Zooney has impeccable taste, so this year I let her choose our favorite top ten albums. As she and I have not yet developed a spoken language we each understand, I devised a system that allowed her to have complete freedom of choice and total control. First, we began by taking every album we acquired this year and placed them on a spreadsheet, with the release dates included and country of origin. For a small service fee of $89.95 USD, I sent it off to a music database company who reviewed and eliminated reissues, European-only titles and any albums that had funky metadata that indicated they really came out in 2012.
Once we had a clean list to work from, I found a company in Odessa Texas that not only sold bulk quantities of ping pong balls, but also were willing to stamp each ball with the artist and album name before shipping them back to us. There is a picture here showing an example of what they do. They worked very quickly and shipped Fedex at no extra charge. I will use them again next year.
Upon arrival, I removed all the furniture from our living room, and emptied the contents of the large cardboard box on the floor. Zooney watched me with great anticipation. Once I yelled “Go”, she went to work using her paws and nose to push the albums (or rather the balls with the albums’ titles) she didn’t like out the front door. After three hours and twenty-two minutes we were left with her favorite ten albums of 2013. Taking a break of Meow Mix and water, she recharged and went to work one more time to select the final order.
