Alert NGIP reader Jennifer sent in a picture of her fainting goat, Gizmo, which was taken in Firth, Nebraska. Jennifer says, “Since everyone always asks if she is a meat or dairy goat, this is a definitive answer to the question! ”

LouLou La Poule from Hen’s Teeth showed NGIP this picture of a guy who’s part of a group of landscapers hired on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles.

Image source:  NPR.org

Here’s an 11 second video sent in by my friend Drew showing an attack Boer goat kid.

Oh sure he looks cute and all…

I am lyrically challenged. You know, as in I don’t know the lyrics to songs. Even if you hum a few bars I can’t fake it. Also? I can’t name that tune in forty-three notes, let alone seven. Why is that? And am I alone in this?

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, my teenage ears were assaulted with ear candy aka disco. Lines like “Let’s whip it, baby. Let’s whip it right”, lacked a certain….depth. And songs with substance didn’t stand a chance with me. We didn’t have thousands of songs on iPods. All I had was the radio, so I couldn’t rewind a song a bunch of times until I finally figured out that Mick Jagger wasn’t singing , “I’ll never leave… your pizza burnin’.”

Today, I will start listening to a song with an attempt to comprehend its meaning, but something happens somewhere between ten and thirty seconds into the song. I miss a word and stop understanding what they’re talking about or I just forget to listen and the next thing you know, I’m catching myself thinking about what I need to get at the pet store for my ostrich, Sheila.

JD at I Do Things posts song lyrics at the beginning of all her posts and most of the time, no, pretty much all of the time, I have no idea which song they come from (unless it’s “Whip it, Baby”)

In this arena called musical prowess, I am shamed by my husband, Mr. MudPuppy, who could kick anybody’s ass in Rock & Roll Jeopardy because he knows EVERYTHING about music. He lives, eats, breathes, sheds and poops it. He can sit on the couch and just listen to music. Or watch the same concert DVD over and over.

I know! Who does that? I can’t even watch the same movie more than once.

I’ll come into the room and see Geddy Lee from Rush again or that dude from Iron Maiden telling the same story from that seat on their tour bus in that same documentary from a month ago, and I’ll say, “Haven’t you already seen this?” And you know what he says?

“Yeah?”

Like there’s an implied “What of it?” at the end. Like there’s nothing wrong with watching Megadeth’s Behind-The-Scenes thing, or that Steve Vai performance repeatedly. As if he GETS something out of it every time. Pffft!

So anyway, for him, music can be a primary activity. Like I said, he can just sit there and listen to it. That bores me to tears. I have to be DOING something else and music is allowed to play in the background while I’m busy doing that something else. Of course, if my mind is on that something else, I’m not really “listening” to the music, which of course prevents me from ever learning what a song is about.

And we listen to different music anyway, Mr MudPuppy and I. While he enjoys all sorts of music, he leans toward 80s Heavy Metal most of the time, while I’m more of a Scissor Sisters / Mika type of person. Frankly, I don’t know what he sees in me. Although we do both like Butch Walker. So there’s that.

I blame my mother. And my father. They were both cultural dodo birds when it came to music. I’m talking bottom-of-the-barrel tragically unhip. You grow up listening to what your parents listen to and that’s your musical library getting informed and molded for the rest of your life.

Most of you were lucky enough to hear original artists. You know what I spent my childhood getting exposed to? Homogenized cover tunes. That’s right – Muzak on a Stick. I grew up in an elevator, my friends. Does anybody in Sacramento remember KEWT? Some people called it “Easy Listening”. I called it crap. Well, now I do. I didn’t know any better back then that my musical taste was being forcibly extracted from me at such an early age.

Yes, KEWT. The home of pure unadulterated instrumental music, where songs were either stripped of their lyrics and dignity, or worse, sung by Lawrence Welk-like studio singers.

Enter Ray Conniff. My mother had an 8-track suitcase full of Ray Conniff albums in the car, so that’s what we listened to. All the time. So I do know all the words to those songs, but at seven years old they never meant anything to me.

Lyrics like:

♫♪Who’s in the Strawberry Patch with Sally,
Who’s making love to her tonight? ♫♪

and

♫♪Happiness Is, Happiness Is, Happiness Is, Happiness is
Happiness Is, Happiness Is….different things for diff-er-rent people…that’s what happiness is. ♫♪

and

♫♪Photograph, photograph, photograph, photograph,
Photograph, photograph, photograph, photograph ♫♪

No I’m not kidding. Wait, here’s another one…

♫♪Leave me alone, won’t you leave me alone,
Please leave me alone, now leave me alone.
Leave me alone, please leave me alone, yes leave me. ♫♪

So while I may have these frickin’ songs memorized, even to this day, I don’t know what any of the songs are about. Except the one where they sing “Photograph” over and over about 63 bazillion times. I think that one is about a photograph.

If I had to recall four specific 8-tracks that I spent an inordinate amount of time being exposed to it would be these:

Ray Conniff – The Way We Were (which includes all of the songs whose lyrics I sang for you above)

Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass – The Sexy Whipped Cream Album Inappropriate for 7-year-olds

Soundtrack from The Sound of Music  (My mom had a “thing” for Christopher Plummer)

Soundtrack from Fiddler on the Roof   (My mom had a “thing” for Tevya/Topol)

Now you might be saying, “Well, that’s not so bad. Those last three are pretty good.” And that would be true if it stopped there, but there was only one album of the last three listed above, whereas the rest of the suitcase contained 147 Ray Conniff 8-tracks.

