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Tag Archives: institutionalized pet prejudice
Princess Pricklepants, Entrepreneur
Dear reader, we regret to inform you that we haven’t got any proper introduction to this, our latest post, nor any apologies to offer, nor any reader letters to review, nor other things like that which fill up space at the top of a post that are easy to use as filler to help avoid going and writing the other parts of the story that involve more work, and thinking, and coming up with ideas, and setup to do. Rather we are going to immediately jump into this tale, with no delays, rambling, digressions, or other peripheral delays. And here we are… Jumping right in. Oddly, while it feels unsettlingly like somehow that isn’t happening, clearly this is an illusion. Probably it’s to do with Quentin, who had recently written in to say something, though we can’t remember what.
As a break from the usual format, we’re also going to not start with a picture, but instead start with words and then a picture, and then words under that picture.
Princess Pricklepants had given up the farming life, and was preparing to retire to a life of royal luxury, when Jane, her accountant gave her a call. “These phones, they’re so hard to dial with hooves. Anyway, I was calling to tell you that the farm wound up eating a surprising amount of capital, to the point that it’s a plot device requiring you to find some form of livelihood.” Princess wasn’t sure what that meant, but assumed it was good news. Jane went on, “You have to find a job.” Maybe not great news. The lack of a photo above the dialogue was moderately unsettling to Princess, somehow, adding to her sense of unease.
But Princess, in her inimitable metaphorical style, decided to make lemons out of lemonade. So, Princess decided to pursue her true passion, acting.
Sadly, in addition to breaking the fourth wall, she also broke a table, a chair, several cups, and broke the skin of several actors. While the director of the show she was trying out for was a patient dinosaur, he eventually had to say “rawr,” which is dinosaur for “Don’t call us, we’ll call you, and we’ll be sending a bill for the broken props and medical expenses.”
Jane noted that this meant that there were going to have to be some lifestyle reductions until they had an income.
Princess came up with a brilliant plan. She would play to her core strengths, and pursue her true passion, acupuncture.
While it seemed like a great idea, in retrospect, acupuncture was very difficult to make a living at. While she tried to be polite, her patients kept whining. And screaming. No patients ever returned after their first visit, and most refused to pay, even when they seemed much healthier once they had every acupuncture point stabbed artfully (and politely) with her quills. A few sent medical bills to her saying something about blood transfusions. When she checked on hedgehogaccupuncturistcentral.com she was surprised to find many other hedgehogs had similar problems.
So she decided to pursue her real passion, photography.
She decided that taking photos of small farm animals on table-top sets had to be the start of a brilliant and lucrative photography career. Strangely, her work never became massively popular in a whirlwind of fame bringing in no cash, prizes, or wonderful adventures as a brilliant and respected photographic artist. She did get a photo shared on Cute Overload, her favorite blog, but somehow that didn’t bring everlasting fame, but more like twenty views. Perplexing.
Clearly that was a ridiculous way to spend her time. So she looked around at what was popular in the Internets and noticed bird photography was very popular. She could still pursue her true passion, photography, by doing a different type of picture-taking. Also, birds were moderately interesting, at least for nerds, so she could use them as a market. Perfect. They buy all kinds of worthless things.
At first things were going pretty well. She found a bird, it didn’t fly away, and she took a picture. Then she looked at the blurry picture, poorly composed, and with terrible light, and determined that she’d need to find another bird. This was tedious. She also realized that while she could pursue this course for a very long time, enough to fill a few blog posts full of Princess Pricklepants, Bird Photographer, this would be very dull for the poor readers. Also, her blurry duck photo was rejected by National Geographic.
So she decided not pursue this as a career. What was left? She had so many skills, advice columnist, farmer, warrior, space traveler, but none of those things were a proper job fitting a hedgehog of noble bearing, regal poise, and impeccable politeness.
Then she had a great idea! She would be a web entrepreneur. She began to study…
This was slow and dull, so she began a montage with 80s music to make it go faster.
Yet, the post was already too long even with this career-related activity compressed into a peppy compressed series of images edited into a sequence to condense space and time illustrating her hard work. Also when she put in her resume, all her applications as a programmer and systems analyst were rejected by the companies she applied to. They said things about degrees, and prior experience, but it was clear that they were hiding the truth – another sinister side of the Perils of Pet Prejudice.
