Anonymity

Sorry to everyone who might have liked to have commented on the last few blog entries, but didn't want to go through the trouble of creating a Blogger account.

Anonymous commenting is now turned on. Use the privilege, but don't abuse it. For those of you LJ'ers on the "agentdotnet" feed - don't forget, LJ commenting on the feed won't reach me.

Narcolepsy

http://www.sublimedirectory.com/00/rusty.wmv

First of all, regardless of how terrible the consequences may be (Imagine poor Rusty falling asleep at the helm of a warship, or worse yet, the pilot of Air Force One), this is one of the most endearing videos I've seen in a while.

And that's saying a lot for a seventeen-second video clip.

Other Weiner-Related Warblings

First off, I don't know what it is about weiner dogs that brings them so close to my heart where other dogs merely bounce off - maybe they've got the right eyes or right ears or even those feet that smell like Fritos corn chips all the time, to get through my defenses.

My first dog, Jack, who went by a variety of names during his tenure in the land of the waking, looked a lot like Rusty. Okay, Rusty's a bit chunky, while Jack had more of a lean figure, but it's the red that gets me. It's the red that brings back the memories.

But I gather I can quantify my endearment by its terms, if nothing else. Let's review: along the course of a lifetime, it's possible, on average, for people to give...

Suddenly, The Game Takes a Cruel Turn

You know, I was trying to get some kind of statistic for the number of "pet names" any one person might be called in their lifetime. Sounds like a useful stat, right?

http://www.squidge.org/~minotaur/cgi-bin/mqa_search.cgi?setup_file=mqa.setup.cgi&cats=writing&submit_search=yes

That's what google came up with. Something on the order of "I'm planning to write a ST slash starring Picard/Riker where Picard succumbs to "le petit mort" when he climaxes, causing Riker to panic and think he's killed him."

That's not what I was looking for, people, when I put "romance statistics "terms of endearment" names" into google. Go ahead, try it. What comes up first?

Anyway, I gather there are as many pet names for pets as there are for people; maybe more. My memory is going, but I can remember at least these.

Jack: woog, veug, fighting veug, gouda, gouda roll, did I miss any? I was only 9 years old...

And now with the new dog, Fischer, we've got:

Fischer: big little man, ears-go-down, mister guy, mister foony, king of raunch, luver man, liver luver, mister longbody, the list goes on...

I'm not sure if there was a point here, other than to say Fischer doesn't have to be red to get to my heart, and frankly, he doesn't need to be narcoleptic to be my favorite little man.

But there are some times that'd sure be nice.

Order of the Court

For those of you who've honestly had enough of the picketing, and the angry voices coming out of your television making as much honest-to-god human stench about Terry Schiavo as they do about the "sanctity" of marriage, take a look at a different, more sober undertaking, as penned by Judge James D. Whittemore of the U.S. District Court of Tampa, Florida.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7264601/

This is the (by looking at the unique spelling errors, obviously OCR'd) text of the federal court ruling relating to a temporary restraining order that made the hulabaloo around the Hill over the weekend. Don't forget, President George Bush had to get up at one in the morning to sign this bill. Because that's a big deal, waking up the President. That only happens in spy movies. And movies with ninjas.

Back to the text, grit your teeth and try to push through it. I know plenty of you won't. Because it's more important to download ringtones, get the latest Paris Hilton T-Mobile porn (e-mail me later) or BitTorrent every episode of CSI than it is to sit down and read what goes into judicial decisions handed down every day.

I know.
You hate lawyers.

And I know.
It's all gibberish that they invented.

But it's amazing, complex, very human, and ultimately, a good look at the judiciary's method of what ultimately equates to betting on the winning horse.

To illustrate, the text states that a preliminary injunction is to be granted if it has a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.

It speaks to me that the judiciary is highly focused on what is likely - not what happens in movies, not what magic can occur if you believe in fairies, or faeries, or fayryies or however you spell it, and not what fate seems concerned to conjur up specifically for one individual. The law doesn't work like that, and it's well it doesn't. Rough, perhaps, but reasonable.

I asked my counselor, who is rapidly turning into my mentor these days, to help me out with a question I had. I said, "I need to understand who, if anyone, is doing the thinking about reasonable efforts to keep our efforts as humans focused and in accordance with our best social interests."

No, seriously. I asked that question. Did you ever get a clear story on that when you were a kid? Did anyone tell you, don't worry, there are social worker committees at work on making sure humankind is progressing in a way that benefits us all?

Well, that's what she said. Strong lobbying groups that work the human sustainability angle. It seems, looking at the judicial write-up, that as trite as it may sound, there are friends in the judicial sector that are willing to look beyond standard from-the-hip emotional gunnery and do what has been prescribed by the spirit and letter of law.

For those that appreciate the more J.S. Mill microcosm gig and don't dig the whole being-thought-for thing, well, go try and stop them. But for me, it represented something of a larger societal safety net. You can't imagine what a relief it is to know others are working on saving people as a species from themselves until you worry about taking it on yourself.

I don't think I meant to twist this in any way politically, and it's not to say that my opinion on Terry Schiavo leans to the life or the death side, or even that it matters what side I lean to - it's more of a reflection on where I'm starting to try to go with my thinking. I believe we can do better than we've all been doing, and the judicial framework, as ugly, entwined, and confusing as it is, really is a good start to looking past shallow emotional responses into the realm of critical thinking.

Maxwell's Demon

The Pacific Northwest can be an adventure. I think there are times, when the wind is whistling around even the small valleys and riverbeds, such as those my house is sitting on, that I can't help but imagine another place. Another way, where the sounds and the smell of the weather and the pressure in your head feels different - one minute you're in the bathroom listening to the howl from outside, the next, you're - somewhere else.

Somewhere else? Right.

New Mexico wasn't what I thought of when I said a bayou, but I couldn't doubt the map, or the thousands of small ponds chained together under the veil of trees like a hidden blue trainwreck all sprawled out, just a secret muddy slaughter. Now, it was me, there, like the last cigarette in the pack, and it was quiet. No lights, no horns, no wind, just stars up above the canopy, stretching out forever.

My arms were cold, and I bundled up where I could. It's not New Mexico, I remember saying; not that anybody heard me, or cared. If it was, if it wasn't - who was going to fix it if it was wrong, or complain about it if it was right? It just was.

There was clay, and water, all mixed together at the edge of the pond near the palm trees that didn't fit; it was a dance of the heterogenous, and there were toes of nature being stepped on in four-four time, the wrong greens and the wrong reds, and the smell was strange but sweet, and still clean.

There had been a million trilobites here once; all swarming around hailstone-dents in the earth where the water had gathered. Red clouds and dust that had traveled a globe wide to get here. I didn't see much else but all those things that seemed out of place - we're all so good at that. Bats, caught up in the chase. A few modern insects at my feet, black and hidden in the shadows that were everywhere, in all those little cracks where the moon couldn't turn the world blue.

This wasn't New Mexico. But I didn't really have anything else to call it, so that's where I started.

It's alright to be somewhere else, I guess.

Turn That Frown Upside Down

I think it's only natural that the first thing I really lock on to when I start this thing up is that little phrase somewhere down the right-hand side of the dashboard; and it's got a literary smile on its face, and it knows me so well already, and good lord, we've only just met - it says:

"Turn your blog into a source of income..."

Really, folks, I'm not that cheap. Don't change the channel. No, don't -