Here we have JP Brown's Serious LEGO - CubeSolver, in which he created a Lego Mindstorms robot to solve the Rubik's Cube. [ thanks Eric!]
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Having enjoyed The Perpetual Orgy, an appreciation of Madame Bovary by Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, I bought his latest book The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto from the remainder bin of the local Book Warehouse the other day. After I finished Anna Karenina yesterday I was restlessly picking up and putting down books (art criticism by John Ashbery, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Jack Maggs by Peter Carey) in a search of a good read, and the Llosa was the one I began, for whatever reason.

An interesting tidbit from Llosa here:

This is my third favorite New Yorker cartoon. My second favorite isn't online, and though I used to have it floating around somewhere, it's gone. It had a picture of Jimi Hendrix sitting across the desk from a typical bureaucrat, apparently at a job interview. The caption said, "Are you experienced?" And my favorite was a recent one, involving a meeting of forks, which I will try to find and scan.
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I just noticed the past two entries had similar sentence structure, and so does this one. I often write in an archaic and plodding style, due to years of studying formal verse.
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We're getting some Venetian masks for Halloween, and seeing Nosferatu at the Orpheum. Dos will be going as a deer, with some pipe cleaner antlers.
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I just dumped two weeks worth of food scraps into the worm composter, and when I dug around I came up with forkfuls of red wiggler worms. They're thriving, even in the cold.
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Last night I dreamt I had someone else's baby. It was a total accident; I knew both of the parents and that they were expecting, but somehow the baby got inside of me and I gave birth to it. I spent the rest of the dream going to work, meetings, dinners and things, and worrying about the baby that I left at home, whose diaper wasn't being changed, and who I felt wasn't getting enough stimulation or attention to facilitate normal cognitive development. I would dash home between events, play with it quickly, change its diaper, feed it, and then run off again. Throughout the dream I felt horrible, and guilty. Maybe this is what it feels like to be a working dad?

But then I woke up with George Michael's Freedom in my head, and can't for the life of me get it out, even having tried the two Judith-recommended antidote-songs, Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash and Billie Jean by Michael Jackson.
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Animal, Vegetable, Mineral On the way to the airport today after a delightful weekend, Judith taught us a game she used to play with her brothers in the car in which each player has to sing a few bars of a song which includes a certain word or subject. For "Money" we had Brother can you spare a dime; Pennies from Heaven; You never give me your money; Money; Can't buy me love; How does it feel? We let Stewart foist If I were a rich man on us, though if we'd had an impartial adjudicator, I'm sure it wouldn't've flown.

Growing up, we used to play 20 Questions a lot, and sometimes Name that Tune, and I can remember counting the mile markers in paralyzing states of boredom on the way to Lola's house in Maryland. ....356 ....357 ....358 ....359 .... Nothing's worse than being a kid in a car rolling down the interstate who suffers from car sickness, can't read, never sleeps, who's gauged the parental mood and determined there's no possibility of an ice cream stop, and has already been scolded for pinching her sister.
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From the New York Times, the winners of the Chrysler Design Awards and other notable designers participate in a round table about the role for design following September 11th, "With the World Redesigned, What Role for Designers?"
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Miscellany

• Last night watching Pollock, a movie about the painter Jackson Pollock, there was a role played by Bud Cort, best known as Harold from Harold and Maude (And Brewster in Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud, a really really odd film). Wondered how baby-faced Cort got to looking so bad; turns out he was in a bad car accident in 1979.
• Anna Karenina is a trove of treasures. Just in the past few pages I've gotten episodes about women and death, about mediocrity in art, about marriage, about motherhood, about how to get ahead in politics... Tolstoy is horizon wide in his purview.
• Who knew such a small dog could let loose such deadly flatulence? Paint is peeling on the hoods of cars across the street following his last blast. P.U. No more cabbage for you, pup.
• Writing, writing, writing. Cracking the knuckles and writing, by hand, at my desk by the window (where the painters of the adjacent building have been entertaining me with their work-to-coffee-break ratio, currently 1:3)

Judith points out that my favorite contrarian art critic Dave Hickey has received a MacArthur Grant. This is a good thing. Can they please now put his books back into print please? She points out that the guy who created the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, David Wilson, was also a winner in the genius sweepstakes.
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Ooky Patchouli. I was very skeptical about the concert at the Orpheum last night. It sounded like a kind of pickup band: three guys who had defected from bands that have nothing to do with one another except their filing sequence in record stores -- Phish, The Police, Primus -- became this thing called Oysterhead. Eh?, I said. Maybe. I like the Police, like, old ska-style Police.