And so she decided that next episode she would pursue her real passion, doing a web startup. But that is something to tell about another time, since we’re close to 1000 words, which is how long these things typically go. So, for now, adieu. And soon, Princess Pricklepants, Startup Founder might appear. Or maybe not soon. Given the way these things go, we might wind up with Princess Pricklepants Pirate Adventurer in a few months. Or maybe, Princess Pricklepants, Bird Photographer, because we’d really like to do that even if it’d be dull and tedious for everyone but us. Sorry, we like taking bird photos, even though it is definitely not a profitable venture.
next:
Princess Pricklepants, Startup Founder Extraordinaire
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Search II
It’s time for another episode of “I think you guys are using the Internet wrong, or something.” Here are the searches that brought people to our rather quiet blog over the last 30 days:
2014-05-01 to Today
| Search | Views |
|---|---|
| pain penelope | 1 |
| princess penelope and the dragon | 1 |
| hedgehog geographic location | 1 |
| peregrinate wit me | 1 |
| hedgehog napping | 1 |
| princess penelope answer key | 1 |
| http://www.free lovely images of princesses.in | 1 |
| african countries that don’t hate pygmies | 1 |
| what are the metaphors in princess penelope f |
Okay people. Almost all of you are doing the Internet wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! Let’s enumerate the ways so we can use an ordered list.
- First, “pain penelope,” person, a word to you: no.
- “Princess penelope and the dragon” person, thanks for a future blog post title. We have no criticisms. You are clearly using the Internet right.
- “hedgehog geographic location” person, hedgehogs have many geographic locations. They are a type of animal that lives all over Africa, Europe, and Asia (and New Zealand). They are not a monument. I can see that you might not totally understand that, no hard feelings. You have to start researching somewhere, though it shouldn’t be here probably, unless you are interested in research on the perils of pet prejudice, or research on the captive African Pygmy Hedgehog’s responses to images of the Verreux’s Eagle Owl, where you’ll find we are a notable researcher.
- “peregrinate wit me” person, you were looking for a travel blog and made a typo, that part is understood. There is the question of why you were looking for a travel blog and wound up clicking on a hedgehog blog, but I can understand the draw of hedgehog mystery. You are not doing the Internet wrong.
- “hedgehog napping” God bless you, it’s relevant.
- “princess penelope answer key” – wait, what? This is inexplicable. You are definitely doing the Internet wrong if you are trying to cheat on homework and you wound up here. Though the answers are: A, A, D, C, B, A, E, C, A, D. (Though not necessarily in that order).
- “www.free lovely images of princesses.in” I was briefly worried that there was a http://www.freelovelyimagesofprincesses.in site out there, and that it would perhaps have some naughty content on it, because nothing is sacred on the Internet. But no, there is in fact no website there. You “www.free lovely images of princesses.in” search person are doing the Internet totally, completely wrong.
- “african countries that don’t hate pygmies” – luckily I wasn’t drinking anything or it would have sprayed on my screen when I got to this one. Seriously, like, I just don’t even.
- “what are the metaphors in princess penelope f” Yes, sadly, that is the grade you will be getting.
Also, look, isn’t she cute?
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The Perils of Pet Prejudice Part 3 – The Princess Strikes Back!
Now begins part 3 of our travelogue, heading on the final stretch, over the river and through the woods to Grandmothers’s house. It was a long drive, so Fancy made good use of the time rehearsing for his role in Annoying Private Ryan:
Still nailing it!
Alabama has a welcome center too, we are sensing a pattern. The first thing we find is a phone booth, a strange relic from the lost past of telephony. Maybe it is a time machine! Princess attempted to communicate with it, but found it strangly unresponsive. Fancy tried to help, but also found it unresponsive. Princess wanted to change into a superhero costume in the phone booth, but we didn’t bring any superhero costumes with us, so Princess and Fancy just played in the booth for a while instead.
Next to the booth was a large concrete monolith with an inspirational saying on it. Fancy thought it must have been placed there by a fellow pet’s rights activist – the persecution of pet’s rights and the sinister signage of institutionalized pet prejudice is an injustice Fancy hopes to overcome some day. He has a dream. Fancy is sure that concrete block is meant to inspire pets everywhere to fight the peculiar and perversely pernicious idea of defending the idea that it’s a “right” to keep pets from visiting visitor centers. Fight the power, hedgehogs, you have nothing to lose but your leashes!
Princess bristled at Marxist undertones of Fancy’s proclamations. As a member of the aristocracy she feels torn. Fancy thought it best to change the topic, since it was a bit of a prickly subject.
“Cousin Phil?”
There were some lovely holly bushes, so we posed Princess in front of them and got this super lucky photo of Princess waving! Whoah!
Once again we met our old nemesis. Rather than explaining with complicated words and sentences why this is bad, we didn’t.
Princess and Fancy were both appalled.
Fancy can be quite the activist…
Is this what happens when a puppet has nothing left to lose? Pushed to the edge, will Fancy, once a mild-mannered and law abiding puppet, become a rule-breaker?
Clearly.
Fancy even turned to handing out brochures he wasn’t authorized to dispense!
And engaged in doing whatever it is that’s happening here.
The breakdown into anarchy continued. Princess turned from her mild mannered rigid authoritarianism to anarchy to the point that *she went past the NO PETS ALLOWED sign*! At this point things were careening off. Princess even tried to climb into that little buttoned down spot on my collar that there was no way she’d ever fit into.
