Sunday, November 26, 2006

The Watering Hole

This is an African watering hole that will happily run all day on your computer on windows media player. It is pretty nifty, really, even though so far all we have seen are bugs. Phosphorescent bugs, granted, but bugs nevertheless. Not dissimilar to the bugs we have right here in North Carolina. Still, as my son said hopefully, "But they're special Africa bugs!" And they are indeed. The soundtrack is really cool, though. The African night is much, much scarier than ours, even those nights of ours that are punctuated by random gunfire, like Thursday (I guess I wasn't the only person who got stressed out by Thanksgiving.)

My son, despite his advanced age, is fascinated by the watering hole. He thinks it would be better if there was a speaker, though, and we could talk to the (so far hypothetical) animals through it. "Wouldn't it be awesome," he said, "If like there was this lion just having a drink, and then you yelled OOOOOOOGA OOOOOOOOGA OOOOOOOGA through the speaker and he just like jumped straight up in the air?"
"Yeah," I said, "Although I'm not sure that's what Dr. Doolittle meant by talking to the animals. I mean, you know, learning their language so you can play mean practical jokes on them."

Mean practical jokes on animals can be amusing, though. Django is terrified of the rooster noise that M can make come out of his celphone, but the scary monkey-hyena-leopard-invisible-smoke-monster roaring noises from the watering hole aren't fazing him one iota. I remembered freaking Theo out one time with the sound of a fox on the computer (he wigged right the hell out) but the watering hole noises aren't bothering him either. So we tried playing some other sounds: lions and foxes and wolves. Theo did get off the couch to bark at the front door when the wolves howled, but Django just stayed on the kitchen floor chewing up a dishtowel. This proves that instinct has been completely subsumed by modern life: you know your dog is a suburban 21st century wuss if he's more afraid of roosters than of lions.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your views on life are hilarious, and your writing, delightful. You're assuming cult status in my eyes.

mygothlaundry said...

Well, thank you! I hope it's a good cult and not one of those ones with the freaky tennis shoes and the evil Koolaid and all. I promise to never make you sell horrible comic books on a streetcorner. Now give me all your money. ;-)