If dogs could speak...

2006-12-25T12:15:00.001-08:00

במרשמי מ"ה, תהליך זה אורך מספר ימים
One of the things I did during my three-month blog hiatus was to make a two-week trip to Israel. The trip was enormously fun and the Israelis were surprisingly warm and open. I say surprising because my previous extensive interaction with them was through dealing with camera salesmen in Brooklyn, and I now realize that they were a special breed of their own and it was utterly unfair to judge an entire nation and people by their actions. It would be like saying that all New Yorkers behave like their taxi drivers, which is not true. Maybe a bit true, but not entirely.

The other surprising thing is that this is a country constantly surrounded by old wars and new conflicts, and I was expecting that most people would be reserved and suspicious of strangers. But, I found that everyone was uniformly welcoming and friendly. In this case, not unlike the New Yorkers.

But this post is not about Israel, but about my flights there and back. The trip over was on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Tel Aviv. Most of the passengers were Israelis going home (perhaps they came over to buy cameras too). For 13 hours, I felt like I was getting an early introduction to the country, except that no one offered me a very special deal on an excellent Nikon, very cheap, “just for you my friend.” But everyone spoke in Hebrew, argued in Hebrew, sang in Hebrew and read stories to their kids in Hebrew.

Even many of the flight announcements were in Hebrew. Since this was an international flight, the flight attendants would speak first in English, then repeat presumably the same thing in Hebrew. Except that the English part would be one sentence short, and the Hebrew announcement was several minutes long each time, and that made me very nervous. I was wondering, what was it they were telling the other passengers that they were not telling me?

The same thing happened the last time I visited Japan when I took the bullet train. They were also telling the natives a lot more than they were telling us foreigners. Sure we knew that the next stop was Hamamatsu, but was everyone getting a refund on their train tickets, or were they having a buy-one get-one-free sushi sale in the dining car? The only consolation was that most of the Japanese seemed totally uninterested and just sat there slurping their noodles, so I knew I wasn’t missing out on anything much. A friend later told me that the announcer was simply reminding passengers to not forget their umbrellas on rainy days, and telling them that the exit at the next stop would be on the right side or left side. And you’d want to know that well in advance, because each stop was only for a few nano seconds (it’s a bullet train, remember?) and if you hesitated, you’d be off for another hundred miles. No wonder I met so many foreigners on Japanese trains – they just didn’t know how to get off.

But, I digress. Unlike the Japanese on the bullet trains, the Israelis on the Delta flight were very alert and paid close attention to the announcements. And many of my neighbors often got up and went to the first class section for long periods of time, and came back smiling and refreshed. I imagined there was an open bar in the front, and I was not invited. And it was no bar Mitzvah either, although apparently many gifts were exchanged. For the rest of the flight I just sat there feeling sorry for myself, probably the only unhappy passenger on the plane while everyone else had a grand party.

They also celebrated when the plane landed, with a big round of applause for the pilots, the flight attendants and each other, happy with the free drinks or the excellent camera deals everyone got. I remember one time the pilot getting congratulated after an unusually turbulent flight to Denver on a stormy day. But this time the flight was completely smooth and uneventful, so I didn’t know what was the big deal. Certainly nobody applauded on the return flight when we landed. Maybe that had to do with the fact that we came back to Atlanta, but still. At least nobody got out to kiss the ground or scoop up a bag of dirt for souvenir. And that’s another way where the Israelis are very different from the Pope.

And speaking of the Pope, Merry Christmas everybody, and Happy Hanukkah to you Delta fliers.

2006-12-22T22:39:00.000-08:00

I’m Back
Hello again everydog and loyal reader (yes, both of you). Sorry I’ve been gone for a while without much warning. So that nobody worries, I should tell you now that everyone is fine. The dogs are doing great, and the people are OK too, just a little weird as usual, but what do you expect? I can make up some story about how I discovered a whole other world out there beyond mushing, eating, sleeping, howling and blogging, but that wouldn’t be true. Instead I’ll just say that I’ve been in rehab, for something much more insidious than alcohol and anti-depressants, and if I work up enough courage, I’ll tell you at the end of this blog.

So what happened while I was gone? Well for one thing, people and dogs kept reading the blog reruns and my reader count went above 33,000. Quite an honor, I have to admit. But I kept asking myself, if I had been more diligent with the blog, perhaps we could have gone over 100,000. That certainly would put me in elite company, with people who are much more witty and certainly do a much better job of writing every week. If I did it, if only I did it! Nah, that sounds too much like the title of a book that might never get published.

