Nothing but an extremely mild maybe-a-fever, the lethargy, and lack of appetite. Vet figures it’s just a dose of the minor icks that every dog that eats as many do-it-yourself meals as she does is susceptible to. Antibiotics, if she’s not better in a day or two back to the vet…
Kang turned up today more subdued than I’ve ever seen her, not wanting breakfast, and generally acting like a sick pup even if there are no alarming symptoms like vomiting or loose stools. Earliest we can get her in to the vet was tomorrow noon, so she has not yet been. I have been rather preoccupied, as when the most “on” dog in the house goes so suddenly and dramatically off, it rings my alarm bells louder than if she’d been doing something dramatic and messy. It’s also well against the odds, but tularemia is always at the back of my mind with the number of rabbits she kills and often eats, and in dogs the infection can present itself with no symptoms other than… listlessness, low fever, and loss of appetite. Which is, of course, the standard way ALL mammals respond to ANY infection of any kind, but still. She puked up most of a fresh rabbit carcass only two days ago. (And then proceeded to get in a loud disagreement with Kodos over ownership of the recyled materials. She was feeling fine then.)
It’s amazing how much more of my time and attention she can absorb when she’s doing nothing but sleeping than when she’s being her normal intrusive, busy self.
More lightweight, but a lot of people are waiting for these, so. You can still see in some angles where the skin from the freshest work is not completely and totally healed back to normal, but it was deemed good enough for photography. Click for big if you want to see more detail.
In answer to likeliest questions,
1. Of course it did, especially in the areas around my knee and achilles’ tendon. The power of small talk as a pain control measure is remarkable, though.
2. I’ve completely lost track, but it was a lot.
3. See above.
4. For reasons that I could lay out, but would probably still only make sense to me. The shortest and most broadly applicable answer is probably “because it’s pretty and makes me happy to have”.
5. Yes, and if anyone has any links to photos or books containing artwork depicting the painter’s best guess at paleolithic fauna, like the artwork of Maruicio Anton, I’d be grateful. Artist needs reference material.
…Or, I exceed all past records for lightweight blogging.
In the fridge, there is a bottle of tomato juice. The tomato juice is for bloody marys, of which I am quite fond, especially in the summer.
For some reason or another- I suspect to cope with having nothing on hand but flavorless American mega-mart lagers- it is a popular thing in parts of the West to make red beer, i.e. beer mixed with a little to a lot of tomato juice. Stingray deemed this practice inherently misguided and possibly Satanic, but I was bored enough to make the experiment.
Result: Pretty darn tasty, or at least it was with the Sam Adams lager I dug out of the back of the fridge. I wouldn’t do this to a beer I’d bought to enjoy for its own self, but as a remedy to a flavorless or objectionably tasting beer, it’s pretty nice.
An interesting Livescience article on a series of studies about Oxytocin. I’d be more tempted to rip harder on the usual sophomoric shoving of the research into polarizing frames that make for a better narrative, but the researchers themselves come across quite well.
The framing of the article is that oxytocin, which is often referred to as the “love” hormone because it’s associated with things like warm parent-child interactions and equally warm interactions between sexual partners, isn’t as fuzzy and peaceful and happy as it looks due its also being associated with increased defensive aggression on behalf of perceived groupmates.
Now, my reaction and the reaction of many of those who think similarly to me is “No duh, love isn’t just about warm fuzzy feelings, it’s about protecting your loved ones”. The article refers to this other effect of oxytocin as the hormone’s “dark side”, and of course I wouldn’t- it doesn’t seem to me there’s anything “dark” about being willing to defend your friends and loved ones. That is, of course, the framing. However, I get the impression the researchers made the series of experiments specifically to address this rather common public perception of oxytocin; it’s unfortuantely too common to think of it as a warm fuzzy “love” thing that we’d all be better off if we had more of, and demonstrating that it’s really more accurately a “bonding” hormone and that bonds have other implications can only be a good thing.
What REALLY interests me, however, is that the subjects of the defensive-aggression study were exclusively male- a measure that I agree with, inasmuch that if the hormone does have different effects on different sexes, their data could have been thoroughly muddied. One thing that a certain breed of feminist and/or liberal likes to bring up is that women produce much more oxytocin than men do, and follow that up with an implication that men would therefore be better off if they had more of it. Women have more “love” hormone, therefore women are gentler and more peaceful.
DOES it have a different effect in females? I really want to see a follow up. On the one hand it might seem intuitive that only men have the “group defensive aggression” response… but on the other hand, I can’t help but think of the way we use the phrase “mother bear”.
So this post is late, and short, because instead of banging around trying to blog something, we went out to catch Iron Man 2.
During the credits while we were waiting for the inevitable stinger, a section for consultants regarding the sequence of action scenes at the end of the movie came up, and out of two or three names, one of them was Genndy Tartakovsky. Which is a memorable sort of name, and it rang a bell in the way the others didn’t.
Why… why…
Oh yeah.
It explained a lot, really. And from now on, so far as I’m concerned, Iron Man is powered by Chemical X.
….We’re back. Pardon the dust; our database done gone tits-up for the past few days, and has just now been restored.