I'd gone through a short Deadhead phase when I was 14 years old, but that brief exposure successfully vaccinated me from hour-long-jam bands, though I can still sing, like, "St. Stephen" word for word. In college I'd had a boyfriend who was way too into this then obscure band called Phish that was a little too noodly for me, which in itself wouldn't have been too bad but for the noodly dancing, and, like, the Phishead predilection for tie-dye. I don't do tie-dye though I think dreads on white people can be cute (though dreads in snoods are a definite no-no). Since what Charlie mostly liked to do was go to Phish shows, if I wanted to spend time with him, guess what I had to do? Miss Fugazi shows. I even interviewed Phish once with Charlie for the Vassar school paper (memorable quote: "Phish is more fun than sex in guacamole!"). Anyhow, that relationship went on for two years and I ruined way too many shoes while watching people jumping up and down on miniature trampolines. Pfffft.

So heading down towards Granville Street last night, my expectations were low, but Oysterhead was less noodly and more hard rock than I would have expected. Stewart Copeland rocks, man! Rocks! He'd be doing this incredibly complex drumming sequence, and he's still be throwing in these fancy little fills. And that Primus dude, Les Claypool, doing the banjo bass and the Bootsy Collins wiggle walk, whooppee! He had some totally peculiar songs telling peculiar stories, which were reportedly very Primus-like, and made me think, well, Primus might be slightly OK after all. There were only a few episodes of noodling, easily overlooked, and while the smell of patchouli was strong, it couldn't hold out against the gusts of smoke from burning Native American vegetation.
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Paul is my favorite Beatle.
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When I lived in New York, and I had only a minute to dash through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there were two things that I would always go see: one was this medieval mechanical drinking game fashioned of silver in a room near all the suits of armor (though they later moved them), and the second was the unbelievably beautiful yellow jasper fragment of the head of a queen, a forgotten queen, an unknown queen, a lost Egyptian queen. I would stare at it, and things would happen inside me, indescribable when-seeing-beauty things.
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Like Tinka, I also had some awkward silences today, with a woman who is also named Tinka, who is in her 60s or so, and is my neighbor. I always seem to encounter her when I'm in a particularly garrulous mood, and I say, "HEY! HELLO! TINKA! HOW ARE YOU? HAVE YOU MET DOS PESOS YET? HERE HE IS! ISN'T HE CUTE?" And when she doesn't say anything, "HOW WAS YOUR VACATION? DID YOU HAVE A NICE TIME?" And there's an awkward silence and she smiles feebly and looks anxiously at the elevator. "GLAD THE SUN CAME OUT," I say and gesticulate towards the windows, and when the elevator arrives she boards hurriedly, gives a lackluster little wave and pushes the 'CLOSE DOOR' button. This has happened several times now.

I'm beginning to think she thinks I'm some kind of maniac. Maybe there is some kind of hint, that if I were to take it, would put an end to these uncomfortable interactions. I mean, I've checked my deodorant. I can't figure it out. How can you resist Dos Pesos?! I *got* Dos Pesos to render myself universally irresistible by proxy!
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Anthony asks, "When do you sleep?" and the answer is lately between 4 am and noon. Today I went to bed around 5 and got up at 10:30. I'm not one of those people who sleeps four hours a night; if I sleep less than six hours a night, I usually have to catch up the next day. I've always thought it would be great to sleep about 4 hours a night until I read about a man who eliminated one minute of sleep each night over the course of a year. When he was down to less than four hours a night he suddenly died, with no explanation other than his lack of sleep.

