A question for all those dog lovers out there: What the fuck do dogs think?
I’ve never owned a dog before, so placate me here. My parents used to have two when I was a little kid, and when I say little, I mean really little, as in “one year for Halloween I dressed up as a cowboy and rode our golden retriever around the neighborhood like he was a horse” kind of little, so I haven’t really given it much thought until now.
While visiting my older brother for Fall break, I met his newly adopted dog and watched my brother’s girlfriend, a trained veterinarian, as she daily enjoyed playing a game with the dog that essentially equated to “jovially slap the dog in the face a few times and immediately afterward demand a kiss.” Yes, she is an educated professional in the animal world. I’ve seen her white coat.
It was in this moment of witnessing this quadruped getting repeatedly smacked in the snout and then gleefully licking its slapper’s face like nothing had happened that I couldn’t stop asking myself, “Dog, are you dumb? Doesn’t that hurt? Don’t you know what the five fingers said to the face? If you didn’t before, you should by now.”
Granted, this is the same dog which months before had managed to bite off half of her own damn tail so that now she only waggles a nub. She’s a beautiful black lab, but she’s obviously not the paramount of doggy acumen. But, if I were the dog, I know for damn sure what I’d be thinking: “Bitch, you slap me one more time and I’ll bite off six of your fingers. Try eating that whole sandwich you never give me a piece of after that.”
However, the bark-translator collar, like Dug the Dog’s from Pixar’s UP, hasn’t been invented yet, and so we’re left to ponder what the bitch-slapped pooch was really cognating until all the spots fall off the 101 Dalmatians…or are we?
Over at Duke University, one mutt-loving professor founded the Canine Cognition Center more than 15 years ago. Yep, that’s right. Vanderbilt invents the first automated bionic leg; Duke studies Lassie’s erratic brain sparkles. (Cone of shame for you, Duke.)
Here’s what lead researcher and director Dr. Brian Hare had to say about the lab lab: “The last decade of research has shown that dogs are more than mere learning machines: they have a rich understanding of their world, which allows them to be flexible problem solvers. Some of their skills even resemble those we see in young children.”
To paraphrase, your fat and flabby bulldog, who we’ll call Cletus in this example, is leaps and bounds smarter than the fat, flabby, young child, who we’ll call Percival, of the most well-to-do Yuppie couple. The so-ugly-he’s-funny smile plastered on Cletus’ face is because even though he can’t speak human, he can still walk and intuit signals before Percival ever gets his thumb out of his ass.
Okay, but what about when their human owners are gone? To quote one of my professors, English extraordinaire Michael Kreyling, without his prior knowledge and approval of my doing so, who had a like-minded query, “Whenever I come home from the grocery store, I wonder if my dog starts jumping all over me with excitement because she was just thinking that I was dead right before I walked in the door. What, does she think something like ‘Oh, I can’t see him anymore, so he must have been hit by a bus’ whenever I leave the house?”
Never satisfied with simply trusting the information spread by a blue devil poking around in canine craniums, I sought a second opinion elsewhere. I read the first chapter of the book Inside of a Dog by Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, and knowing that the rest of you are too busy to read it – or don’t care about what Fido thinks as long as he fetches the morning paper for you – I’ve summarized and extracted the true meaning of her work.
Here’s the watered-down gist of her shared wisdom: “Hey people, dogs are not people, so quit anthropomorphizing them. They couldn’t give two shits about you when you leave them trapped inside all day as you go off to work or leave to find a tolerable human substitute for them. In fact, they may have shat on your expensive oriental rug simply out of boredom. When you find the contents of your kitchen trash can spewed all across the house, you can bet your candy ass that the dog is sleeping soundly in his own bed.”
Like humans, dogs don’t really “think” too much. They rely on internal biological rhythms (“Boy am I hungry. Isn’t it time to eat yet?”) and react to external stimuli conditioning (“Hey, Pavlov, disable your doorbell, man! I’m tired of always salivating for no reason.”). If canines spoke instead of barked, your child would be far dumber than your dog until the kid reached the age of four.
Unlike humans, evolution didn’t give dogs the capacity to perceive the invented structure of time. The magical ability of episodic memory (“Sallie-Anne, didn’t we make a baby ‘round this time last year?”) is something that enables our species to recall the reasons why we continue to hate our mothers-in-law and still run from the angsty bully who stole our lunch money last week.
