it’s a cud thing

Put down what you are doing – this is an emergency. Martha Stewart needs your help!

Don’t worry, you won’t have to pluck pheasant or obstruct justice or anything. It’s just that Martha has been asked to babysit some midget cows for the summer but the midget cows don’t have names so she wants you to help name her new midget cows. And here’s the most disturbing piece of information of all: not one word of that previous sentence is a lie.

“My friends and neighbors, Judy and Michael Steinhardt, keep quite a menagerie of animals on their property,” Martha writes on her blog. “They asked me recently, if I would be interested in taking in their rather adorable pair of miniature Herefords for the summer. Since they eat grass, which, I happen to have an abundance of, I decided to give ‘cow-sitting’ a try.”

First of all, please do not buy Martha Stewart any commas for Christmas. She clearly has an excess supply and is trying desperately to get rid of them.

Second, let us pause and give thanks for the Internet. Yay Internet! If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be able to keep up with crucial developments of global import, such as cow naming with Martha Stewart and sex having with Charlie Sheen.

Third, it’s the weirdest thing – I suddenly have a craving for a very small hamburger.

Anyhoo, let us leave aside the question of whether it wise to entrust your midget cows to a woman with her own cooking show and instead focus on the task at hand – giving human names to animals too stupid to recognize or ever respond to them in any way.

Unsurprisingly, Martha – who, it should be said, already keeps a number of miniature horses on her property and is perhaps in the process of building the first backyard in the world where Tom Cruise can feel tall – is unwilling to cede total control. Her blog offers a list of suggested names from which we are urged to choose. They are:

• Napoleon and Josephine
• Lily and Carlos
• Maggie and Thatcher
• Sir Loin and Madame Bovine
• Bridgitte and Balthazar
• Hillary and Barack
• Dandy and Clover
• Isabel and Ferdinand
• Jen and Ben

I am confident the former prime minister of Great Britain is touched that tribute is being paid to her long and influential political career in the form of potentially affixing her esteemed name to a pair of domesticated ungulates. Because really, what woman wouldn’t enjoy that?

“By the way,” Martha notes, “Lily and Carlos both work for me at my house in Bedford.” And believe you me: winning the contest and having two midget cows named after them will definitely make up for no paid holidays or health coverage.