This week: a haiku contest.

My dog, Lulu, is quite possibly the dumbest of her species that I’ve ever met. She’s very sweet . . . but also very stupid. Seriously: I have shoes that are smarter than this dog.
For example, Lulu’s not fully housebroken. It’s not that she’s physically incapable, or even that she has some emotional problem that causes her to deposit stinky turds on the bathroom floor at regular intervals. She simply forgets that she’s supposed to go outside.
Today, she yet again proved her complete lack of intelligence by breaking away from me to chase a jeep down the street. Once I overcame my surprise at seeing my tubby pug racing off at a truly shocking speed –- she actually caught up with the jeep –- I then had to retrieve her before she got crushed beneath the wheels.
When I finally caught up, she was howling and gnashing her teeth at the jeep, which the driver found highly amusing. Probably because she weighs 20 pounds, and looks like an overstuffed teddy bear.
It’s weird for us, this dumb dog situation. Our old dogs were all amazingly smart. They tended to use their extraordinary intelligence for evil rather than good, but you had to respect the problem solving that went into a knee high dog figuring out how to retrieve the Thanksgiving Day turkey from the kitchen counter, pull it to the floor and devour it whole. That, at least, takes moxie.
It’s harder to respect a dog who thinks that she can actually catch and eat a jeep.

This week: three-letter words.

I don’t know anything about who came up with the idea of Daylight Savings Time. I suppose it would be an easy enough matter to research – I don’t know how any writer functioned in the pre-wikipedia era – but I have such a vivid picture of this pestilence, that I’d rather not be enlightened.
Here’s my theory: the inventor of Daylight Savings Time was an evil sociopath. Not content with the usual career opportunities available to the soulless – politics, telemarketing, serial killing – he decided to instead torture generations of innocent, overtired mothers, by once a year, taking away one precious hour of sleep from them.
As if it’s not exhausting enough racing through the morning routine of child waking, breakfast serving, lunch box packing and making the school run on time, now we get to do it all while still half-asleep. No wonder the number of fatal car accidents spikes every year right after the clocks change.

This week: my lessons on the Dark Side.

On his website, Campaign for the American Reader, Marshal Zeringue has a cool blog, where he invites authors to look at page 69 of their book, and report whether it gives a sense of the book as a whole. He asked me to do this with TESTING KATE . . . here’s my report.