Thus, what can we conclude about the thoughts of Cletus the bulldog and Percival the Yuppie child? Puppies are cute; children are annoying; both are pretty stupid. And if all else fails, just distract them with shiny objects and sugary treats.
Fight, Flight, Feed, Fuck, and…Fetch?
TFLVP (9-22-11)
- (440) So im in your apartment and listening to the new Avril album and youre not here which is sad 
guess who! 
- (504) Hey, you just texted yourself. Perv.
- (678) What’s a single piece of rice called?
- (678) Take mine and ask him to hear the piece that got him the nickname “Dirty Mike”
Nashville Board of Tourism Seeks to Boost City’s Marketability by Combining Shakespeare, Vanderbilt Football, and Motown
On Saturday, September 10th, the Nashville Board of Tourism unveiled its new initiative to increase the city’s tourism revenue by fusing together multi-chronistic, cross-genre, and disparate forms of consumer art. The board had been incubating this idea to redirect cash flow down the Cumberland River since 1616 but postponed its debut until earlier this month to find the perfect combination of art for enticing the most dissimilar masses into spending simultaneously within the city limits.
The program broke fresh ground with an evening performance of William Shakespeare’s beloved, classic play “Romeo and Juliet” that ran on the bandshell stage of Centennial Park’s annual Shakespeare in the Park festival. And, just as the mathematical computations had predicted, the ubiquity of the selected production magnetized the polar opposites of the population together in the spirit of spending.
Stephen Ford, lead analyst for the initiative, drove his point home while sharing his fail-proof tabulations. “Now if you’ll look at my statistical data, you’ll see that the combination of loud, distant noises interjected over poorly-projected, Middle-English verse has the highest rate of consumer greenback shelling. What, did you think that the exact correlation of the Vanderbilt Football game only a few blocks away was an accident? That’s been planned for centuries! It’s why I have a Ph.D in Mathematics.”
Tammie Carney, a Connecticut resident entirely unaware of UConn’s existence or sportage in Nashville that weekend, expressed that she, too, loved the added background acoustics. “Every time that touchdown horn dramatically blew and that one random guy bit his thumb at that other random guy, I blushed grenadine red, whipped a $10 outta my Miley Cyrus wallet, and stuffed it in the Shakespeare-head tithe bucket.“
City historian and tourism boardmember Bronson Ingerholt had the ingenious idea to incorporate the life-size, replica Parthenon, sitting just a stone’s throw away, into the artistic amalgamation. With cane in hand and jive in his step, he told me, “Ya’ know, sonny, I damn near cried when the actors carried Juliet’s corpse and coffin off the stage as ‘The Electric Slide’ jammed on from the black wedding reception just a few paces away. Even ole’ Billy himself couldn’t have written anything nearly that poetic…or profitable.”
NewsChannel 4 field reporter Cheryl Chatterly reported in her late night Saturday broadcast on the hustle and bustle of downtown Nashville once the riveting performance came to a close. “It feels like St. Patty’s day down here with all this green floating around. I’ve never before seen such a mix of unkempt beards, tweed jackets, and shiny dancing pants in such a condensed area, and all emptying their pockets in the name of the bard of the football field! The mayor may have finally stumbled upon a way to make Nashville the greenest city in the south…green with money that is!”
Mayor Karl Dean, when speaking about the success of the weekend over Sunday brunch with his lead assistant, ebulliently spoke of his satisfaction with the Board of Tourism, “Well, hot damn, Billy-Joe, we’ll be a rainbow circus of dinero in no time! My Little Ponies for each and every senator!”
Slant’capella, The Premierest Vocalest Group Ever
On August 26th, at this year’s annual VPAC Spotlight Showcase, an entirely packed Langford Auditorium audience voluntarily fisted their own eardrums to ameliorate the unwelcomed entry of excessive a’capella vocals. Some returning students anticipated the aural onslaught and stuffed cottonballs in their pockets in preparation, but the first-years, who entered the auditorium entirely unwarned, had to find other means of self-deaf-ication.
“I saw the guy in front of me MacGyver a nice set of headphones out of his yellow Commons t-shirt,” said first-year Regina Cory. “His friend, on the other hand, was writhing on the floor in murderous pain from lacking a home-brew muffling device.”
Before throwing the empty beer bottle he previously tried to stuff inside his ear against the outside wall of Langford, first-year student Frank Knoller was quoted as quickly stating, “There’s only one American Idol a year, man. The rest just become William Hungs.”
