There are 10 kinds of dogs. Those who know binary and those who don't.

Okay, remember the first dog toy I bought at Target? The creepy eyeless pig with only one front leg and one hind leg?

Well, I've found that it's not the only totally wacko dog toy they have.

The highlight of my day today was a dog newspaper.

But the absolutely awesome thing about it isn't the fact that it's a newspaper. Or the fact that it's really just a squeaky toy in the shape of a rolled-up newspaper. It also isn't the title "Doggy News," or the slogan "All the news that's fit to chew on." Nor is it the price (two dog bones), the paw-stamp with "edition" written under it, or the headline "Man bites dog" with the corresponding illustration.

It is the fact that the newspaper is written in binary.

Think of it! Dogs can read binary! Who'd have thought it? The headline in plain alphabetical characters was just to throw off computer-illiterate humans. Your dog can spend joyful hours poring through articles that you would need a decoding program to understand. Now you know why your dog gets jealous when you pay too much attention to your computer. It's because he wants the computer all to himself!

I suppose it says a lot about me that I actually went to the trouble of transcribing all those ones and zeroes into my text editor, and then went looking for online binary-to-text translation programs. But, alas, when you paste

01110110 111011011 1101 101110 111 0110 01 01101101 110110 110110 10 011 01101110 011 111011 0110 11010 01101110 11011011 1101 0110110 11011 111011 011011101 10 0110 1101101 01101 11101 0110 1101101 11101 011011101011 1101101 01101 0110 011 0010111 110110 11101 01101 01101 0111011 011011 0110101 011

into an online decoder, you get either an error message, or a line of characters that looks like this:

I guess dogs know something that I don't.