You can skip the blather below and jump right to the Ollie pictures, but you'll miss the best part

We, meaning me and Mary Ann, always had names for our dogs before we had the dogs. We knew we'd get a Scottie one day. In fact, we knew we'd have two. One would be Stan and the other would be Ollie. They'd both be females. Females less likely to extrude rude organs in front of company and decide to orally groom them. We were never really tied to gender identification of our dogs. They knew who they were and we knew what they were.

In fact, we're so good at choosing names that we'll have to live to be 158 years old before we can use up all of the names: Siegfried and Tristan, Harlow and Powell, and a host of others. Five bonus points if you can site the references for the names.

Ollie was always going to be our first. We'd been in our new home for about six months when we started discussing getting a dog. Mary Ann had developed an allergy to cats while living with her parents. They had a evil Siamese named Pooh. Supposedly after the bear, but I think more likely after the body effluvium judging from the way the cat treated everyone but Mary Ann's father.

We thought it would be a good idea to have Mary Ann tested for allergies before we actually got a dog.

She came back positive for just about everything from prairie dogs to pythons. She was crushed. Fate had decreed no dogs. Then a miracle occurred. Well, at least Mary Ann remembers it so.

She insists that upon learning the results that I said we must immediately get a dog. Damn those sawbones eyes, I'd show 'em.

Mary Ann found a breeder with a litter of Scotties that were about eight weeks old. Just prime for adoption. We decided to go out to reconnoiter. Friends advised Mary Ann to take a box . . . just in case.

I'd been studying-up on how to choose a puppy. I'd watched TV shows about it and everything. You want to pick them up under the shoulders and see if they squirm.

If so, reject them.

You want to roll them on their backs to see if they struggle against that.

If so, reject them.

You want watch them play. You're looking to see If they're too aggressive or too dominant.

If so, reject them.

Well, you get the picture. I had about 27 different behavior criteria I would use to try to find the dog perfectly suited to us.

The breeders were an old couple in Painesville or some other exurb a hundred minutes away from where we lived. They looked to be approaching the far side of 70. They brought out four puppies and released the hounds upon us.

After Mary Ann stopped laughing and giggling, I started my evaluation process. It was like trying to administer the Stanford-Binet to a bunch of three-year-olds who'd just eaten sixteen Hershey Bars apiece. They all squirmed like oiled eels. After a few minutes, Mary Ann had found Ollie.

As the other three pups were involved with biting each other's ears and tails and ignoring the humans in the room, the fourth puppy went over and began untying Mary Ann's shoe laces. She and Ollie had found each other. It was a good thing we'd brought a box. Well, maybe not. More on that in a moment.

We wrote the breeders a check and drove back to Western Civilization. We would stop at my parents first to show them the pup and then Mary Ann's folks. About 25 minutes into the trip, Ollie brought up her last meal. Oogie.

We got to my folks and showed them Ollie. The pup was a little worse for the wear, but still interested in everything. Onto John and Roberta's.

Ollie ralphed again. Uh oh [don't worry, things turn out OK].

By the time we got to Parma, Ollie was looking bedraggled. We later found out from Mary Ann's dad that he didn't expect Ollie to last the week.

She recovered somewhat when we got home. As I was the driver, Mary Ann had charge of Ollie and was trying to keep her in the box in case things came out of either end. Turns out that was the wrong thing to do.

We found that Ollie got motion-sick if she couldn't look out of the window. If she could see where she was going, she could ride for hours, especially of there were people to see and scold.

Scotties are known as dour dogs, which kind of reflects their native origins. Occasionally we'd get a "smile" out of her, but most of the time she took her job of being a dog very seriously.

As you can see from the picture, we found a collar with links big enough to act as anchor chain for an aircraft carrier. The blue thing is a make-it-yourself ID tag. Kind of like a plastic locket that you put the dog's ID in. The whole foolishness lasted until just after the first puppy training class where we were made the butt of jokes about the collar. Luckily, we weren't pushed down and had our milk money taken away from us.