One other thing that happened – and this is a honest-to-goodness true story that was in the news this week – is that they discovered that the upscale department store Macy’s has been selling winter coats lined with dog hair. They have been advertising the jackets as “faux fur,” but it turned out that the fur in fact came from a dog indigenous to parts of Asia and Siberia, perhaps, you know, like Siberian huskies? This is now making me very suspicious of the people who have been saving bags and bags of my fur in the garage. Here I was thought they were being nice by brushing me and saving the fur to make warm blankets for the children of Katrina (or Darfur, I forgot which), but it now looks like they’ve been selling it to Macy’s. Does it ever cease, the so many ways dogs are exploited? They toil away at blogs, and even their fur is harvested for profit. Just unbelievable.

There is one more thing I should tell you. For Christmas the people bought a nice digital camera. Probably with the Macy’s money, now that I think of it. The camera is a Canon SD800 IS, an superb shiny little thing, very compact so it can be taken everywhere, unlike the 10-year old brick they used to carry. But perhaps the nicest feature of this camera is face detection capability. Basically it scans the picture for faces and automatically adjusts focus and exposure conditions to best capture the subjects, so they don’t come out too dark indoors or too bright when a flash is used. It might sound like a gimmick, but in reality it comes in very handy, and for these people it is just about necessary – until now everyone in their pictures looks remarkably like the unfortunate children of Darfur.

So how does well does this face detection work? It is amazingly effective, I must say. It works best when you look straight at the camera. Using little focus boxes on the LCD screen, it tracks faces when they move or when the camera moves. You can fool it by turning sideways, but partial sideways is still OK, and it kept going even if you put on a hat or headphones. It even works with pictures in magazines and on computer screens. The ultimate test was that it had no trouble detecting doggy faces like mine (naturally. I would have made them return it otherwise), but it failed to recognize our dear great leader George Bush. As I said, an incredible little camera. The people had so much fun playing hide-and-seek with it they almost forgot to take pictures. I had to bite them before they snapped out of it.

OK, so you ask what was the addiction that sent me away for three months? It was thoroughly embarrassing but now is the time to admit it. My name is Woofwoof, and I am a cataholic.

2006-09-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

Never Forget

2006-09-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Parade
For reasons that are too complicated to explain here, I was in Washington state last weekend. I like Seattle as I do all of the Northwest, and I love Seattle even more during the summer when the weather is beautiful, and the city is green all over from the drenching rains that keep it wet most of the year. This time I visited not only Seattle but also went to a parade in Federal Way, a 80,000-resident city about 25 miles South of downtown Seattle. This is a smaller, quaint town unfortunately with all the suburban trappings like big-box stores and strip malls, most of them containing a liquor store, a laundromat and a taqueria of some kind.

Normally I try to stay away from all things federal, like the presidential elections or Homeland Security or the IRS. But as I discovered in my research later, the town got its first name some fifty years ago as "Federal Highway 99" due to its proximity to that highway when it was originally built. Over time, residents decided to shorten the name to just "Federal Way." Now "Bob" and "Littletown" are shorter names too, and I am certain that they haven't been taken by any American city, so I don't know why these folks chose something strange like Federal Way instead. But it was true that the town did look and smell a bit like a 1040 tax form. During my visit, I was afraid that at any moment the authorities would pull us over and demand $15,327 or 27% of our income as shown on line 14b, whichever was more.

We were there to watch a parade from the main city park to the Borders bookstore through one of the main town roads (there were only two, one that runs North-South that is the Federal Way, and the other that intersects it and has most of the big shops). The parade was dominated by marching bands from their many high schools and middle schools, preceded by football cheerleaders and players who tossed footballs back and forth -- it's going to be a long season, judging from the number of dropped passes.

The kids were joined by the mayor, a Korean-American who looks like any other mayor, bright tie and big ~~phony~~ friendly smile, more cheerful than the cheerleaders themselves. There were also assorted state senators and assemblymen riding in convertibles surrounded by huge American flags fluttering in the wind (I looked, and fortunately there was no grassy knoll). And they were followed by wannabe state senators and assemblymen who had no flags but plenty of election signs of their own, and busty assistants who tossed candies out to kids and other little people. After them came a Scottish pipe band (men in skirts blowing into big bags) and not one, but two Korean dance groups (mostly women in skirts, but no bags). Maybe they were all relatives of the mayor -- after all, it's really a small town. And finally, insurance company representatives who looked remarkably like the politicians. I guess they share the same goal of taking money from you with as small a deductible as possible.

