Atomic Nerds

And this will mean jackall to 99% of you. Occupy Nerd Ranch!

Over at Marko’s place where I was a’browsing while bored, Lissa asked how one goes about finding a good breeder for a purebred pup.

Sounds like time for Way More Answer Than You Wanted! Getting any dog from any source has its own risks and pitfalls, and getting a purebred dog certainly has plenty.

Bad starting points:

- Newspaper classifieds. Sometimes good breeders advertise here, but usually it’s the domain of mills and people who bred their own purebred because they were cute/nice or to get some money back out of them. It’s perfectly possible to get a puppy this way that is healthy and delightful, but it’s a riskier option.

- The back of dog magazines. For the same reason as above. Your signal to noise ratio can be better here, as sometimes bigger kennels looking to boost their name will buy an ad space without advertising a particular litter; this is an especially good strategy if your kennel breeds a rare breed that almost certainly cannot be found locally for most people.

- Pet stores. Not only is the pup virtually guaranteed to be a mill dog, pet stores are breeding grounds for epidemic- AND you will probably pay twice as much as you would have from a breeder, at least in most breeds. (Some breeds make breeding them extremely inherently expensive and you should expect to take a hit either way- like, say, French and English bulldogs.)

Bottom line: most ethical breeders don’t breed litters primarily to sell, they breed in order to get a particular hoped-for result from the cross and sell according to what they got. They don’t need to go retail or advertise in the classifieds first because they want to have as much control as possible over where the pups go and into what circumstance, and second because they usually have waiting homes already- or at least contacts who’d know who is looking for a pup of that breed or why.

Good starting points:

- Your veterinarian is always worth asking. Vets have good breeder clients and horrifying breeder clients, and they can sometimes either recommend or warn you off breeders in your area, and may know about upcoming litters, particularly if the breed is a relatively common one.

- A friend or acquaintance who is already in the breed, so to speak. Or someone who breeds/shows/trials a different breed, but is active in the dog world. Breeders and show people usually know everyone local who also trials or shows, or if in their actual breed, everyone in the region.

- Google and your wits. Don’t search for “(breed) puppies for sale”, search the full name of the breed and by state. Established kennels often have websites, as it’s a good way to network and to attract people making a slow, non-impulsive search for a good bet in that breed. Unfortunately, so do millers, which brings us to:

Bad signs

- The puppies are from “champion lines”, or “papered”. Having one champion in the lines only means that, at some point, a dog who titled was genetically involved, no matter how far back; people who actually show or trial take “registered” for given, the same way you would take “is definitely a dog”. Someone who has to make a selling point out of “is definitely a dog” probably doesn’t have something you want.

- They seem to breed lots and lots of litters, and in several different breeds. Sometimes there’s a “he’s in Malamutes, she’s in Rottweilers” situation, or an established kennel also has one other breed, but usually there’s a primary and a secondary and the total number of litters is still relatively low. Places that advertise they always have puppies available are places to run away from, fast.

- They’ll sell you a pup online, sight unseen. They are more interested in your ability to pay than in why you want a pup of that breed and what you expect your dog to be like.

- There’s plenty about how cute and maybe healthy the puppies are, but almost nothing about the breed, about actual health testing and existing health issues in the breed, and about what their rationale and goals for breeding are.

Good signs

- Pedigrees rather than “papers” or “champion lines”. Pedigrees can be very informative for people within the breed that know how to read them; probably not to the average prospective pet home, but this is an attempt to provide real meaningful information about the pups’ lines.

- The site, or breeder, is up front about giving you reasons why you DON’T want this breed. No breed is without its issues, and none is a good fit for every person or family; good breeders care about the eventual fate of their pups and the last thing they want is for them to end up homeless because the owners couldn’t cope with normal issues in the breed.

- They are also up front about discussing health issues known to the breed, at length. Again, while some breeds are healthier than others, NONE is problem free, and this should not be hidden information. Along with this should be the records for health testing, where tests are available; at the very least you want to see OFA (orthopedic) and CERF (retina) certifications on breeding stock. For most large breeds you also want thyroid testing. When testing is not available, the breeder should be willing to chat about that issue.

- Links to national and/or local breed rescue on the main site. Good breeders tend to be a community, and they care about the breed as a whole, not just their own dogs. Active involvement is even better. Speaking of, there should also be some mention of what happens if, for whatever reason, you can no longer keep the dog; if the breeder cannot take the dog in themselves, they should have a backup plan that is not “shelter”. “It’s your dog now, it’s your problem” is something to run away from.

- Discussion of temperament, both in the breed in general and their dogs in particular. If it’s not up, ask. “Wonderful” is not a temperament in and of itself. Even great dogs have more specifics than that.

- A purpose for breeding beyond money and cute. Titles are a good sign; many different kinds of titles are as well, or at least they can be. Years ago I would have said that titles were mandatory, but I’ve since changed my mind; in some breeds especially that have been heavily modified by the ring, it’s no longer possible to win with a dog I would consider healthy or reasonable and some breeders have forgone the ring in favor of trying to bring back a sounder dog. The key here is that the breeder should be able to talk all day about their goals and guidelines for breeding and what results they’re getting.