That's a 1984 Ford Tempo we're about to use. I'd loaded the trunk with 24 cinder blocks and 32 gallons of water in preparation for the test. I wanted to be sure to test her to the limit. I also carried a bowling ball in my lap. Although Ollie didn't seem to have much joy in anticipating the test, she was very stoic.

A quick course correction on my part put the rear tire over Ollie at 11:24:16.594 Zulu.

Results bore a strong relationship to predictions.

I, however, still could not take pictures of a black dog on a bright day. There's almost no way to set the exposure to get a satisfactory picture. Either the dog comes out as a silhouette against a properly-exposed background or the dog has definition, but it looks like the picture was taken at noon, on the equator of Mercury during the summer solstice.

While that might be an interesting experiment, we decided that it couldn't be allowed: we'd be continually tripping over it. Thus began The Hideous Haircut Experiments.

Owning such an exotic breed as a Scottie meant that we had to search through about sixteen different dog groomers before we found Westgate Groomers. The first attempt at a cut rendered Ollie's torso 1.74 times longer than normal as well as dropping her center of gravity three inches. Completely unsatisfactory. However the grafting of a rat's tail to her butt was a cunning move.

Haircut Experiment A: Slide One

The second groomer decided that a Scottie wasn't anything but a Miniature Schnauzer standing in a hole and clipped Ollie accordingly.

This did have the unexpected result of allowing Ollie to yodel on par with Ranger Doug. Sadly, she lost this ability when we ran out of Ricola throat lozenges.

We got a close approximation of what a Scottie should look like by a chic-chic groomer who had a waiting room that looked like a set from Gigi. I suspected they were French and my suspicions were confirmed when we picked up Ollie. She was doused with some kind of perfumed concoction and bedecked with ribbons. How did I know they were French groomers? Under the overpowering smell of perfume, Ollie smelled worse than we dropped her off: there was an undercurrent of eye-watering BO about her. Luckily it wore off after she rolled around on the carcass of a week-dead skunk. Her smell improved considerably.

Mary Ann called them and asked if they knew how to clip a Scottie. They assured us that they did, since they owned a Scottie. We found the shop, a little hole-in-the-wall place. The shop's amenities did not compare well Pepe Le Peaux Grooming and Stinkhole, but we had nothing to lose and Ollie only had about eight pounds of hair to lose.

When we picked her up, she was clean and groomed to look like what we expected a Scottie to look like. And, she only carried the faint scent of shampoo.

The picture above is of Ollie in her prime, taken at my parents' house. Notice the red shag carpet. My mother's taste in interior design ran to the Late French Brothel school, lots of red and gold.

One of the biggest challenges Man has faced in the XXth Century has been the development of a Flying Dog. Given that most dogs are relatively inefficient airfoils at high Reynolds Numbers, I took a different direction in my research. Instead of creating a dog that could be propelled through the air via airfoils and powerplants, I set out to create a lighter-than-air dog.

By adjusting Ollie's diet with the addition of massive amounts of beans, cabbage, and petroleum jelly, I succeeded in expanding her internal gas capacity by 22%. With increased hydrogen-compound production – mainly methane with a large number of fractional ketones – her tethered body weight was reduced to 13.1 grams. As is apparent from the picture, a moderately-inflated mylar balloon on Xmas morning was able to lift 97.2 percent of her from the ground.

I believe that this diet and the development of a lactose-intolerant Scottie fed 4.11 liters of yogurt per day would result in a buoyant dog able to lift significant amounts of payload.

While Scotties have been capable of inflicting damage at low altitudes, the destruction they inflict is localized. Expanding the battle envelope of the Scottie was the purpose of Experiment X51 which was undertaken through DARPA funding.

A "Scottie Gun" was developed to deliver high-velocity Scotties for use as an anti-personal weapon. In the experiment shown above, Ollie was deployed against a 60+-year-old male volunteer. Ollie's muzzle velocity was subsonic and measured 67 meters per second. She struck the volunteer in mid-torso and rendered him unconscious for 43 minutes. Fortunately both the Scottie round and the volunteer were contained by a "couch" device so neither was harmed. When deployed against enemy troops, such a restraint will not be used, of course.