Classical Values :: Laundering alimentary values

Laundering alimentary values

A friend emailed me a truly frightening story, and because Coco reads this blog, I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to even to link it, much less discuss it, lest I give her evil ideas.

But I've decided to be brave, and I hope Coco is mature enough never to do something like this:

MENOMONIE, Wis. (AP) -- Debbie Hulleman's dog Pepper has been known to gnaw on lipstick, munch on shampoo bottles and chew on toothpaste. But Pepper got Hulleman into a real mess after gobbling nearly $750.

"This is probably the worst," Hulleman said Thursday, recalling how she poked through vomit and dog piles left in the yard to recover the cash.

Ugh!

Talk about a direct threat to family values! What could be more valuable than the family cash itself?

The problem with dogs eating things is that even though they do it all the time, few people are inclined to believe the truth -- all because snot-nosed second graders have been using "The dog ate my homework!" as a traditional excuse for many, many decades. Not that anything is fair about this. I never used that excuse. So if we suppose that Coco did something like that to me (or something worse, like eating an important legal document), why should I be penalized because of an apocryphal tradition of lying 7 year old brats?

Hulleman's mother recovered some of the money that Pepper spit out, thinking she had it all. But when Hulleman returned from the trip and went to clean up her dogs' mess outside, she noticed a $50 bill hanging from one pile.

The chore of sorting through dog feces netted about $400, the 50-year-old dog lover said. Between that and other bills that Pepper had either vomited or simply chewed on, the family recovered $647.

"We have a $100 bill that can't be recovered because you need three-fourths of a bill and it is only half of a bill," Hulleman said.

That's true. They have to be able to match up the serial numbers from both sides, otherwise, how are they to know you're not running around scamming different banks with two halves?

"It wasn't that bad. I soaked it and strained it and rinsed it. I just kept rinsing it and rinsing it. I had rubber gloves on of course," Hulleman said.

"Everyone said, 'I can't believe you did that.' Well, for $400, yeah, I would do that," she said.

Well, who wouldn't? Heroin dealing rings have to go through far worse stuff than doggie poop in order to pull out the balloons stuffed with freshly smuggled smack. And then (as if to add insult to injury), it gets repackaged in smaller balloons, which end up being put into the oral cavities of street dealers, who either spit them out for customers on demand, or swallow them in the event of a police search -- only to go through the whole "retreival" rigmarole all over again. (No wonder the more civilized addicts tend to prefer pharmaceuticals!)

Hey, if that sounds gross, consider the huge amounts of cash they handle.

Any idea where your unlaundered money might have been?