And I'm all for napping. Here is a list of some famous nappers.
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As Nabokov says, every genius begets a new generation of insomniacs. Here I am, 3/4 of the way through Anna Karenina unable to sleep. I got the Maude translation on Meg's recommendation, and it's a remarkable improvement over the last translation I had in the Signet edition. It also does not have a photograph of Christopher Reeve and Jacqueline Bisset on the cover, an improvement that cannot be overestimated. These movie tie-in books get so dated so fast: Now a feature-length motion picture starring Tatum O'Neil!
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Last night in my dream I was being quizzed on the marine life surrounding Malafalera, a place that apparently does not exist. I like the name.
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Puppy Love Department As I was falling asleep this morning with a small doggie curled up beside me, I wondered how dogs ended up being so nice. Niceness must be a breedable characteristic. Now, imagine if humans had been bred for niceness by some God-breeder-eugenicist. How pleasant everyone would be, smiling and waving all the time, baking cookies, kissing babies. Traffic signals would become a thing of the past because everyone would let everyone else go first. Eventually, cars would have to go. People would prefer to walk down the street holding hands. We'd spend all our time making collages for our best friends and enjoying Tacky Nature: rainbows, waterfalls, sunsets.

Dos Pesos's personality reminds me of what my nephew Nathaniel was like when he was two: eager to please, happy, affectionate, helpful, remorseful when he's had an accident, and trying really hard to understand what you're saying. Before he became wayward and contrary during the so-called Terrible Twos. Dogs are like kids that have never gone through the Terrible Twos. I am daft for this dog. I keep having John Vance moments with him.
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Eric put some of his gorgeous books online. I miss him.
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SNOOTs have claws. Mark Halpern has written a scathing critique of both the Harper's article by David Foster Wallace about the "usage wars" on the occasion of the publication of Bryan Garner's book A Dictionary of Modern American Usage and an article by Simon Winchester about how despicable a thing Roget's Thesaurus is. (I also disagreed with it.). In this entertaining article, Halpern makes no bones about how "fulsome" he thinks Wallace's writing is or how dunderheaded Winchester's article is. Unlike Halpern, I quite enjoyed the arch/vernacular style of Wallace's piece, found his arguments compelling, and went out and bought Garner's book. It's sitting on the table next to me right now. I was happy to see this article. This is the kind of tomato-throwing I was agitating for earlier, though with respect to book reviews. Magazine article reviews will do for now. [via Arts & Letters]
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I am not a bush league insomniac. Oh no. I am a major league insomniac.
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Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa was an elegant and aloof recluse whose hobby was smoking and who died a virgin. "Stop living and read" was his motto, and that's just what he did. After he died, a chest full of papers divulged no less than 72 personae who kept him company in his solitude. There's a new translation of his Selected Prose available, though the author of this article recommends starting with The Book of Disquiet. From what I understand, this latter book is similar to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which I read as a teenager, and which impressed me deeply. [via Arts & Letters]
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Interesting site I found when searching for a play to see with Judith when she comes to visit: Two for the Show. Look at the sidebar; it's a kind of a theatre-opera-symphony matchmaking service.
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Through Ockham's Razor I am introduced to the work of the Dutch psychologist J. H. van den Berg, the father of "metabletics" -- the study of historical change and its effect on the individual. What's interesting in the quotations on this page is his eccentric phenomenological conception of time:

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The Fantod Deck: a tarot deck by Edward Gorey in fabulously morbid Gorey style. Today I got "The Waltzing Mouse", which means I will suffer from any and all of the following: May, vertigo, loss of jewelry, a betise, morbid cravings, disorders of the large intestine, corruption, equivocal symptoms, a hazardous project, brawls, suicide, involuntary seclusion, shriveling. Now where can I buy one? ... Wot? Not buyable? In America?! [via boingboing]
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I know what you're saying: Finally, finally. And this is just a quick redesign, meant to be temporary. But we all know how that goes. The last one was meant to be temporary too.

I haven't done the photos pages, or the 2nd level books pages, and the sidebar CSS need tweaking, and I haven't tested it in all the browsers I wanted to, but, well, I'll get to it sooner or later. I have to get to sleep now. I'm tired.

