I was sitting here trying to think of something to write about this month when I suddenly started puzzling over the structures of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (aka NAD) and nicotinamide riboside (aka NR), a couple of molecules people routinely ingest for purposes including but not limited to hair regrowth and anti-aging. I swear on Vidal Sassoon’s hair clippers that I am not making this up.
I don’t know why NAD and NR popped into my head. But I thought ‘maybe I can work this into a column’. After that I thought, ‘well first of all, almost nobody knows what a “column” is any more because columns are what people write in newspapers and secondly almost nobody knows what a newspaper is any more.’ Finally I thought, ‘What the heck? This is a totally stupid, boring idea.’ In fact, it was so boring that I fell asleep at the keyboard. But while I was sleeping I had this dream…
This brief post has nothing to do with alien monsters. It may have something to do with Dave Barry and his dog Lucy. Time will tell.
The topic of this post is actually a freshly-minted canine classification known as the Giant Suck-Lump. The Suck-Lump moniker was invented in my back yard two days ago by my daughter Alex. Last summer I thought she might also have invented another canine classification: the Giant Floof. However, in the course of due diligence, I Googled “giant floof” and found this photo:
So I have to admit, I feel like the Giant Floof might already have been a thing last summer before Alex mentioned it. You never know though. Newton and Leibniz are reputed to have independently discovered Calculus a few centuries ago. So Alex may have independently coined Giant Floof. Questions remain though. Is that a smallish man surrounded by smallish furniture hoisting an average-sized dog or a large, burly man in a room full of normal-sized furniture hoisting a freakishly large dog? Is that just one of those camera angle tricks? Sometimes I think that searching the Internet raises more questions than it answers.
Thankfully, the provenance of the Giant Suck-Lump (GSL) is undisputed. I was there.
The GSL is noted primarily for its ability to elicit a stream of baby talk from even the most stoic individual-male or female- and also for its tendency to induce a state of bliss, calmness and possibly profound hypotension.
Alex, apparently normotensive and blissfully cuddling a freshly-captured Giant Suck-Lump
This Suck-Lump is technically a 9-week old Bernese Mountain Dog puppy named Sarge. He has frightening large paws. Frankly speaking, he is a huge suck. There’s no other way to put it. In the two days since he came to live with my wife Jeanette and me he has rarely strayed more than 15-20 cM away from either one of us. In fact his right ear is touching my left shoe as I type this.
The following photo shows Jeanette and Sarge on the day he was extracted from the Suck-Lumpaculum where he was hatched.
Jeanette blissfully holding Sarge
Did I mention that Suck-Lumps have frighteningly large paws?
Our Suck-Lump likes to sleep with his head underneath something, this case, a table.
Here he is, fresh from a fierce battle with his current nemesis, the dreaded Alberta forked tongue lizard-snake.
Below we have our Suck-Lump, fully recovered and proudly dominating his vanquished foe.
And finally, here are Dave and Lucy, looking somewhat perplexed:
Dave: What the heck is an Alberta lizard-snake Lucy? And where is Alberta anyway? Lucy: Great questions Dave. I’ll have to circle back to you on this.
The Department of Lateral Thinking 
You must be logged in to post a comment.