Beatrix Potter has a lot to answer for

This morning I overheard the following conversation between a small boy and his mother at Riverdale Farm:

Boy, coming up to the cow pen: And does this animal talk?

Mum, exhaustedly: No, this one doesn't talk.

Boy, incredulous: It doesn't? This one doesn't talk either? What kind of a farm is this?

Mum, resigned: It's not that kind of farm.

Finally, a Barbie doll of astonishing realism

I never had a Barbie as a child, and here's the really sad part: I never wanted one. But I bet if this particulary model of Barbie had been around at the time I would have begged my mother for one. Why? Because Barbie has a dog who eats her own shit.

Under Product Features, you learn that "You can open Tanner's mouth and feed her dog biscuits". More fun awaits "when Tanner has to go to the bathroom" because "Barbie cleans up with the magnetic scooper."

So let me get this straight: the fun of this doll is essentially totally scatalogical: feed your dog a turd, watch him drop a biscuit (did I get that the right way around?) and shovel the shit. Excellent!

These are going to be yoinked from the shelves faster than the I Hate Math Barbie, mark my words. So I'm going to buy one tomorrow and keep in safe for my eight-year-old son's birthday. He's going to love it.

Little Mr. Mousikin, in our little housikin...

Let me preface this entry by saying that it's been a long, hard week of swabbing bodily fluids, and not in that fun way. I'm talking vomit and poop, friends, almost all of it emanating from a small miserable person. It's been our first real brush with pukey illness chez Quince, and I guess we should count ourselves lucky. Public service announcement directed at childless people reading this: I'm sure you've thought to yourselves, "oh, I'd like to have kids, but it must be a drag when they get sick and puke all over your shirt." Yes, it is a drag. SAVE YOURSELVES. It's too late for me. Wear a condom. I beg you. Because otherwise you will not only have a small person puking on your shirt, you will actually instinctively be stretching forth said shirt while still on your body to better catch the stream of barf before it hits the carpet.

Yes, that is a true story. And here's another one: we have mice. Many mice. We have had at least 9 mice living in our house. How do we know this? Because we have killed 8 of them using mousetraps.

And what happened to the ninth? Well may you ask.

We have a cat, Smudge, who is really quite lovely. She is also elderly and frail and, to be honest, a bit of a prima donna. She is the type of cat who complains over a full food dish, and we love her for it.

This week, Smudge has also had cause to complain that mousetraps were placed near her food dish, and the traps occasionally have contained dead mice. (Not for days on end; that would be gross, but just until we've gotten home for work or something.) She complains in Cat language, of course, but I can tell she's saying, "Waiter, there's a mouse near my soup."

Anyway, Smudge is far too refined to actually catch mice, or, apparently, even deter them from running riot. Or so I thought.

This afternoon, in order to tend to my poopy child, I came home early. I was attending to some important business while patiently awaiting the next poopsplosion (note to childless people: put Trojans on shopping list) and was taking an important phone call from the Editor-in-Chief. Who should come waltzing in but Madam Smudge herself, thoughtfully gumming the head of a mouse.

This was reasonably distracting in itself. Frankly, Smudge isn't the type of cat who'd wake us up if the house were on fire; if that were happening, it's more likely she'd start bitching about the fact her water dish was getting uncomfortably steamy. But the whole element of distraction began to get out of control when I noticed the mouse was still kicking its legs feebly.

Smudge gave me a look like "what now? I have sucked the fur bon-bon for several minutes, and am full of ennui."

I am still on the phone with the Editor-in-Chief.

Smudge puts down the fur bon-bon. It kicks to life and then starts to run towards me, obviously totally out of its little mind from breathing in the stank of Smudge's maw. Without thinking too much about it, I drop an empty yogourt pot down on top of the bewildered mouse.

I am still on the phone with the Editor-in-Chief.

The mouse begins to beat against the side of the plastic. Smudge gives a baleful wail at the loss of her fur lolly, a wail that sounds very much like "I was enjoying that."

I finally get off the phone with the Editor-in-Chief. What to do with the fucking mouse? I decide the drown the little bastard, because it seems like sensible plan and I might have read about doing something similar in a David Sedaris story. I ready a dustpan and brush, remove the pot, whisk the mouse into the dustpan then into the sink.

And yes, reader, I drowned him. I am a killer of mice. This was not manslaughter or criminal negligence, but actually first-degre mousiecicide.

A couple of things to know if you ever want to drown a mouse (perhaps having Googled "mousiecide" and wound up on this page): they appear surprisingly hard to drown. This one managed to swim around successfully for around a minute, like a very small Ophelia in the all-mouse production of Hamlet. They also poop quite a lot in their final minutes, which was unexpected and not at all fair, given how much poop I've had to deal with today already.

I might have left Ophelia for a few minutes to see what would happen, but the Editor-in-Chief called me again so I took a butter knife and weighed the mouse down under the water. Finally, after a conversation about performance management that went on far too long, Ophelia achieved her quietus.

She was put to rest in a Sun Valley plastic bag in the trash.

Note to self: scrub sink, autoclave butter knife.

I like to watch

Sitting here as I do on the poop deck of the Titanic, as is my wont, I was intrigued by this article in Slate about the declining watch industry. It seems that now that humans have cellphones, computers and iPods more or less permanently attached to their orifices at all times, there's less of a need for wrist watches. What does this mean?

As in many other consumer areas, the middle is getting squeezed. According to Deborah Rudinsky, merchandise manager at the Doneger Group, sales of moderately priced watches—time pieces that retail for under $200—were probably down about 10 percent in 2005.

The purpose, or unique selling point, of watches used to be that they could provide you with information (the time) that was inconsistently available otherwise. There's nothing unique about watches as a time-information delivery device, apart from cultural associations we've built up around them. If other devices can deliver the same information as efficiently, they got nothing. And unlike the information contained in, say, newspapers, the time is not complex or nuanced in any way; it cannot be branded, personalized or shaped to give it added value. In fact, 'good' timekeeping is based on the fact it's standardized across the whole world.

So what's left for poor old watches? According to this article, the high end, the low end and niche markets.

"The customer is buying a fine watch more as a jewelry piece and less as a timekeeper," said Doneger Group's Rudinsky. Women are drawn to watches that help accessorize different outfits. Men are drawn to high-tech gadgetry. Fitness geeks of both sexes opt for souped-up digital watches equipped with heart rate monitors and GPS technology. "To capture younger customers, watches today need to have much more of a fashion nuance," said Rudinky.

Watches will probably be around for a while yet (much like newspapers). By the way, I looked up watches on Wikipedia and discovered this gem:

Because most watches lack a striking mechanism, such as a bell or gong to announce the passage of time, they are properly designated as timepieces, rather than clocks.

You just know some pedant tediously insists upon this distinction to the profound irritation of his friends and family.