professor darkheart

surprise!

2011-06-17T13:46:00.001-04:00

One cool thing about having a dog who looks like a drunk assembled him out of the spare parts of other creatures is that he can always surprise you. You can be sitting in the study reading a book and catch a movement out of the corner of your eye and glance over and think "Oh my god what the hell is that?" before realizing that it's just Z, assuming some improbable new shape after having gotten up, turned around 1.5 times, and resettled himself on his bed, which is one of his few household duties.

So just now I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced over and saw this:

I didn't think "Oh my god what the hell is that," exactly, but I did laugh out loud. Not just because of the generally daddy-long-legs-esque disportment of limbs and the fact that his head looked like that of a dog doing something totally different that had been awkwardly photoshopped onto an image of Z's reclining body, but because despite all this he was gazing at me soberly, almost disapprovingly, in a way that suggested invisible wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose over which he was regarding me.

And then I noticed the thing that really surprised me. Look back at the picture for a minute. pretend it's one of those puzzles where you have to find what's wrong with the picture. Did you see it?

WTF? What is that foot connected to? How is its farfetched position in any way consonant with the act of reclining in a bed? And what will happen next?

r.i.p.

2010-12-17T22:32:00.000-05:00

You were the best dog ever, L.

imaginary conversations with dogs

2010-10-20T10:26:00.000-04:00

I don't usually post cute animal stories, since the internet market for that is pretty well saturated already. But after reading the story of Atlanta dog Ellie, whose two lady owners are bemused by her decision to adopt a tiny orphan kitten they found near their home, I could totally imagine the owners sitting Ellie down for a patronizing talk in which they attempted to explain to her that the kitten isn't really hers.

OWNER #1: Ellie, let's talk about your kitten.
ELLIE: You mean my puppy?
OWNER #2: So, Ellie, why do you think she's your puppy?
ELLIE: Don't you remember? You guys found her wandering around outside and took her in to keep her safe and I adopted her.
OWNER #1: Oh, Ellie, that's not how you get a puppy. A puppy comes out of its mother's vagina.
ELLIE: Ew. You're telling me I used to be in one of your vaginas?
OWNER #2: Of course not. Someone found you wandering around outside and took you to a shelter to keep you safe and we adopt–...oh.
ELLIE: Um, could you guys please step back from my puppy? You're making her nervous.

this has been bugging me...

2010-10-15T15:55:00.004-04:00

Yesterday on The View Bill O'Reilly was insisting on his right to talk about all Muslims as if they were terrorists because "Muslims killed us on 9/11!" After he said this Joy and Whoopie walked off the set in protest, which strikes me as a little bit backward, since it's their set. It's sort of like if my landlord wouldn't fix my heat, and instead of beginning a rent strike I protested by quietly moving out and forfeiting my deposit. Anyway, it was all dramatic and got a lot of media coverage, and O'Reilly went on to defend himself that night on his own show by "arguing":

No one I know, no one, wants to insult Muslims. But almost everybody I know is tired of the political correctness surrounding the 9/11 attack. […] Did we say, in World War II, "We were attacked by 'Japanese extremists'"? […] No: we said we were attacked by "Japanese."

I've read some perfectly fair responses to this analogy, mentioning problems with it such as, for instance, that in World War II we were attacked by a military force representing the state of Japan, while the 9/11 hijackers don't, officially or unofficially, represent Islam, or that it doesn't constitute a legitimate excuse for being just plain rude. But they seem to miss the point.

The correct answer is: yes, we did say "we were attacked by 'Japanese,'" as opposed to "members of the Imperial Japanese Navy who were ordered to attack us on behalf of Imperial Japan." In fact, we often referred to them fondly as just "Japs." And then we went off and rounded up everyone we could find who looked "Japanese," even though they were American citizens and therefore "us" by any even minimally not-racist definition, and put them in internment camps. And then we dropped atomic bombs on a couple of densely populated cities because "Japanese" lived there. They are two of the worst things we have ever done.