I'm sad, though, that my web site is no longer HTML 2.0 compliant and readable on Lynx. Progress. *sigh*. It's just geek snobbiness, really, I don't know any Lynx users anymore. And thank you Mitsu for sending the screen grabs. Next time I'll try PHP. (Can't we just get rid of Netscape 4.7 altogether? Sheesh.)
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September Eleven, a font family of question marks to commemorate the people who died in the terrorist attack. I feel very huh? about this. My first response to the attack was not to express myself in bezier curves, and certainly not in question marks, and when you place them adjacent to one another, you end up with a "display" font -- a "non-serious" silly font -- and certainly nothing coherent or commemorative or beautiful or useful or desirable. I'd rather give a donation for a worthy cause than give money to receive something schlocky in return. Schlock is disrespectful. Emily says, "I guess it's hard to express complicated and subtle emotions in a font." Exactly. You need to put words in the font for that to happen.
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How can you not like The Watts Towers? Something that draws comparisons to the Sphinx, Gaudí's Sagrada Familia and Disneyland can't be all that bad. I have never seen it myself, and it's possible that I never will, but I derive great satisfaction from the fact that it exists. I applaud any lifelong, or at least yearslong, artistic endeavor. It's open again to the public after six years. Built by an itinerant Italian immigrant, Simon Rodia, who spoke broken English and left no explanation, it's a real curio.

I was recently having a conversation with Miles about how his (and my) dreams are always architectural in nature -- that when we dream, we enter rooms, go through buildings, and always have a sense of the height of the ceilings, the narrowness of the passageways. Sometimes dreams consist entirely of walking through such spaces. Please write to me at caterina at caterina dot net if you have the same kind of dreams! I'm thinking of writing a little piece about these dreams and these vernacular architectural efforts. I need to get my copy of The Poetics of Space back from Serena. I'll write her now.
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Internet Archive Wayback Machine is unfortunately really slow right now. It looks like they didn't save a lot of the images, which, when you had nothing *but* images on your old portfolio site, is kind of lame. [Here's one page from my circa 1996 site. I think the, uh, gaussian blur filter was relatively kewl in those days.] I can't find my original 1994 (!) site, though I'm looking. I'm not sure they were archiving back then...Agh. Too slow. I'll check it later.
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I finally got a chance to read the article that Jonathan Franzen, our current writer du jour, wrote for Harper's in 1996, which has been mentioned by almost all of the reviewers of The Corrections as the article that both launched and stymied that book. The piece, misnamed Perchance To Dream: In The Age Of Images, A Reason To Write Novels is an overlong and garbled piece of writing, which presents, but doesn't fully pursue, many disparate ideas. Franzen bemoans the increasingly marginalized role the novel plays in contemporary culture, its near irrelevance in face of (the usual culprits) TV, Hollywood, Wall Street, the Internet and other manufactories of the lowbrow, commercial, commodified and banal. He prizes his own depression as clairvoyance into the ills of society and sees pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions as a species of cowardice in facing what he terms the "Ache" of living -- an existential state of alertness to one's own insignificance and unfulfilled desires, traditionally assuaged by religion and art. He talks about the impossibility of writing a timely and yet lasting novel, crabs about the ways in which academia stultifies the avid reader, touches on many vaguely related things.

The thing that I -- and he -- found most interesting in this Harper's piece is the work of a linguistic anthropologist named Shirley Brice Heath who studied the reading habits and histories of avid readers. She said that people who grow into avid readers in adulthood either had been "heavily modeled" by a parent who read serious books and encouraged the child to do the same, or the reader was a "social isolate" -- a child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. She said that such children live "in a world you can't share with the people around you -- because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community." Thus insatiable readers read to reconnect with their community. Heath goes on to explain that this second type of reader is more likely to become a writer later in life since both reading and writing become essential for her to feel connected.

