Not long ago, my wife attended a conference. One of the speakers -- or sponsors or hosts or strippers or something; I wasn't really listening -- was from Aflac. The insurance people. With the commercials. You know the ones.


This Aflac person apparently came bearing gifts, and so my wife returned home with a small plush doll of a duck, about eight inches tall. It's wearing sunglasses and an 'old man hat', and when you squeeze its tummy, a voice says:


'Aflac! Aflac!! AAAAAAAAFFFF! LAAAAAAAACK!!'


This noisy duck is now my dog's new nemesis. From the very first squeeze, the mutt has been mesmerized. The duck is sitting on a shelf in the living room, just above the dog's eye level. So she sits and stares it down, just daring it to pipe up. One measly peep, and she'll rip it wing from wing. Or slobber all over it and drop it in the toilet, whichever's easier.


Clearly, the dog is an idiot.


Honestly, how moronic do you have to be to obsess over some cutesy little trinket that only knows one line? Sure, sure, I had that incident last summer with the 'action figure' with the recording of 'This one time, at band camp...' I won't tell you where I had to squeeze it to make it talk, or exactly how I ended up breaking it. But that was the best. Birthday. Weekend. Ever.


Back to the dog. And the duck.


I fully expect to come home one day to find the duck gone. There'll be fake fuzzy feathers all over the floor, and a little chip in the corner wheezing, 'Ellllfff... fffllleeeccckkk'. Two days later, the dog'll shit the sunglasses, and we'll close the book on this chapter of the dog's jackass obsessions.


Until somebody gives us some new doll that says, 'Is it in you?' or 'Can you hear me now?' or 'Yaaaa-hoooooowoooo!!' And if I ever get my hands on one that makes that creepy 'zoom zoom noise, I'll feed it to the bitch myself.