Which I feel like makes my point, but I'm left with the worry that Bill O'Reilly might actually think it makes his.

how sweet is Z?

2010-09-26T15:56:00.001-04:00

No, really, I'm asking, because I can't tell. He likes to do this obnoxious thing where if L is lying on a bed he wants to lie down on, he stands with his butt up in her face until she grudgingly moves and he can take over the spot.

Yesterday morning I woke up to find L on the floor under the coffee table in the living room in a puddle of her own pee. She'd tried to get up during the night, I guess, and failed, and somehow gotten herself under the coffee table and couldn't get out. She looked like she'd just given up. She didn't even lift her head when I went to her. So I got her outside and then cleaned up the floor and wrestled her into the bathtub and cleaned her up and deposited her on the bed in the office wrapped in a towel. Eventually Z decided that that was the good bed (it's usually the one closest to wherever I am) and did his butt-in-face thing. But L didn't get up, because she couldn't, so eventually he curled up with her.

I don't know if he could tell that she felt awful and he was trying to comfort her, or if he was just settling for as much of the good bed as he could get.

Later on I took L to the vet, where they found that her temperature was 104 and drew some blood and shot her up with antibiotics and pain meds and subcutaneous fluids and scheduled her to come back for X-rays tomorrow. Her legs still don't work but by evening her temperature was down some and she seemed more alert, and she ate some food, either because her appetite was back or because the canned food I'd bought was too good to pass up in any circumstance. She still needs a lot of help getting around but I bought this complicated lifty harness thing that makes her look like she's into leather and it works a lot better than the towel sling. Today after she came in from peeing she went straight for the blanket I'd put on the floor as if she didn't want to attempt getting up onto the real bed across the room. Z eventually settled down next to her even though I was in the office and all the other beds are free and it's just a blanket on the floor.

So is this that profound empathy that everyone talks about animals being capable of in times of need even though most of the time Z is a self-centered jerk who feels that his primary responsibilities are barking out of the window at every dog who has the nerve to walk by our house and bogarting whichever bed he's decided is the good one at any given moment?

Or does he think that because I put it there especially for L, the blanket must be the good bed and he's taking advantage of the fact that now that she can't move, his sister makes a pretty good pillow?

waiting

2010-09-24T21:13:00.001-04:00

L has been my dog for 13 1/2 years. She hasn't moved from the spot you see her in here since last night except for twice when I've slung a towel under her belly and hauled her painfully outside to pee. Her hind half has stopped working. This has happened a couple of times in the last year or so–Dr. H thinks they were mini-strokes–and she began to recover within an hour or two, was mostly fine after a day and totally fine a day after that.

This time, it doesn't seem so mini. It's been 24 hours and no change. She won't eat. She never doesn't eat. She's going to see Dr. H in the morning. So I'm waiting. And as sweet as it is that even Z seems worried enough about it all that he's curled up behind her like a security blanket, I wish he weren't. He never worries.

o hai!

2010-08-20T10:10:00.003-04:00

step 3

2010-08-19T21:09:00.001-04:00

I had no trouble "installing" three out of the four floor mats that I'd received for the new car in the mail yesterday. Their installation instructions could more or less be distilled into: "put them down on the floor." But the driver's side, front posed a far more serious problem.

After taking a moment to appreciate that the diagrams in step 2 are followed by two boxes reading "click to play" and "click to stop," implying that these instructions were written either by a drunk or by someone who by accident of birth or mishap lacks the cognitive ability to distinguish between plain white paper and video animation, notice the words "utility knife," "cut," and "remove" in step 3. They instantly evoked in my breast a fierce sense of protectiveness at the thought of anyone inflicting such violence on my brand new car's innocent floor coverings. Who even uses utility knives? Terrorists, that's who! It took a second to wrap my mind around the notion that I was being asked to do this thing, and another to process the fact that the instruction sheet had the nerve to specify the direction in which I was supposed to cut into the pristine rubber and carpet. This struck me as being something like a mohel casually advising the use of "gentle but firm pressure" while handing the knife to a new mother.

