It made me blink yesterday when I opened an email concerning dogs who need homes yesterday. It was forwarded to a neighborhood list by one of the finest citizens of Echo Park, and the subject line said: "Pedigree Commercial...5 dogs left."

The message read:

Pedigree is shooting a commercial on Monday, and the shoot is at North Central Shelter. Its an exciting cause that is close to all of our hearts. Pedigree wants to make sure that the dogs that are in the commercial end up in loving homes, instead of being forgotten and euthanized. The rescue community has banded together to help these dogs, which is terrific. ... Pedigree is offering a one-year supply of food for each dog taken, plus will cover spay/neuter and all vaccinations.

Please send this email to every one you know and contact Stacy Torres at Chiat Day if you can take any of these sweet dogs.

It's great that the dog food maker is shooting its commercial at a shelter. And I suppose it would be unpleasant PR if the dog on your pet food can had been put to death shortly after receiving his/her props for a good performance.

Would anyone be better off if the agency recruited "professional" working dogs instead of the ones housed at the kill-shelters? Doubtful.

File this one under: Dilemma-- sell your soul or keep it at a discount?

PS: the Pedigree commercial dogs are about as cute as they come.

The new novel is a constantly firing engine of tweets. Yesterday CalArts' Black Clock announced a Rick Moody fiction event on on Black Clock's Channel (@BlackClockmag):

The first story written expressly for Twitter by a major literary author, Rick Moody's "Some Contemporary Characters" will be tweeted over the course of three days on Black Clock's Twitter channel, @BlackClockmag, beginning Monday, November 30th at 10 am through Wednesday December 2nd. Tweets will appear every ten minutes from 10am until 6:30pm. Utilizing social media, followers of the story will re-tweet it in real-time, a community event that breaks down the conventional barrier between reader and publisher.

Moody's story is broken into 153 bursts of 140 characters or less, each clearly labored over with a precision and lyricism that reveals the surprising literary potential of the tweet. "It really was like writing Haiku," says Moody, who went head-to-head with the character limitation of Twitter and used it as a source of inspiration. "Moody has taken something that could be seen as gimmicky - 'Twitter-fiction' - and created something transcendent," said Electric Literature's Editor, Scott Lindenbaum.

A new way of writing that requires a new way of reading. Not to be confused with thumb novels of Japan, which my 15-year-old cousin Abigail Burman informs me is "a thing."

Disclaimer/boast: Chicken Corner's own Jenny Burman has a short novel excerpt appearing in Black Clock's Issue 11.

In honor of Saturday, Nov. 7's, frugality forum at the Edendale Library, Chicken Corner will be conserving its words (in this entry only!) ... because hereabouts we don't buy the notion that talk is cheap.

Some Saturdays the Edendale branch has classical music.

Here's info, emailed by Niels Bartels, librarian:

We'll be having a frugality forum at the Edendale Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library this weekend. It will be an open discussion on doing more with less. Bring your money-stretching tips, your challenges, and your questions to ask.

Saturday, November 7th, 1-3 p.m.; 2011 W. Sunset Blvd., L.A. 90026; (213) 207-3000; there's parking behind the library.

It promises to be rich.