Why couldn’t my parents be cool and listen to The Beatles or Elvis or Frank Sinatra? Something culturally relevant for Pete’s sake? For MY sake. My parents missed out something fierce. And in turn, so did I.

If I were a rich man, I’d yidle-deedle-didle-deedle back to my childhood and buy some real music for my mother for birthdays and Christmas, rather than hearing over and over again that a doe is a deer. A female deer. And then I would grow up listening to music that meant something. Music that didn’t have all the flavor sucked out of it before I had a chance to hear it.

It’s not that I don’t like music. I do. I’m even moved by it at times. I just don’t know the words. And I don’t want to hear music that has been “cleansed” to within an inch of its life.

Once every ten years or so, I do pay attention to the lyrics of a song and this one, called Walk You Home, by Passenger, I fell in love with the first time I heard it. The video for it below is curiously shot, and the song is funny, clever, and a bunch of other adjectives I can’t list without spoiling it.

Just listen to the words.

Link to Walk You Home by Passenger video.

Link to Lyrics for Walk You Home

Alert NGIP reader Anna snapped this shot near her home in Arusha in  Northern Tanzania.

According to Anna, who’s originally from the UK, “there are lots of goats here and it’s not unusual to find them riding in buses, on top of buses, on motorbikes, taxis, or just taking a casual stroll down a busy shopping street!”

Thank you, Anna!

And no Goat Thing of the Day would be complete without showing a video of a goat acting like a jerk.

Link to Goat Video on YouTube (if unable to view here)

Thanks to Wendy (of Swirl Girl’s Pearls) and Thomas (of 101 Things)  for pointing out the video!

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have a new logo, thanks to the artistry of Daniela of Seafood Punch.

Poor Sacramento. It shoots itself in the foot and wonders why nobody comes to visit it in the hospital. Sacramento is not a “destination city” and never will be as long as the City Council has anything to do with it.

We don’t know what tourists even look like. We don’t get visitors, except for the obligatory 4th grade field trip to Sutter’s Fort the schools keep insisting on.

Did you know famous food guy Anthony Bourdain is coming here Sept 17th? He was asked if he’d ever been to Sacramento before, which is kind of like asking if this pillow padded tutu makes me my butt look fat.

Here’s a recent interview question to Bourdain from a Sacramento Press article:

Have you been to Sacramento? Have you spent much time here?

I haven’t spent much time, unfortunately. I’ve been through for one night, and didn’t get a chance to see anything.

Look how sorry he feels for us. “Unfortunately”, indeed. But what he says epitomizes this town. People don’t come here, they just pass through on their way to San Francisco or Lake Tahoe. If we’re lucky, we’re a pit stop. Which means local entrepreneurs should go into the bathroom business.

“Sacramento: Come for the Capitol. Stay for the toilets.”

I was in Manhattan recently and was awed by this Halal street cart across the street from our hotel, thinking how much Sacramento could SO use this kind of thing. But no. We have city ordinances preventing any kind of street cart to truly thrive. Rules like, you can’t operate for more than 30 minutes on any day that ends in “Y”.

The Sacramento Bee recently published an article with the headline: “Sacramento Says No to Hot New Food Trend“. Of course they said no. It’s got four bad words in it.

1. Hot

2. New

3. Food

and

4. Trend
Check out this line at 2am at 56th and 3rd in Manhattan on any given day of the week including Mondays.

If you ever go to Manhattan, make sure you go to the street cart with the line.

It’s at 53rd and 6th Ave. and there’s a line for a reason.

This is the gyro plate a mix of chicken and lamb and it was yummy! And….are you ready for this? It was SIX BUCKS!

You wouldn’t know that “street meat” was an OK item to eat. It just sounds bad. And maybe some of it is. But you should try this stuff and see the long lines, which is what SOME people in Sacramento need to see before they “pooh-pooh” it with ridiculous city ordinances designed to clearly prevent such businesses from operating.

I could totally open one of these “street meat” carts and I’d put it right across the street from the Hyatt Hotel on a large sidewalk area near the Capitol. And I’d blast my boom box and be singin’ all:

♫♪ “My street cart brings all the boys to the lawn….” ♫♪

In other words, my street meat would draw a crowd. And nothing draws a crowd better than a crowd. Because people are so nosy and curious and want to know what all the hubbub is about. It’s like those spontaneous outdoor public entertainment events, where somebody covered in chrome is doing backflips while juggling guppy-filled fishbowls and an audience forms and people start clapping.

Other people walking by stop to see what all the commotion is about and other people, say that one random tourist that Sacramento does get, whips out his camera and then someone else whips out their camera and all kinds of people are taking pictures with their iPhones and sending photos off to Facebook and Twitter and Whrrl so that now, people all over the country are seeing this really cool thing happening in Sacramento, and is that the Capitol in the background? This of course, leads to more people showing up and strangers on the sidewalk start talking to one another because they are sharing something so awesome and now you’ve got yourself a local cultural phenomenon, not to mention a sense of community. I mean, you always get that one long-haired lady in the rainbow-colored tie-dyed muumuu and finger symbals who dances to everything in front of everybody even when it’s inappropriate, but it’s all part of the charm, right?