Nonetheless, I wandered out to the car with the closest thing I could find to a utility knife in my house. OK, not that close, but surely superior, no?

But when I got there I found it completely impossible to reconcile the above image with the one below:

It was as if they emerged from separate and wholly orthogonal realities. I unfolded the hunting blade and peered closely at the carpeting, but nothing changed. I had no idea how the one applied to the other. I went back inside.

A trip to CVS, seven bucks, and quite a bit of spine-stiffening self-talk later, I went back out to the car with this:

It still wasn't easy. I didn't take any pictures of the holes I was asked to make; I think there are Geneva Conventions forbidding that kind of thing anyway. But eventually there were two small rectangular holes in the rubber floor mat and two loosened flaps in the carpet behind them, and slipped from the latter under a section of carpet into the former and clipped shut, two anchors to keep the driver's side front mat from sliding up under the brake pedal and causing a high-velocity crash that would render the condition of the floor carpeting, before or after mutilation, irrelevant. It was only that thought that made this possible at all:

I felt better once the holes were covered up. And better again when the things in the holes were themselves covered up by what they anchored, which like the other floor mats and the cargo liner tray and all the rest of this miracle of a car seemed to have been made of some material at once not-yet-invented futuristic and primally magical.

I'm not sure the picture conveys all that, but it doesn't matter. I know it the same way I know that how silly it was of me to marvel only at the steepness of the forty-dollar price the dealer would have charged me to do this two-minute "installation"; by the time it was over, of course, I realized that if they had offered me the forty bucks for the chance to do it, I wouldn't have allowed them within spitting distance.

Anyway, my new car:

Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 4 of Marx's Capital is entitled "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof." I never had any intellectual trouble with the concept of commodity fetishism, but the mystical implications of the term "secret" in association with it remained elusive to me.

No longer.

go

2010-08-19T11:05:00.002-04:00

So one of the things that's been keeping me busy this summer is my beloved 1992 Volvo 240, which for months had been stalling at lights and even while trying to back out of the driveway. I didn't really give it much thought; I have all the time in the world to get out of the driveway and those people behind me at the lights can all evidently really use the opportunity to practice their zen detachment from the affairs of this world. But then it started stalling at times like while downshifting from fifth to fourth gear, which is usually done at speeds not conducive to zen detachment. I put off doing anything until after July 15, when I had a big work deadline, and then suddenly on July 16 as I was leaving for western Mass and then Vermont for H's wedding, I thought it might be a good idea to get it checked out.

D, my mechanic, didn't have a lot of time that day and I used up more than my fair share just asking him to open the hood, which turned out to be stuck and required the disassembly of all kinds of components on the front end before it could be coaxed open. D put the scanner on my car's "computer" (I love that they call that grimy little plastic box a computer) and it told him my air mass meter was shot. D wasn't 100% sure that it was a trustworthy diagnosis but thought it was consistent with the symptoms and looked up the part, which he at first thought would cost $600 but after more investigation realized my car required a super-special air mass meter that runs $900. Both numbers are higher than the book value of the car, but a kind of relief washed over me when I heard the higher figure. This, finally, was the Repair That Didn't Make Sense To Invest In, the death knell I'd known would come someday. D agreed. So of course there was nothing left to do but get in the car, stall it once or twice, and head to Vermont. Everything was fine till the end of the journey, which involved a lot of steep hills, windy roads, and downshifting from fifth to fourth. Every time the car stalled it eventually started again, often while coasting down a hill and usually before it had slowed enough that I had to pull over. But it was a little harrowing.

