Training Squirrels to kiss my ass

I've spent yet another day at the Golf course. Not playing, of course, but working our golf tournament. The first one had the afternoon round rain out, so we had to go at it again. Thankfully, we only had to report for duty from 10-1 today. Of course, three hours in this heat is still enough time to sweat through your clothes and feel gross, but at least it was three hours away from the office.

Having the majority of the office in one place at one time is always a great way for me to realize that I don't really like any of my co-workers. We've got so many new people right now. I found out that I was calling the new guy Blaine, but his actual name is Blake. My response to this when it was pointed out to me: "At this point, he should feel flattered that I knew he worked here."

I was reading the newspaper this afternoon (it is my job to scan and look for any articles that might have a mention of us) and I found an article on chocolate making. It was tied in to the release of the new "Willy Wonka" movie and had a nice little box of bulletted tidbits related to the making of the movie. How many real chocolate bars were used, how many fake ones were made, and there was this one:

• 40 squirrels were trained over 19 weeks to sit on stools, open nut shells and drop the nuts onto a conveyor belt.

WHAT? They trained SQUIRRELS?!?! Isn't the whole invention of CGI based around the thought of not having to do asinine things for movies and let computers do them instead? I'm beginning to think that the squirrel factoid was added in by some one pranking us. There's someone related to the Willy Wonka movie that's scanning newspapers throughout the U.S. to see if there was a newspaper dumb enough to fall for the training squirrels fact. There was. It was the Tennessean.

Of course, then I googled 'Training Squirrels' and the first hits were all about Tim Burton and his million-dollar squirrels. That's a good practical joke.