Bob Crespo

Free listen. Well? That mouse ain’t gonna click itself. Get busy!           New song: “Let The Show Go On”

Scientists planning to communicate with alien beings should bear in mind that we can’t even communicate with cows, never mind hairless gnomes with giant brains in UFOs. To them, we’re the cows. Let’s hope they’re vegetarians.

Hello humans, it’s me; Jimmy, The Blogging Dog. This guy Bob Crespo that runs this boy and pony show here at bobcrespo.com is really starting to get on my nerves. Here I am, the only dog in the world who can write English and use a computer, and all this guy wants me to write about is what I think of humans! I keep submitting pieces about what’s on my mind and he couldn’t care less if it’s not about a human. Well, screw him, I sell those writings to human scientists, at least they’re interested in my observations.

Well, I paw-printed a contract with bobcrespo.com, and that’s that, a dog is true to his word, so here I am checking out a bunch of news sites on the internet trying desperately to find something that catches my interest. Believe or not, my opposable thumb chauvinist friends, not every creature on this green globe is fascinated with humanity. You people are nuts! And I’m not talking monkey nuts or shrieking parrot nuts, they’re just harmless whack jobs, but murderous psychotic weirdo nuts.

Between the wars, the football mania, the murders, the arson, the torture, the genocide and American Idol, I don’t know what’s the worst thing about you people. And what the hell is hockey all about? That makes no sense at all, even by human standards! Listen, I may be called The Canine Einstein, but that doesn’t mean I’m smart enough to figure out humans. Hell, as far as I can tell, neither can humans! Half the trouble you get in to is from a lack of communication. The same people who are slaughtering one another when they are part of a military organization get along just fine when they meet one-on-one. And yet you kill one another without a second thought, members of the same species, without even knowing exactly why! How is that even possible?

I much prefer dogs, which always seems to come as a shock to humans, even though I am one. You don’t see dogs killing one another over stupid shit. Back in the day, before we became a slave population under the thumb of humans, dogs would fight and sometimes (but only rarely) kill other dogs, but only over vital hunting territories or mating rights, for self preservation and the chance to pass on one’s genes. No dog ever went into battle against rival dogs without knowing why they were doing so. We had no misunderstanding about our enemies, we knew exactly who they are, how they think and what they expect of out of life. Hell, they’re dogs and we’re dogs, so what’s the mystery? Are people so radically different from one another? That simply cannot be. You are all of one species, for crying out loud! Nature doesn’t work that way, it sort of makes every member of the same species quite similar.

Anyway, I’m supposed to be writing about something specific here, so let me get to the point, although that hockey stuff still gives me the creeps. What I want to mention is sending people to the moon, or rather, your president’s decision not to send anyone else there anytime soon. Why? From a dog’s point of view, that’s probably the greatest thing you people have ever accomplished! It’s the friggin’ Moon, dammit! In case you haven’t noticed, we canines have a thing for the Moon. Not just dogs, but wolves, dingoes, coyotes and foxes too, we all howl at the moon, sometimes for hours on end.

Why doesn’t your president send one off us up there? You say a dog is man’s best friend? Prove it! Send Jimmy, The Blogging Dog to the Moon. That would be Nirvana for a dog. Once I started reading up on this whole space program thing, I couldn’t help but notice how humans all of a sudden abandoned it after some really impressive early achievements. What, was it boring to you or something? Inexplicably, at least to me, you stopped reaching for the Moon and the stars and built a whole bunch of flying cargo trucks called Space Shuttles and spent the next 30 years filling Earth’s orbit with hardware. That’s not romantic or exciting at all!

And don’t forget, this internet, the computers, cell phones and all the other electronic gizmos you can’t get enough of were all made possible by scientific advances that were the direct result of the Space Race! Imagine what else you clever mammals can invent with a renewed push into space. So that’s one more reason to love the Moon, which, to a dog, is super important. It is important to you too, but you don’t seem to realize it. Well, people, do some math here. If the Moon can move earth’s oceans, what makes you think it has no effect on you? Like every other mammal on earth, you’re made mostly of water. How can you figure that the Moon’s pull doesn’t affect humans?

