ohmidog!

Seamus finally got a song.

DEVO’s Jerry Casale has released, “Don’t Roof Rack Me, Bro,” a song that mocks Mitt Romney for strapping his Irish setter, in a crate, to the roof of his car on a family vacation trip.

The  new single, subtitled “Seamus Unleashed,” was written by Casale and will be released in conjunction with a game app titled The Crate Escape: Seamus Unleashed.

The song and the game will launch August 26, which is both National Dog Day and the day before the Republican National Convention.

In releasing the single, DEVO joined forces with Dogs Against Romney, an online advocacy group with more than 70,000 members on Facebook, to help call attention to Mitt Romney’s “crate-gate” scandal.

Have a listen:

“I can’t overstate how excited we are to have DEVO’s Gerald Casale as a partner with us in making sure every voter in America knows Mitt Romney strapped his dog, Seamus, to the roof of his car for a 12-hour trip to Canada,” said Scott Crider, founder of Dogs Against Romney. “The new DEVO song Gerald created with his bandmates is awesome, and I believe it will be the soundtrack for Romney’s defeat in November.”

DEVO recorded the song as an anthem for pet lovers and as a message to others to never forget what happened to Seamus in 1983, when the Romneys drove from Boston to Ontario with the dog crated on the roof of their station wagon.

The single will be available at all digital music retailers; the game is initially being launched as an app on iTunes.

“We are delighted to have a new DEVO song as part of our game’s offering,” said Andy Berryman, chief marketing officer for Censault, LLC, the game’s developer. “It’s exciting to break new ground in the mobile/social gaming space – first as a game that is both fun to play and promotes a positive social message, and now as a new distribution medium for popular music.”

More info on the game can be found at www.facebook.com/CrateEscapeGame.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Casale, who has raised funds for Obama in Akron through a DEVO performance, said of Romney’s nearly 30-year-old mistake, ”It’s just a deal-breaker about the man … What you want in a leader is a guy with some humanity at his core … I think any animal lover that hears the story will learn so much about the character flaw of Romney.”

DEVO may include the song in its act when it tours America this fall with Blondie, he said.

While the song may or may not become the 1970′s-80′s-era band’s first hit in a long, long time, it has already gotten off to a better start than my suggestion for a Seamus song, a reworking of the Pink Floyd tune of the same name.

When a police dispatcher in Michigan got a call from the frantic owner of a choking dog, she offered a quick lesson in the Heimlich maneuver, and it worked.

A 10-pound dachshund had chewed on a present and swallowed either a piece of the gift or its wrapping, blocking her airway, according to the The Oakland Press.

The woman called 911 at 9:46 a.m on Christmas morning:

“I am so sorry to call you but I’ve got a dog that’s choking on a piece of Christmas present she opened,” the woman said between sobs. “She’s choking to death.”

Royal Oak police dispatcher Stacey Sheldon told the caller to open the dog’s mouth to see if the obstruction was visible.

When it wasn’t, she told the woman to perform the Heimlich maneuver in the manner generally recommended for small children.

Have a listen:

dispatcher 12.25.11 by Bruce MacLeod

The dispatcher told the woman to hold the dog in her arms, find the place where the dog’s ribs meet, and push in and up with force. The caller relayed the directions to a man.

Near the end of the recording, the caller can be heard saying, “She just coughed it up. I’m so happy.”

“I’m happy too,” Sheldon said. “Take her to the vet to make sure she didn’t hurt anything in her throat. Merry Christmas.”

“The dispatcher did a great job of walking her through the correct procedure of where to apply pressure to dislodge the object,” Police Chief Corrigan O’Donohue said. “I just learned about it from a thank-you note from the family. I listened to the call and the dispatcher did such a great job. She was compassionate but firm and patient.”

(Photo: Oakland Press)

Sixty years ago, my sister used to sit on the front steps at 804 Avalon Road in Winston-Salem, N.C., and wait for the mailman, in hopes he would be carrying a letter from my father in Korea.

To pass the time, she recalls, she would converse with the pansies planted around the stairs of the apartment.

They looked like they had faces, she explained, so she talked to them. I can only assume, knowing my sister, that they spoke back.

She told me this story for the first time (or perhaps for the first time that I was listening) just this past weekend, when she and her husband came from Wisconsin for a visit with my mother.

In addition to spending some time with my mother, sister Kathryn was looking forward to seeing where I’ve been living for the past few months — the same apartment our parents lived in when we were born.

In case you missed the explanation of how that came to pass, here’s the short version: Ace and I, after nearly a year of traveling across the country, were dwelling temporarily in the cellar of a mansion. He got back problems. We were looking for a place without lots of stairs when, on an outing with my mom, I asked her to show me where she lived when I was born. It had a for rent sign in the window. I, 57 years after my family moved out,  rented it. (If you need a longer version, it’s here.)

After hearing my sister’s talking-to-pansies story — odd as I found it — I decided to surprise her when she and her husband came over for an official homecoming dinner on Saturday.

I bought a six pack of purple and white pansies, and two little pots, did my gardening, placed them on the front steps and stepped back  to admire my work. “How does that look?” I said to myself (or was it to the pansies?)

My sister spotted them as soon as she pulled up, and later she would step outside to bond with them.

She remembered far more than I do about the little apartment. The family moved out of it when I was one, and she was five.

Like me, the old turn-the-crank doorbell sounded familiar to her. But she remembered sitting in the dining room, and what furniture was where and, of course, the talking pansies.

During our front stoop photo shoot, Ace — apparently feeling left out — tried to squeeze in between Kathryn and her husband John.

In the photo to the left, I’m guessing Ace is telling her that flowers can’t talk.

The stoop has changed a bit since 1950, which is when the black and white photo at the top of this post was taken. Originally all concrete, it’s partly brick now. But other than that, College Village, as the community is called — it was built in anticipation of Wake Forest University coming to town — remains much the same as it was then.

My sister was an only child for about four years. Nine months after my father returned from the Korean War, I was born. Five years later, my brother came along. (Though he never lived here, he’ll be visiting the ancestral homeplace next month.)

For homecoming dinner, I served John and Kathryn homemade beef stew, biscuits and pumpkin pie. We opened a bottle of wine, but barely made a dent in it — even counting what I poured into the stew.

She talked a bit about what she remembered of the family home, but I think that for her, as with me, what returning here triggers is more a swirl of hard-to-pin-down emotions — the kind that don’t lend themselves to words.

She seemed to spend a lot of time quietly reflecting, which has always been my favorite way for her to reflect.

I’d have to acknowledge — and maybe this is true of many brothers and sisters — that, since childhood, I have sometimes tuned her out, or only halfway listened, as if she were a college professor lecturing far too long on a subject in which I had no interest.

It makes me wonder how much I might have missed, especially when you throw in all others I may have, on occasion, paid less than full attention to — grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, wives and people who talk too much.

After four days in town, Kathryn and John moved on to visit other relatives, leaving me to sit on the front stoop of the ancestral homeplace and ponder all that, and to make a vow to listen better and listen always.

Listen to the dog, listen to the relatives, listen to the house.

Listen, even, to the pansies.