The best part was the mascots. Naturally the schools had their mascots, but so did the businesses that participated in the parade. The Old Country Buffet restaurant was represented by a large bumble bee that looked like it has been at the buffet line and dipped into the pollen a few times too many. But nothing topped the ridiculousness meter as the two dog mascots that accompanied a float run by Bark Busters, a self-proclaimed animal service that offers "dog obedience training." The idea, I suppose, is to teach people ways to get their dogs to behave: listen to commands, stop digging, and stop communicating. All crazy talk, but funny as hell. The dog pretenders almost tripped over themselves while doing a dog dance, and they greeted the crowds without any food stealing or butt sniffing, clear signs that they have a long way to go before mastering the canine art.

A good time was had by all. It was a brilliant sunny day, almost as warm as California. We got to shake hands with the mayor and get stung by a chubby bee, and the dogs enjoyed the Bark Busters comedy skit and almost mated with their mascots. And we left town just in time, without having to fill out a single tax form.

The Classics
Some things are just too good to not enjoy over and over again. Like a husky song or a Bark Busters show. There are two classic works that will make their reappearances after long absences. The first is "The Far Side" calendar. After Gary Larson stopped publishing his cartoons years ago, his fans could still get their daily fixes of weirdness with a cartoon-a-day calendar. But even that stopped a few years ago around the time our President Bush was elected, perhaps because there was more than enough funny stuff in the news. Well, the nerdy kid and the cavemen and the talking cows are back. For 2007, Larson is publishing an "encore edition" of the calendar, using the proceeds to support wildlife conservation. I saw it on sale already at Costco, and I must say that the demented humor remains intact.

The second encore event is a new edition of the sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Sometimes people ask you, if you were stuck forever on a deserted island, what movie would you want to have with you? For me the answer has always been and will always be: Blade Runner (my runner-up choice would be The Blue Lagoon). Blade Runner came out on DVD in 1992 back when the format was new and the picture was muddy, but because of movie copyrights and artistic disputes, that was about all there was for over 20 years. Until now.

This week a remastered edition will finally be available, unfortunately still the Director's Cut version, but with vastly improved picture quality. Then next year if all goes right, a new super duper ultimate DVD set will come out in time to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the film, possibly with the many versions combined into one set to settle arguments once and for all. It is hard to justify double-dipping now and again next year, but if ever there is a movie that deserves it, this is the one. If Ridley Scott took some broccoli and called it "Blade Runner - The Sequel," I still think you should watch it. So save your money, everyhusky, steal credit cards, run auctions and bank scams, but whatever you have to do, go out and get Blade Runner, and get The Far Side. You are no cat, and you live only once.

2006-08-20T05:42:00.001-07:00

Tag
I've been busy the last few weeks and returned to find that I've been tagged by Raisa the Brazilian Husky. As I understand it, I am supposed to reveal five weird things about me (wow, tough choices), and turn around and tag five new dogs. This blog tag game has been going on for a while, and it appears that every husky in the world who blogs has been tagged at least once, some twice. I don't want to tag them again, so I will give you ten weird things about me, and hope we can call it even. So, here goes...

1. My real, complete name is Doctor His Eminence Sir Woof. People also call me Woofwoof (they think it's cute doublespeak. I think they stutstutter), Bigfoot (to run better in the snow -- in my dreams, that is), Wookie (from Star Wars fame -- we have the same woo), Darwoof (after Charles Darwin since I revised his theory of evolution), Wolfowitzki (after Paul Wolfowitz who was Deputy Secretary of Defense and is now President of the World Bank. The -ki at the end is due to my Siberian heritage), and Wolforamaaaaaaaaa (more aaa's the harder I bite them).

2. I generally disdain water. When it rains, I tiptoe around the puddles, trying not to dirty my big feet. But I dig big holes in the yard, let them fill up with water, and jump in and sit there motionless, hot tub-style, water up to my neck. People freak out when they look out the window and see a dog head lying in the grass. It's usually their first real-life Godfather experience. I tell them some people have rock gardens, and they have dog gardens.