Franzen took this as a description of himself, and as a reason to write. He goes on to half-dis the academy, book clubs, MFA programs, the frequency of certain types of stories in the small literary journals, etc. The romance of the writer-recluse, as exemplified by Cormac McCarthy, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and others, appeals to him, though he makes an effort to dispel the notion that he would take the same route (especially relevant vis-a-vis the paroxysm of Franzen articles and interviews we've seen in the past couple of months). There are several good essays contained herein. I wish Franzen (or Harper's) had taken the time to cull them, and write them.
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Dos Pesos is still pretty timid in crowds. Yesterday Muriel and I walked him all around Beach Ave and Denman. Of course, since he's so small and cute, everyone wanted to pet him, and whenever someone reached toward him, he trembled a magnitude of 6.5 on the Richter scale . Nonetheless, he's getting more courageous every day (last week it was 7.3). If you doubt the ferocity of Chihuahuas, this little video should convince you. [turn off your audio first].
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Last night, as I was watching a lot of people in leotards writhe on the floor to the sounds of weird music, I realized that I've spent an inordinate amount of time watching people in leotards writhe on the floor to the sounds of weird music.

How does this happen?

Rennie said, "Are you having fun? Is this fun? I'm not having fun. This is no fun at all." Actually, the whole thing made me laugh. In the future, I'll undoubtedly find myself at Yet Another Performance where a lot of people in leotards are writhing on the floor to the sounds of weird music, and I will undoubtedly say to myself, here we go again and I will undoubtedly laugh, because, when you get right down to it, it's downright hilarious to be witness again and again to earnest people in leotards writhing on the floor to the sounds of weird music, with a lot of earnest people in the audience earnestly trying to find some "art" there. People try so hard to say something and fail so ridiculously.

It is because of things like this that life is grand.
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New York Times: PEARLS

On the subject of pearls, ancient Romans held them to be the frozen tears of oysters or the gods. Greeks attributed pearls to lightning strikes at sea. Then there was the dew theory, espoused in the first century A.D. by the learned but often fanciful Roman Pliny the Elder, who wrote:

"When the genial season of the year exercises its influence on the animal, it is said that, yawning, as it were, it opens its shell, and so receives a kind of dew, by means of which it becomes impregnated; and that at length it gives birth, after many struggles, to the burden of its shell, in the shape of pearls, which vary according to the quality of the dew."