I’m not the only one who sees such obvious neglected potential. The Sacramento Bee article quotes Randall Selland of the Selland Family of Restaurants, which operates gourmet eateries Ella Dining Room & Bar and The Kitchen who’s interest in starting a street cart is on hold because of the city’s tight restrictions: “It’s such a cool thing, but it just goes back to Sacramento being so backwards.” Amen, my brother.

Do I even need to say this out loud? We need street carts, dag nabbit! And when the city finally relents and gives in to the people (and common sense), they’d better not blow it right out of the gate. Whoever opens one should take a lesson from the Halal cart on 53rd and 6th in Manhattan, which, by the way, is open until 4am and has a constant line. And do you want to know what the secret is to that street cart’s reputed $10,000 per day income? It’s the simplest trick, yet the most difficult to achieve….are you writing this down, you future entrepreneurs?

Make food that tastes good.

If you want to read about the ordinance and leave a comment in support of allowing street carts to operate more reasonably in the city, check out the post at Yum Tacos called “Save Sacramento’s Taco Trucks“.

Have you ever walked behind a person, let’s say it’s a chick, and she’s got some distracting element about her and your mind is now occupied with nothing but the pesky needling of that distraction for the whole three or four blocks you’re stuck following her, which is helpful in some ways because it does pass the time in this sweltering humidity.

And then you take a picture of her because you figure hey, you have a blog, you can tell everyone else about this THING you saw and you can even feel better about yourself because you’ve been staring at and judging this person for a good five minutes, but your readers will validate you. Or vilify you; their choice, I suppose.

So anyway, I was walking down the street the other day (Fifth Avenue in New York City near the NY Public Library, if you must know) and I get stuck walking behind this:

In public. On a pedestrian-laden sidewalk.

And I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing I did, which was…

Where in the holy heck did she get pink headphones?? Right?

So I’m at this blogging conference in New York a couple weeks ago and I end up at this party hosted by some chick and her friends at some bar on Columbus Circle, although why we continue to egregiously celebrate Wrong Way Roger by erecting statues in the middle of the roadway around which people must drive is beyond me, but I digress.

I’m with Robyn of Robyn’s Online World and Connie of Brain Foggles and they decide to come with me and “crash” the party since they are not “on the list”. When we arrive, there are several young, large, muscular, black-T-shirted men who are asking questions at the door and I’ve already decided that I want to be a rebel and crash this party too. Even though I’m on the list.

As we approach the door, one of the black-shirted, clipboard-carrying, tanned robots turns his head away from us and we literally sidle along the wall and walk  in and I feel like I’ve gotten away with a bank robbery. Even though I’m on the list. I got to experience the adrenaline rush of “crashing”. Man I never felt so alive!

Anyway, Gavin DeGraw is near the window overlooking Wrong Way Roger and the place is filled with writhing and screaming women. I know you don’t believe me when I say I just walked into a bar and there is Gavin DeGraw but I snapped this picture to prove it.

It totally looks like him, right? Maybe next time you won’t be all up on your high horse talking all, “Margaret is a big fat liar”.

Whaddya mean it doesn’t look like him? Is it the angle? It’s the angle, isn’t it. I figured this would happen because I can’t seem to figure out how to use a “point and shoot” despite the eponymous type of camera, so I invariably take twelve  pictures of everything in the hopes that one might turn out OK. So how about this one?

Does this look like him? (The guy on the right, I mean.)

But who cares about celebrity sightings, right? You want to know how I became a supermodel. Well, so at this party, which was sponsored by some place that makes razors, they had these crazy skinny models who I think are in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest legs in the world.

These are the Schick Girls. More like Stick Girls, if you ask me.

So anyway, these Stick Chicks call out to me and ask if I want to be their leader and I say, No way! And they say Way! And I say No Way! And we go back and forth like that for about half an hour. So I cave and sign a lucrative multi-million dollar contract – well that’s redundant, isn’t it – I mean since when is a multi-million dollar contract not lucrative? I probably just should have said multi-million dollar, but then that’s semi-specific and not really any of your business, so maybe I just should have said lucrative, but then lucrative is a relative term and you might have thought that $10,000 was lucrative and I’d want you to know that it was multiples of millions. In fact, I don’t want you to minimize it and think it was only 2 or 3 million when it was more like $14.8 million.

And I suppose you want proof of that too, so here you go…

Not that that will satisfy you because there is no satisfying you people, I swear.

My point here is that until someone pays me multiples of millions for blogging, I’m stuck posing with sticks for a while.

I stumbled on a Sacramento Bee news story about a guy, practically a kid, who was recently arrested for shining a laser at a CHP airplane. Excuse me, he was arrested “on suspicion” of shining a laser. Last year, another guy was sentenced to prison for over three years for doing the same thing.

Personally, I think it’s kind of idiotic, no it’s definitely idiotic to play with the cops in this manner. Especially when you know what you’re doing is wrong (they found the laser thrown over the fence – a bit of an indicator)

But my question is, why should idiots like this take up valuable tax paid space in the pokey when there are violent criminals on the waiting list to get in? I say make the punishment fit the crime. I mean for God’s sake, make an example of him via non-jailed humiliation, not by giving him free lodging and three squares a day. He’s not so much a criminal as he is an idiot. I have a few ideas that I pulled out of my tukus just now for you, not that I have any idea what I’m talking about.

