So, it turns out dogs make pretty good film critics.

Pooch and popcorn enthusiasts held a Dog Film Festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico recently. The films had to be about dogs, have dogs in them or make you think about dogs. Owners had to pay $5 to get in, while the dogs got in for free. Of course, no one told them that the proceeds were going to the city's spay and neuter programs. If they had, I suspect the dogs would have staged a major riot, which would have involved throwing their chocolate covered milkbones at the projectionist.

Why did they hold a film festival for dogs? For starters, it would be impossible to hold one for cats. This is because:

1) You can not leash a cat to take it out anywhere. They either go limp and slither out of their collar, or attempt to shred your shins. Possibly both.
2) If people were able to transport their cats to the theatre, 70 percent of the felines would resolutely look everywhere but the screen, just to be contrary.
3) The other 30 percent would go slightly psycho and attempt to attack whatever was moving on the screen.

But the real reason why they held a film festival for dogs is, well, people get slightly weird about their pets sometimes. We talk to them, hold birthday parties for them, and dress them up in four-legged versions of human clothing. Even I confess to wrapping the odd bone-shaped parcel and putting it under the Christmas tree. Of course, I learned the hard way that it's never a good idea to put edible things under the tree until Christmas morning.

Of course, there's a good reason for being nice to animals. In addition to providing companionship, they have skills and abilities we haven't got, and can't yet imitate with technology. For example:

Dogs: In addition to protecting your home from squirrels, the neighbourhood cats, and falling leaves, dogs are great additions to any lawn maintenance program. They provide free fertilizer and many dogs aerate your lawn by digging large holes in random places. They've also got great noses, capable of detecting a Twinkie at 200 yards. More seriously, we've recently discovered that dogs can detect cancerous cells just by scent.

Cats: Cats have this tremendous ability to bring all the hidden mice in your home out into the open, usually by eviscerating them and leaving them on your pillow. They are also an excellent addition to any home office, adding to your professional demeanour by saving all their best hairballs for important conference calls. The sound of a cat purring, meanwhile, may have healing properties - the tone and vibration frequency has been shown to improve bone and muscle thickness.

Fish: Fish promote personal hygiene, mainly because after cleaning out a tank, you smell like, well, fish. Watching fish swim around in their tank or bowl, meanwhile, is a good way to reduce stress. And if you're depressed, fish are a good source of omega-3 fatty acids, which help combat depression. Mind you, they're only a good source once.

Rabbits: Rabbits provide free lawn care, trimming the grass down to golf putting green level. They are also excellent at producing more rabbits, which means you could open your own organic lawn care business with only rabbit transport costs to worry about. Petting a rabbit, meanwhile, and assuming you don't get bitten or kicked, can reduce stress levels and promote general well-being. For you, if not the rabbit.

So the next time you rent a movie, consider inviting your furry or scaly family friends in to watch too. You never know how they might pay you back.

First it was tae bo kick boxing. Then yoga was all the rage. Then came Pilates. After that, fusion programs became trendy - things like yolates and piloga. And you just know that someone, somewhere, is working on a kick boxing version of ashtanga power yoga. ("Peace be with you." *Thwack!*)

As a parent, business person and writer, I find it hard to make time for exercise. Thus, not to be outdone in the trendsetting department, I have come up with my own program: Yoga for Parents. I believe that it will be easy for most parents to incorporate the following routine into their daily schedule:

Sun Too Soon: Begin with this posture, first thing in the morning. Use the left hand to gracefully pull the blankets over your head while the right hand snakes out to push down the snooze button of your alarm.

Drunken Master Walk: After several reps of Sun Too Soon, make your way to the bathroom. Let yourself bounce gently off the hall walls. Breathe deeply with each impact to bring yourself to partial wakefulness.

Power Shower: Place both hands in a choke hold around the shower head and let yourself dangle from it while the water cascades over your body. This will stretch and tone the arm muscles, while loosening the back and shoulder muscles.

Java Warrior: With both hands wrapped around your mug, take long, deep gulps of your morning coffee. Don't forget your breathing.

Hands Cover Ears: Use this posture to approach your child's bedroom, especially if they are awake and exceedingly hungry. It will help you retain some semblance of the peace you were enjoying before Sun Too Soon.

The Octopus: Pin the child with two hands, unbutton jammies with another two hands, remove diaper with two hands, hold nose with one hand. Use remaining hands to prepare new diaper and put it on.

The Squid: Use two hands to feed child. Moving constantly and quickly, use remaining hands to catch flying food, wipe nearby surfaces, and guard your clothing. This is an advanced routine, but with practice, you'll be able to catch all the food bits before they hit ground.

The Nose Bridge: Throughout the day, bring two fingers to the bridge of your nose in a pinching motion. This will relieve stress and bring a momentary sense of peace.