For all your brilliance, sometimes you people are awful dumb. I’m no scientist, but I have to figure that your senses are even duller than I originally thought. You can’t smell or hear worth a damn, and can’t sense earthquakes or storms beforehand like just about any other animal can. There’s so much I simply cannot explain to you because you lack the capacity to experience what is going on all around you every moment of every day, and seem to possess exactly no telepathy, a huge component of inter-species and extra-species communication. To have no empathy and telepathy is to be in a very real sense deaf and blind. Remember that the next time you talk about “dumb animals.”

Well, that’s all I have to say about the Space Program. I could go on and on about the Moon, but this very limiting form of communication that you call language doesn’t allow me to get into the sort of detail and emotion required. Dogs would understand. Hell, even a canary would. You don’t know what you’re missing and even The Canine Einstein isn’t smart enough to fill in the gaps. I am positive that at some point in human history you possessed these universal senses, otherwise you would never have survived, just like 99% of every species that ever lived. Extinction is more the norm than survival on this beautiful and terrible earth, and if you had species memory, that universal mental connection to the past and your ancestors that every animal possesses, you would know that.

So there’s a price to be paid for your civilization and your dominance of the earth, and that is blindness, which is as close as a I can describe it to you sense-deprived creatures. Now that I think of it, that’s probably why you invented alcohol and drugs and the like, to try to simulate the sensations that you are missing by having lost touch with them, but that’s another a can of worms for another day. It’s not that I dislike people, there’s a lot of you I really love and admire, but all things being equal, I wouldn’t trade places with your king, or your president, or whatever the hell it is you’re calling your Alpha Male these days. Until next time, this is Jimmy, The Blogging Dog.

Yes is the word we most long to hear.

We have seen the future and it is now. Look at all the futuristic crap we already have, and Steve Jobs just won’t stop introducing more modern crap every two weeks or so, before we even figure out what the hell the last one was supposed to do. Every electronic device we have acquired in the past six months is already obsolete and we haven’t even figured out how to use them yet. Who ever uses anywhere near one quarter of all the functions of their computer? And if so, why? For what? Now we hear that some other company has introduced touch screens a lot more advanced than Apple’s, able to respond to an infinite amount of touches. Sounds a little kinky, no?

Still other companies are promising us computers that need no screens, just a pair of 3-D type glasses that project images in front of our eyes in thin air! Others promise that the geeky 3-D glasses won’t be necessary, they’ll just implant chips in our eyes and receptors elsewhere on our person that will connect us to the internet and powerful computers with just a thought. One supposes that cell phones will be included in our chip installations, so we can just do that thumb and pinky thing we use to pantomime making a phone call to actually make phone calls. Presumably, e-mail, calendars, contact lists, address books and GPS devices will also be built in. Wonder what will happen if we don’t pay our phone bill? It all sounds kind of creepy and Star Trekky.

Speaking of creepy, the Japanese are thisclose to perfecting a lifelike sex robot, a computer with plastic skin and organs indistinguishable from the real thing and “fully functional.” Fully functional? Given the very wide range of human sexual preferences, the researchers at the sex robot company must have had some very interesting experiences compiling the computer commands necessary to make a sex robot fully functional. The line for that job had to be pretty long, and undoubtedly the research was exceptionally thorough.

All in all, great news for girlfriend-challenged geeks the world over, and perhaps the end of life as we know it. Robot lovers would find no fault with us, will never refuse a request, never get sick or old or tired of us. And if we tire of them, we could always program a new personality, change their hair, skin or eye color, or simply screw around with other sex robots and never have to deal with jealousy, separation or divorce. Threesomes? Not a prob. Oddball sexual tastes? Just change the settings. Lots of people would swear off real spouses with their insistent demands, their aging and personality changes. Could be a real herd-thinner, this one, with the birth rate plunging drastically and production of sex-robots soaring.

Now add to the list of techno wonders a pill that will keep our muscles and bodies in perfect shape by fooling our bodies into thinking we’ve just exercised for an hour or so. Perfection without exertion! No more diets, no more jogging or sweating in gyms, no more wearing sweat pants all the time when we outgrow yet another wardrobe. Perfect 6 pack abs while we enjoy a perfect 6 pack of imported lager! Does it get any better than that?

Then there’s the plan to seed the planet with trillions of tiny sensors so that nature can now talk to us, with lakes and rivers warning us when they are about to flood, the earth telling us it is about to quake, food crops reminding farmers that they are getting ripe and it’s harvest time and who-knows-what else. Will we even need eyes anymore? If tomatoes will be able to tell us when to pick them, what will these sensors tell about us? Will there be such a thing as privacy anymore? Will everybody else find out all the crazy things we’re up to with our sex robots? Sounds like Big Brother will be watching, and Big Brother will be everybody.