Six Ways to Properly Punish a Criminal

1. First, make him sit through several long and excruciating lectures given by a Ben Stein-like speaker and quiz him to within an inch of his life on the dangers of pointing lasers at airplane or helicopter pilots. Clockwork Orange him if necessary to make sure he’s “getting it”.

2. Confiscate the idiot’s laser pointer, citing his inability to use it responsibly, find out who the idiot’s arch nemesis is and make a loud big public deal presenting the laser pointer to his nemesis, preferably a guy named Meathead, making sure to tell him why he’s receiving such a cool toy. Make sure you tell  Meathead to use it responsibly (i.e. do not point it at pilots in the air).

3. Fine his ass. Ten thousand dollars ought to do it. Garnish his wages because something tells me he’s not the type to pay bills on time.

4. Make sure his parents know about this fine mess he’s gotten himself into.

5. Community Service: As long as there is litter in the streets, there will be a need for people to pick it up. This task serves as a double message sender. Not only does it give him time to think about what he’s done, it also serves as a potential warning to him against littering. If people didn’t throw crap out of their windows, he wouldn’t have to be there picking it up. Maybe he’ll think twice about littering himself. He should also be made to wear a T-Shirt that tells everyone else working with him and people driving by why he’s there. On the front, it should say, “I’m an idiot” and on the back it should say, “I pointed a laser at an airplane pilot”.

6. Make him write 1000 times: I will never discharge a laser at another aircraft again. With a crayon. On a busy roadside billboard.

I ask you, how is this NOT better than sending him to the slammer?

Becky the Design Lady calls this little guy Billy Vanilly because he was busted once for lip-syncing to a goat rap video called Angora Management. OK, that’s not true, it’s because he like Vanilla Wafers. You can see Billy Vanilly (also known as Bob) going for a box over at Becky’s blog called Dream Believe Achieve in a post entitled, “My New Lawn Ornament“.

Have you seen the Diji Farm Maternity Ward? They’ve got a U-Stream video you can watch all day if you like.

Link to Diji Farm video (if it doesn’t come up here)

(Thanks to Sharon for pointing this one out!)

Have you ever tried getting marmalade out of a malamute? I wouldn’t advise it, is all I’m saying.

But that’s not why I called this meeting. No, today’s meeting is about the dreaded wicker chair – no wait! – it’s about effective humor blogging.

More than once I’ve heard that self-deprecation is a good way to deliver the humor. It endears your audience to you. But the fact that people keep mentioning it is making me rethink my whole approach. Self-deprecation is now mainstream and conformist and … passé.

It’s also a cop out strategy that merely demonstrates your desire to “play it safe” and is why I’ve decided to give up on that whole concept.

That’s right – from now on, I am awesome and you can suck it. Which is going to be the chorus of my new song because it is lyrical and repeatable and it’s catchy and has a good beat and you can dance to it. I give it a 10 and did I mention that I am a ridiculously gifted songwriter? Oh yeah.

Also? I’m drop dead gorgeous.

See?

This is’t me, but I look almost exactly like this. Ask anybody who hasn’t seen me.

I’m also horribly philanthropic, way more than you. I make Mother Theresa look like Montgomery Burns.

So anyway I was at this party the other night, name-dropping with Elizabeth Taylor and Susan Sarandon when Susan mentioned this particular blog post of mine that she thought was hysterical.

“You’re a female Steve Martin is what you are, darling,” she said. “Except you look almost exactly like Gisele Bundchen.”

Which, of course, I already knew, but it’s still nice to hear now and again, right? I mean, if nothing else it makes more great blurbing on my best-selling books.

And while I’m on this self-deprecation hiatus, I should also point out that I am exceedingly rich. I have way more money than I know what to do with and quite frankly, it just won’t stop rolling in. My success never ceases to amaze me and all my friends on a daily basis. Why just yesterday, Bob (you might know him as Robert DeNiro, but his closest friends call him Bob) calls me and asks for some advice on motivation for a scene he was about to shoot where a beautiful young princess has to figure out how to choose which Prince Charming she will allow to propose marriage. “I mean, you know, since you can relate so well to this particular situation, Mags, who better to ask, in my humble opinion”. So I gave him some helpful tips, because I try to help where I can.

I have to admit, it’s quite liberating to release myself from the self-deprecating cliche and I just might be on the cutting edge of a new trend in blogging. In fact, I’m sure of it, because I usually am.

I know that sounds like something that belongs on Dog Thing of the Day over at Daddy Dogs in Diapers, but Steven from noSpacesnoSpecials sent in this Angora goat from Ditchling Common in West Sussex, England, where he WWOOFed.

This year, he’ll be WWOOFing at the Crooked End farm in Glouchestire, England. You can find out WTF I’m talking about at the WWOOF website.

Have you guys seen the trampolining goat?

Thanks to Linda of The Good, The Bad, The Worse and Andrea from Mommy’s Martini for showing me this video.
Link to the trampoline goat (if unable to view video here)

One of my favorite things is cream-colored ponies and crisp apple streudels, which you might say are actually two things but if you knew me in person, you’d know otherwise.

