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Monday, July 28, 2014

WHERE IS THE CAT PEE


Okay I swear to god this realy happened: I went to retrieve my sneakers from the basement. It was dark. It was quiet. I tiptoed over to the light switch. A voice from the shadows said: "STOP. Don't turn on the light." The voice was eerily familiar. A purple laser beam temporarily blinded me. I was paralyzed with fear. I stepped back towards the door. "DON'T WALK THERE," the voice warned. That voice again. I had heard that voice threaten me before. Many times before. I realized it was my wife. What was she doing in the dark with a laser beam? "I'm looking for cat pee," she said. "Have you tried the catbox?" I asked. She said, "Someone is peeing down here, and the only way to find it is with an ultraviolet light."

So she looked all over with the blacklight, and there it was! Eureka! She found a tiny area of carpet in between two couches. This was the only area where there was no cat pee.

Apparently this is a special blacklight made specifically for finding cat pee, so it did not come with a Jimi Hendrix poster or anything (back in the 70s, blacklights were used for finding teeth and dandruff). Seeing the blacklight made me nostalgic for the 70s. All the great songs, like "Chick-a-Boom" and "Sylvia's Mother...." The great hairdos... the great sayings: "GROOVY! FAR OUT! LET'S BOOGIE ON DOWN!" Things that really meant something. I thought about how great it would be to live in a great place like Iran, where I read that people got stoned after they made a video of the song "Happy!" And another person got stoned after saying the word "bieber" in a crowded place. What a fun country!

Anyway, how do we even know it was a cat peeing in our basement? It could have been a mouse, or a bird. Do birds even pee? In all this time I have never seen a bird tinkle, and it's not because they are so modest; I've seen them do a bunch of other disgusting things.

"The cat is simply marking its territory," I observed, and the minute I said it I became terrified. If the cat had already annexed the entire basement, it was only a matter of time before it peed its way upstairs and took over the whole house. I was going to have to file for an easement just to use the stairway.

"I'm going to have to re-mark the territory as ours," I said triumphantly. "I am going to pee our house back! And I'm going to do it NOW!" Only I didn't have to go yet, and my wife made a move towards the phone, so I postponed the re-districting.

"They do this when they are angry with you for something," my wife explained. The cat is literally pissed off. This had me scratching my head. Shit! What if they are angry with me for not scratching their head? A cat could be angry at you for ANYTHING, because they don't share the same values as we do. They might be peeing on my tennis bag because I am not paying enough attention to them? Am I paying too much attention too my tennis bag? I immediately stopped allowing my tennis bag to sit on my lap. Shit- what about my laptop? If they see that thing sitting on my lap all the time they are going to get jealous and pee on it.

"You need to engage the cats more," my wife said. "Play with them once in awhile!" "CatS? We have more than one?" I asked. So I set up a weekly card game. Oxford stud, progressive pot, no limit. I lost about $120 the first two weeks, which made me really angry. I started thinking of ways to get even. I admit that I peed on some of their stuff.

Finally we went outside to escape the pervasive smell of cat pee and breathe the fresh air. "Do you smell something? It smells like cat pee out here, unless the cat peed inside my nose." I exclaimed. "No," my wife said, "that's a boxwood bush- the smell keeps the deer away." Which is probably the only thing that explains why there aren't that many deer in our basement.



Incidentally, ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength than other colors visible to humans, although it looks taller in person. UV light has long been used in hospitals to disinfect surgical equipment. When the light hits the object it breaks down the germs, causing them to cry. The photochemical reaction renders the germs unable to reproduce. It would have been a great thing to try on the cat.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

SOCCER IS BORING

Is it wrong to say that I can't wait until the World Cup is over? Soccer is just SO FRIGGIN BORING I can hardly contain myself. You can waste more than two hours of your life seeing them run back and forth, and at the end of the game the score is still zero-zero. The Brazil World Cup is played on partially natural turf, and the stadiums are brand new, so you can actually compare which of these is more boring: watching the grass grow, watching paint dry or watching soccer.

I would rather watch curling, women's figure skating, even biathlon. They have a biathlon, a triathlon, a pentathlon and a decathlon, but they have no sexathlon. That would be six events, all related to sex. I can guess what the events would be, although I am too much of a lady to say what they are here. I will say that in this competition, "sticking the dismount" is NOT something to be proud of.

Even car racing is easier to watch, even though it's so dull you're basically just waiting for someone to crash so you can go, "COOL!" Wouldn't it be more interesting if a deer bounded into the middle of the road like in real life? Or if there were a million potholes, or if people insisted on not using their turn signal?

No one can even tell you how long a soccer game is. It's supposed to be 90 minutes, but the referee can just tack on extra minutes to the game based on how long he thinks injuries or penalties took. If someone gets injured during a penalty the referee scratches his head for 5 minutes and you can tack THAT on to the end of the game too.

I saw that a guy was kicked out for biting another player on the shoulder. How stupid is that? How many goals are you going to score with your shoulder? He should have bitten him on the foot, or taken a divot out of his head so the ball goes off in some cockeyed direction. Apparently it was the third time he has done this. Instead of biting three different guys, he should have bitten the same player three times; he could have gnawed off his ankle by now. Thank god they kicked this guy out- he could have finished off an entire team- Cameroon, or even Turkey. I heard they are going to have to put him down. This biting is certainly not something I would do, but only for dietary reasons; is a white soccer player considered red meat or white meat?

And good luck getting his mail- we used to have a chow chow and the UPS guy was so convinced he would get bitten by him that he used to leave our packages 50 feet from our house.

Soccer fights are the fifth stupidest fights anyway. Basketball fights are the best, football fights next, then baseball fights, then hockey fights. A guy who picks a fight in soccer has to run 15 or 20 minutes to get to the guy he wants to fight with, and by that time he is so winded he just stands there hunched over with his hands holding the bottom of his shorts while the other guy pushes him over with his index finger.

Then there is the TV announcer who yells, "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALLLLLL!!!" at the top of his lungs. People love him, because compared to the game itself, all that noise seems interesting. I find it supremely annoying, and before I can hit the "mute" button, it sets off my car alarm. I go make a sandwich and when I come back he is still at it. Yes, I admit I used to make the same call on a particularly successful date, but I quickly outgrew that kind of behavior about two years ago.

They even had an opening ceremony for the World Cup with a concert and everything. JLo was up there shaking that big ass of hers at Pitt Bull. It seems like no one can make a song these days without Pitt Bull. I recently recorded a song in my basement, and to save money I used an actual pit bull, but it ate two of my microphones.

At the bar, the fans were rabid (possibly something they caught from Pitt Bull), cheering every time the Americans got close to the goal (742 times) and even louder when they scored (0 times). USA lost the match, but since they did so well scoring NO goals, they let them keep going in the tournament.

The fact that I can't stand soccer doesn't seem unpatriotic to me, since it's called the World Cup and I'm disagreeing with the entire rest of the world. When I put it like that it seems completely normal for me.



Incidentally, players from Chile, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina are banned by team rules from having sex during the World Cup. I don't really know if that means for the whole month of the tournament or just while they are on the field. The rule makes these players definitely NOT players. Americans have no such rule, and can have sex with anybody they want, except for players from Chile, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina. By the way, if it Herzegovina, you're not doing it right.