I found out that I tend to write what I would have posted here in other threads when I don’t have this outlet. Here is what I inflicted on my dog forum today in an otherwise civilized and on-track thread about public perception of pit bulls. It got me going on all the various facepalm moments I’ve had engaging in that ultimate masochist’s sport, arguing on the internet. If this many people are following these rules, there must be something to ‘em I’m missing.
1. Politics is a team sport, and everything is, eventually, political. Any point scored against your team may be matched, and therefore negated, by scoring a point against the other team. It is therefore possible to win an argument about Congressional fiscal policy by bringing up Sarah Palin.
2. Any argument you make is intrinsically connected to some aspect of your identity. An alternate way to win is to be the first person to ferret out some aspect of your opponent’s identity that may be linked to their position, so that everything else they say from then on may be safely dismissed. If this does not work and the thread continues, find someone else with that identity that agrees with you, therefore proving that it is the only logical one that any person of your identity would hold if only they were thinking clearly.
3. If lots of people disagree with you, this is proof that the harsh, searing light of truth you go around bringing to people’s web of self-delusions is painful to experience and their protestations are merely attempts at cognitive defense against realizing the scale of their failure. Congrats, you’re hardcore like that.
4. Being a prick is actually worth points toward your win if you are a really, really funny prick.
5. If you can make your point with words superimposed on a picture of a cat it’s much more likely to get across.
6. If you ever admit to having been factually incorrect, logically deficient in any way, or otherwise wrong about anything since birth, you lose and can never, ever win again! Never do this!
7. If you can predict how someone will react, and make them react in various ways, this demonstrates your supreme skill as a puppet master of lesser mortals. The easiest way to do this is to be as deliberately inflammatory as possible, say at the beginning people will react angrily, then point this out as your only response to angry responses. Puppets. If you possess such deep insight into the psyches of others, clearly this must also mean you are right. See above rule three as to how people resist the evidence that everything they know is wrong and they are pathetic.
8. If none of the standard routes to victory are available or seem to be making an impression, bring up a different but somehow tangentially related point and try again. Thanks to rule one, the possibilities here are endless. If you can’t win playing ping-pong, try foosball. The teams remain the same, after all.
9. Related to point seven, if you can predict how people are going to react, this frees you from having to read or further acknowledge anything they say. Being a teller of truths is tough, so no one can possibly expect you to keep up with all the waillings of the cognitively dissonant when you already know what they’ll sound like anyway.
10. u mad bro?
Before you ask, yes, I really am this hard up for material today.
It’s common for opponents of same-sex marriage and adoption who are reaching for an argument other than “gay people gross me out” to cite sudies of children of gay parents who show worse outcomes. In response, the fire is usually returned citing studies that show a parity of outcomes, and pointing out that many of the previous studies were done on kids whose parents had come out as gay mid-straight-marriage and initiated a divorce, which tends to be rough on kids. There have been no long-term studies of children of gay parents in which the family unit was same-sex from the beginning- until now.
And the children of lesbian parents had better outcomes than the kids in traditional families.
Now, I don’t actually think this proves a damn thing except that children who are deeply wanted by their parents, which they have to be in order to get pregnant the non-traditional way, are going to have better outcomes than a mixed bag of kids who were wanted, kids who were an accident, and kids who were had because that’s simply what one does when one reaches a certain age and income level and is married. I ALSO think that both marriage and parenthood are such an individually experienced and lived thing that these kinds of studies are fairly meaningless to begin with, and should never be used to determine policy. It’s always a bad fucking argument to assert that the government should be actively “structuring” families based on what it thinks is best.
But do I think the Studies Say contingent who thinks gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry or adopt because Science Shows It Hurts The Kids are going to switch positions and say the government and law should now endorse all children being raised by lesbians because that’s what’s objectively best for them?
I’m not going to hold my fucking breath on that one.
Today involved getting up way too early to shuffle off our little show princess bitch to yet another completely and totally objective event to measure, sort, appraise, weigh and grade her. Which entailed with dealing with Santa Fe in the morning.
Yeah.
So since about the only thing we’re capable of after that is either screaming until Gunny Ermey shows up and says “Hey, you should really tone it down a notch” or taking a nap, y’all get a summer re-run.
Anybody got kids? Got a kid in Boy Scouts? It’s about time for summer camp, isn’t it? Just remember, the Scout Law doesn’t necessarily stop at the twelfth point.
Seems Comedy Central is considering a new animated series called JC, which is to be a series about Jesus Christ moving to New York to get out of the massive shadow of his father and looks to be a general sending-up of Christianity. This would be the same Comedy Central that folded like overdone pasta- twice!- when South Park wanted to depict Mohammed… even though they’d already done it before at great length and it simply hadn’t caused controversy at the time because the relevant Islamist death threateners were busy doing something other than watching decadent Western TV for reasons to threaten someone with death. (Comedy Central also, in a move even more chicken-hearted, also completely censored the episode’s final speech… which never mentioned Mohammed or Islam and instead was entirely about the poor wisdom of caving to bullies. Not that I am remotely bitter about this.)