- If the dog is of some physically extreme type, there should be extra discussion of what that dog’s particular needs are. Flat-faced breeds should come with warnings on how easy it is for them to overheat. Deep-chested breeds should come with warnings about bloat. Long-backed breeds such as Dachshunds should come with warnings about how easy it is for them to injure their backs. Hairless breeds should come with a “needs sunscreen”. Very thin-coated, lean breeds need warnings about how easy it is for them to get chilled. Heavy-eared spaniels need warnings about ear infections.

- Mention of “temperament” or “aptitude” testing. Usually this refers to the Volhard test. You’ll not see it much outside of trialing working and sporting breeds, however. A good breeder should be at least somewhat concerned about matching puppies to families and this is one way to get an outline of their drives and personality.

One last caveat: figure out if the breed you want is divided into working/sporting and show or “bench” lines, or is all show, or virtually all field/work. The odds are that unless you’re looking for a dog to actually do that job, in which case you probably already know how to track down what you want, you want show/pet lines, NOT working. Working/field/stock lines have energy and focus to match their job demands, they want and need work, and they will *not* be terribly reasonable housepets. A Border Collie whose parents both herded stock is not going to be just-a-pet, and unless you have stock that needs herding you almost certainly don’t want one. Most show breeds and lines have been significantly mellowed from their original incarnation.

There are also some breeds that are almost guaranteed to be field/work dogs; Patterdale terriers, Large Munsterlanders, and Boerboels are likely to turn up with their bags packed and ready for the job. Avoid unless that’s what you’re getting the dog for and you really know what you’re doing, especially guardian breeds. Unless roving bands of wolves and barbarians are a bigger problem for you than neighborhood kids, that can be a short path to the ER.

Via Chas, a story of a fellow who planned to live off the land for a year in Scotland. In a battle of man vs. wild, winter won and he is presumed to have died of hypothermia. (His body was not found for weeks so it’s difficult to tell.)

OK, couple of home lessons beyond just “don’t do that, are you retarded” for those of us in the audience who are of an independent, outdoors-loving bent who find survival skills useful and interesting to know.

1. The vast majority of survival courses and training aren’t oriented to “living off the land”, they’re oriented to surviving for timespans of a week or less. All sorts of things become problems over longer time periods, because our bodies cannot handle certain kinds of stressors indefinitely, partiuclarly persistent calorie deficit and especially acute shortage of protein and fat.

2. While it is correct to observe that we evolved as hunter-gatherers and that there are societies of hunter-gatherers all over the world and in all climes and locales, it is important to realize that physically, we evolved in savannahs where hypothermia isn’t really a problem. We are not designed for, say, northern European winters. While the evidence for the capability of humans surviving in Scotland is present in the Scottish, it’s also important to realize two other things.

3. When we arrived in places like Scotland, we did so with all sorts of pre-existing cultural knowledge and technology that rendered us better able to adapt to things like Scottish winters. When we arrived, the landscape was also vastly different; we became primarily agrarian long ago and the land now reflects that reality.

4. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers and later succeeded in environments they were not physically designed for because they are, at core, a group-living species. All of our life history revolves around it. A group of humans can divide and pool labor to get more fuel, more shelter, more water, more care for the sick and injured, and more vigilance and defense from danger in a way a lone human just can’t compensate for. If you plan to survive off the land, you’d better bring some friends if you’re planning to do it all that long. Even Bear Grylls doesn’t really travel alone.

So yesterday Stingray sent me this article by Kay Hymowitz saying it pissed him off and he couldn’t quite figure out what to say about it other than “Article about angry males makes male angry! Woo irony!”, and I wound up with this link from another source this morning.

I’m not going to bother to go through either one line by line. The Hymowitz piece is something I can barely even bring myself to call “sexist”, because between it and everything else I found by the same author, her raging contempt for men and women alike appears to be roughly equal, if shitty. The Ask Men piece is yet another in the genre of short magazine pieces that are written like stereo instructions for women.

It would rile me up and you’d pretty much know everything I was going to say anyway, so instead of trying to do it that way- I tried, but it kept getting away from me- some observations instead.

- I’ve seen an awful lot of men react to the feminist “don’t objectify women/objectifying women is a problem” complaint as though they were being asked to stop being heterosexual. Objectifying != being sexually attracted to; it literally means treating someone like an object rather than a person. If you can’t see people of the opposite sex as people rather than objects of sexual desire, that’s a problem, but the odds are that’s not the case for the generic-you reader. Here’s a hint: if you’re talking about people of (category that doesn’t include you) as though they were all interchangeable and worked by the same “rules”, you’re objectifying them. It’s just we talk about sexual objectification as much as we do because it’s a persistent problem in our culture where we sometimes have conversations about things like that; it beats the hell out of talking about objectification in the context of buying and selling people. A narcissist constantly treats people in their life as objects for gratification or resource, it’s one of the defining traits of narcissism. You can be wildly turned on by someone you see wholly as a person and really enjoy as a person; arguably that is the definition of romantic love. (Or, for that matter, by someone you really HATE for who they are, which is an option, albeit a sad one.)

- If you find yourself persistently dating people you dislike, it could be that you simply have very crappy luck- it happens!- but it’s more likely to be one of three others.

1. You’re dating people whose value systems and desires are totally incompatible with yours. If you want a serious, long-term, sexually exclusive relationship with someone who will treat you like a friend outside of bed that will maybe lead to marriage, stay the hell away from bars and clubs. If you want a sex buddy, trying to find one at church or work is probably not going to work.