3. Like most huskies, I howl mournful, soulful Siberian songs. But I like to climb to the top of a shed in the backyard and howl at the neighborhood on hot summer nights. No reason to waste such a beautiful singing voice, so I might as well broadcast it to the world. The reflection from the steel roof of the shed helps carry the songs miles and miles. Hey, what do you expect? It's free. Would you rather listen to William Hung instead?

4. Did I mention I climb ladders? Yes I go up ladder steps just like people, well, maybe better than some people. The big feet help. It doesn't matter if the ladders are made of aluminum or fiberglass or wood. I climb them just the same. The view from up there at night is incredible. The neighbors call me the Homeland Security patrol. Not an enemy cat or squirrel will enter these territories without delicious consequences.

5. I usually sleep on my back, big feet up in the air. But when I lay on my belly, I like to cross my front legs, right leg first then left leg on top. If you uncross my legs or try to switch them left first then right, I will cross them back in the right order. Once. The second time I bite (hence the nickname Wolforamaaaaaaaaa).

6. I am not a picky eater. The type of food I like best is called "lots of." For desserts I prefer carrots, and bits of that Chinese spinach called "gailan" that the neighbors throw over (it's leafy and makes my poop green). But my most favorite snacks ever are raccoon (I've caught three -- bake them in the sun for two days until they acquire that beef jerky toughness and smell) and Cheez-It (a Nobel prize for whoever invented this heavenly thing).

7. It's no big secret that I blog. I also read lots of books. To keep me inside the people built a tall fence around the yard but one time I dug a tunnel under it and got out. I went to the city library about five miles away and walked up to the second floor before someone stopped me. They saw the house phone number on my tag and sent me home. I never found the roadkill barbeque recipe book. That's how I got to improvise the raccoon jerky method.

8. I once received a credit card application addressed to Woof Wolfowitzki. No kidding, and no Nigerian bank scam either. They gave me a credit limit of $7800, probably because of my World Bank connection, although I have more raccoon bones than pennies. Of course I didn't bother sending it in. The people have plenty of credit cards already, and they never noticed a little charge here and a little charge there to Big Dog Sled Repair Service, Raccoon Anonymous and HULA (Husky United Liberation Army).

9. The people keep a very large bag of my dog hair in the garage. Maybe they plan to knit it into a blanket for the children of Sudan, or the endangered chickens of PETA. But wait, you want to know weird things about me, not weird things about them (that would fill volumes).

10. I jog. The people jog. At different speeds. When I was a puppy my little feet couldn't keep up with them. They would run ahead of me and look back, shouting encouragement "Come on Wolfie, come on Wolfowitzki!" like mad dorks. It was utterly embarrassing, but it didn't take long until my feet got bigger and I outran them. Now they hang on for dear life at the end of the leash, screaming "Slow down, Bigfooooot!" You should see the look of sheer horror on their faces. Priceless.

2006-08-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

Asahi Super Dry Weather
Weather is complicated business, even before the arrival of Michael "The Hurricane" D. Brown and FEMA. First there is this confusion about Fahrenheit and Celsius. Personally I think the use of Celsius should be limited to police reports and autopsies where numbers don't really matter anymore. For example, the patient dies of acute interoginkoba sceptomicenkolititis, and had a body temperature of 419.2C when found. See, something like that might make you think that the physician really earned his golf club membership, even if the most doctor-like thing he ever did was to spend several months at Club Med.

But it is not only temperature that influences weather. There is also humidity and wind speed, both of which can change how comfortable you feel. 75.2F at 22% humidity and 9 mph wind might feel like 23C at 59% humidity and 12 mph wind. But you can't really expect people to always have a supercomputer with them to calculate these things, or to run to weather pages on the web to look it up each time they plan a trip.

Leave it to the Japanese to figure it out, and what they came up with is truly ingenious, better than anything they have ever put into your Toyota SUV or Mazda submarine. Yahoo Japan's online weather service has started to provide four new indices this summer to tell you just exactly how it is outside. They have a "UV index," a "sweat index," a "heat exhaustion index," and finally a "beer index." The first three are somewhat self-explanatory. The last one is too, I suppose, and here they rate each day on a scale of 0 to 100, and that rating value helps you decide how many beers are best to drink. For instance, a 0-19 day deserves one beer, a 20-39 day gets two beers and so on, up to five beers for a 80-100 day.