As the night wore on and the a’capella groups performed seemingly without pause or end, even the upperclassmen could no longer play deaf.
Sophomore Shannon Halifax admitted that, “After the first two groups went, the earplugs I tucked in my bra really came in handy. Besides, I only showed up to watch that one Melodore shake his ass like a duck again and to see the Juggleville kids fondle their balls. It sucked that I had to sit through the rest of those shitty singing groups just to get off to that glow-in-the-dark routine at the end. Because all the lights were dimmed, nobody could see me touch myself while they flailed their rods around wildly…”
Auto-eroticism aside, lead audio technician Chip Robertson reaffirmed that, regardless of how poorly the house amplification system may have been working that evening, he was actually doing the crowd a favor by plateauing the sound levels of the a’capella groups. “I was trying to prevent some trapped kids from self-inducing vomiting to escape the rest of the show simply because I didn’t want to clean their puke off the seats later on that night,” said Robertson. “They’re already making me work overtime.”
Most serendipitously, I happened to sit down next to three-time Grammy winner Michael Buble who had snuck into Langford to check out the Vanderbilt a’capella scene. When I asked him to provide The Slant with a brief statement on the night’s a’capella acts, he left me with some profound, expert knowledge on the majority of the groups in a simple, succinct statement before leaving three-quarters through the show: “Dude, this shit sucks.”
Additionally, I canvassed the crowd in the seats surrounding mine to get the common man’s response to the never-ending vocal spectacle.
Junior Johnny Johnson, Jr., who viewed the showcase from the very back of the top level, had to admit that he enjoyed the performance by Variations the most. “That beatboxer kid was freakin’ hilarious! While the rest of the group was skyscraper-still, that kid was Jay-Z in his head and bouncin’ all over the place in an empire state of mind. I want him at my next rave party! There’s a free disco biscuit with his name on it if he rolls in.”
Johnson then revealed that it was his guffaw from the back of the auditorium that helped the rest of the crowd to giggle at the Variations beatboxer along with him. The laughter acted as the much needed comic relief in the sad, on-stage drama overlaid with a nails-on-a-chalkboard soundtrack.
The other folks from whom I requested an opinion were elbow-deep inside their own ears and isolated within a repeated “la la la la la” chanting trance, so they never responded.
Of the 26 performance arts groups promoted on the Spotlight Showcase flyer, at least half of them were a’capella related. Even if the other non-a’capella groups had given the worst performances of their careers, the crowd would have loved them anyway simply for the sake of being something different.
Thirty minutes after Spotlight ended, the Silent Disco room at VPBpalooza was packed with glowing smiles because nobody could hear themselves, or anyone else, singing.
TFLVP (9-3-11)
(414): You have to remember that I am now a ladies man. I have spent countless hours purposefully making myself worthy of dating, fixing personality flaws, etc. There are several women on campus interests in me right now.
(504): Lolz, all the ladies love them some typo-ists!
(414): *Grammar
_____________
(504): You fell asleep like a little girl.
______________
(440): It’s sexy when you pick up on subtext like that.
_____________
(901): You’s a dickface. Pronounced “dick-fuh-say.” It’s French.
The Real Sing-Off
After returning from taking third in the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA) and conquering nearly the entirety of the a cappella world, the Vanderbilt Melodores decided to concoct a new in-house competition to keep themselves awake and interested in their own performance at their most recent concert this past weekend in the Student Life Center.
Erratic-and-nearly-spasmodic-dancing Melodore, Zan Berry, first brought the idea to the rest of the Melofolk. While doing a cross between “The Robot” and “The Garden Sprinkler” at practice one evening, he conjectured, “Fellas, now we know that we’re all ballers when we sing together, but which of us is the most baller?”
Sultry-as-all-hell-and-taller-than-most-statues Melodore, Turi Clausell ,immediately responded with the boast of, “Oh, all you boys know it’s me. Change ain’t gonna come til I say it is, and you kids best believe that I’m heads above you in this game. Wanna high five? Hahaha, nice try, but you can’t. Get to my level.”
Still attempting to get out of the ensemble and to stop harmonizing, wildchild-fratstar-prettyboy Melodore, Matthew Thompson, and mohawked-motor-mouthed Melodore, Brandon Goodman, simultaneously exclaimed, “But fellas, how do we gauge who wins? What do we use to measure our individual ballernesses?”
