This is why we can never have "nice" things.

JUICE'S EARBUD LAW #1: Our dogs will not utterly EFFing destroy earbuds that cost only $5 at Big Lots. Earbuds over $20 in value? U.F.D.

The first act of destruction was for a pair of Bose earbuds my goodly wife purchased for me as a birthday gift three years ago. Magnificent things, they were, and actually fairly tough. But they lasted under a year before Sadie, in her puppy exuberance, jumped on their cord one too many times, severing the line in one channel. I still have them, on the off chance that one day nanotechnology will progress to a point that they can be repaired.

After that, I returned to using the Creative Labs earbuds that came with my old and dearly missed Zen Vision-M mp3 player. They too were leaped upon numerous times by Sadie, causing me to develop a tick comparable to the retarded younger brother of Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary. In the throes of these ticks, I am driven into furious screaming rages whenever my earbuds are violently yanked from my ears by a jumping dog. Again, my neighbors must absolutely love me. Eventually, the plastic casing of the headphone wires began to crack, so I repaired them using dabs of J.B. Weld. That worked well enough, but they were unsightly, so they became my backup pair that lived in the car.

After the untimely and dog-unrelated death of the Creative Zen Vision-M, I got another pair of Creative Labs buds with the purchase of a Creative Zen X-Fi, a player that I cannot recommend less. While the Zen Vision-M was a talented and elegant soul trapped in the body of a fat shlub, the Zen X-Fi was more like a really klutzy pop singer/actress with a substance abuse problem and an eating disorder. Sort of a Phillip Seymour Hoffman vs. Lindsay Lohan kind of thing. The earbuds that came with it were pretty good, though, but they too were met with doggy destruction. While I had finally trained Sadie to stop jumping up on me, we now had Moose who to this day refuses to stop doing that. In fact, after destroying the new Creative Buds, he then helped destroy the old emergency backup buds as well.

I then spent several months buying only $5 earbuds from Big Lots. They were Sentry brand buds, each pair contained within stout metal housing and not at all bad in the sound quality department. One pair lasted me nearly a whole year, with scarcely a doggy jump at all. I even managed to run them through the washing machine on more than one occasion and they still sounded fine. Eventually they too died and I bought another pair. In fact, I took to buying two pairs at a time, to have an emergency backup pair. They were great.

Nearly two months ago, I purchased a set of Tweeked Audio earbuds, which can be seen in remnant form in the accompanying photo. Tweeked is a frequent sponsor of the Nerdist Podcast, a show I wanted to support. And for about a month and a half they were great earbuds. My only beef with them is that the plastic coating is of the textured rubber variety, which catches on cargo pockets, plus the fact that the cord itself is long enough to reach my cargo pockets in the first place. My other beef is not a design flaw, but that the dogs seemed to sense I'd spent a little money on them and they were starting to get jumpy around them again. I found myself guarding my cord when in the presence of the dogs, always ready to turn a hip to the side to catch any enthusiastic leaping.

Last evening, while out playing with the dogs and listening to Jordan, Jesse, Go!, I called Sadie over to me to try and get her to play stick. As she arrived her fluffy tail caught the cord of my earbuds and its curly end deftly wound around the cord. I think she felt the cord on her tail and thought something was trying to get her, for she then tried to dash away. The buds were yanked from my ears as her tail slid up to the buds themselves. Oddly, I didn't scream even once. I just said, "Oh, Sadie, Oh, Sadie, NO Sadie!" as the cord tightened and then broke, leaving me with the lower half of the cord dangling from my pocket. One of the buds flew apart in mid-air and I saw it land. The other bud and the rest of the cable disappeared in Sadie's tail. I later found it ten feet away, where her tail must have flung it.

That's it.

No more.

I'm headed to Big Lots and will stock up on a whole pile of cheap ass Sentry headphones. I may even buy an extra pair to sacrifice to the dogs in advance.