Instead of saying that it is partly cloudy in Tokyo with a temperature of 79F, humidity of 83%, and wind of 9 mph from the South, you say simply that today is a four-beer day in Tokyo. Very straightforward and to the point. We all understand what a four-beer day is, no further explanations needed. I am sure that some people might claim that every day is a many-beer day, but at least now they can point to the supporting evidence. If it's on the web, it must be true.

That really makes these dog days of summer a lot easier to accept. I have a feeling that today is going to be a beautiful six-pack scorcher already.

2006-08-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

Dog Howl
Susan Butcher, 1954-2006
Four-time Iditarod champion, 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1990

2006-08-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

Crappy Update
In case you have been wondering, it is now safe to go to Japan without bringing along Whiff the poop smell eliminator. Last September there was a story about Kazuo Hoshino, an eccentric Tokyo resident who seemed to enjoy harassing his neighbors by storing his "bathroom waste" in a hole he dug in the backyard, then cooking it in a small pot so that the stink permeated the entire neighborhood. Kinda like what dogs do, minus the cooking.

The neighborhood collected a thousand signatures in a petition to police and the city government to make Hoshino stop his daily routine, but officials claimed that they were powerless since city laws against foul odors applied only to factories and businesses, not to individuals. This went on for about three years. The stench was so bad that some neighbors had to move away, and some nearby businesses shut down for lack of customers, all except for the local McDonald's which was thriving. That's not to suggest that Big Macs smell like crap. The taste, however, is a whole other matter.

Well, things have changed. Last month, police arrested Hoshino for violating an environmental protection ordinance of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Why it is a violation now and not in the last several years isn't clear. I suppose the environment is even more fragile today than ever before, and needs all the protection it can get. Police went to Hoshino's house and removed over 250 lbs of waste from the pit, probably to be used as evidence in his trial. Life must be good again in Tokyo. You can now open the windows to hear birds sing and let the fresh air in, and not have to put up with the smell of Hoshino, only the smell of the local McDonald's.

So there you have it. It is certainly not big news, but I do hope to give you closure.

2006-07-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

Zoom zoom zoom
Those lucky Alaskans! They have so much oil money that instead of paying tax to the state, they get an annual loot-sharing, I mean, "dividend" check back from the state. Just for living there. On top of that, they sweet-talked the federal government into giving them another tanker-load of money to build a bridge to nowhere. When they decided later not to build it, they were told to just keep the money - so basically it's money to build no bridge to nowhere.

And they get tons of snow in the winter, meters and meters of dog-sledding quality, cold and fluffy snow, a true Husky paradise. And in the summer while the rest of the country was broiling in high heat, they bragged about their 79F weather, ideal for oil-drilling, tree chopping and moose hunting, all the fun things that Alaskans get to do. The last time we saw anything near 79 degrees here in California, I think it was in Celsius or deciliters or something weird like that.

The Alaskans just struck it rich again. Last Monday a huge cargo ship suddenly tipped over to almost horizontal, about 240 miles off the coast of Alaska. The Cougar Ace was perhaps carrying goods from Far East sweatshops to gadget-starved Americans, things like Floo-Bees and iPods, but onboard were also over 4,800 spanking new Mazda vehicles fresh off the paint shop. 30% were CX-7 SUVs, and the rest were mostly Mazda3 hatchbacks. The CX-7 is a new model for 2007, getting excellent early reviews. One insurance firm estimated the automobile value alone was $72 million, give or take a few front-disc brakes, airbags and leather seats. Even that seems conservative, but you know how these insurance companies always try to low-ball you and raise the deductible.

Initial analysis suggests that the massive ship was thrown sideways when the ballast tank was adjusted incorrectly in the open seas. It was also possible that the few remaining whales that the Japanese haven't caught and eaten yet got together and used their blowholes to push the ship over to its side, but that is still unconfirmed. By Friday, the vessel had drifted from international waters into US territory, only 150 miles south of the Aleutian Islands, but it stayed afloat at an 80 degree angle. By next week, some of the cars will probably wash ashore, perhaps a bit wet and salty, with a few squid and shrimp stuck to their mufflers, but nothing that a good car wash cannot fix. And of course, since the oil is right there, all you have to do is to stick a pipe into the ground and pump some of that luscious black gold out, and in no time you can have a new SUV parked in front of the log cabin.