The Cow Pasture: Use exaggerated leg movements to both improve range of motion and proceed with caution through the debris field that is your child's play area. Stepping on a plastic toy disturbs your aura nearly as much as stepping in a cow pie. Stepping on and squishing Woodsy the Bear will also really disturb your child's aura.

Java Warrior Redux: As the day wears on, you may find you need to repeat this movement to maintain peak productivity.

The Toe Deflects: While stirring the pot for dinner, move one leg in a slow arc to carefully redirect your child from the stove/garbage pail/cupboard/other half dozen things he's trying to get into while you're cooking.

One Hand Clapping: Children should be praised for their accomplishments, but this can be difficult when you're cooking/cleaning/trying to run your business. Use this movement to reinforce good behaviour.

The Crane: If you find yourself unable to get away from the phone (talkative neighbour, telemarketer, on hold with utility company), use this posture to keep an eye on your youngster.

The Hummingbird: A quick darting movement may become necessary after The Crane, say, if you spot your child shinnying up the lamp post.

Fireman's Lift: When it's time for bed, sneak up on your child, scoop him up, and put him over your shoulder. It may be necessary to adapt The Octopus to keep him from squirming away or grabbing door jambs en route to his crib.

Downward Facing Dad: At days end, you will find you have no problem adopting this pose for slumbering purposes. Indeed, the only issue will be making sure you are near the bed when the posture takes you.

People tell me things.

Sometimes I think it's because I must have been born with a "you can trust me" aura. Maybe I look empathetic. Whatever the reason, the upshot is that strangers have always felt comfortable talking to me, sharing opinions or intimate details about their lives. Usually within about a minute of meeting me. This means that 1) I never had the "embarrassed" phase as a teenager. I'd heard it all by age nine. 2) Every time I travel it's an exercise in sociological research.

Take the gruff fellow I met at the gas station yesterday. He was filling up his quad cab pickup, and very incensed over the cost. Bent my ear for fifteen minutes, on all things related to gas prices. "Global warming is a crock," he huffed, "it's effing freezing out here!"

That, for me, neatly summed up how scientists and environmentalists have blown the climate change debate.

The message for the past 20 odd years, you see, has been that we need to reduce pollution because it's one of the chief causes of climate change. This message has failed for the following reasons:

The Scientific Method - Scientists fight amongst themselves, in public, over details. This would be fine if we had a scientifically literate public. This problem isn't helped by the fact that this week's science reporter was last week's lifestyles editor. Consider the following scientific discovery headline cycle:

* Researchers suggest guar gum may possibly improve blood circulation if ingested on Sundays
* Studies link guar gum to improved blood circulation
* Better blood with guar?
* Chewing gum: Does it make you live longer?
* Major chewing gum manufacturers investigating guar, debating new product lines
* Cola bottlers announce plans for guar supplements in your favourite fizzy
* Nation gone guar crazy!
* Scientist at another institute says original guar study flawed; author forgot to carry the one
* Guar.com launched
* Original guar study author claims critic's mother wore army boots. Did not forget to carry one
* Guar industry analysts worried
* Guar critic says did too, did too forget to carry the one
* Another new study: Guar linked to heart disease?
* Guar.com folds, 3500 IT employees now seeking work in India
* Year in review - Remember guar?

Vested Interests -- The people concerned about climate change are researchers, volunteers, and environmentalists - you know, people who are happy to have enough spare change to be able to afford a fair-trade coffee sometimes. Critics of climate change research tend to be car makers, oil companies, and manufacturers - you know, people who are happy to have enough spare change to be able to afford a coffee producing country now and then.

Whither the weather? - The average non-scientific Joe on the street has difficulty believing long term predictions about climate, when we still can't reliably predict if it will rain in Philadelphia next Thursday.

So what *should* the message have been? Air quality.

It's personal: We all breathe. It's scientific: We've got instruments that can tell us exactly what we're breathing in. It's immediate and health related: What was that about asthma rates again? It's tangible: Even guys in pickup trucks know when they can see, smell, and practically chew the smog.

Plus it's really, really tough to spin the benefits of smog: "Just look at that brown sky! Doesn't it just make you want to... to... oh, never mind."

One last ponderable: In most of North America, it's now socially unacceptable to light up a cigarette. But it's still okay to fire up a smoke stack.

I suppose I should be careful. Without these kinds of strange contrasts, I wouldn't have any material for a column. And then I'd have to... ARGH!

Work for a living. Forget everything I just said! No, really...

Humans, it is said, are creatures of habit. That's certainly true, but it occurs to me that some of our habits are more useful than others.

For example, consider the act of making tea. We toss a teabag in a cup, boil some water, put them together to steep and then... dump the teabag in the sink. I'm not sure why we do this, except that there must have been a rash of garbage pail fires back in the 1970's caused by hot, soaking wet teabags. Either that or a kitchen cleaner manufacturer has subliminally encouraged this in its advertisements so we buy their 'tea stain removal' products.

