Stuck Inside of Riverside With the Richmond Blues Again

It's coyote season again!

Local media have returned to the evergreen story of coyotes (gasp!) eating cats in the 'burbs, and of death squads hunting us down. The only new twist is that the killers are trying to appropriate the touchy-feely language of psychobabble to explain how they 'manage' coyote/human interactions by 'establishing boundaries'.

I guess maybe guys who murder stuff for a living have a lot of trouble with their karma. And, this being Ottawa, they've decided to try to re-spin the cosmos.

The one on CBC Radio One's Ottawa Morning positively squirmed when Kathleen Petty cornered him into admitting out loud that 'managing' pretty much means 'killing'. He drove the semantic bus straight back to 'management' as quickly as he could, but you could practically hear Kate's eyes roll when he did.

I still find it fascinating how many urbanites want houses with all the perks of country living, as long as they don't have to, you know, deal with the actual messy ruralness of it all...

So I just wanna say, in coyotes' defence, that these suburban excursions ain't exactly our fault. You saw this morning's news story about car companies falling over themselves to licence Bob Dylan's voice for their in-car GPS systems? They didn't make it out to be a done deal, but since Bob is the Head Coyote, I'm pretty sure that our contractual confidentiality agreements can be loosened to let you know that we coyotes have already been beta-testing it.

So those coyote encounters? It ain't us, babe. The test version, like Bob, has, ummm, mumbly moods. Any coyote that has not ingested massive quantities of hallucinogens at some recent point in their life has got no hope in hell of translating the incomprehensible blithering.

Hey. That incomprehensible blithering is why he's our oracular spiritual leader in the first place...

But we, like, you know, end up lost in places we shouldn't be, starving and eating cats to survive. As you may imagine, our karma suffers terribly from this. However, I'm sure they'll fix it in the production models...