When walking a dog, the shortest distance between two points is impossible.

Yesterday, brother Mike stopped by for a visit, eager to have me listen to a new-old Hugh Masekela CD. The conversation covered a lot of terrain, music and politics, but mostly about family, stories of hope and adventure, stories of hard times getting harder.
"So," he asked, "how old is Marley?"
"Thirteen."
"What is that in human years?"
Well, as it turns out, the commonly used metric of one dog year equaling seven human years doesn't quite work. Dogs mature much earlier than humans; a one-year-old dog is more like a teenager than a seven-year-old human.

Data (PDF)  from California Veterninary Medicine Association.

So, that led to a search for clever about dogs, leading to "My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can. That's almost $7.00 in dog money." ~Joe Weinstein

The quote is undated, but I figured that a can of Alpo has increased in price along with everything else. Google Shopping showed that you can get pretty close to a buck a can for some sale items in case lots.
One offering, though, is not much of a deal at all. Not only is the price-per-can at nearly $3.00, but shipping is, well, ...

For that price, they should not only ship it, but also get up early in the morning and feed it to him.
While looking around for that other information, I stopped to sniff these fenceposts:

• The Centers for Disease Control report, via WSJ, (subscription), that tripping over pets is a major cause of emergency room visits and that people are more than seven times as likely to trip over their dogs as over their cats.
  
• Spending $50 to test your dog's IQ probably says more about your IQ than your dog's.