Once country-all-star-boy-scout Melodore, Nathan Hall, interpreted golden-glove-beat-boxing Melodore Justin Kenney’s Morse Code and epiphany-worthy message, they voted and agreed that the winner would be determined by the amount of clothing that the audience members voluntarily removed whenever each Melodore sang.
With the collective of manly voices at odds, it was only a matter of time before matters grew catty.
Multi-talented-and-sleep-deprived Melodore, Aidan Carr, chuckled smugly to himself. He knew he would have every pair of panties from all the Vanderbilt Off-Broadway members in attendance.
Voice-so-high-pitched-he-could-be-missing-his-Adam’s-apple Melodore, Seth Johnson, wanted to add some clarifications to the rules. After inhaling a small balloon of helium to get a leg up, he chipmunk-chirped, “Guys, guys, guys, I don’t even have to say words. I just make arbitrary semi-instrumental noises and all of the ladies instantly begin throwing their bras at me. Especially the big girls, they love them some little red head, if ya know what I mean. Soooooo, words don’t actually need to be sung. Deal? Cool.”
Moves-so-slick-he-should-be-black Melodore, Ben Edquist, then lobbied that the competition include a dancing element that would allow him to decimate the competition with a single hip shimmy. Jealously, the other Melos denied his request. “This is intended to be a singing competition, you tiny dancer,” pompously noted knighted-and-archivally-wise Melodore, Will Timbers.
Hip-hop-star-in-the-making Melodore, Nick Wells, had only three words to drop, “Black and Gold,” after which he Michael-Jackson-grabbed his crotch, slapped Edquist across the face with a sequined white glove, spun on his heel, and found himself on Youtube to watch his own music video on non-stop replay to psych himself up.
Ivory-tower-of-innocence Melodore, Tyler Verdell, opted out of the competition and grabbed his darkest pair of sunglasses to wear throughout the concert. “Momma wouldn’t approve,” he stated briefly when asked why he would refuse throngs of attractive women throwing themselves at his melodic, hairy self. Walking away, he shook his ass like a duck.
Quiet-and-intriguing-enough-to-keep-you-wondering-what-he’s-really-thinking Melodore, Richard Whalen, just smiled silently at the rest of the Melos. He was already planning to take the win by stripping off his own clothes and running buck-ass-nekked across the stage half-way through the show.
Resident-thunder-bass-Zeus Melodore, Trevor Fortenberry, just nodded calmly in the corner of the room. Knowing victory was surely his – his bassy voice is so powerful that it literally, and selectively, vibrates off women’s clothes. He simply released a James Earl Jones-worthy grumble and replied, “Goooooood, goooooood,” when they all decided that the competition was indeed on.
Following the concert, the winner will be determined upon Melodore founders Shane Stever’s and John Baunach’s unbiased inspection of the video from the concert. Currently, the video is still under review. The winner will receive the right to pick his favorite lady from each of the other Melodores’ hordes of admirers for his own enjoyment without any protestation from the losers.
The selected ladies are, of course, also allowed to object, but with those good vibrations, they’d have to be melofools to do so.
On Being an Illegitimate Senior
For about a quarter of you reading this article, you have probably already started cherishing many lasts of your college experience.
Last random, semi-regrettable hook-up with that co-ed you’ve creepily had your eye on since freshman year. Last night of shot-gunning Natty and shooting Taaka in a moldy, cramped dorm room with your underage friends. Last paper to turn in to that slunt of a professor who you just knew always hated you for no good reason, but who you nonetheless found even more irresistible because of the sexy way she let the words “supply” and “demand” just slide off her tongue in class (because you knew what the words really meant when she stared diabolically and said them directly to you). Last days of telling your class schedules and homework agendas to go fuck themselves because you just wanna go lay out in the sun on Alumni Lawn and fix your late-night, library-light tan.
Last inhale as a child before the exhale as an adult.
At the same time, with only about a month of Vanderbilt undergraduateness left to your names, I’m sure that a lot of you seniors are looking forward to the final walkout across the graduation stage when you blitzkrieg the chancellor and run off with your diploma in hand, wildly screaming “It’s all mine now, bitches! Fuck all those terribly-colored couches!”
You, the Last of the Non-Commoners, are thinking about how much you wish you could have done things a little differently. You’re wishing that you could have gotten out past the Vanderbubble and into the thick of leather-booted Nashville more often, out of attending all of those copied-and-pasted frat parties, out of wearing all of those terribly-designed student organization t-shirts that you were cajoled into buying (because you really do care about the extremely niche population of starving-blind-savant-displaced-Ethiopian children in Myanmar), and out of running those same student organizations that you really couldn’t have given two shits about, unless you were able to spectacularize them on your resume, of course.