I made the wedding with five minutes to spare and was happy to leave the car outside the impossibly cute Strafford Town House where the wedding was to take place, and to know that for now I'd only have to get it to Barrett Hall a couple of miles away for the reception. The Town House is just one of many buildings in Strafford and South Strafford that look like churches but aren't, though they must once have been.

When I got there after only a few more stalls, it turned out that Barrett Hall was another one of these ex-churches, as was, somewhat more surprisingly, the Rosa Tyson Gym down the street, which still has its stained-glass windows and steeple. The wedding was lovely, the reunion with college folk a welcome reconnection to my life after the cloistered work schedule of the past few months, and the reception a pleasing blur of old and new friends (not to mention the making of new friends out of old acquaintances).

But then it ended. And when I got in my car to drive to the house where I was camping out, the Volvo. Wouldn't. Start. At all. I had to leave it at the bottom of the hill we'd tried to kickstart it by rolling down, and after confirming that if all else failed, I could get a ride with another guest back to western Mass, enjoyed the rest of the evening. South Strafford is, of course, way too cute for cell phone service, so the call to AAA the next morning involved knocking on the door of a random stranger next door to Barrett Hall who didn't have a phone but was happy to let me use Skype after warning me and J, my ride, not to try to pet her very sweet old deaf dog because in the absence of aural cues, he was prone to defensive bitey reactions. The tow truck eventually showed and brought us to the best garage ever, in an old red barn sitting atop a hill in the middle of a hayfield amidst a graveyard of the kind of once-expensive but now-ridiculously-impractical-to-maintain decades-old European cars people drive in Vermont. Not one but two Volvo 240s rested there. M, the mechanic, after the now-familiar rigamarole with the hood, rediagnosed the problem as a cheaper one by wiggling some wires, which caused the car to stall and start mysteriously, and sent me and J on our way. The next day, after the ride home from J, the ride back up to South Strafford from my eternally helpful mother, and the exchange of a couple hundred bucks, the Volvo was as good as...well, as good as a 20-year-old car that wasn't stalling all the time anymore.

The next part of the story isn't as fun, so I'll sum it up: loss of brakes on Mass Pike while driving back to western MA after the news of my cousin K's death, diagnosis of $1000 brake work needed, the search for a new car in time to get back there for the memorial two weeks later. The search involved several dealerships pitted against each other; an old red Chevy Astro van with no driver's side mirror that pulled terrifyingly hard to the right whenever you braked, and then swerved back to the left unless you released the steering wheel in perfect synch with letting up on the brake; the fear that I was signing my life away by financing a decent used car and then the eureka moment when I realized that if I was signing my life away, I might as well get a new car with a 3-year warranty; a last-minute save by my father, who stopped by his local Honda dealership and found the exact Right Car just as I was about to move on the Not Exactly Right Car my dealership had on offer; and another helpful ride from mom for me and both dogs despite L's unspeakable actions in the back of my parents' SUV the last time she'd been in it. And then paperwork, more paperwork and finally, my very first new car.

I won't ask if she's pretty. I know she's pretty.

P.S. I know I kind of slipped K's death in there and then went on with the "me, me, me" part of the story as if it hadn't happened. But what is there to say? He was my handsome, brave older cousin in whose company as a kid I was often a little afraid, because there was often a real possibility that whatever activity N and I were eagerly trailing after him into might involve getting burned or cut or falling from a high height or, even scarier for me, getting in Trouble. I never understood how K could be so unafraid of Trouble. Listening to the stories about him at the memorial service, I realized that the fearlessness that continued to lead to increasingly real Troubles in his life was also at the core of everything curious and generous and dedicated and, ultimately, beloved about him. It's sad he's gone.

marriage equality in ca revisited

2010-08-04T21:45:00.002-04:00

Well, hooray for federal judge Vaughn Walker for returning the state of marriage law in California to the more constitutionally justifiable form in which it could be found two years ago. I'm tired and a little weepy after reading his opinion, so I'll only say that I consider it a happy coincidence, and not plagiarism or anything, that one of his core arguments echoes the one I made here.

