I know a lot of people like to post pictures of their pets on their blogs and discuss how cute/crazy/dumb/stinky they are. It’s fun! Everyone likes to read about animals!

Well, I don’t have a pet right now, fools. So I will have to just continue posting pictures of my former pet, Melvin the Dog.

See? There he is. Watching my dad (AKA AlphaDog) lead a funk band made up of high school students. This photo was taken during a rehearsal at our house. Melvin had let himself in (he knew how to operate the sliding screen door, despite being a hopeless moron in many other areas) and plopped down at the foot of our soprano saxophone player, Dan.

Aside from screen door openry, Mel had a few other surprising and useless talents. One was that he could clean a whole chicken bone off with his front teeth, which made him look really dumb. The other was that he could sing. And I actually mean that. He liked horn sounds, and would howl along with me as I played the trumpet. The most interesting part was that, for a dog, he had excellent pitch. If I went up an octave, so did he. If I went down really low, he’d sort of growl. He just wanted to be part of the pack, and that meant making the right noise.

So, when he heard our rehearsal going, he wandered over and looked at the band leader. Then this:

You can’t really tell in this picture, but Dan is trying, unsuccessfully, not to laugh. Mel’s howling could get pretty loud.

I wish I had thought to release an album.

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