Back to the sex robot thing (that one’s got everybody thinking furiously). These robots beg the question: If they can be created and programmed to be perfect replicas of human beings, why are we limiting them to performing sex acts? Why not send them to work? They don’t need any sleep, and we’ll sure need plenty of it from all the sex we’ll be having. Let them deal with commuting and our crazy bosses while we chill! There’s all sorts of lousy jobs they could be doing, like sewer cleaners, McDonald’s clerks and dentists. They’d never give anybody any lip since they will be programmed to be cheerful and compliant.

And we’ll all know if they’re doing a good job or not with all those sensors feeding us data, maybe even program some of them to get two jobs so we can buy everything we want and not have to do a damned thing. Could it be possible that all this technical wizardry will help mankind evolve into what we’ve always wanted to become, healthy and robust stay-at-home couch potatoes with our every whim catered to?

So, maybe this confusing glut of perplexing technology is leading us to the Promised Land after all. Built-in brain video, beer, chips, perfect physical conditioning without any tedious physical exertion and sex robots to indulge our every fantasy? Sounds too good to be true, so it probably is. Odds are that none of these wonders will work remotely as advertised, and wind up being only more confusing gadgets to frustrate and torture us. But we can dream, can’t we? At least that’s one thing we can all do without technical assistance.

When someone is suffering, that’s not a good time to point out that there are people in worse shape. Contrary to popular belief, that does not ease their pain and they would not be remiss to take a swipe at you with a crutch.

Now this: In addition to the (!) 9 million or so vehicles that Toyota Motors is recalling to correct the self-accelerating gas pedals that have resulted in many fatalities, their expensive Green model, the hybrid Prius, has been experiencing the opposite problem, brakes that fail when they go over a pothole or other “irregular surface,” sort of undermining the whole idea of having brakes on one’s vehicle, you know, stopping the damned thing to see what the hell you just ran over. The results are potentially the same as the gas pedal fiasco, death behind the wheel. Since Prius also features that trick Toyota gas pedal, that car has the potential to kill its driver twice. Who says the Japanese aren’t innovators but copiers? Hell, the best American car companies could do was to have only one fatal flaw per vehicle at a time!

Which just goes to show what success breeds in corporate circles. Contempt. Contempt born of greed, of course, since that is the only acceptable motivation for corporations in recent years. The passion for building a better and safer product, just like in Detroit, was for the founders of automobile companies, not the bottom line money grubbers who run these multi-billion dollar corporations these days. Once the founders of the automotive industry in both America and Japan were safely dead, their successors began earnestly cutting corners on safety and engineering and firing the skilled and dedicated workers who made these same executives so very wealthy by “outsourcing” their jobs to nations that pay their workers in shiny objects, seed corn and sunglasses.

And now Japanese automobile manufacturers will enter the inevitable period of decline experienced by America’s Big Three auto makers. Today’s corporate weenies don’t care what business they are in, they only want to become instant multimillionaires by any means necessary. And if that means saving money on safety and pocketing the difference, or bundling billions of dollars worth of worthless mortgages and selling them as the greatest thing since dark chocolate, so be it. These so-called “automobile people” could just as well be selling oven mitts, washing machines or cookies, it makes no difference to them. Commitment to quality and innovation is a thing of the past, replaced in almost every large corporation by a serious commitment to greed.

It’s not so much making the boneheaded mistake with the gas pedals (and now the brakes), the truly horrible thing was waiting for people to die before admitting there was a problem. In a move that would make all the unindicted coconspirators in the financial industry proud, Toyota executives attempted to pass off the unwanted acceleration problem on careless drivers failing to secure the floor mats. Nine million careless motorists. Who knows what they’ll say about the Prius brakes? Maybe they’ll go the Wall Street route and blame other car companies or, also like Wall Street, claim they had no idea there was a problem.

So far, the president of the company, Akio Toyoda, a master of understatement, has admitted that Toyota is “in a crisis” and has promised to appoint a committee of top Toyota guys to address the problem, just like the committee the last president of Toyota appointed to address the previous set of defects in their cars. The results? 9 million recalls and counting. No word yet on whether or not this new committee will concentrate on public relations or automobile design. Of course that would require Toyota executives to actually talk to the people who design and build their cars, said people generally unacquainted with the fine points of greed for greed’s sake. Corporate executives are uncomfortable around such people, and vice-versa.