But with family intervention and care she settled down a bit – note she still was rebelliously sticking out her tongue here.
With more time cooler heads prevailed, and we persuaded Fancy and Princess of the value of the social contract, and that we had a Grandma to get to.
On the way out, we decided that there must be a politically connected brother with a sign making business, because seriously.
And later that day we got to Grandma’s
And Great Grandma Gracie even got to see Princess Pricklepants:
THE END
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The Perils of Pet Prejudice Part 2
We made our way on the long drive from Louisiana to Mississippi, a state with constant and consistent consonant complications.
Princess liked it since it had two Ps in the name. Fancy had many opinions about Mississippi but nobody was interested in hearing them. So he rehearsed for “Annoying Private Ryan”:
Nailed it.
For various reasons Mississippi claims to be “The Birthplace of America’s Music,” which seems like a very grand claim. We could have been pedantic quibblers, but hedgehogs don’t really promote pedantic quibbling so we tried to work with it:
:
Once again we encountered the sinister signage of institutionalized pet prejudice.
While we were taking photos of our hedgehog out front, various people noticed our hedgie, and we were showing her to them. One of the workers at the visitor’s center noticed Princess and liked her, and wanted us to bring her in, though when he tried to get us in, security actually stopped us. The Man Holding the Hedgehog Down. (Technically security was actually a lady, and she didn’t hold the hedgehog). Here was the worker who liked Princess holding her:
We sort of took our a stand for pet civil liberties, in a way, by taking pictures of our hedgehog near the sinister signage of institutionalized pet prejudice.
Others kind of joined us, in a sense, by also taking pictures of our hedgehog near the sinister… the “No Pets” sign.
Given the circumstances, we left Princess safely in the car and went inside the Mississippi Welcome Center with Fancy to take a stand. Inside there was this painting of an American ship exploding, as if Mississippi wanted to say, “welcome, ships explode here sometimes, but not often.”
Since the Visitor’s Center was under Pet Segregation, only Fancy was able to pose before the state seal, though he tried to appear hedgehog-like in solidarity. Next time we plan to bring toothpicks to really show them.
Fancy also met Miss. Mississippi, who he enjoyed meeting. Luckily she wasn’t Mrs. Mississippi since that would have been far too difficult to say, and also Fancy might have been challenged to a duel.
After talking to the nice people and forgetting to mention that they really shouldn’t be prejudiced against pets, we headed back to the car. Princess was sleeping in her huffledome, so we let her be without further photographic documentation.
Next – The Perils of Pet Prejudice Part 3 – Alabama’s Revenge (and Land of Too Many Signs).
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The Perils of Pet Prejudice Part 1
On the day after Christmas we packed up a minivan and headed out on the road for a trip to go visit family in Alabama. This was the first time we’ve traveled with Princess Pricklepants, so this was a learning opportunity for us. So far we’ve learned that traveling with hedgehogs isn’t as bad as it might sound. The kids have also learned that traveling with their parents is as bad as it sounds.
For this trip we took along another traveling companion, Fancy, who you probably remember from a previous post. Fancy is our giraffe friend who was a costar in the theatrical release of the drama, “The Princess, the Dragon, and the Giraffe.” Fancy has starred in many long car drive based dramas, including the early hit, “Ow!” as well as many other serial dramas like “Don’t Make Me Pull This Car Over,” “Does Anybody Need To Go To The Bathroom,” and the incredibly long running “No, We Just Got Food.”
After a long day’s drive, we pulled in for dinner at Cracker Barrel in Beaumont, Texas. Fancy generously covered our dinner at Cracker Barrel.
The Cracker Barrel cashier was quite surprised to be able to meet Fancy, we guessed that he had never met a giraffe actor of Fancy’s fame before.
Once we got checked in at the hotel Fancy called his agent.
No new jobs, but a he did send over a script to look at called, “Annoying Private Ryan.” Here’s a shot from one of the many, many rehearsals:
The next day we made it to Louisiana. The visitor’s center had a lot of construction work happening which created some tension between Princess and Fancy in the parking lot.
Then we made a startling discovery. The Louisiana Visitor’s Center was prejudiced against pets!
Facing grave injustice, Princess and Fancy made up and joined together in solidarity.
Together they laughed at danger:
Unfortunately, Fancy had broken the law. Princess was a strong law and order hedgehog, who felt she had no choice but to arrest him.
Princess had stark plans for the scofflaw Fancy.
Fortunately a very friendly and cooperative local construction worker stepped in and began the long needed process of bringing peace and healing between hedgehog and giraffe.
(Side note, has anyone noticed that Christmas keeps coming earlier and earlier each year? It’s not even January, and they already have these things up.)
Coming after this, The Perils of Pet Prejudice Part 2.
The Pleasantries of Princess Pricklepants 