2. Your value systems are the same, it’s just that your values are shitty, or at least incompatible with hooking up with people you like and respect. If you treat other people badly or see them primarily as resources to be manipulated, you’re mostly going to end up with people who see you exactly the same way. If you’re a straight man looking for casual sex who thinks that women who have casual sex are sluts and whores, you’re… probably not going to meet a lot of women you like. There’s a flaw in the system there, not the gender as a whole. If you’re a woman who views men who play video games and have interests other than marriage and work as overgrown children you must civilize into respectability, you’re probably not going to find a lot of men you like either.

3. Your social skills are underdeveloped, either because you’re very young and your experience pool is small, or because you’ve been viewing other people as objects and thus you’ve missed most of the subtleties in your search to find ways to make them behave interchangeably and consistently. Figuring out people and how they work takes an anthropologist’s attitude, not an engineer’s. There is nothing inherently wrong with being inexperienced or socially inept, though there is in feeling entitled to other people in various ways or getting pissed and concluding that most of the rest of the population is “broken” somehow.

- There’s a very persistent meme in our culture, which movies and many stories have a terribly unfortunate tendency to reinforce, that love and boy/girlfriends are rewards, not relationships. You get it because you were good enough, or nice enough, or proved your worth- you get it because you deserve it, you earned it.

In the real world it doesn’t work like that. Relationships are relationships, formed and negotiated between two individuals, and metrics like how nice or pretty or successful you are may factor in, in terms of making you appealing to be with or sleep with, but are way far away from being determinants. Sometimes relationships are formed on shitty terms, sometimes on terms easily understandable to outsiders to the relationship, sometimes on terms very difficult to understand, but they are not ever terms that can be laid out like stereo instructions. No one actually “deserves” a relationship, in the sense that no one deserves another person in an entitlement or earned sense; they only do in the generally well-wished sense that they will find happiness and relationships they want.

We usually find this much easier to understand with non-intimate relationships like friendships; most people comprehend that after the age of 12 or so, being the same age and both liking Nintendo is no longer sufficient basis for friendship. It’s a complex dynamic that depends partly on your behavior but also on just enjoying each other on an elemental level that’s difficult to describe or define. Adding sexual and romantic attraction on top of that (which are not always even the same thing) makes everything much more complex and fluid. Yet, more people seem to understand that you cannot argue someone into being friends with you than understand that you can’t argue someone into wanting to start, or remain in, a romantic or sexual relationship- but friendships carry *far* less cultural baggage.

- Lastly, if you cannot tolerate being in a relationship with someone who is not exactly like you and can’t be predicted as always wanting or doing the same things you would, you don’t need to date, you need to masturbate. If you cannot tolerate being in a relationship with an individual person who has unpredictable wants and needs unique to them that they may have trouble articulating at times, you don’t need to date, you need a RealDoll or a sex worker. If you find it enraging that other people have wants and needs and perspectives that yours don’t automatically trump, you need a therapist.

A few days ago NFO posted about Sgt. Reckless, a hero of the Korean war. Watch the video at his place if you want a fuller version of the story, but the short version is that she was a locally purchased filly who ran ammunition and other supplies to and from the artillery line, often through heavy fire.

The video begins with the line “Can you imagine this little, sorrel filly in the middle of all this (warfare scens)”?

Knowing that she was a Mongolian horse, and that she was purchased at a Korean racetrack? Yes, I sure as hell can.

Americans and Europeans are used to thinking of war horses as particularly big and powerful examples of their kind; our idea of mounted warfare is usually of a big, heavy animal meant to carry a soldier with a lot of equally big and heavy gear. Thus, Reckless’s relatively small size is often mentioned in a slightly marveling tone.

In Asia, however, war horses were for light cavalry that could move quickly, didn’t carry much heavier than a javelin or a bow and arrow, and could survive and thrive at very high altitudes and relatively poor fodder. The big European draft horses and warmbloods* would either break their legs, starve, or have a heart attack under some of the conditions that Mongolians and Koreans put their war horses through. Reckless was exceptional, especially in the sheer degree of her nerve and her willingness to protect humans, but she wasn’t that special- Mongolian horses are meant to be tough, extremely strong for their size, fearless, and highly intelligent. Her ancestors were shuttling Genghis Khan and his raiders down the battlefield; the Korean war wasn’t that foreign a setting. In many ways it was what her lines were originally bred for, though by the time the Marines came along looking for a pack pony they were far more often found at the race track. The breed is old and little-changed, though, given that that gene pool is more left to fend for itself than not, and horses that humans did get their hands on that WEREN’T fast, tough, smart, and loyal were food.

The Marines got a war horse rather than a pack pony because by breed, that gene pool has maybe the best claim to the title of horses still living. It was luck and training that they got a great one, but still.

(Half credit for this post should go to Farmgirl, who gave me an education on the breed in an unrelated conversation a few weeks back. Sadly I did not remember the anatomical and conformation portion of that education well enough to justify expanding on it here.)

*note for non-horse people: “warmbloods” refers to a class of midsized horses used for work and war, with the term coming from “cold blood” to describe heavy draft horses and “hot blood” to describe light, fast saddle horses.

It’s Friday. Have a puppy picture.

