After I wrote that blog about Spirit Mountain, and the two yapping, howling dogs and the shamanic overtones, I remembered one of my favourite old jokes, and one of my favourite old T-shirts.

A young Native American boy (you can’t say “Indian” any more, can you?) said to the tribe’s old medicine man: “How do you give our people their names?”

The medicine man said, “When the baby is presented to me, I pray to the Great Spirit, and then I look around, and the first thing I see gives me the child’s name. Like I look into the sky, and see that one child’s name is Soaring Eagle, or I look across the plains and know that another child’s name must be Running Elk. But why do you ask, Two Dogs Fucking?”

In an old heritage building in Adelaide, where I used to visit because Perpetual Trustees once had its offices there, the basement was inexplicably occupied by a bar and micro-brewery which made and served what it claimed to be Australia’s first alcoholic lemonade, bearing the name “Two Dogs”.  Which I of course found highly amusing.

I convinced them to sell me one of their staff T-shirts with a picture of two bulldogs on the front, and a legend on the back reading “Why do you ask?”

That was my second favourite T-shirt ever, after the one that said “Try to never split an infinitive”.

Once a nerd ….