While you’re trying to figure that one out, a show of hands for those of you who have been to Alameda, California.

Okay then, how about a show of hands for those of you who have heard of Alameda, California. Three of you? Great. Then you’ll know that I probably spent about 47 hours in the car the other day driving around the Bay Area and ultimately meeting up with Linda (author of The Good, The Bad, The Worse) and her husband Alex. You probably can’t remember where you heard about it, but I’ll wager it was in the society pages of your local paper.

This was another one of those blind dates I keep making with fellow bloggers in an effort to meet everybody in real life.

Linda and Alex gave me a mini-tour of their faboo Victorian home-filled neighborhood before heading off to a Turkish restaurant where we had that classic Mediterranean dish: rib-eye steaks.

These two are a riot and Alex is awesome for two reasons:

1. He spilled steak goo on his shirt.

And 2… he let me take a picture of it.

There’s nothing I like better than when I’m dining with people for the first time, somebody pulls a whoopsie, food gets spilled, and it’s not me. It’s such a relief to know that I’m not the only one with a hole in my lip whenever a donned white shirt appears.

Linda was wonderful and chatty and the three of us blabbed like old friends who’d known each other their whole lives.

But all good things must come to and end, so I hopped in my car and hit the road. Luckily, with the post-rush-hour traffic, it only took about 35 hours to drive the 90 miles back home.

Today’s Goat Things of the Day are brought to you by The Litany of Brittany, with a dash of The Screaming MeMe.

Is this a goat or a rabbit?

‘Cause Brittainy took this photo at the Barnstable County Fair in Massachussetts, but forgot to check the sign.

So my birthday was a couple of weeks ago and I was touched when MeMe from The Screaming Me Me! posted this birthday card on my Facebook wall…

Cute, right? That was posted at 6:45pm.

Then, at precisely 7:43pm, less than 60 minutes later, Brittainy posts THIS on my Facebook wall:

See the difference? That’s right, a balloon is missing.

No, silly! The second one, of course, has panties.

Pretty inventive putting panties on a goat, right? But wait, there’s more.

Brittainy recently made a Facebook page for her blog (The Litany of Brittainy, did I mention that already?) and I was the first one to “like” it. So I facetiously asked what I had won for being first and she said something about sending me a handmade glittery Thank You card.

The next thing I know, a handmade goat in panties is delivering that glittery Thank You card via USPS:

I suppose you’re wondering if the card is one inch tall or if the goat is three feet tall. Well, if I had known you were going to wonder about that, I would have put a dime next to them as a reference. Or a man-hole cover.

Anyway, if I didn’t love the Britt before, I do now. I can’t begin to tell you how awesome my new little “Brittainy” is. She and Lacy (the NGIP mascot) sure made fast friends.

Little Brittainy and Lacy, the NGIP mascot

It broke my heart to tell them that Lacy would be going with me to New York this week. But I can only cram, stuff and shove so much into my carry-on. My, but little Britt is a bit of a drama queen – I thought she’d split a stitch with all the belly-aching, but her threads held tight.

Thank you, Brittainy! MWAH!!

Why do dogs who meet on the street for the first time in their lives get along so much better than two strangers standing in line at the grocery store? Should I be sniffing their butts instead of saying something innocuous like, “Boy, you really know how to pick out some rockin’ honeydew melons! And where did you find the monster-size super hefty turbo TAMPONS? I was looking all over for those. Do you have the coupon? I have an extra coupon for the TAMPONS if you want it. Do you want the TAMPON coupon? Hey, that rhymes – HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!”

Sacramento isn’t “something” enough to be a hip destination, but is big enough so that neighbors don’t usually hang out together and strangers don’t talk to each other, let alone smile, let alone make eye contact in public.

There is no sense of community, so if you talk to Joe Stranger, you are the enemy or have recently escaped from an asylum and are not to be spoken to. Because only weirdos talk to strangers. Actually, I’m guilty of it as well. If anybody talks to me, I figure they must be out of their minds.

It’s a shame, really. And it only exacerbates my anxiety when I have to introduce myself at social events.

But sometimes, I give humanity a chance.

So a couple of days ago, as I was loading groceries into the back of my car, a man standing at the passenger side of the car next to mine says to me: “Harry Potter? I read all five books…”.

I was wearing my “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” baseball hat, so I smiled. Then he finished his sentence:

“…in jail.”

Oh yes he did. How awesome is that? My kinda guy, I thought to myself, because I was going to embrace this opportunity to give humanity a chance. He’s funny and friendly. What could possibly go wrong with this conversation?

I respond to him in my outside voice:

My Outside Voice: In jail? OK, you just prompted me to ask a bunch of questions there.

Strange Man: Well, I’m a veteran, so…

My Inside Voice: What does that even mean? A veteran? I thought he was going to explain that he was a prison guard. I’m still expecting him to say he was a prison guard. And how awesome is this conversation? His opener was fantastic and I want to hear more. I’ve always wanted to say, “So what were you in for?” Hey, I might even get a blog post out of this. See? This is why people should talk to one another more often. We all have wonderful stories to share and have so much to learn from each other.  Besides, what else is there to do while we’re here, sharing this planet? Why can’t we all just get along, be nice to one another, engage each other?