Seems today federal prosecutors shut down Megaupload, which theoretically has nothing to do with SOPA/PIPA except thematically but certainly is timed “well”.

In response, Anonymous has shut down the Justice Department’s website. Also Universal Music, the MPAA home site, RIAA, Warner Music Group, a music licensing site, the US. Copyright department, and a few other sites I don’t recognize and obviously can’t access right now. You can watch Anonymous’s feed for the operation, as well as the speed for which #opmegaupload is trending.

Whether Anonymous is right or wrong (they’re usually some mix of both), it’s fascinating to watch, particularly the sheer speed with which coordination happens and the number of different languages being used to spread the word. No wonder dictatorships are afraid of Twitter and Facebook.

Somewhere in this 40 second clip is the platonic cartoon ideal of Stingray.

I leave it to the reader to identify it.

I think we’re all agreed it sucks sweaty syphilitic donkey balls (and if you don’t agree, fuck you you’re so wrong you’re in the column of “needs to die in a crotch fire.”). And I think congress would do well to remember that if they make a serious effort to gut the First Amendment, there’s another one right after it specifically in case they do try to make such bullshit stick.

That said, I lol’d pretty damn hard at this.

We now return to your regularly scheduled misanthropy and science.

In light of recent events- not our family, but a compatriots’- might as well blog about what’s been a dominant topic around the household lately. What do you do, and what should you know, if you want to help an obviously lost dog?

- Probably the dog is very stressed and frightened. Some dogs are so people-oriented they feel immediately relieved when they see a person that isn’t being obviously threatening and will come right to them, but most aren’t and won’t. If you want to help more directly than just leaving some food or shelter around, first you have to help the dog see you as friendly. Crouch down and turn your body and gaze away. Talk sweetly and in a slightly high pitch, and calmly- you’re not about to turn terror into happy excitement, but you might get curiosity with calm. Think about what you call the dog- you won’t know its name, but lots of dogs have been called “puppy” by friends and family in their lives and will respond to it as though it were another name. “Sweetie” or “honey” sometimes work as well.

- Keep in mind how you’re coming off if the dog is far off and you must approach. If you were in a strange place and stressed because you didn’t know how to get home or how to get to a safe place, how would you feel about a stranger moving in a purposeful, silent straight line at you? Probably, you would move away, and if you felt cornered you might be getting ready for a fight. Most dogs will react the same way unless they are so friendly any human is a welcome sight.

- Avoid threatening touch. Don’t loom, or open by reaching over the dog’s head and neck. If the dog isn’t tensing or pulling away, light scratching to the chest and neck can be a way to introduce yourself. Try inviting the dog to come with you before you try to pick it up. Dogs aren’t stupid, and don’t have to be taught “come” or “heel” to recognize an invitation; the question is whether coming with you seems like a good idea. Lots of dogs know riding in a car and will hop through an open car door before they will necessarily let a stranger pick them up. Leashing is also easier than picking up, if the dog is wearing a collar, or if you can pass the clip of a leash through its loop and make a makeshift slip lead.

Once you get the dog home, or into your yard, or otherwise a safe setting:

- He may have been lost and running a long time. When touching or examining him or her, be very gentle with legs, joints, and feet. They probably hurt right now.

- Offer plenty of fresh water. You might want to do this outside at first, or in limited amounts in stages, as if the dog is very thirsty they may gulp down a bunch and then throw it back up.

- The same principle applies to food; likely the dog is very hungry, but they may bolt it down and then lose it. If you don’t have any kibble on hand and don’t want to go get some, rice and a protein like ground beef or turkey, or scrambled egg, are nourishing and gentle.

- Give the dog a place. From their perspective, they are still lost, with a stranger, and in a strange place where they don’t know the rules. Putting a towel or blanket on the ground somewhere in the dog’s temporary “area” is fairly easily recognizable by most dogs as meant for them. If you remember the Hyperbole and a Half cartoon about Simple Dog’s adventure being lost, the dog doesn’t have to be brain-damaged to latch onto something like a blanket or towel they were given as their whole new world in a strange place. If you can, try putting the dog in a relatively narrow place/area, like a guest bathroom or mud room. Some dogs will panic in the confined space- but a lot more will go “this is my new den”, and are less likely to soil or damage what’s in their “den”. Do a bit of dogproofing anyway, like putting the toilet paper in a cabinet and unplugging electrical devices.

- Along with access to water and a “theirs” place, bear the weather in mind. In hot weather, shade and relative cool is important, and in cold weather, shelter and relative warmth. Keep the dog’s build and fur in mind when judging how at risk from the elements they might be. Bigger dogs are less vulnerable to cold than smaller dogs; dogs with an undercoat at less vulnerable than those without, and dogs with really short, thin fur are most vulnerable of all. Smaller dogs are less vulnerable to heat than bigger dogs, and short-faced or flat-faced dogs are *much* more vulnerable than dogs with a long nose. The same general rules about coat apply, in reverse.

- If you have your own pets, especially dogs, keep them away from the stranger. They are probably about as thrilled to meet the lost dog as a spouse would be if you unexpectedly brought home a hobo to stay with you indefinitely. The lost dog wants to meet them about as much as anyone invading a home wants to meet the owner, with a shotgun.