That's it. I'm packing and moving up North with the Huskies. Snow, moose, oil and imaginary bridge, and now with zoom zoom zoom. How can I resist?

2006-07-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Raining Dogs
It's summer over here, dry as a bowl of lamb and rice dog food, but in Poland it's raining dogs, and not just any dogs, but enormous hundred-pound dogs. On Monday in the southern Poland city of Sosnowiec, a man was walking down the street minding his own business when suddenly a Saint Bernard fell from the sky and landed on his head.

It turned out that the dog, named Oskar, had been pushed out of a second-story window by his people at that exact same moment when the man walked by. Police arrived at the scene and found a couple in their thirties living in the house with their three-year old daughter. The adults were totally intoxicated, having just downed a large bottle of liquor, when they decided to test the flying skills of their giant dog.

Thanks to the pedestrian, Oskar had a turbulent but soft landing, and suffered only a few scratches. The passer-by was more in psychological shock than physically hurt, and the skunk drunk couple are now in jail, charged with child endangerment and animal abuse. And good weather has returned over the city, with not a single animal floating in the deep blue sky.

In related news, the big event in dogdom today is that a Siberian Husky named Meeshka will be participating in a Blog-a-Thon to raise money for Northern dogs that need a permanent home. I think it's a 24-hour blog fest, although I am not sure if that is measured in dog, human, metric or prehistoric time.

One thing Meeshka promised to do to generate even more interest and sponsorship money is to post a picture of her sitting on her human woman's head. Not quite like flying out a window, but a delicate exercise nevertheless, requiring tremendous balance and humiliation (I mean for the dog. For the woman it must be a big honor to be sat upon by a dog while she is sleeping). I am sure you will agree that such a sacrifice is worthy of a few, or a lot of your hard earned dollars. It's a great cause and a huge spectacle, so go over there TODAY and donate generously. Good karma will flow your way, I swear. May no fluffy dog ever fall on you.

2006-07-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Knock knock
Alright, who's the wise guy who deserves a nasty husky bite in the butt? Rarely have I been so upset with a product, but this one should offend the entire canine population in the world as well. You've been warned.

You see, some people like to play a cruel trick on dogs. They tap on the front door and quickly run back to the living room couch, pretending to read the newspaper or watch television as if nothing had happened. But dogs being fierce protectors of homeland security, have to interrupt whatever they are doing (usually something important like digging through trash or tormenting the cat) to go and investigate. Who knows, it could be a burglar, a terrorist, or a Latter-Day-Saints missionary who has to be sniffed all over in case he carries lethal peanut butter cookies or Cheez-It on him. But the dogs get to the door, and there is absolutely no sign or smell of anybody. Really makes them wonder if they've lost their senses or sanity (well, it's possible), and when they get back to the business at hand, the trash has been put away, and the cat has escaped once again. Very frustrating.

Now a company has come out with a device they call a "Knock Knock Door Chime" that rings a door chime whenever someone knocks at the door. The way it works is that there is a sensor unit that you attach to the inside of the front door. When it is activated by a knocking sound, it rings wirelessly a chime that you can place anywhere in the home, up to 100 feet away from the door. The good thing is that it should confuse your visitor -- he knocks and hears a door bell instead, and maybe that'll be enough to scare him away. No more Girl Scouts cookies to buy and no more Mormon literature to read at night. But it will also baffle the heck out of your dogs. A knock at the door, a chime in the kitchen, and the lazy homeowner just sitting there watching TV oblivious to it all, seemingly deaf and dumb. How are the poor dogs supposed to respond? You can ask them to focus focus focus, but expecting them to multitask on three things is a bit much.

This deviant thing sells for $49.95, but I'll be damned if I tell you where to find it.

2006-07-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

You gonna eat that?
Animal scientists use the term "anthropomorphism" to describe what many people do, ascribing human traits, motivation and thinking (you've got to be kidding me) to animals like dogs. If a dog could talk, this is what he would say. Oh puh-lea-se, utterly ridiculous! It's the notion of "I know how you feel because I can walk a mile in your shoes," but how do you apply it to a dog that wears no shoes and no clothing? Especially when the dog is already at a more advanced stage of evolution than you. So, forget it.