The “Council Against Religious Bigotry” feels that this demonstrates Comedy Central is unfair and hypocritical with regards to how they treat satire of various religions, which is both true and begging the question of what exactly it is the Council of Religious Bigotry actually wants. If Comedy Central does not allow open and pointed satire of Islam, it is certainly not for lack of trying on the part of show writers; South Park has always been extremely even-handed in their treatment of religious beliefs or lack thereof. Judaism gets its share of mockery both gentle and rough from them, and so do varying forms of Christianity, and so do atheists- in the one episode they did that specifically calls atheists out on the carpet, at the same time atheism becomes the town fad, so does eating your food with your ass and crapping out your mouth, so that every time a smug atheist speech about the foolishness and evil of religion comes out of a character’s mouth, so does, literally, shit.
And it was fucking hilarious, or at least I thought so. The same episode had, as the rationale for the mass wave of conversion to atheism, the reaction to the Catholic pedophile priest scandals, to which the town priest reacts by going to the Vatican to find out just why the Church hasn’t handled it better, only to discover that the Catholic Church has actually been led by a malicious spider-god guarding the “holy documents of the Vatican” for an indeterminate length of time and that’s why priests molesting children has been protected. (Spoiler: Father Maxi fights and kills the spider-god.)
…Okay, it was a lot funnier than it sounds, at least to me. It was so over the top I don’t understand how anyone could have taken offense, particularly because the underlying message of the episode was that the fad-atheists were stupid to abandon their faith just because the structure of the church was corrupted, and that the priests defending the structure of the church as “faith” outside of actual moral consideration were equally misguided. It is to be sure a liberal Christian message rather than a fundamentalist one, but it’s also one that tends to affirm Christianity and its values rather than simply mocking it as wrong and stupid.
After all, the key point of Jesus Christ and God being characters in the South Park universe that Organizations of Professional Indignance tend to miss is that, within the South Park universe, Christianity is literally real. Father Maxi is usually more a hypocritical and ridiculous character than a heroic one, but so is every single other adult character; it’s just how the show universe works. The only people who have a consistent bead on reality are (some of) the children, and they’re just as often wrong and/or silly due to being nine years old.
South Park saves its real venom for beliefs, institutions, and organizations that it regards as actively exploitative rather than just human and therefore amusingly flawed, like Scientology- the vicious satire of which Comedy Central let air in its entirety, being evidently more afraid of being killed than of being sued. Super Best Friends was itself an episode whose fundamental structure was of “real” religions, represented by their respective major figures, versus a cult-like pseudoreligion that bore more than a passing resemblance to Scientology- evidently Matt and Trey decided they hadn’t been clear enough the first time.
Of course, Comedy Central is more than just South Park, I’m just a big fan of the show and it’s the network’s most obvious representative of no-holds-barred satire owing to the show’s success. When it comes to politics, the liberal point of view of the network is much more obvious. There’s the Daily Show, which is a bigger source of news to some demographics than most actual news shows (though I’d argue that it has more integrity than most news shows if only in its willingness to put its biases on full display), and then there’s the lesser known Lil’ Bush, which is lesser-known if only because it was much, much less funny. I’m usually too far afield Jon Stewart’s point of view to find him all that funny (and comedy does depend hugely on point of view), but when we’re looking at something from remotely common ground, I think he’s hysterical. Lil’ Bush, on the other hand, was simply unfunny, because it lacked any affection whatsoever for its targets and had absolutely no sense of self-awareness- which comedy also depends on.
If the “Council Against Religious Bigotry*” sees Comedy Central and sees it treating satire of Christianity one way and satire of Islam specifically another way, I’d argue that they’re taking entirely the wrong lesson from it, the lesson being “If I throw a loud enough fit I can get people to treat me as if I’m too important to mock. Treat my fit equally as the one with the death threats, or else you’re a hypocrite!” The right lesson to take from the broad willingness in the media to satirize Christianity isn’t “the media hates Christians”, it’s “the media correctly identifies Christianity as a broadly confident enough faith in America to see the humor in it, or at least shrug it off with grace”. CARB points out that eighty-three percent of Americans are Christians, but again don’t seem to realize the implications of that- if the media and its satires were as insulting and anti-Christian as they claim, their satires would be utter flops. Bill Maher’s Religulous really was as vicious as they seem to think all satires of Christianity are… and it was also a complete and utter flop in terms of money made and eyeballs on the screen, a pure vanity project for Maher.
If JC is exactly what they think it is, that’s exactly what will happen- it will flop, as thoroughly as Comedy Central’s other fundamentally humorless but ideologically satisfying properties have. South Park continues because it is very, very funny to a big enough audience- the majority of which are probably Christians- that it continues to be a huge money-maker to them. And if JC turns out to actually be funny and therefore popular… is there really anything all that wrong in that?
If Jesus Christ could, as Christians believe, take a crucifixion and a polearm to the side and get back up, and the faith based around him survive the privations of both persecution and popular success (and consequential structural corruption) for two thousand years, I’m fairly certain He can take a little ribbing and emerge none the worse for wear.
*I suspect a far better title for their organization giving the timing and context of their crusade is the Council Of Stop Making Fun Of Me.