- Time to figure out if you have a lost dog, or a stray dog. You’ve probably already checked for collar and tags. You can also check the insides of the ears for a marking tattoo, though these have fallen out of use in favor of microchips. Most vet’s offices and almost all shelters will have scanners that can detect multiple kinds of microchips. Vet’s offices, pet stores, and grocery store bulletin boards are popular places to hang lost pet posters; often shelters get calls from families looking for lost dogs and will file the description. Check Craigslist. Check your local paper’s classifieds. Post “found dog” on Craigslist. If you do a found-dog poster, the same places that are good to hang lost dog posters are good for those. Ask around your neighbors.

Edited to add because I spaced it completely even though I intended to mention: Figure out who your local animal control is obliged to take stray dogs to, and call them. They will definitely have the chip scanner, and they will take the dog’s description, date, and time if the owners call there looking, which if they are at all savvy they likely will. Also call animal control if you cannot catch the dog- it’s their job to, and the dog will be safer with them than loose. If you want to specify that you will take the dog, or at least take responsibility for it, if no one comes looking, you can.

- Once you have essentials taken care of, let the dog do most or all of the approaching that isn’t strictly necessary for things like taking it to the vet for a once-over. Stick to invitations and make approaching likely to end in low-key nice things like small treats and gentle petting.

- Check to see what the dog knows, with simple and common commands like “sit” or “down” or “come” or “shake”. Not only will this tell you a little bit about the dog, the dog may be enormously relieved to find it has some common language with the strangers that have taken it in. Keep it light; you’re not giving an exam, you’re just finding out if you have any common vocabulary.

- If it’s becoming obvious there isn’t a family out there looking for the dog, or at least if there is they can’t be readily contacted by the means already outlined above, time to start thinking about what you’re going to do with the dog next. You can use Petfinder, and talk to local veterinarians, to find out what local rescue groups are around; the local county high-kill shelter is rarely your only option. If the dog is obviously purebred, your best bet is going to be the breed rescue group for that breed; they tend to have very extensive networking. Breed rescue and local breeders are usually mostly the same group of people; if you can’t quickly find a local rescue contact through googling, if you can find a local breeder with a lot of show and trial titles likely they know where to point you. Breed people tend to know everyone else in the breed within a several-state radius.

- Do you want a dog? Before you make that decision, keep firmly in mind that the dog you brought home off the street is not going to be the dog that’s there a week or two weeks from now. You need time to see who the dog is when they’re not exhausted, starving, hurting, and scared out of their minds- and when they think they are in a place or with people that aren’t strange anymore.

- If the dog is staying more than a day or two, you need: leash, collar, food, enzymatic cleaner (even if the dog is housebroken, stress and unfamiliarity may lead to mistakes), at least one broadly appealing chew toy (Kongs are great for this) that you can give to the dog when it picks up something it shouldn’t. These are the base basics you’ll be glad to have on hand. Petsmart and Petco are often open late. Good luck.

Stingray is out of town helping some friends move, so I’ve been knocking about the house this weekend. It’s cold, black, and rainy today, so I feel like making something hot, cheesy, and garlicky to nosh on for the rest of the week and will be getting on that once I’m finished here. (Perhaps it will somewhat make up for the discovery as of three minutes ago that our soft, fluffy, white puppy is now mostly also black and damp. That will be fun to come home to.)

In the spirit of the holiday and its means of coming about, as well as other disparate posts, a useful axiom:

No matter what point you are trying to get across, lesson you are trying to instill, or argument you are trying to make, it is entirely possible that the single biggest and indeed most important thing you will teach your audience, subject, or opponent is that you are an asshole.

While instructive and useful in its own way, it’s probably not the intended lesson, and always worth questioning whether that’s actually the one being learned.

It’s not really been a bad winter here at the Ranch, as winters go. We’ve had our cold spells and warm spells, and while I find it vaguely irritating that our yard is currently a very small scale version of an interglacial period, it’s not so bad now that Tank is old enough to go outside without an escort to mark the exact last point at which he went to the bathroom. I’m a lucky first-worlder and thus my grocery store is stocked with all sorts of out of season things, though being a small grocery store in a small town, both space and supplies are limited, especially when it comes to fresh food. Thus it comes to pass with the democracy of the market that I can much more easily lay my hands on honeydews or cantaloupes than the hard winter squashes I’m so fond of, cherries are easy but kale is a question of if the store felt like stocking it that week, and the same goes for beets. Somewhat more exotic veggies such as celeriac and okra are totally out of the question, and eggplants tend to be obtainable but only if you don’t mind that it looks as though it was used as the ball in a game of rugby before hitting the store shelves.

I was brooding specifically on the subject of sugar pumpkins and how much it irritated me that they were only available for two weeks out of the year: the week of Halloween, and the week of Thanksgiving. This galls me, because they are a base ingredient in two* recipes I REALLY enjoy in cold weather, and tend to be good candidates for serving guests. I was bitching about this to Indy, who tends to be the default listener to my bitching about many things (lucky her), who responded by linking me to this article on heirloom pumpkins. There was a thought; eating pumpkins, only much better than even the pricey ones the hippie mart up on the hill has. Hmmm. She linked me to seed savers, because she’s helpful like that**.

I spent some intensive time contemplating vegetables, most particularly the scrawny and missing sorts on our local produce shelves. Time passed.