My Outside Voice: Well, I’m no Harry Potter connoisseur, but wasn’t there more like seven books?

Strange Man: This was before.

My Outside Voice: Oh, before they had all come out?

Strange Man: [nodding] Mm-hmm.

My Outside Voice: So, how were you in jail?

My Inside Voice: Doh! What were you in for? What were you in for? Should I reword my question out loud? Or have I just blown the whole timing and delivery opportunity? Crap.

Strange Man: Because this is a police state. [And he laughs. Not maniacally or anything. More like he's accepted the fact that this is a police state and isn't life just funny that way?]

My Outside Voice: California is a police state?

Strange Man: [nods again]: It’s a communist fascist state.

My Inside Voice: OK, I believe we’re done here. Let’s make walking away motions, pushing our empty cart back towards the store. Say good-bye to this little slice of humanity.

My Outside Voice: OK, I think I get it now.

My Inside Voice: Freak. FREAK! Oh, why do I even bother?

The strange man smiles and climbs into the passenger seat of the car, where I see the woman driver has been waiting for him to get in. She doesn’t even look at me knowingly, as if to apologize for his social outcastiness, so no human connection there either. Maybe they belong to the same wacko conspiracy club.

Ugh.

There’s never a small town around when you need it. Stars Hollow, take me away!

Hey, have you ever seen a goat with a wooden leg? No? Have I got a picture for you!

An alert NGIP reader (whom I will call Miss Griswold in the interest of privacy, even though her real name is Rochelle) sent in this photo taken in 2004. She was on a company field trip to New Bullards Bar and the New Colgate Powerhouse here in northern California.

The story of this guy is that the Davis Veterinary Hospital provided him the wooden leg many years ago. A friend of Rochelle Miss Griswold tried to follow up on the story but couldn’t find anyone who knew anything about it.

So if you know anything about it, speak up!

And Another Thing…

NGIP fan Melissa alerted us to the story where a lady from Shasta California won the lottery and gave it all to her goats. Yeah!!!

Got something goaty for Goat Thing of the Day? Here are the submission guidelines.

We are also taking submissions for the 2011 NGIP Goat Calendar. We’d love to see a Christmassy Goat for our December page!

If any of you read the blog called Pseudonymous High School Teacher (aka Winds of Change), you can just bring out your jealous right now because the Goat Lady had lunch with Pseudo in real life and yes, I have the picture to prove it, and no, I didn’t photoshop her in.

That’s Pseudo on the left. I’m the goofball on the right.

She was in Sacramento to get away from that awful Hawaiian weather of hers and soak in the 100+ degree heat wave that we Sacramentans all know and love.

Where was this picture taken you ask through your obviously envious gritted teeth? Why, we had lunch at Pyramid Alehouse on the K Street Mall, if you must know.

You don’ t understand why this is such an auspicious occasion. It is because nobody ever comes to Sacramento. They pass through it, maybe use it as a pit stop on their way to Lake Tahoe or San Francisco, but people don’t just come here and stay for a day or five.

So when I found out Psuedo was going to be in town for more than five minutes, I begged her to have lunch with me. “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze”, I said. Oh, it was pathetic. You would have been so embarrassed for me.

It’s just that I don’t often get to see people in real life. It was all I could do not to pee on the floor when I saw my bloggy friend up close and personal. You understand, don’t you?

Have you ever had one those little things on your face? You know, those long sticky grayish turquoise things that just sort of dangle around for days and nobody says anything until one day the cat starts batting at it while you’re trying to watch Real Housewives of Deliverance and the next thing you know, Fluffy has managed to wrap this thing that’s connected to your face around its neck and you can’t decide whether to call the vet or 911? OHMYGOD – me too!

But that’s not why I called this meeting. No, the reason you’re all sitting here today is so I can complain about my nosy Nellie of a computer.

I was writing an email to my late late grandfather the other day and one of the sentences I used was:

“I never did like any of your wives and I’m including the hag who birthed the woman who birthed me….”

And do you know what my computer said to me?

Now, where does Google Mail get off eavesdropping on my personal correspondence? I don’t go around openly challenging Google’s search results, do I? Why are they suddenly so interested in my affairs? What have I done to warrant special attention? I mean, other than publicly threatening the president with a toothbrush which by the way was not my fault – I was high on too much mouthwash and didn’t know what I saying.

But how would you feel if you were minding your own business writing an email to your friend, discussing something kind of personal and your email program starts butting in?

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want my mail program getting all up in my business like that. What do you think?

Lee, of Simply Rooted sent me via iPhone this little gem in the animal petting area of a CSA/pick-your-own farm called Great Country Farms in Bluemont, Virginia.

And  Thomas (of 101 Things in 1001 Days) showed me a couple of goaty items. I don’t know why they don’t just start a website called Goats of Walmart because they just keep coming:

And once again, with apologies to my many many thousands and thousands of Kindle subscribers who don’t have video capability, that is until the Edgar Allen Poe Signature Edition of the Kindle 5000x with Dual Exhaust comes out, here is a video of a goat bridge. With goats and everything.

(Link to goat video, if above embedded link does not work.)

Got something goaty for Goat Thing of the Day? Here are the submission guidelines.

We are also taking submissions for the 2011 NGIP Goat Calendar.

