On ferrets and calendars

A couple of years ago, a friend gave an office mate of mine a calendar. This is of course not normally an event to write about, but for whatever reason this calendar involved ferrets playing musical instruments. If you check it out on Amazon, you’ll notice it even has a bit of a following. Indeed, Amazon’s still selling a calendar for 2005.

So what makes this worth even talking about? Well, it turns out that this calendar really ended up bothering me. I certainly mean no disrespect towards Jeanne Carley and her ferret-loving brethren...but it did. It was quite clear that someone spent a lot of time on it. But it was also clear that someone needed to spend a bit more time on it. Should you ever get a chance, check out the month with the ferret playing the piano in the concert hall. It’s very cute, until you notice the keys being struck are completely unrelated to where the paws are hitting. And then you notice that the meager number of people around are all standing, reading the program. Clearly, they’ve just arrived. So is the ferret just tuning the piano before the show? Or rather, is it pretending to tune the piano?

Anyway, the calendar is filled with things that, by the end of the month, will drive you crazy. At some point people began to believe that I hate ferrets. And that couldn’t be more untrue. Some of my best friends like ferrets. The problem was that it was clear someone has put a lot of effort in making this calendar, and yet they should have put a heck of a lot more in.

Interestingly, this past Christmas someone got me a peeps calendar. I guess the idea was to annoy me some more. Fortunately (for me, at least), it’s quite clear that very little effort was spent in making this calendar.