Free beer with every kitten!

Just a few short months ago, my wife and our seven-year-old daughter were out shopping.

I got a call from my daughter (my wife put her up to it because she's sneaky) asking if she could have a kitten. I'm very bad about telling my wife and daughter "no," so I agreed. Provided, of course, I got to name the kitten anything I wanted.

So, The Cheat (named for the character on the Homestar Runner site) came to live with us. Now, The Cheat is a girl cat (I know the real The Cheat is male -- don't hassle me), so I told my wife to go get the thing spade. I told her that at least once a week until it was obvious the cat was knocked up, in fact.

The Cheat had kittens the other day. The problem with kittens, of course, involves getting rid of them. That usually requires standing in the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart or Kroger for a day and trying to con people into taking one (we wound up with The Cheat as the result of one of those conning sessions, by the way).

I'm not wasting a Saturday standing in a parking lot with a bunch of kittens. A friend of mine had a brilliant idea -- give away a case of beer with every free kitten.

Ah, that would work perfectly. Since there are obvious problems that come with giving beer away in public (particularly since I live in a dry county), an ad could be run in the classifieds and the offers would roll in. This is Arkansas, after all, and who around here doesn't love free beer?

It would be a cheap way to get rid of the kittens, too. The classified ad would be free. I wouldn't give away premium beer for free, so four cases of Milwaukee's Best Light would only cost about $48. By the way, everyone with any sense of national pride should join me in refusing to buy anything made by those rascals at Anheuser-Busch. Selling out to the Belgians. Good grief. So, my kitten beer would be cheap, indeed, but at least Anheuser-Busch wouldn't be the ones making it.

We'd have to take some precautions, however, as there's always the chance that the kind of person who would take a kitten in hopes of getting some free beer might be a no-goodnik. Prefacing the classified ad with "free to good home," then, would at least show that we tried to find a suitable owner. Good enough.

My wife has objected to the brilliant marketing plan. Typical.