We have a number of strange habits when we're on the phone too. For instance, ask anyone (in North America, at least) at the other end of the call a question that involves shuffling through paper or looking something up. Chances are that, while doing so, they will make a strange noise with their mouth that sounds something like "chew-tee chew-chew-chew." I think this comes from a generation of radio and television conditioning: we know there must not be dead air silence.

Or consider gestures. How many times do you or your officemates gesture to explain something while in a phone conversation, even though the other person isn't able to see it? And how many times are you going to laugh at yourself this week now that I've pointed this out? [Columnist's disclaimer: Author not responsible for laughter causing car accidents if you were talking on your cell phone and noticed yourself gesturing. Indeed, author strongly encourages you to stay off the phone while driving and to stay in your own @#$%^&! lane.]

Speaking of driving, another utterly useless practice is turning on your signal light to indicate that you want to parallel park. This is because in most cities, traffic is so bumper-to-bumper that the person behind you is only three inches away from your tailpipe and couldn't back up to give you any room even if he wanted to. And anyway, he probably won't want to, because he's too busy gesturing rudely at you to move on. Or possibly gesturing at the person he's talking to on his cell phone.

Some of our habits have good intentions. I suspect most of you, either at home or at the office, have a place at your desk for pens and pencils. This will either be in the right-hand drawer, or in a battered coffee mug that says "I listen to CHUM FM Radio!" on the side. Time for a quick survey. How many of you:

A) Don't have any actual pens or pencils in your special 'pen and pencil place' because you've absentmindedly left them near the copier or other people have filched them?

B) Have 38 pens that don't work because they have no ink, and 15 pencils that don't work because they haven't been sharpened in five years and you have no idea where you put the sharpener?

C) Don't have a special 'pen and pencil place' because some dork who was gesturing while talking on his cell phone in the car accidentally crashed through your office and mashed your desk?

Of course there are some habits with historical legacies that may have made sense once. Many of us still say "knock on wood" or "touch wood" when we want to prevent a jinx on whatever we just mentioned. The problem with this of course is that very few of the things we own these days are wood and somehow saying "knock on MDF product" or "touch plastic" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

And talking of ringing, there's the phone. I'd sign off on this column now, except that I can't find a working pen.

Just as well you can't see me gesturing rudely about this.

As amazing as the human body is, it has some serious design flaws that I want to discuss with whomever's in charge.

I say this because as I watch my sons grow, it occurs to me that certain systems could have been put together a lot better. (Hey listen, when you're up for your third feeding of the early morning you can't help but think that there's got to be a better way...).

For instance, consider the human digestive system. It is clearly designed for an upright, bipedal creature. Food goes in at the top and is meant to slide down. Unfortunately, while your average baby deer can walk within a couple of hours of birth, human babies can't even sit upright for several weeks. Babies are, however, exceptionally good at swallowing air and trapping it deep in hard to release places like, say, the middle left toe.

As a parent you will try anything to help your cranky baby get rid of gas: you'll put him over your shoulder, across your lap, over your arm, or dangle him by his feet.* Indeed, we've tried putting our wee one in so many different positions that my husband reckons we can now write a book called: The Karma Burpa.

It's also not particularly clever to have a food intake system share the same plumbing as the air intake system. This is because babies have all the patience of a New York cab driver when it comes to eating, and forget to do vital things like, oh, breathe between mouthfuls. This means that contrary to popular belief, a baby's first words are not things like "mama" or "dada" but rather "grlp" and "snrk." See also deeply trapped gas, above.

Not that our first words are particularly useful anyway. We humans are for some reason not born with the ability to communicate with our elders effectively. Any attempt to compile a Newborn to English dictionary might look like this:

I'm hungry: Wah
I need a diaper change: Wah
I'm bored: Wah
I need a hug: Wah
I'm about to spit up on that shirt you just changed into: Wah
I've got air trapped in my middle left toe: WAAAH

It also doesn't help that humans have no idea what all their various bits are for or how to control them. A child doesn't know she has hands or how to use them and in the meantime she'll whap herself in the nose or pull her own hair and wonder why it hurts. The relationship between cause and effect isn't learned for quite some time; indeed, in some people, not until middle age.

Perhaps the most important flaw humans have though, pertains to the need for sleep. Personally, I've never been a big fan of sleep: it takes me forever to fall asleep, I resent the amount of time it takes out of my life, and once asleep and comfy, I hate trying to drag myself out of bed in the morning. But now I have another reason to dislike the need for sleep - there is a fundamental mismatch between a baby's sleep schedule and that of their parents. And all I can say to that is:

Well good thing handle sleep deprivation I can it's a.