split infinitives, dangling participles, or even sentence fragments; rather, I hope to discourage people from posting in the code that seems to have arisen from cell phone text messaging. The chimps who surf my blog on their breaks from writing Hamlet have an excuse. The rest of us are reasonably literate human beings.

And now for something completely different...
Sonja got her microchip implanted today when she went for her checkup and feline leukemia shot. The chip is about the size of a grain of rice and emits a signal that can be read by a scanner at shelters or vets if the pet gets lost. The signal contains an ID number that can be traced through a database back to the pet's owners. We chip our cats because, being that they are indoor cats, they do not wear collars. However, we like to have some kind of ID in case they should get out. The chip is a perfect solution. The vet implants it between the cat's shoulders with a hypodermic needle the size of a whale harpoon, which the vet assured me is no more painful than the vaccinations, and it is in for life. According to the literature and registration pamphlet, the pet microchips "protect virtually any pet you love...dogs, cats, horses, birds, reptiles, exotics, even fish!"

You read that right. Fish. Two thoughts come to mind simultaneously on that:
1. That would have cut 98 minutes off the running time for Finding Nemo.
2. How do you lose a pet fish? Guppynapping? [comment courtesy of Elie]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, maybe I'll have one implanted in my pet grain of rice! Oh wait, that could be difficult...

As far as tagging pet fish, haven't you ever heard of Fish and Chips???

-Larry Steller aka Mr. Grooism is not anonymous, but I play him in the comments!

Janet said...

Larry, I ought to have you write the punch lines! Fish and chips...I laughed so hard that I almost spit coffee all over the monitor.

Anonymous said...

I remember loosing one of my fish when we were kids...and yes, a guppy! They do jump out of the tank (do watch Finding Nemo if you don't believe me)! Boy if I had one of those little detector things, I wouldn't have had to empty all 25 gallons to move the tank to find dried fish! Ann Onomous