The two kinds of pumpkin, cherry tomatoes, eggplant, and beet seed arrived today. The kale, okra, other two kinds of tomato, lemon cucumber, and Thai chiles will probably get here next week. Spring fever being what it is, I have spent my time planning ways to cope with the results of success.

Only one minor problem with that: beyond the hops vines, which are natives- our non-native vines all died- we’ve never successfully grown anything. In fact as a gardener I’m only slightly better than Agent Orange, because I do not care much for messing with plants, only eating them.

Well. I’ve got some time before the soil warms enough to do anything with… and the seeds were only $2.50 a pack. If you don’t hear anything from me for three months, you’ll know why.

*That is not our pumpkin and bacon soup, which doesn’t have potatoes and does have a number of other things, but I don’t feel like writing the thing down and then linking that. Suffice to say pumpkin and bacon soup is more of a genre than a specific recipe.

**Translate “like that” to “you will technically end up with what you wanted, and you will have willing help, but your project will be six times larger than originally planned and have many children”.

Earlier I was laughing at what is a sadly not-uncommon thread of discussion in gamer communities that are not particularly moderated, which is gamer dudes lamenting the apparent injustice that video games sometimes have female characters that aren’t damsels to rescue and even sometimes makes the player play as a female character. The part that got the actual horselaugh out of me as opposed to “roll eyes, move on” was one guy playing “what if” a woman were realistically the character in a first-person shooter; apparently it would be hilarious because she couldn’t lift the rifle without dragging the barrel, load it, or hit anything, and if she shot it anyway she’d break her shoulder or something.

Someone did the usual “we apologize for the abominable trolls in our nerd culture because they’re socially awkward and inexperienced with anyone who is not a fellow unsocialized troll exactly like them” thing, and it occurred to me that the inexperience speaks for itself- not merely with women or anyone that doesn’t have to brush the cheeto dust out of their neckbeard when trying to look swank, but with real-world physical skills in general.

Shooting is still a boys’ club, so are most strength-based fitness sports, and for very obvious reasons they attract a lot of macho, competitive young men. But it occurred to me that I very rarely hear gender based “women can’t shoot/load/rack/shoulder (blah)” from men who have trained, competed, and especially taught a lot, in much the same way that I see very little “women are frail/weak” talk in areas where people are training seriously for strength/speed/power and not guys who’ve done a little at the Globogym to try and pump up.

The reason why isn’t an onset of enlightenment or even growing out of any sexism or misogyny, it’s experience. If you work seriously to train a skill and don’t isolate yourself, you are going to get outperformed, by lots of people who’ve trained more or smarter than you, and even in areas where men as a gender really do have a physical advantage (in shooting they don’t, unless you’re shooting elephants) some of those people are going to be women, and it’s not just going to be when you’re just starting out.

I’m not saying there aren’t significant gender differences in certain physical domains; anatomy and endocrinology make that Just Fact. What I am saying is that the curve of training is a very long one, much longer than people with no experience of it tend to imagine, and the two places it’s most relevant are the ends- completely untrained individuals, and top-level competitors. In a physical contest between a man and a woman who’ve trained roughly as hard and roughly as smart, the man will almost always have the edge*- but there’s so much distance in between the two end points that big experience and development gulfs that easily exceed any theoretical innate advantage exist, and often.

Or, to put it in much shorter terms, if I see someone saying something along those lines, what I actually read is “I live in the basement and never lift anything heavier than a cereal box, and neither do the six or so other people I know.”

Super TL;DR: Yay Dunning-Kruger effect.

*Though not in cases where the most important thing is not actually raw power, but strength to mass ratio. When two athletes are both strong enough to do things like handstand pushups and pullups for reps and speed and are competing on those terms, the male upper body strength advantage may not be enough to give him an edge when he weighs 220 pounds and she weighs 105. This is, I think, why I see such a near-total lack of gurlz-are-weak in Crossfit boxes as compared to bodybuilding circles; a lot of their workouts are structured like that, so guys get smoked in workouts by tiny women often enough to make an impression.

In which I will try to say as little as possible about the actual plot beyond the beginning, because the movie does such a good job retaining mystery and unanswered questions for so long that it’s worth going in unspoiled.

Our grocery store DVD shelves seem to inexplicably specialize in offering a selection based around an overarching theme of movies no one would ever want to buy; they cover all decades, but are composed mostly of movies that went nowhere because they were either self-evidently terrible, no one ever heard of them at any point, or a they were unexpectedly terrible but a terrorized earlier audience saved the rest of us from it. Occasionally there’s the remnant of the latest blockbuster to hit disc, but those always disappear quickly and leave the remaining collection of losers unchallenged once more.

Which is why I was sort of intrigued to be browsing the Failure Bowl waiting for Stingray to finish checking out, and pick one DVD up that actually seemed sort of interesting and like I might theoretically actually want to watch it. I didn’t do anything so rash as to actually buy it on that premise, but when I went home I found it was available on Netflix Instant, and also that the Bloody Disgusting review was pretty positive, and they are not inclined to review every or even most movies positively. The reviewer extolled the virtues of going in cold, so once it was apparent he really liked the movie I took that advice for once and only read the rest after watching it.