The bottom line is, once you remove institutionalized inequality from the legal definition of marriage, all you have left is two people who want to make a life together. Whichever kind of two they are. And for that reason, all of us who are or want the choice to someday be part of such a twosome have reason to rejoice.

Making cupcakes

2010-07-07T10:44:00.006-04:00

Where's that butter I left out on the counter to soften while I went to the store to get more eggs? Wait a minute, where's Z?

Oh...

Whenever Z eats anything he's not allowed to eat (glass Christmas tree ornaments, wheels of baked brie with apricots, all of the fingers of one cashmere glove: you know), I race to the internet to find out whether or not it's going to kill him, or call the vet if it seems likely enough that the answer is "yes." I have found, for instance, that antifungal cream and packets of silica gel aren't such a big deal, but you know what is? Chewing gum. Half a pack of that shit requires a rushed trip to the vet to have vomiting induced. By putting weird green drops in his eye. Seriously. Kind of cool and also gross, huh? Then the vet tech (and I used to think I wanted to be one of them!) has to poke through the puke to see what comes up.

Once when I was away for a few days and left Z with my parents, they told me on the phone that the following had happened the previous night: Z had stolen an entire packet of dark chocolate Raisinets from a table and wolfed them. This is Z at their house, where he's allowed on the furniture:

You'd think that anyone who had seen him in this position would realize that he can probably reach all the stuff on pretty much any table around, wouldn't you? Anyway, they called the ASPCA's emergency poison line because they know chocolate's bad for dogs and they wanted to find out what to do. What they found out was that the amount of chocolate was probably not enough to do any harm, but all those raisins could easily kill him. They advised feeding him a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide to make him throw up and making sure he'd upchucked most or all of them. My parents tried this with some old peroxide they had in the house, but it didn't work and the poison line person said it was probably no good anymore. This was late, and the drugstores were all closed, my dad found as he drove around to each of them one by one. He finally had to stop by the local (human) hospital emergency room and beg them for a cup of hydrogen peroxide, which apparently they provided fairly grudgingly. Then he had to stop at a gas station to get another box of Raisinets.

Then he drove home, they induced vomiting, and my mother had to a) count all the Raisinets in the new box to figure out how many Raisinets are in a box and b) count all the Raisinets in Z's puke to compare the numbers. It was within three. I think if it hadn't been I never would have heard this story.

Anyway, back to the cupcakes. I was looking desperately around on the internet to find out if there was any even remote possibility that eating an entire pound of butter (with paper wrappers) would kill Z, because I knew that at the very least it would mean explosive and unpredictable diarrhea for a few days and I wanted an excuse to make him puke now and avoid all that. I found pancreatitis. Not likely, but good enough for me.

I keep a fresh supply of hydrogen peroxide in the medicine cabinet. For obvious reasons.

i still exist...

2009-12-12T18:02:00.001-05:00

...barely

the best thing about president obama's speech tonight...

2009-02-25T01:08:00.001-05:00

...was that it occasioned the following image:

apropos of nothing

2008-11-28T21:40:00.001-05:00

Live Video streaming by Ustream

slums r us

2008-11-20T07:57:00.001-05:00

Shorter Michael M. Bates:

The Obamas will bring rats with them from the slums of Chicago that will overrun our precious White House.

what i did this weekend

2008-11-17T21:24:00.003-05:00

See the tiny shirtless man more or less in the middle of the shot waving a mic around? That's Girl Talk. Now picture us three or four people deep from the center of the stage, with around one million bodies behind and beside us pressing in closer. Heavy.

By the way, for Christmas? I would like a hydraulic toilet paper launcher.

Hitler=Kennedy=Obama?