Well, forget it some people apparently cannot. There is a Japanese online store called Dot Wan that specializes in selling human food made for dogs. Now it's true that dogs do want some types of people food, like your steak cooked medium rare, or the hamburger you just finished grilling before you smother it with gooey ketchup and mustard, or the bag of chicken you just brought home but haven't put away in the freezer yet. But that's not what Dot Wan sells. Because this is a Japanese company, they naturally concentrate on Japanese food, and in this case Japanese human food, which makes it doubly yucky.

Unfortunately it's not raw fish or anything good like that, but what they have is regular, everyday human food. Some examples: Fruit cookies in kiwi, avocado and blueberry flavors, pre-packaged cups of mixed vegetables (usually in Japan "mixed" means cucumbers but here the vegetables are pumpkin and sweet potato), rice and tofu yogurt, miso soup, and a disgusting fermented bean dish called natto that even most Japanese people don't touch. To make the human food more appealing, Dot Wan also offers human-style dishware for the dogs, such as ceramic bowls made exclusively for them by a famous pottery maker in Okinawa.

All this just doesn't make sense to me. Do dogs insist on making people eat dog food (I mean, usually), and act convinced that it's good for them? Here is your dinner Joe, a bowl of delicious Alpo lamb and rice, or chicken liver, or delicacies like raccoon roadkill or the dead opossum the huskies dug up behind the shed. So if you think you might not like that, then stop shoving weird stuff like sweet potatoes and soybeans in their direction. Now if you really want to be anthropomorphic, let the dogs sleep in your bed, rub their bellies, or open the yard gate and let them run off-leash. That's when we are really talking in the same language. Woof!

2006-07-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

You repel me
It is summer, the season of baseball, bikinis, outdoor barbeque and of course mosquitoes. We are not in Alaska and the summer swarms here are usually called "Canadian tourists" or "Mexican guest workers," but we still have more than our share of flying pests. So what is a Nile-virus-fearing Californian to do?

Well, you can apply some of that DEET bug repellent on you, but this may be a case where the cure is worse than the disease. If you read the warning label on the bottle, it seems that you need to exercise more caution than you would need bathing yourself in concentrated DDT. Don't drink, don't smell, don't spray near eyes or mouth, keep at least 30 feet away. No thanks, I'll just take my chance with Lyme disease. Or you can get one of those electric bug zappers, as long as you don't mind the constant buzz and zap-zap-zap sound. And seeing your picnic guests look like pale bluish zombies from Night of the Living Dead (the original George Romero version, of course). For some people that might be an improvement but then you can't tell them that or you would be joining them. Reality does really suck sometimes.

But there is good news. Scientists at Aberdeen University in Scotland are developing a mosquito repellent using chemicals in human body odor that the insects do not like. They noticed that certain people tend not to get bitten by mosquitoes, and have isolated the chemicals in those people that act to drive mosquitoes away. They hope to formulate a synthetic version in about two years, so potent that all you need is to put a small drop on your clothing without applying it directly to your skin. They didn't say, but the chemicals probably smell like armpit odor, and one side effect of the "eau de human" is that you will be shunned not only by mosquitoes but also by everyone else. That may not matter much to Alaskans who are in most need of bug repellents but who are an anti-social, anti-environment breed anyway. File your complaint here.

Around this house we use a more nature-friendly method to eradicate mosquitoes, and it is called Siberian huskies. They have lightning-quick reflexes and lethal bites. Usually a husky sitting outside waiting to be petted (that's what people think), or waiting to steal a hamburger or hot dog from an unsuspecting kid (that's the real answer) can catch and kill with his mouth any insects that happen to fly by. On a busy warm day, that can be a mosquito a minute, better than any electric bug zapper I have seen. The most effective missile shield defense ever invented, and a lot cheaper too.

2006-07-02T05:52:00.000-07:00

A.1. or Ketchup?
Just in time for July 4th, two recent stories about hamburgers should give you food for thought as you plan your holiday barbeque. First there is a burger joint in Boca Raton, Florida that two weeks ago started serving a hamburger that they dub the "beluga caviar of sandwiches." Or "heaven on a bun" as the restaurant owner describes it (No it's not what you think, you perverts). But one thing for sure is that it does cost a lot like caviar, beluga or not. A burger at the Old Homestead Steakhouse in the Boca Raton Resort and Club goes for a cool $100. That is after you pay $40,000 upfront plus $3,000 per year to join the club.