Last Exorcism is a pseudo-documentary/hand-taped footage movie in the vein of Blair Witch, Cloverfield, and Paranormal Activity, which I normally don’t care for a lot- I was underwhelmed by Blair Witch, and thought Paranormal Activity was an hour of excruciating boredom followed by twenty effective minutes- but I liked this one almost immediately. The big difference is that Last Exorcism completely eschews the Twenty Minutes With Jerks trope in favor of quickly establishing character and motivation and then moving on to the meat of the movie. Rather than making us spend a long time developing a thorough distaste for characters we then won’t mind see dying, it takes the path of making characters quickly sympathetic and then spending the same amount of time slowly pulling on the suspense ratchet until literally the final minutes of the movie.

What’s interesting about that is the main character shouldn’t actually be sympathetic, but the writing and Patrick Fabian’s acting do an excellent job of making the guy likable anyway. The premise of the movie- and I will spoil nothing you won’t learn in the first fifteen minutes- is that Fabian’s character is a charismatic fundamentalist preacher who was raised by his father from a boy in that role, and that for most of his life aside from revivals he’s made his bones in fake faith healing and exorcisms. Now that he’s an adult and has had time to mature, and have a family that includes a boy with some kind of developmental disorder (implied to be autism), he feels he can’t continue and plans one last “exorcism” that he will film as a documentary revealing exactly what the fraud is, what he’s playing on, and how he does it.

Given that the main character spends most of the movie consciously scamming the distressed family he chose for this last unveiling, we should hate him, but we don’t. The character comes off as having genuine faith, just not in demons, and of genuinely caring for the welfare of the people he ministers to- he’s just become disgusted with the idea of using their fear, pain, and superstition to perpetuate fraud, even if that satisfies them in the short term. He genuinely wants to help the “victim”, and as soon as it becomes apparent she’s in real trouble her well being becomes his top priority, even well past the time it’s also become apparent she is dangerous.

The other characters in the movie are also well done, and the script and acting do a fair bit of playing with them and the audience to bring their perspective, logic, and general validity of their point of view to stretch out the question of what is really going on nearly to the very end without becoming tedious.

The ending seems to be a point of controversy for viewers; either it broke the movie for them or it was just fine. I’m in the latter camp- there’s cries of “punch-out” ending, but if you are paying attention you’ll see it doesn’t come out of nowhere, though it’s still a bit of a hard left turn. I actually rather liked it for the sense of having passed a point of no return without being aware of it, but your mileage may vary. I hear there is a sequel planned. I think this is a really bad idea, as it would do the ending the most justice to stand completely on its own.

Still haven’t decided whether I will rescue a DVD copy from the Failure Bowl, as I’m not sure it would work as well on second viewing, or would actually become better. Regardless, this one is worth watching at least the once.

Via Peter, Roger Ebert gives six reasons why movie revenues are declining.

Some of it is dead-bang on, and some of it is “you kids get off my lawn”, since a lot of what applies to him in his list of reasoning doesn’t necessarily apply to, say, a family with young kids or a teenager. Ebert is a lot more jaded by Hollywood’s lack of originality than a 17-year-old would be, as well as much sicker of bad behavior in theaters.

Still, though, he’s fundamentally right. Stingray and I are yuppies; we have a pretty darn good home theater setup. The sound can rattle the windows, the picture’s pretty big and pretty clear, it has a pause button, no one beyond us cares how well or poorly we behave, the popcorn’s as far away as the stove and it has real butter, there’s a bar, a humidor, and pants are optional. We can play whatever we want, be it an esoteric flick from South Korea or Event Horizon for the 75th time. As options go, this is always a pretty damn tempting one.

If I’m going to leave the house and plunk down cash on the counter for a movie, I want three things:

1. I want my popcorn and soda, and unless the ticket cost ten dollars or less, which it won’t, I want it for less than the price of the ticket. I’d also like there to be not so much of both that it necessitates a bathroom break in the middle of the movie.

2. I want to be more absorbed by what’s on the screen than distracted by what’s going on in the seats. No film can survive an ambience more reminiscent of a Middle Eastern street protest than a theater.

3. I want a damn show. The only downside to watching movies at home is that it’s home, and there’s that pause button, so suspension of disbelief can be difficult and it’s pretty easy to treat the movie as the most diverting thing in the background rather than the experience it was meant to be. This is just fine and even preferential for mediocre movies, but these days it takes a truly excellent movie- and one I’ve never seen before- to make the film my world for two hours, which is how I think movies operate at their best.

Movie theaters are a darkened little world that exists in large part to make this process easy, or at least as easy as it’s going to get. Subdividing theaters into shoebox multiplexes running more and movies of less and less spectacle factor has hurt this process, as has Ebert’s lamented rise of the bright-screened texting idevices, which each create their own competing glowing screen in the dark world. If Avatar can do well despite having minimal decent acting and a plot ranging from thin to actively offensive because it made for great spectacle, the justification for Mr. Popper’s Penguins is much more difficult to find.

So far as I can tell, the audience actually going regularly to theaters consists roughly of the following:

1. People on dates. Movies are the ideal date activity not because of the cost or food, but because it gives you a couple of hours of pressure-free time together, gives you something to talk about afterward, and, should the date be going well (or this being part of an ongoing relationship), gives you a good setting for some light physical contact. People on dates have fairly low standards for what they watch as long as it’s not going to put their partner in a horrible mood, but they do want an inviting theater experience.