2008-11-09T12:36:00.003-05:00

Ask not what your country can do for you, but if a black man suggests how you can do something for your country, go ahead and call him a Nazi.

note to gay bloggers who want to blame "excess" black turnout in CA for prop 8 passing

2008-11-06T18:44:00.006-05:00

If you were passionately against Proposition 8 and for Barack Obama, and had donated money to both, and if Proposition 8 had been defeated, and John McCain had been elected president, and if the exit polls showed that if gay Republicans had only turned out in their regular anemic numbers instead of en masse, or that if their presidential votes were the same as gay Democrats, Barack Obama would have won, and the next morning a lot of prominent black bloggers started lamenting how "the gay vote" had cost them their best chance to see a black man in office, wouldn't you be kind of pissed off?

And if they wanted to do better in the next election, don't you think those black bloggers would be better off trying to educate the gay Republican community about why they actually shared a common cause than pissing you off by setting their cause against yours, and ignoring the fact that you and many others had fought valiantly in support of both?

Just askin'.

in which sharks devour the McCain campaign whole, in what will come to be regarded as an act of mercy

2008-11-04T06:28:00.000-05:00

God willing.

in which sharks hint darkly at "possible legal and/or extralegal remedies"

2008-11-03T17:51:00.002-05:00

Seems like "it's so not funny that it's kind of funny, if only because if you don't laugh you'll probably chew off your own fingers or kick a puppy" is yesterday's theme over in bizarro Freeper universe. I don't have words for today's.

in which sharks, their earlier request having had no effect, circulate a petition reiterating that request with added emphasis

2008-11-03T17:36:00.002-05:00

I have a dream that, in Barack Obama's new America, Matt Drudge will officially cease to matter.

in which sharks are so tired of being jumped over that they ask the McCain campaign to please find another dangerous aquatic predator to jump

2008-11-03T12:21:00.007-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson is still trying to convince everyone (or perhaps just himself) that the media handed this election to Obama, citing as evidence, among other things, their shocking (shocking!) failure to make liberals' decision not to kick up a fuss about the finance system that was going to propel their nominee to a win the story of the year. (Note to Victor Davis Hanson: a "story" is usually defined as something that a) happens, b) isn't already crystal clear to anyone who cares, and c) doesn't reflect a basic fact of politics that we all understand without the media telling us that–gasp!–people don't mind inequality as much when it works in their favor. This is as much a story as Republicans never having cared about campaign finance reform in the first place until a Democrat was in a position to raise a lot more money than them. Call the Times!)

Anyway, in the course of calling Obama a socialist because he doesn't support lowering taxes on rich people in New York and California because the things they want are really expensive there, or something, Hanson writes:

“Tragedy” is frequent in the Obama vocabulary, but largely confined to two contexts: the tragic history of the United States (e.g., deemed analogous to that of Nazi Germany during World War II), and the tragic unwillingness or inability to use judicial means to correct economic inequality in non-democratic fashion.

One thing I really, really won't miss when this is all over is Republicans' ongoing struggles to decide whether Obama actually is Hitler, or just thinks white people are.

seriously, though

2008-11-03T08:22:00.002-05:00

It's been hard to post much lately, because I'm a little bit of a wreck. I talked to F yesterday, and it was cheering to find out that she, too, had been wound up tight and periodically bursting into tears of thanksgiving or terror or some weird combination of the two. We even had separate stories to tell about weeping in response to memories of Studs Terkel, feeling the same excruciating knife's edge of fear and hope that the politics he stood for were maybe a distant dream and maybe about to be welcomed back into our world tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

games we can believe in

2008-11-03T08:19:00.002-05:00

From today's Times:

It has been months since Mr. Obama has ventured with any regularity to the back of his plane where the journalists sit. (The one time he played the board game “Taboo” on a cross-country flight to Oregon is a distant memory.)

He even plays the right board games.

two things

2008-10-21T21:41:00.002-04:00

a) It's starting to seem like, even if I actually have to start paying for it, I need to get hold of a cable package that includes MSNBC.

b) "Companion"? Isn't that the mid-1800s word for it?