Is this a great country or what? We may not have enough to keep the White House open for tours, and we’re busy miniaturizing our armed forces. But we still generate enough surplus wealth to pay grownups to wait around for dogs to yawn.

OK, we’ve parsed what dog yawning means. I wonder if these same cutting-edge scientists will tell us next what my neighbor’s male border collie was doing to the postman’s leg last week. 

If these doggie voyeurs are correct, our late and much-missed German short-haired pointer — one Easy — must have loved my wife and me a lot, because she was always yawning (Easy, not my wife). That is when she wasn’t taking a nap, chasing squirrels, or staking out a position in the exact center of the kitchen when food was being prepared.

If dogs understood how some of us humans were abusing our time, they would laugh as well as yawn.