2. Teenagers. It’s something you can do with your friends and without your parents that’s (relatively) private, within price reach, where no one’s really going to question where you disappeared to for a couple of hours or what you were doing or who you were doing it with. They tend to have low standards, limited budgets, and to want the theater to be a welcoming… playground.

3. Parents with kids in tow. As long as the kid is old enough or phlegmatic enough to keep quiet, it’s a couple of hours off your feet and not micromanaging with some entertainment. The movie might even be good enough to be entertaining outside its aimed age range. They have low standards for entertainment factor for the movie, some very specific hot buttons about its content, and really, really want the theater not to be too rowdy unless it’s just little-kid rowdy. Without the kid, their standards jump to maximum level for everything, because the connection between their time and their choices for spending money is really, really apparent.

4. Fanboys. These people only turn up for very specific movies, but do so with great enthusiasm and usually multiple times. They are in a party mood and it shows. They usually buy lots of concessions and make the other types of patron want to murder them.

5. People who love movies and the movie experience. Ebert is in this last category. They want an experience worth the ticket and concession price, and they get downright surly when they don’t get it. These people swarm out of homes and into theaters like ants out of a mound when something good hits the screen. Hollywood spends most of its time trying to figure out how to make that happen, and usually resorts to filling a carefully actuarial number of seats by trying instead to appeal to groups 1-4. This is how there are seven Saw movies, an Adam Sandler career, and a blockbuster Twilight franchise.

I actually don’t see the end result of the evolution of these market forces as not necessarily a bad thing. As Ebert points out, a lot of the most popular stuff on Netflix isn’t what Hollywood thinks will sell, it’s more obscure movies, directors, and actors who get eyeballs through word of mouth and word of Netflix’s rating and recommendation systems. I’d LOVE it if the standard for the likelihood of a movie getting made were as much how it would perform on Netflix, Vudu, and other such systems, as how many butts it would put in theater seats. I’d love it even more if it were recognized that the audiences for different kinds of movies are often very distinct and have very distinct desires for what to get for their money, rather than trying to smush together as many groups as possible for any given movie for the greatest possible draw.

I’d be holding my breath waiting for that to happen, but I think instead I’m gonna pull a beer, pop some popcorn, and maybe watch Dead Man instead.

- Billing error caused by new systems implementation.

- Yes, we are getting tired of this.

- Because we’re getting an amazing bandwidth deal and have someone within easy reach to shout at.

- Not sure yet. It’s a possibility. See above.

- Winning by eight votes over the next guy is not being a frontrunner by any stretch of the most fevered imagination.

- Has being the boring rich white guy who has never made or stood by a risky decision, stirs all the exciting feelings of eggshell ecru paint, feels he should get his party’s nomination because it is his turn, and running against someone who does not bugger goats on camera ever worked out all that spectacularly? It didn’t for Al Gore, John Kerry, Bob Dole, John McCain, or Walter Mondale. Hell, it didn’t work out for Mitt Romney in 2008. What’s this year’s slogan going to be? “You could do worse”?

- If after kissing every single baby in the state of Iowa at least twice, hugging every woman over sixty who doesn’t threaten to shoot him, promising to wage culture war on everyone who wouldn’t fit in at a church pancake breakfast, and generally pandering for months on end until his hair threatens to fall off, Rick Santorum still finishes eight points behind Eggshell Ecru, he is not going anywhere in particular outside of Iowa. On the bright side, if Perry remains in the race as he seems to be for now, that will be at least a two-way furball for the Bother Thy Neighbor vote.

- Are the early party primaries and the Miss (State) pageants starting to blend indistinguishably for anyone else? Does anyone else think that, if we have to put up with Iowa, New Hampshire, and North Carolina as kingmakers, we should at least have a talent competition portion of the event? I would like to see Rick Perry play “Turkey in the Straw” on his teeth.

- On paper, I could potentially pull a lever for Huntsman against Obama without being blind drunk. In practice while campaigning, he seems to have the personality of certain small and foul-minded dogs I have known who enjoyed biting retreating ankles. I do not think this will serve him well in the primaries to come, but bigger surprises have happened.

- Dear media at large: Paul coming in a close third is not a sign there is something wrong with Iowa, it is a sign there is something, perhaps many things, wrong in general. The gentlefolk of Iowa were not particularly inclined to the Wookie vote before, but they have to choose from among what they are offered. Mitt Romney does not appear to believe in anything beyond his own suitability, Rick Santorum appears to believe very strongly in enclosing America with a sweaty clinch of right-thinking government, and Paul at least appears to consistently and verifiably believe nine sane things for every tenth barking mad one.

- It has taken me forty minutes of intermittently pecking away at this, looking for heartburn medication, and trying to dig up final results to dimly remember that a)I had forgotten entirely that Newt Gingrich was in there, and b)I have no idea where he finished other than it wasn’t among the frontrunners and it probably wasn’t dead last. I find that telling. Go back to 1995, Newt.

Not only for the handy whisky stones (thanks, Alan!), but more importantly for the glass.

And if you recognize it without looking at the file name or alt tag, you’re possibly an even bigger nerd than me.

What? It’s a new year. There’s plenty of time for depressing content about the shitsack we’re passing off as an election later.

I spent the morning- far too much of it- tangled in sweaty, conflicted dreams about rallying for Ron Paul in Iowa.

I am now completely ready to trade a year of my life to skip right on ahead to 2013.