By now you’ve probably read about Hillary Clinton’s embarassingly shrill speech (hat tip: Calblog.) at a recent fundraiser in Connecticut. If you haven’t actually heard the speech, do. One can’t appreciate its full effect just by reading the transcript; on paper, it sounds like a bunch of empty political sloganing. When you actually hear it, it sounds like she’s really losing it. Case in point: Tonight, Mrs. Xrlq wasn’t in the mood to watch Hannity and Colmes, so I watched it with Molly, the pit bull, instead. Molly was a good sport until it got to the part where they played clips from Hillary’s speech, in which each sentence was a few decibels louder and half an octave higher than the last. Finally, it reached the point where Molly was too terrified of the TV set to remain in the living room, and darted upstairs to the bedroom. The other dog, Jodie (a Rottweiler mix), also ran off, though it was less clear whether Jodie was afraid of the TV set or just wanted to follow Molly for the sake of following Molly. I don’t remember training them to hate liberal Senators, but then again, you never know what subtle cues a dog will pick up.

Speaking of dogs, Eugene Volokh buried the lede in a recent post. The heading and the introductory sentence suggest that the post is about the Roomba, a robot that vacuums his house. “Big deal,” you might say, “all those vacuum-cleaning-robot things do that.” Ah, but the real story, hidden in an oblique reference to dog hair, is that the Volokhs have at least two dogs, and he hasn’t posted a single picture of them! Oh, the humanity caninity.

Finally, if you have a dog yourself, or intend to get one, be sure you have the right kind of grass in your back yard. We learned that the hard way and had to have the whole yard redone, by having the pros dig out six inches of dirt and lay new soil and Bermuda sod in its place, to the tune of $5,000. That was only a week ago, and already they dogs have managed to lift a section of sod off the ground, leaving an ugly hole in its place that will need to be repaired later this week. And no, I didn’t just say that in order to see how many Google hits I’ll get from people who typed the search terms “sod off.” OK, maybe that was part of the reason I worded it the way I did, but only part! OK, maybe it was the only reason…