However, if you’re like me and somehow didn’t manage to finish the rat race within the admission department’s projected four-year allotment for the $200,000 slip of fancy text embossed on cardboard that was blessed by the chancellor, times are a little different for you and me right about now.
We’re gladly sharing with all the rest of you in your lasts – go on ahead and live it up, we appreciate the free and flowing libations – but it sure as hell ain’t gonna be the last lasts we’re gonna have. Yep, I’m referring to all my super-seniors out there, my victory-lappers taking some extra spins around the old block.
While all our other senior friends and enemies are floundering in their confused bouts of guilt, questioning the utility of their college experience, and fearing their future “will I get the career/internship/mail-order bride/grad school/amount of granddaddy’s money when he kicks the bucket that I really want?” worries about life beyond the tree-lined limits of the Commodore’s territory, you and I get to postpone our own for at least another six months.
Oh yeah, we’ll be freaking out too, just not while you are. At this instance in life, procrastination is just like masturbation: We’re fucking ourselves and, for right now, it feels so damn good.
Currently, you and I don’t need to fret over the little things like job hunting, pissing ourselves like puppies in anticipation of receiving grad school acceptance letters, having to find real money to pay for food at Chili’s and Wendy’s, going to big boy jail instead of the conduct office, and never again being able to drunkenly bellow the chorus of “Don’t Stop Believing” in public without severe peer judgment.
Those fears are something you and I will revisit next December or later. In the meantime, I’m escaping all of it for shores and cities less American.
The same day that all you crazy kids walk across the graduation stage in front of an ocean of folding chairs, I’ll be hopping on a trans-Atlantic flight, jet-setting across an ocean to Switzerland and France for my first, only, and final Maymester experience. Throughout the rest of the summer, I’ll be couch-surfing with friends and family while gallivanting all across Europe. Next fall, I’ll be taking a random assortment of classes that I couldn’t fit into my previous semesters’ schedules otherwise, and it’ll be the lightest course load that I’ve taken since I was a freshie. Collegiate career bell-curve of difficulty for the win!
So, to all of my fellow seniors who are graduating on that fateful Friday the 13th of May, I wish you the best of luck with life after college. Try not to think about how shitty the job market is right now, or about how hard it is to get into a good med school to fulfill your parents’ dreams, or how shameful you’ll feel moving back in with your folks after four years of freedom and three months of being unable to find employment.
As of right now, you’re still college students, so enjoy every last one of your lasts.
Zelda Turns 25, Has Quarter-Life Crisis
A mere few days ago, the well-established and instantly recognizable The Legend of Zelda video game series celebrated 25 years of digital existence. Since it’s birth in 1986, The Legend of Zelda, or Zelda for short, has gone through quite a few changes in its lifetime. And, as any recent college graduate trying to make a life for itself in this new market would, our young Zelda began looking back on all the life-altering links to its past and began to wonder what its master quest would have been like without all those changes. What if it could turn back the phantom hourglass?
Link began to imagine existence if it had stayed in that golden, infantile state of pixilation, back when everything was just so 8-bit, pure and simple. “What if Ganon had only remained as that large pig-bear-monster-looking-thing I had slain? But noooooo, he had to go ahead and arch-nemesis-up and then bestiality-rape someone and have a baby Ganondorf. Narcissistic asshole messed me up for innumerable, possibly unrelated, generations.
“But then, what if I had never realized that tree people adopted me when I was just a little tyke? I think I’d still have quite the case of mistaken identity, even developing 3-D multiple personality disorder so hardcore that I’d still be trying to hide behind various masks. And then I would’ve missed out on that crazy, blade-induced acid trip that took me back and forth seven years in and from the future. After all that time-travel bullshit, I realized I should’ve just told Ganondorf to blow my Ocarina of Time. Pick a form and stay in it, you asshole.
“And then I met this Twilight Princess who hooked me once and changed my life forever. I loved her to death on multiple occasions, had given all my hearts just to get a taste of her Triforce, but she was so freakin’ bipolar. Like day and night, I never knew how to read her, but she caused enough thunder down under to wake all my winds, an oracle for all the seasons and the ages.”
And then Link had a great awakening and figured out it was all a dream.
Fuck you, shitty plot twist.
