2 Dog related stories for you from when I went to the Santa Monica pier last night:

A lady walks by with a little terrier on a leash. It's kind of dancing up and down as she walks by and then she stops right in front of me. Well, the dog keeps dancing up and down but now I notice that it looks a little stiff. Very stiff actually. It's head and legs are not moving independently. I look a little closer and I see some string leading up to the lady's hand, like a puppet. She was standing there, jiggling the string to make it look like the dog's walking. She was even talking to it.
She told it to "Come on" and they flew off on their magical rainbow pony.

Later, I passed a homeless woman with a dog standing nxt to two skateboarders. They were probably xtreme, I don't know, I didn't look closely but I did hear her say:
"Can you teach my dog to ride a skateboard? He already bites tires."

I just like the fact that she thinks biting tires is a step on the road to learning how to skateboard. "He already bites tires? That's step one!"

My wife suggested that the implication was that the dog understood the concept of things having wheels, which kind of would be step one. But on a list like that step 3 would be "Realize that an object in motion will remain in motion unless stopped by an outside force" which is a bit hard for a dog to grasp. I think the homeless woman was [insert metaphor similar to but not actually "barking up the wrong tree" here] if that was her thought process.

I prefer to imagine the homeless lady riding a skateboard, head bent over the edge, attempting to bite the tires for balance, with the skateboarders nodding in approval and shouting encouragement. Now that's xtreme!!!