The Day of the Cock

Yesterday we sat down after getting a lot of work done for some nice family time watching "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel (TIVO, actually). If you haven't seen it, you should--it's this great show where the (coincidentally really hot) host sees what it's like to do the kind of menial, awful jobs that some people do so we don't have to.

Someone picked the "Dirtiest Animal" show, which sounds pretty tame, right? Of course, one of the segments was on electro-ejaculating a bull with a huge rubber dildo-like thing about a foot and a half long. This is, I suppose, kind of tame next to someone shoving their entire arm up the bull's ass. No questions here, fortunately.

Then we head out to lunch and some errands. Right now I need to preface the rest of the story by saying we go out to chinese food too much, and my kids are intimately familiar (and I realize that after that last paragraph, the phrase "intimately familiar" sounds unclean) with the Chinese Zodiac menus they always have. The male chicken-mate is always called a "cock," which is just fine, until you realize that your nine-year old is still calling a rooster a cock.

So Wiley spikes up his hair and says "Mom, I look like a cock!"

And then we repeat the occasional "perhaps you should start using the work "rooster" like everybody else" conversation, which leads to me explaining what the colloquial meaning of "cock" is, and how one usually does not use it in polite conversation. Which, of course, leads to Wiley asking "so when *would* you use the word 'cock?'"

All I could think of was "In no conversation you'll ever be having soon."

Sigh. At least I got out of explaining what electroejaculation was :-)