No cows were harmed in the writing of this blog post

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/04/25 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/04/25/582700.aspx

I honestly can't believe how strange the conversations I have seem to get, sometimes.

I mean, Cathy came by to grab a snickers bar from the candy dish, and she was fussing with the stuffed cows on the bookshelf. She was trying to figure out why they were all facing the books instead of out at the room. I pointed out that this is just something Shawn does while he is telling me that he is stealing something from the candy dish.

So as she was sitting there repositioning the cows to more outward facing positions I asked her not to hurt the cows (the three stuffed cows and one beanie baby cow are all I have left of the Godot project, UniCOWS!).

She seemed shocked and offended that I suggested she would ever hurt them, which forced me to remind her of the "cow on wheels" incident.

We were at Crate and Barrel waiting on a dinner reservation (meeting someone else there, if memory serves), and Cathy had found one of those European toys, a 'cow on wheels', something like this one:

She was pulling it around by a string that was attached, and she accidentally ran it into the wall.

Shocked, I asked her how did she think Julie would feel if she saw Cathy's little exercise in cow abuse?

And then she proceeded to run it into the wall repeatedly. I was certain that she'd be giving them a credit card to pay for damage to the wall (and the cow!).

Of course at this point I remembered the recent posts from over at Language Log about the cow, and I asked whether that cow on wheels (assuming it was still ambulatory after Cathy's exercise in bovined abuse) clouded the issue of the "cow a motor vehicle" further....

This post brought to you by "⺧" and "𐂌" (U+2ea7 and U+1008c, a.k.a. CJK RADICAL COW and LINEAR B IDEOGRAM B109F COW)

While I certainly can understand fiddling with the cows as a means to focus your attention somewhere else while someone robs the candy dish....

there are really people working at Microsoft who pull around cows on wheels that are attached to a string?

It strikes me as funny that the post focuses on the potential damage on the wall treating the cow on a string as perfectly normal everyday behavior. :-)

To set the story straight: the cow on wheels was stuffed, so there was no possibility the wall would have been harmed. I'm not a vandal! I may enjoy making fun of Julie's unnaturally protective nature towards stuffed (inanimate) animals, but not harming other people's property :)

Please consider a donation to keep this archive running, maintained and free of advertising.
Donate €20 or more to receive an offline copy of the whole archive including all images.