I was just saying maybe I should write more book reviews, having enjoyed writing up my little blurbs this evening, when I happened across this piece by Walter Kirn on his former career as a book reviewer for New York magazine: Remember When Books Mattered? How right he is about the British literary lions treating each other to fabulous public drubbings while the public cheers them on, throws tomatoes, riots! Here? Pap and twaddle, and a little hands-in-the-pockets shuffling-of-the-shoes while looking down at the ground. Come on now, authors, gird up your loins and throw some spears! America, read some books! Care! Please!
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Corey: Mountain-strong, lamb-gentle and heart as big as the outdoors. Happy birthday! I love you.
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My latest enthusiasm: The Domain of Images, by James Elkins, an art book about things not traditionally included in the categorization of 'art' ...i.e. visual images beyond painting, photography and printmaking, including images from calligraphy, musical notation, maps, carpets, geometric forms, microscopic images, etc. Derek left it here last night when he was here for dinner. I have to finish this Stanley Elkin book first, though, now that I've decided to refrain from starting a new book before I've finished the last one, a regime it seems harder to adhere to than daily flossing.
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What does bin Laden want? He's already told us, in his many interviews, statements and press conferences. Here's a summary of what he's demanded, on Time.com: Osama's Endgame.
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Leafing through the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list, I noticed a couple things. A lot of these terrorists are very small -- 5'2"-5'5". There are many Egyptians on this list, many Saudis, a few Kenyans, a Tanzanian (These last three tied to the Khobar tower bombings in Saudi Arabia and the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania) and a couple Lebanese. There is one American. They're all men. (No, not all terrorists are men. I was interested to discover the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled in the El Al article mentioned below.)
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I had to post this. Have a look at the guy behind Osama's ear. It's a pro-bin Laden poster photographed in Bangladesh, and, I assume, it's completely in earnest. And that's Bert from Bert is Evil, though the image that was used to make the poster is no longer on that site, you can find it here. And here's the second sighting. And the third. Sesame Street is apparently not aired in Bangladesh, so we can only assume either they didn't know who Bert was, or some graphic designer in Bangladesh has a perverse sense of humor. Follow the Metafilter thread as we get to the bottom of this surreality.
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Had an excellent day of writing yesterday; I haven't written so much since moving here. Page after handwritten page. It was marvellous. Dinner with Dinka and Derek and Henry and Rachel. Thanksgiving Dinner, postponed one day. Dug out the Maya Deren book to show Derek (talking about Divine Horsemen over dinner, and the various tales of Deren's demise) and it says "Gotham Book Mart, 1992" on the inside from when I used to write the place I bought a book and the year. Gotham has moved somewhere else now, and I don't know where. I spent a lot of time on 47th Street when I was a kid; my mother came down to haggle with the Hasidic jewelry merchants there, and she'd deposit me and my father in Gotham so we wouldn't get bored. It's terrible to hear secondhand about New York replacing itself piece by piece since I last lived there, it's startling to see how fast it changes when it's a year or more between visits, but then again we're replacing ourselves cell by cell all the time. When I see Corey again, she'll still be Corey, won't she? Heraclitus, solve this one for me.
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Faboo new weblog alert: [sub]culture : hipsters flipsters & finger-poppin' daddies
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Sadly, the flopsicality of Dos Pesos's ears is no more. After only a week of puppiness, they now stand up in batlike alertitude. Heather says that Chieka's ears flopped when she was a puppy and she was sick. Adios floppy ears! This comes at a bad time, because now we have stiff competition for the webloggers Cute Puppy Competition.
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Today is Canadian Thanksgiving, apparently older than the American Thanksgiving, it nonetheless seems to be much less of a big deal. I mean, I searched in vain for a special tinned & jellied cranberry sauce display, and there were only 3 turkeys available at the Safeway.

Three Thanksgivings ago I was at a friend's house in San Francisco (who'd struggled mightily to accommodate two vegans, a dairy allergy, a wheat allergy (mine) and an allergy to nuts among her seven guests) One of the guests (vegan) went on for the entire meal about what a despicable holiday Thanksgiving was, a celebration of imperialism, the subordination of the laborers who'd planted, irrigated, and harvested the vegetables and fed and slaughtered the turkey, etc., an exhortation to consume, an advocacy of carnivorousness, boy did the sanctimonious bore go on, I nearly fricasseed her. And then there was this Christmas dinner a few years ago where there were two Mormons, two pagans and two atheists. It sounds like a joke, right? "A Mormon, a Pagan and an Atheist sat down to Christmas dinner." The first argument erupted over the proper way to say grace. And, as you might imagine, it was -- or felt like -- hours between grace and dessert.

It's also Columbus Day today. Far be it from me to wish anyone a 'Happy Columbus Day'. Not as harmless a holiday as it might seem.
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Reload, reload, reload. Sometimes I wish I had a television set.

On Friday night Marni and Stewart and I went to see "Jung: In the land of the Mujaheddin", an Italian documentary following the efforts of an Italian organization to set up a hospital to treat the war wounded in Northern Afghanistan. The documentary was made to chronicle the unending battle between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, before the latest events; interestingly, the soldiers of the Northern Alliance said that the Taliban was being funded by "America and Pakistan" and "England". There were horrible scenes of widowed women -- not permitted to have either an education or a job -- begging in the street in the chadors the Taliban requires them to wear. Allah's name is invoked by both the Alliance and Taliban armies to justify the savagery. The most horrifying part of it, besides the very graphic surgery scenes where you actually see people as their limbs are being amputated, were the images of the children who'd lost arms and legs by stepping on the land mines which litter the countryside.

