"Stupid Dog!"

         I love my dog. Only problem is, I'm not sure he has enough brain cells to love me back. Or at least, I wasn't sure, maybe I am now . . . See, my dog has always been the family dunce. He barks outside, and what do we say? "Mugsey, you're such a stupid dog. People are sleeping! Ssh!" Of course, we never say it too harshly, and I was sure he never knew the difference because of our tone of voice. See, if you say in a nice tone of voice, "Aww, you're so stupid and dumb," the dog just hears the tone of voice, looks blankly at you and wags his tail. On the other hand, if you sound angry and say "Good boy!" he runs and hides in the corner. I always thought he was stupid too. I mean, he ran his own head into a tree while he was chasing squirrels. He wraps his little doggie chain around a tree and can't get himself unwound again. When people come in the door, he wags his tail so hard that it gets caught in wires from the computer and everything from speakers to mouse go flying. See what I mean? Stupid dog, right?
         Wrong. I should've known. There was always something in those big brown eyes of his that betrayed his understanding. When I cried to him, he sympathized with me. When I watched TV with him, he laughed with me. When I was angry, he growled. He supported me. I just never thought he was smart. Then one night, about two o'clock in the morning, Mugsey woke me up. I looked at him drowsily. "Do you know what time it is?" I asked. He just whined and wagged his tail at me. "What, do you want to go out?" At the word "out," he looked excited, backed up and wagged his tail some more, harder this time. "Ok Mugsey, come on." After managing to get him to go down the stairs first (and without tripping over him in my comatose state) we walked toward the door. His leash jingled as I opened it. He looked eagerly at me. "No Mugsey, I will not take you for a W-A-L-K." We had fallen into the habit of spelling things out that we didn't want him to understand. If we only knew. He went outside (on his chain of course) and watched me close the door. I turned on the yard light so that he could see, walked to the couch and turned on the TV.
         This time though, I watched him through the window. He walked past the windows in the living room, noticed me watching TV, and walked away again. Strange, I thought, and crawled up to the windows and peeked out to see where Mugsey was. To my surprise, he was digging a hole in the yard! He had never done this before, why was he . . . Having made his small rectangular hole, Mugsey stuck his nose into it. A light shone from the hole on his eyes. He stuck his nose back into the hole a few times, snurfed to himself, filled the hole back in, came to the door, and whined. Whined, and whined, and whined some more. I let him in, looking at him in wonder. "Geez Mugs, do you have to whine like that?" He just looked at me and wagged his tail. I pretended nothing had happened.
         The next day, while Mugsey was on his walk, I went outside. There in the yard, almost unnoticeable, was the hole Mugsey had made. I dug it out myself, and to my surprise, found a small computer screen. "Holy cow!" I said involuntarily. Touch-screen control, cable internet connection, file-sharing programs, built-in webcam and microphone . . . my dog had this yard wired! This was one thing I could not attribute to animal instinct. I opened Internet explorer, checked the history, and went to the last webpage he had visited. To my surprise, I found myself looking at an online broker. He'd been checking the stocks! I looked at the other pages in the history: Ebay, Yahoo mail . . . My dog, the canine webmaster . . . I chuckled to myself and refilled the hole.
         I never told Mugsey what I found, but since then I have never called him "Stupid dog." In fact, a few months later, I found an electronic door opener he had rigged for himself. And that's not all - unless I'm mistaken, the cats have a WebTV hidden in the attic and the hamster is now a walking laptop.