Dear Max,

I am living in a small house in Sydney’s Inner West. It’s a great area and I love our house, but there’s one significant caveat: there is a very rude dog living on our street. He barks at all hours with no consideration for residents or their sleeping patterns. I am woken constantly and upset frequently. I, for one, am sick of it.

What can I do about this very rude dog?

Struggling in Suburbia.

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Dear SiS,

Horrible acronym. Very annoying. Fix or suffer the consequences. (These are the consequences:)

In ThIs LiFe ThErE aRe SoMe PrObLeMs YoU cAn DeAl WiTh On YoUr OwN. tHiS iS nOt OnE oF tHoSe PrObLeMs. YoU dId ThE rIgHt ThInG cOmInG tO Me.

Let’s start here:

Are you a dog?

I only ask because you use a nom de plum, which makes me very suspicious of you and your suspicious motives, and also because the obvious solution that any rational human would employ in this situation would be to locate the rude dog’s owner, knock politely on his door and read him a selection of poetry from Australia’s finest and baldest laureate, John Williamson, until he eventually gets so worried about whether it is really me or you or mum and dad or the cockatoo or standing by your mate when he’s in a fight or just vegemite? TRUE BLUE.

And so it is concluded:

YOU ARE PROBABLY A DOG.

Wow. Dude. Impressive. I’ve only had like four previous encounters with animorphs in the past.

(Not counting the family of unidentifiable vermin I personally incubated from eggs last year using only body heat, saliva and duct tape (obviously) and gave to a pretty girl last February. Happy Valentinyrodents Day! Let’s keep all this between us, though. What a good boy you are! Wouldn’t want to blow your cover. How great is the park?)

Anyway, it sounds to me like you’re heatedly involved in a territorial war. I’m not a total expert in this field, so I’m going to defer to the gnarliest bad boys of progessive heavy metal, Sepultura, who wrote a song on the subject in 1993. It goes like this:

Dictators’ Speech

Blasting Off Your Life

Rule To Kill The Urge

Dumb Assholes’ Speech

Deep.

For legal reasons, I can’t tell you exactly how to scathe your nemesis because animal cruelty is wrong and bad. Just how angry were the beavers in Angry Beavers in real life? Probably not very. Just one example. The itchy/scratchy paradox is another. Let us also say that Shroedinger’s cat was having a very mice time inside that box full of chemicals and leave it at that.

What I can do is leave a completely unrelated pipe bomb diagram below and walk away giving no further instructions, deeply satisfied in the knowledge that I am assisting you only in the construction of an explosive device for professional uses and STRICTLY NOT for use on mortal enemies. Okay? Please note: I am winking.

Surrealism, dawg.

Masel tov / Molotov!

Max.

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