So far, the president of the company, Akio Toyoda, a master of understatement, has admitted that Toyota is “in a crisis” and has promised to appoint a committee of top Toyota guys to address the problem, just like the committee the last president of Toyota appointed to address the previous set of defects in their cars. The results? 9 million recalls and counting. No word yet on whether this new committee will concentrate on public relations or automobile safety. Of course if they opt to address engineering issues, that would require Toyota executives to actually talk to the people who design and build their cars, salaried people generally unacquainted with the fine points of greed for greed’s sake. Corporate executives are uncomfortable around such people, and vice-versa.

When the head guys have no idea what goes on with their products, that doesn’t exactly reassure either their customers or their stockholders. That’s a crisis, alright. So look for Toyota City, home of the Toyota corporation, to start resembling its sister city (true fact) Detroit any year now; high unemployment, empty houses and people deserting the place in droves. So much for Toyota’s dominance of the car market, and good riddance to the ugly pieces of crap with all the fun and flair of a Volvo, minus the reliability, longevity and safety. Looks like Toyota executives will have to get into a different business, maybe the Japanese Stock Market and investment houses. Keep an eye peeled for a huge scandal in a couple of years when Japanese financial institutions start selling multibillion dollar bundles of bad mortgages on tiny houses with paper walls.

Winning millions of dollars in the lottery doesn’t completely guarantee happiness, but close enough that no one ever complains about it.

In our ongoing quest to affect a more civil society, bobcrespo.com has been a leader in publishing our continually updated MODERN RULES FOR GENTLEMEN, with such timeless nuggets as “a gentleman always takes the wet spot” and “a gentleman refrains from appearing on reality shows.” In the interest of fairness, we now bring you MODERN RULES FOR LADIES, a handy guide to the difficult task of being a lady in these strident and contentious modern times. These upgraded rules for decorous behavior are essential as the role of women in society grows and evolves in what we ambitiously like to call this Modern Era. Consider these:

A lady never contacts the wife of her lover for any reason.

When chugging whisky from the bottle, a lady always wipes the rim with her sleeve before passing it on.

No one can call herself a lady who appears on an episode of “COPS” as anything other than one of the cops.

When engaged in pole dancing, a lady never shows her utter contempt for the slobbering losers shoving beer-soaked money in her G-string.

A lady makes sure her man doesn’t clutter up the yard in front of their double-wide trailer with more than 2 rusting pickup trucks. A creative lady turns them into attractive planters.

When a lady schoolteacher is giving “private lessons” to a high school boy, she takes pains to wipe the huge grin off her face afterwards.

A lady never takes a pool boy as her lover when the house she shares with her husband has no swimming pool. Explaining his presence in the household would be quite problematic.

A lady makes sure her Sugar Daddy pays a hefty price for his gifts of jewelry to her and always acts dissatisfied that he didn’t spend more. This will keep the old gentleman on his toes, and he will not fail to spend more next time.

When plotting to steal one’s wealthy boss from his wife, a lady does so in a subtle manner in order to make it appear that it was all his idea.

When a lady’s famous husband is caught cheating, it is not necessary to stand by his side silently and supportively at the press conference where he tries to explain away his preference for transvestite albino dwarves. “Stand by your man” only goes so far, and a lady is no one’s doormat.

When one too many plastic surgeries make a lady look like the inflatable love doll from Hell, she refrains from frequenting playgrounds and scaring the children.

When losing an argument with one’s gentleman, a lady always brings up his past misdeeds, especially those of many years ago, and acts as if freshly wounded. The judicious use of tears will also help a lady prevail, no matter how weak her argument or silly her request.

A lady always exhibits impeccable taste in choosing a firearm to eliminate tedious husbands and troublesome lovers, and is ever mindful of the advances in forensics.

Similarly, a lady makes sure that her husband’s life is well-insured.

A lady always remembers that her own money is hers, while her husband’s or gentlenman friend’s earnings are always “ours.”

A middle aged lady is very careful not to publicly exhibit her hatred of beautiful young ladies.

When employed as a crack whore, a lady never brings her clients home.

A lady makes it her business to know the difference between cheap knockoffs and genuine designer goods, and lets her gentleman know that she knows.

A lady always provides a happy ending.

When the going gets tough, the tough squeeze harder.