It’s a Dog’s Life After All

I guess we’ve officially entered the dog days of summer. That’s an expression that’s always puzzled me, using “dog” as a pejorative, since most dogs I know usually seem to be having a fine old time. (Like dolphins, dogs always look like they’re smiling, even when they’re about to take a bite out of you, something that may actually add to their enjoyment of life.)

Maybe they call them dog days because the heat causes people to pant like a dog on a long car trip (another item on the doggy top 10 list of fun things to do, right up there with chewing toilet paper, sniffing bums and rolling in the remains of fish that have been dead for a long time).

And let’s not forget that Monday the Alpha Male of this entire nation is about to give video testimony on whether he’s behaved like a dirty dog or not. Not to mention that Kenneth Starr will probably be asking him about that T-shirt dress from Martha’s Vineyard’s Black Dog restaurant he reportedly gifted little Monica with. So maybe there’s more to this dog days thing than I thought.

Plus, it’s true, lately I have been scratching a lot, barking at postal workers who claim to have run out of the new Alfred Hitchcock stamps when they simply can’t be bothered to ask their co-worker at the next window for some, drooling on my pillow during naps, and twitching and making little grunting noises while chasing three-picture deals and pilot commitments in my sleep.

I’ve also been chewing on a lot of indigestible thoughts, worrying them exactly like (you got it, simile fans) a dog with a bone. (There, isn’t that a beautiful segue? And my editor says I ramble too much.) They’re the kind of thoughts that begin “Maybe it’s me, but. . . .” And you’re certainly not going to get to the end of this column without hearing them. After all, why should it be just my footsteps that they’re dogging (another beaut!)?

Maybe it’s me, but . . .

* Does the fact that people in Texas have been frying their brains in the heat like the eggs in that drug commercial, or that big chunks of Florida have spontaneously combusted like so many “Spinal Tap” drummers, have absolutely nothing to do with the global warming everyone was so worried about a few years ago? Is it worth losing the ozone layer so that we can have Pam?

* Are we hearing even more about Jerry Seinfeld now that “Seinfeld” is over? Is he thinking of running for office? Naysayers, I have two words for you: Sonny Bono. And then three more words: Sonny Bono’s wife. (No, not Cher, she’s his ex-wife even if she hasn’t been acting like it since he died. I mean the other one, Whatsername, who got elected to Congress while no one was looking.) And does that mean that someday we could see Shoshanna Lonstein in Congress? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

* Why does “catnapping” mean taking a short nap, while “dognapping” means kidnapping a dog? (Another brilliant thematic tie-in and yet another example of dogs getting short shrift in the connotations department.)

* Isn’t there a Hispanic actor alive who conceivably could have played Antonio Banderas’ father-in-law instead of Anthony Hopkins in “The Mask of Zorro”? Was Edward James Olmos busy sweeping up South-Central that day? (On the other hand, they could’ve cast Jeremy Irons. Or Meryl Streep. Or maybe Anthony Hopkins actually is Meryl Streep and she’s just that good an actress. Have you ever seen them together?)

* Do you think anybody, even Candice Bergen, really understands which long-distance company saves you the most money? I suppose Stephen W. Hawking might be able to figure it out, but to reach him I’d have to call long distance.

* If Eskimos (excuse me, Inuits) supposedly have so many words for snow, are there some things they don’t have any word for? Like “pin~a colada”? Or “parking violation”?

* Do movies just not have to make any sense any more? I mean, c’mon, flying debris from an asteroid “the size of Texas” wipes out half of media central, New York City, and the government keeps it under wraps? When they can’t keep Linda Tripp from handing off her tapes to Lucianne Goldberg? And the only person who can save the world is Bruce Willis, who can’t even save his own hair?

* When the cash machine says you’re out of money, aren’t you tempted to ask for a second opinion? And if not, does that mean that we’ve reached the point, beloved of so many sci-fi writers, at which machines are smarter than we are?

* Do you think we’ll ever run out of old TV series to make movies out of? How does “Spin and Marty: The Movie” sound to you?

* Do people just lie about anything now? Saddam Hussein said he wasn’t stockpiling weapons and hiding them from U.N. weapons inspectors, O.J. said he’d never hit his wife, Diane and Mike said they were going to lose their virginity on the Internet, and then there’s our prez--noninhaling, nondraft-avoiding and nonsexual-relations-having. Or is it like when we were kids and if you had your fingers crossed behind your back, fibs didn’t count? (If so, I wish we could just establish the ground rules so I could get back to a very absorbing game of “Mother May I?” And by the way, if fibs don’t count, I am working on that script right now. And sticking to my diet. And flossing regularly.)

* Ever noticed how in football, you score? But in baseball, you go home? (I didn’t really think of that, I just put it in there to make fellow columnist Mike Barnicle from the Boston Globe, recently suspended for lifting jokes from George Carlin, and then denying it, feel better. And besides, I had my fingers crossed.)