The real reason we love dogs. - By Jon Katz - Slate Magazine

So I'm reading this article about why people loves dogs.

Here's the important passage:

Psychologist Brian Hare of Harvard has also studied the human-animal bond and reports that dogs are astonishingly skilled at reading humans' patterns of social behavior, especially behaviors related to food and care. They figure out our moods and what makes us happy, what moves us. Then they act accordingly, and we tell ourselves that they're crazy about us.

. . .

If the dog's love is just an evolutionary trick, does that diminish it? I don't think so. Dogs have figured out how to insinuate themselves into human society in ways that benefit us both. We get affection and attention. They get the same, plus food, shelter, and protection. To grasp this exchange doesn't trivialize our love, it explains it.

The bolded item threw into relief why I am a cat person and, if I were a bettin' man, I would argue that more Platonists (or Apollonians) are cat people and more Aristotelians (or Dionysians) are dog people. Dogs give us affection and attention, but cats allow us to live out the other side of the God-Human equation. Cats love us for a little while, when we feed them, for example, but they can get food on their own and even the best cat is mischievous. The worst cats are downright malicious and/or perfidious.

Cats, like children, are fickle, and like adults are faithless. They might want to be good (using the litter box or going outside) but sometimes they're just lazy. Dogs are built with their nails out, but cats must put at least some thought into brandishing their claws, which makes their attacks seem premeditated and intentional.

If dogs are our true friends, our faithful children, the cats are our true selves, our faithless acolytes. They reaffirm for us the possibility of a loving God, for who other than That would put up with the host of transgressions? If we can sustain our cat, we who are easily moved to anger, who have our own headaches, whose capacity for forgiveness is so easily overmatched, then certainly some other Providence can sustain us.

Read: The real reason we love dogs. - By Jon Katz - Slate Magazine

It has been nearly 370 days without a single posting.

I am beginning to think that people are forgetting about me. Wouldn't that be convenient? Well: I will not be forgotten. Not that easily.

Let me share this fortune:

You will go nearly 370 days without anyone posting to you. Then you remember that once you were loved and it will so increase the loneliness that your world will be overpowered by its cloying inevitability--the smell of orange blossoms about to turn rancid but for now promising a cornucopia to the bees and the grass at the trees' feet is sticky with nectar. Sneer at your good fortune if you dare, the stingers of your comeuppance are bared and their venom is more bitter than turned orange blossom, I assure you. Your blog is like spoiled fruit on the vine: it clings to a tree that has already abandoned it.

NOBODY BETTER READ THIS!

This is totally bullshit. Didn't I talk about this, like, more than a week ago? Are there people reading this blog? I sure hope not.When Love's First Arrow Strikes Close To Home (washingtonpost.com)

The Availability Paradox.

The complement, opposite, or corollary to what you describe in "I want Junk Food" is what I would describe as the iPod effect: 2,000 songs seemed like more than I could ever want in my hip pocket until I was actually able to put 2,000 songs into my hip pocket. Now, there are many days when I shuffle through song after song, sighing to myself, "There's no good songs on this thing."

The iPod effect, I would argue, suggests that rather than inspiring desire, availability tends to create a feeling of insufficiency. That is, one never wants Item C, until one already has items A and B. Also, having items A and B somehow raises one's estimation of item C.

What's most interesting, however, is I don't think that the iPod effect poses a threat to the point of "I want junk food," as both, according to my experience of this thing we call life, hold true.

The real question is then, How can that be? How can availability simultaneously drive us to desire what is readily at hand and yet somehow color our perception of what is readily at hand so that it is somehow never enough? How can the available be simultaneously both superior and inferior to the unavailable?

I want junk food.
 
I want junk food for no reason.  I am not hungry.  I do not want to get fat.  I do not crave either sweet or salty right now.  Still, I want junk food.
 