Melodrama will get you nowhere with me. Just ask my pink guppy, Millicent, who straps herself to the undersea railroad tracks in her tank on a daily basis, screaming about how she can’t pay the rent while Thrashfield, my algae eater hovers over her twisting his moustache, screaming how she must pay the rent. Never a dull moment, those two.

I will admit that those over-the-top-sad-puppy-dog-eyes, Sarah-McLaughlin-background-vocal-tracked  commercials for the SPCA (or whatever suffering animal organization it is) can get to me, but not enough to pick up the phone.

And what annoys me, actually offends me, is when my emotions are assaulted prematurely. Like, before you’ve even had a chance to peek inside an envelope like this:

Really? An uneducated Cambodian with my home address is having problems focusing on her homework because she’s hungry? I mean, REALLY REALLY hungry (because it’s underlined, so she’s one of the super starving.) She can’t be THAT hungry if she has managed to study enough to write perfect English.

Can you tell that if you resort to fearmongering or guiltmongering, you will be mocked? I do not like to be so blatantly manipulated into action. If you can do it subtly, then that’s different. That’s proper manipulation. But this lazy job of “give us money or you’re a horrible person” feels like spam and I won’t have it in my house. An envelope of this nature doesn’t even get opened around here.

This behavior is outrageous and unethical because they are trying to make ME the bad guy here, but their efforts fall flat, therefore, THEY are the guilty ones. They should be ashamed of themselves.

They have the audacity to think they can say what they want, how they want and that no one would DARE say anything bad about them because they are a CHARITY. And it is highly politically incorrect to slam any charity.

And now that I’m on a tirade of sorts, I will also now add that you can’t expect me to feed one faceless person out of the hundreds of millions that go to bed hungry every night on this planet. I can’t actually see this so-called “student” who is starving in Cambodia, but I see plenty of hungry people every day in my own country, my own state, my own city who could use a meal. We have dirty-faced hungry helpless children in this country too, you know.

See? Now they’ve made me go all enthnocentric when really my point there was that if they want me sending my money outside my country, they should have been nicer about it.

So…

Dear Lame Charity:

If you really want my money, don’t bite the hand that feeds you and don’t insult my intelligence. Engage me, don’t bully me. Don’t you see that your ugly envelope has had its opposite intended effect on me?

There are a lot of needy people and organizations in this world and not enough money to give to them all and I understand that everyone is constantly competing for everyone’s dollar, but it’s crap like this that pisses me off because it’s showing an inappropriately ugly side of doing business. And it’s crap like this that makes me NOT want to give. You’re spoiling it for the rest of them and giving charities a bad name. Knock it off, already.

Signed,

A Really Angry Person Who Has Worked Herself Up Into a Lather and Will Now Go Kick A Dog Because of You

The last time my name made the papers was when a local bridge troll and I partnered up on an international spy ring involving a rare Chinese grasshopper and some yellow Legos. That grumpy old cuss took me places and I’ll never love another wart-infested weed-dweller like that again.

So I wake up the other day to a little Google alert that The Sacramento Bee is talking about Nanny Goats in Panties. And as I’m totally bragging about it on Facebook, some people start reporting that they saw it “on the front page” (of the Living Here section) of the actual paper. Like, the paper paper.

I know!

So I run over to the nearest Safeway, a grocery store on University and Howe Aves., which is sort of an abbreviation of all the other Safeways in Sacramento, a Safeway-Lite, if you will, and grab a paper.

And I come home and I can’t find any reference to NGIP. Crap! I start asking everybody on Facebook where they see it, are they sure it’s Monday’s paper and not the Sunday paper. They insist it’s Monday’s paper. I go low-tech and call a friend using an actual phone (a landline, no less) and lo and behold discover that I’m on the front page of the D section and the paper I have contains only sections A through C and do you know what I thought of?

That’s right, Confessions of a Cashier. One of my favorite blogs written by a convenience store employee who complains about the customers. She wrote a post, shaking her fists at us, asking us, God, and for the love of all that is holy, why do people refuse to take the top newspaper? Oh how I wanted to jump through cyberspace and say, “This is why!!!”

So I went back to Safeway, you know, home of the abbreviated stuff, like newspapers. Turns out, all papers were missing the last 3 sections. I told the cashier about it and she gave me a refund of 72 cents, which I wasn’t expecting, but turns out to be very fortuitous. I’m walking out of the store wondering why she only gave me 72 cents and assumed maybe they don’t charge the full 75 cent newsstand price (because they are Safeway-Lite), but I’ll bet the Starbucks next door does, which means I’ll be actually paying three more cents for a paper today. Such is the price of fame.

I walked next door to Starbucks. Same thing. “Yeah,” says the barista, “the papers are messed up today”. What??? Today of all days?

I’m in the freakin’ paper and half the city will never know! You cannot know the overblownwhelming sense of travesty I felt at that moment.

I climbed back into my car and drove right past La Bou Bakery on Howe Ave., which has newspaper boxes out front because, what if I put in my 75 cents and they are also missing the last three sections? Now we’re talking about paying  $1.50 for a 75 cent paper, and frankly, I don’t know if fame is worth $1.50. So I drove on to Peet’s Coffee and guess what? Yep. Missing the last three sections.

