Jim Hightower

I know some of you snooty people look down on us Texans – thinking we're just rubes and riff-raff with no class. But let me just point this out to you: Austin is to be the first city in the nation to have a high-rise luxury condo building featuring a 10th floor dog park with – get this – a scented, self-cleaning doggie toilet!!

HA! Take that you snoots!

This automated pooch poop potty consists of an 18-square-inch, stainless steel plate that is scented with a chemical aroma that attracts dogs needing to do their business. I don't know exactly what that aroma is – but I don't really want to know. When a dog does his thing on the steel plate, the pet owner simply hits a specially-issued electronic fob and – zzzzzzt – a scraper slides across to deposit the poop into a flush system.

The designer of this wondrous new canine pooper scooper thinks it'll be a big selling point for the 55-story condo, where units start at half-a-million bucks and rise toward $4 million. He notes that "Owners of condominiums don't want to walk around with a bag in their hands." Well, I'd think not. So, see, not only do we have the classiest dog park in the whole USA, but it's also attracting a higher class of people to live here. I can't tell you how proud this makes us.

Also, we're terribly grateful to the corporate builders of these condos for changing the name of us Austinites. They've named the building the "Austonian." Apparently, Austinite was a little tacky, and Austonian was deemed to have a sort of Bostonian blue blood cachet to it. "Luxury living," says one of the hucksters for this project, "is all about convenience and vision combined with elegance." Yes, and nothing says elegance like a scented doggie toilet.

So we don't need you out-of-state snooty people looking down on us. We're going to have a place where our own snoots can look down on us.