War, my friends, if you haven't heard already, is hell. And now we are in it.
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From The New York Review of Books: The Lure of Syracuse. Though some believed modernization would render tyranny obsolete, they were wrong. Worse, the philotyrannical intellectual was born. Like Gail's friend says, if we could just get rid of all beliefs, we could get rid of all the isms too: fascism, communism, totalitarianism, existentialism, papism, postmodernism...
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Pictures of Dos Pesos? Yes, we have pictures of Dos Pesos. [thanks sam]

Dos Pesos is Chubby and Well. I just returned from visiting Dos Pesos, and boy is he ready to come home. Fat from all the glucose and food, bored with the tedium of illness, surrounded by the cries and howls of dogs in distress, tethered to an IV machine, shaved bald and missing his favorite warm lap, he cried Get me the hell out of this minihell when I entered the room. His parvo test was negative, thank the gods of the dogs. The doctor said he can probably come home this evening. I'm so happy!

Thanks for all the warm wishes. Dos Pesos licks you, and when Dos Pesos licks you, you stay licked.
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A Short Story of Puppy Love straight out of Central Casting. When I was sitting and waiting to see Dos Pesos at the animal hospital there was a hilarious scene going on in the waiting room. A smiling beefy guy wearing a hockey t-shirt and a backwards baseball cap was paying his bill while behind his back his fat drooling bulldog was lunging at a petite poodle. The poodle's owner, a superskinny neurotic-looking woman in a plum suit -- what we used to call a "social x-ray" -- was tugging her poodle away from the slobbering brute. "Stay away from that dog" she snapped at the poodle, with extreme disapproval. I smiled at her and she said, loud enough for the beefy guy to overhear "That dog is a little beast." The guy didn't overhear. The poodle wagged its tail at the bulldog who continued lurching as far as his leash would let him. When the beefy guy finished up and turned towards the door, the bulldog plunged at the poodle, locked his forelegs around her and started humping. The beefy guy chuckled and pulled the dog away. The woman crimped her face into a real lemon of a facial expression, and brought the poodle up into her lap. "Harrumph!" she said. The poodle continued to wag its tail at the departing, backwards-looking bulldog.
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We went to visit Dos Pesos at the hospital this evening, and he seemed to be getting better. He was more alert, though still very droopy. They'd shaved the back of his head and his leg and the side where they had put in the IV. He was trembling mightily when we came in, which he does when he's afraid, and I held him on my lap for a half of an hour or so, and the trembling stopped and he dozed. But then when he was back in the little steel box, he started shaking again and collapsed weakly where he stood. He wailed when we left and looked at us with those enormous damp eyes; it was just wrenching.

The good news is that he didn't vomit or have diarrhea, both of which are indications of parvovirus. The doctor said his glucose and protein levels had been very low in his morning blood test, so the IV was definitely doing him some good. I hope he ate his dinner tonight and didn't vomit. Then maybe he can come home tomorrow.
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Rest in peace John Lilly. Depending on whom you asked he was variously a genius and a crackpot, best known for developing the isolation tank and his efforts to communicate with dolphins. The movie Altered States was about him and his experiences. He was also heavily into ketamine and other experimental (and more established) drugs and was a countercultural figure of renown, like Ram Dass and Timothy Leary. I know his son, also named John, who lives in Zacatecas in Mexico. John Sr. died on September 30th at the age of 86.
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This morning Dos Pesos was all limp, and didn't follow me anywhere. He drooped like he'd lost all his bones and was clearly very sick. I started crying. We took him to the animal hospital immediately, and think he might have Parvovirus. He's on an IV, and is in quarantine. He's taking antibiotics. He also has a surface wound that might be causing him to be sick. It started swelling yesterday. We're waiting to hear back on the tests. I hope it's not parvovirus.
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Woe betide Jason who had to listen to several hours of me puppy-gushing today, going for walks with Dos Pesos, at lunch at Stepho's, back at the apartment. Judith and Emily keep asking where the pictures are, but I lost the cable for my digital camera and Stewart dropped his and broke it and my 35mm is on loan to Scott. We called Sam to see if we could borrow her digital camera, but it was on loan to Marni who was using it to take pictures of her cats Snooker and Blackball, so we called Marni and she came over and we took pictures of Dos Pesos and had those kinds of conversations that pet owners have, people with new babies, you know, boring conversations.