You know what this means, right? It means that my brand new arch nemesis, Marc Valdez, who approached me in person at a function last week to label me as such, is conspiring against me because I stuffed the ballot box when I asked you guys in last week’s post to click over to the Sacramento Top 25 . Clearly, he is trying to destroy me by going to every rack in town and removing the last three sections of the paper, right? I mean, come on…I’m on the front page of Section D and the paper JUST SO HAPPENS to stop at the last page of Section C? Like Agent Gibbs says on NCIS, “I don’t believe in coincidences”.

Figuring I should get off of Howe Ave. and cross some neighborhood delivery route demarcation line, I drove across the American River to my old stand-by (another Starbucks) where I was greeted by familiar faces and “haven’t seen you in a long time”-type comments. I made a beeline for the Bee and cue the hallelujah chorus because the whole paper was there.

And I bemoaned to the employees and another lady customer about how my blog was featured in the paper and everywhere I turned, Section D was missing, and the other lady customer asks me what my blog is so she could read about it in her paper at home and I showed her right where to look.

A closer look, because I know you, you’ll say I’m making this whole thing up:

NGIP is Blog of the Week - woo hoo!

I start digging through my purse for my wallet and the Starbucks guy (who I swear is the spitting image of Ralph Fiennes and I’ve told him this before and he just doesn’t see it) says while thumbing over his shoulder to another employee, “you know he works for the Bee” and we get into this whole conversation about inserts and home deliveries vs. rack deliveries and he’s gonna call someone to find out what happened because he knows the guy who delivers to Safeway-Lite, and I’m still digging through my purse (which by the way is a total justification for carrying small purses as blogged about very recently by Kathy of the Junk Drawer in her post entitled The Purse Curse ) until I realize I’ve got only two or three things in there and none of them is my wallet.

You’re probably wondering about now, at least the quicker of you are, how I paid for the first newspaper if I didn’t have my wallet with me. Well, aren’t you the observant one? The thing is, I did indeed have my wallet with me the first time I went to Safeway-Lite, but my wallet–his name is Wally, I suppose your wallet’s name is better than that?–is afraid of the dark and he hopped out of my purse while I wasn’t looking and I took off the second time without him, but anyway, back in Starbucks…

I throw the back of my hand to my forehead and cry out that I left Wally at home, and then proceed to dig around some more in case I have coins floating around which I of course must have because Safeway-Lite just handed me… 72 cents.

Well, call me Blanche DuBois because the other customer lady asked me how much money I needed because there was no way I was walking out of there without a paper. I dug around and scooped up all the coins in my purse and an errant dime must have found its way in there because I pulled out…82 cents. (And this would be the fortuitous part where as you may or may not recall, I was driving past La Bou Bakery earlier, contemplating checking a newspaper sales box (Vending machine? Dispenser? What do you call those things?)

I profusely thanked the stranger woman for offering and I totally blew an awesome PR opportunity to give her one of my new awesome gel pens that I recently ordered, did I tell you guys about it? They come in individual wrappers and are New and Improved over my last pens because they are Pilot G-2 gel pens and they write in purple ink and they are awesome and I didn’t think about it because I am Blanche DuBois and I’m selfish, thinking of no one but myself in a crisis. I could have spread goodwill through my new awesome pens, because I had one of THOSE in my purse.

Behold, the NGIP pen.

I came home, opened the paper and reveled in the fact that I’m on the same page as Rihanna and Brandi and wondered how many people in Sacramento will never know that the Bee’s Blog of the Week is Nanny Goats in Panties.

So for those of you that subscribe to The Bee, be sure and line your bird cages with Monday’s page D1 so that Polly or Fido or whatever that clump of feathers you call a bird’s name is, can read all about me while he or she sits on the can.

- – - – -

P.S. By the way, if you do happen to check out the Bee article about NGIP online, feel free to leave a comment – it might make them think I’m somebody. Somebody who depends on the kindness of strangers, anyway.

I don’t even want to know who’s going to end up here because of an icky Google search, but anyway…

Here’s Chewie. In Panties.

OK, they aren’t exactly panties from the store or anything. Poor Chewie was attacked and bitten by his owner’s dogs so he was taken to a local animal shelter (SAINTS) where he had surgery.  The shelter volunteers bathed him and redressed his wound.

Chewie gets a bath

According to Miz Dinah Gogina, who recently volunteered at SAINTS with her daughter, took these pictures and forwarded them to NGIP. She says Chewie was a sweet little goat, and after his bath he pranced back to his pen in those little mesh panties.

SAINTS, Senior Animals In Need Today Society, is in Mission, BC, Canada. Most of the animals have behavioral or physical issues and take up permanent residence, but they will adopt some of them out to the right home. They also give them a peaceful place to die when it’s time and have a garden with a wind chime for every animal that passes.

If any of you wish to take the time (no registration required) to vote for SAINTS to win a grant from the Petfinder Animal Rescue Site’s shelter challenge, you can go to The Animal Rescue Site’s Voting Page. Be sure and enter the following information in the search form:

• Shelter Name:  S.A.I.N.T.S.     (with all the periods)
• Country: Canada
• Province: BC

When it finds the SAINTS shelter, just click the VOTE button.

You can vote until August 22, 2010.

Got something goaty for Goat Thing of the Day? Here are the submission guidelines.

We are also taking submissions for the 2011 NGIP Goat Calendar.