Specifically, I want some of the cake that is in the kitchen.  Other people will eat it if I do not ACT NOW.  I am constantly besieged by messages telling me I must ACT NOW.  I could lose out on an opportunity that may NEVER COME AGAIN IN MY LIFETIME.  This could be my moment.  I can have my cake, but only if I agree to eat it.   And that, my friend, is what I don't want to do. 
 
In the flea market of appatite, the sign reads "eat it now or regret it later."  That is what I tell myself as I try to keep my tush firmly in the office chair of my self-discipline. 
 
Who among us has never wanted something simply becuase it is available?  What man does not know the aphorism "Willing is sexier than beautiful"?  And is there any who could stand in a court of his peers and not admit this truth: we are driven to feats of maddnes by what is unattainable and desired, BUT ALSO by what is undesired until it is offered to us.
 
This is why we hate ugly women: we know that any of them could have us if they were insistent and more present than we were in our own lives.  And what man does not frequent vacations? 
 
Surely our appatites are danger, mitigated not by our will power, but only by our other appatites, for we are ruled ultimately not by our rules--ethical codes, philosphies, religion--but by our rulers: desires, needs, and appatites that are forever blind, slavering and unfulfilled.

FW: Digit Fables Draft

Excerpts from a book of Digit Fables

The Thumb Who Fell in Love with an Eyeball
 
-She was round, blue, and glistening. This was all he knew of her and all he needed know. The thumb had always been impetuous. Quick to stand in silly approval of things he never understood. Always lying down for a quick snap.
 
-He longed to plunge into the glistening roundness, but contrary to randy clichés and nursery rhymes, people rarely stuck their thumbs in anything.
 


The Sad Journey of the Index Finger
 
-Tired of life on the hand, he simply left one day. Not a word to the thumb or the middle finger who’d overshadowed him for so long.
 
-No one looked at him, but only where he was headed, as if he were always on the verge of discovering something
 


The Pinky Toe who Longed to be a Nipple
 
-True she was smaller than most, with just a tiny, impossible to paint nail, but it wasn’t just her stature that fueled her desire. It was a matter of sensation, or, in her case, a lack thereof. Callused from years of subjugation to the sandal a size to small, she felt almost nothing
 
-She’d hear talk of rare operations that turned ankles into knees, procedures that inserted parts of the stomach into the buttocks, but then she’d also heard stories of body parts removed entirely never to be seen or heard from again.
 
-She meant no ill will to the current nipples on her body. Would swap assignments with either if they were willing.
 
-“I could tell you that nipple don’t have it all that good,” said the wise big toe, “That they too, dream of being other, some even pinky toes, but I would be lying. The nipples in fact have a rather good lot. Truth be told, if I had my druthers
 


The Great Middle-Ring War

-Long before the tyranny of the hand, in the days when the fingers roamed free, legend has it that the middle and ring fingers were in love. Their names, of course, were different then, as  

-The thumb, whose name, like the devil’s, has always been the same, offered the couple a gift.
 
-But she would forever pay a price for winning this adornment, unable to stand or sometimes even move lest her onetime husband grant her permission.
 
-And so the former lovers remain forever joined, but forever severed.
 
 
 

Give That Googlebot a Bone!

Look there are ads to Dreamweaver MX in the Google ads at the top of the page! I'm so impressed with what the little bot can do. I can't help but see it as this little smiling robotic half spider half dog. Very earnest, very eager to please, a little on the simple side, but getting smarter every day.

I really think Google needs to market the google bot or spider or whatever as a soft and cuddly mascot. There could even be an animated sitcom spinoff.

I'd call it "Googlebot Saves the Day." The premise would have our cute and cuddly little Google bot traveling from town to town bringing people things that he thinks they really need, but it turns out are only loosely related to trivial matters they mentioned offhand in a recent conversation. The kicker is that these trivial items would always end up saving the day in some unexpected way at the end of the show. Then everyone would smile look into the camera and say -- [I challenge you to come up with our catch phrase because I've grown tired of this post]