But how can I avoid it? Even though I know other people's sentimentality is embarrassing, I'm quickly becoming Other People. Today I threatened to Photoshop wings onto Dos Pesos and put it online, I was feeling so squishy about him. I feel bad now for deriding pet sites.
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El Al shows pilots art of the fightback. Here's some real life James Bond action. I'm impressed:

"CAPTAIN Uri Bar-Lev was about to level out his passenger jet at 31,000ft when he was alerted by his crew that he had hijackers on board, armed with guns and grenades. One was holding a stewardess hostage, a pistol to her head, as the other demanded entry to the cockpit. Bar-Lev, a former Israeli air force pilot, reacted instinctively. After passing a coded message to his crew to secure themselves, he pushed the nose of his El Al 707 down into a steep, twisting dive - a manoeuvre he knew would cause weightlessness. Seconds later, he forced the nose back up, ensuring that anyone who was not strapped down would be slammed into the walls of the plane. By the time he had completed the "negative g-dive", one hijacker lay dead after being shot by El Al security guards. The other, Leila Khaled, a notorious PLO terrorist, lay unconscious, pinned down by two guards.

Today we're doing some serious dog training with Dos Pesos. He spends most of his time either sitting on my lap or following me around. He's like a little shadow. But he whines whenever I'm out of the room or keeping him in the kitchen. So I keep saying "SHUSH!" whenever he does that, and he gets so frightened when I'm mad. It's scary to have this much power over a little animal. I feel like B.F. Skinner. But it's either this or he'll infuriate the neighbors whenever I go out, and end up in the pound.
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The Vancouver Film Festival is in full swing, and yesterday we saw Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner, a beautiful historical film written, produced, acted and directed by an Inuit team. It is the retelling of an ancient Inuit myth that has been passed from generation to generation in its oral form, but never otherwise told, written, or filmed. It is a story about about an evil spirit that visits the village of Igloolik, two families torn apart by jealousy, murder and strife, and the man Atanarjuat who struggles to put things right again.

The film won the Camera d'Or for Best First Feature at the 2001 Cannes film Festival, as well as Best Canadian Feature at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival and Best New Director at the 2001 Edinburgh Film Festival. If you have a chance to see it, take it. It's lovely.
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Blacks have earned the right to vote Mark sent this to me (thanks!) but I don't completely understand the logic here. He says,

The Voting Rights Act of 1982 involved amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by making it more restrictive for states to "upgrade" the right to vote. One important revised area was the declaratory judgment proceedings.    The revisions under the declaratory judgment proceedings make it almost impossible for a state to be granted any type of requested standardized measures (such as certifications) or requested standardized tools (such as exams) for the "betterment" of a state or territory's electoral process. Unfortunately, these provisions are valid for only 25 years.    Why must there be an expiration date? My guess is due to the various changes undergoing American society, new and improved legislation in the future may be needed to maintain equal and unrestrained access to voting everywhere in America. Thus, these expired amendments probably serve the purpose of allowing future legislators (25 years from now) an opportunity to preserve the voting privileges to all future Americans. There is no expiration date for blacks to vote. We were secured the right to vote as with many other rights through the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors since the Civil War.

It's clear the "declaratory judgement" extended the law further out of the reach of the state's meddling, but I still don't understand the reason for the "expiration" -- I'm not satisfied with Swinney's explanation here that "these expired amendments probably serve the purpose of allowing future legislators (25 years from now) an opportunity to preserve the voting privileges to all future Americans" since it could just as easily provide them with an opportunity to deprive future Americans of their voting privileges.

Are there any lawyers out there who know anything about this? UPDATE: Frank writes that he'd heard this presented as an urban legend, and looked it up. He found this document on snopes2.com that clears it up.

Even if the Voting Rights Act is not extended again in 2007, this will not mean that the right to vote will "be taken away" from Blacks -- it will simply mean that the federal government will no longer require Southern states to seek federal approval before changing their voting laws. We should see this as a positive -- that we as a society have finally (if slowly and painfully) progressed to the point we no longer need to take special measures to ensure that every citizen has a fair opportunity to participate in a democratic voting process.