Here are the specs for you bun aficionados: The patty is 5.5 inches across, 2.5 inches thick and combines Colorado free-range prime beef with Japanese Kobe and Argentine cattle beef. Maybe they also sprinkle some "holy cow" if you ask politely. The beef is flown in fresh from New York (there must be a secret ranch somewhere in the middle of Manhattan), then sautéed on order in grape seed oil (hand-pressed by young Italian girls wearing wide brim hats) for exactly five minutes per side then finished in an oven at 375 degrees. They didn't say, but I hope they got the Celsius and Fahrenheit right. Organic micro greens, exotic mushrooms and heirloom tomatoes are included, but fries and Pepsi are extra.

At the other extreme, a company in St Louis has just come up with a new kind of hamburger meat that offers both the health benefits of soy and the flavor and tasting chewiness of real meat. Now, don't you think they just grind some beef from Safeway together with edamame soybeans. These guys at Solae Company are applying for a patent for their hybrid meat technology, which they said took ten years of exhaustive meat research to perfect. The end product is a blend of vegetable and meat protein, and has only 2/3 the calories and 1/2 the fat of regular meat. I have a different technique for cutting calories and fat which I call "making a smaller hamburger" but never bothered with a patent.

For our barbeque, my thinking is that we will stick with chicken. Ultimately everything tastes like chicken anyway, so why make things complicated and spend more? And the threat of bird flu always adds a dose of adventure to the eating experience. But no matter beef, chicken, kangaroo, snake or soybeans, I hope you all have a great Independence Day (or Canada Day for you 51st staters).

2006-07-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

Altered States
We had a pre-holiday picnic at work yesterday. Somebody brought an industrial-sized cake, probably from a warehouse store like Costco, big enough to feed 200 people before hamburgers and hot dogs, or 500 people after. Or the entire population of Uganda for a week. Since the theme was Independence Day, the cake was made as an American flag, white frosting with half-strawberries for the stripes and whole blueberries for the stars.

The cake looked great, except that someone (probably one of the tax accountants) pointed out that were only 49 blueberries arranged on a 7x7 grid, and wanted to know who had "deducted" a star. According to IRS rule 142.76.5.3 in section 7E of the U.S. Tax Code, revision 2, we were not eligible for a star allowance unless we resided in the state in question for at least 45 consecutive days in the previous two months, or the commuting distance is 30.7 miles or greater, whichever comes first. Therefore the violator was subject to a maximum of 2 years in jail and $100,000 fine. We explained to him that no, the cake was really made that way with only 49 blueberries to start with, and the stars were supposed to be the white spaces between the blueberries, not the blueberries themselves. He was skeptical, but said he would research further and issue a ruling in 60 days.

In the meantime, we got busy trying to figure out which state was missing. A bad apple in the group said that at our company, what's missing is the "State of Enlightenment." We said that was too geeky and told him to go back to his computer chess game. Or was that a Sudoku puzzle, I forgot. But how do you go about assigning blueberries to states? There were a few obvious clues: The smallest blueberry went to Rhode Island. California got the weird-looking one that tasted oddly sour. Washington was the plump, juicy, wet one. On the opposite end was Arizona, the dry blueberry shriveled almost like a small plum. By this process of elimination, we got to the 48th blueberry before the accountant told us to get back to work because American productivity was already declining at an alarming rate.

This much we now know. The missing state is either Hawaii or Alaska, states that we usually leave off the map -- we did check, there was no little piece of cake inset to the left or bottom of our big cake. One state is big, cold and oily. The other is sunny, warm and clad in bikinis. And only one of those two gets a blueberry. If anyone has an idea for how to decide, let us know quickly. We are afraid that by next week, the entire cake will be moldy and blue all over.

2006-06-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

The Invincible Lemon Trees
The dogs don't like trees. Or rather they love trees to death. They fertilize the trees, they sharpen their teeth on them, and they use them for tug-o-war games. Once two or three years ago, I brought home a very elegant Japanese maple tree. I was still digging a hole to plant it when I noticed the huskies were already salivating and taking bets on how long they would need to take the tree down. Someone at the pet store recommended to spread a bitter apple paste on the trunk to discourage the dogs. I tried a taste and sure enough, it was sour and disgusting. Normally I don't go for dog food (except in Korean restaurants -- just kidding. Really, don't send me any more hate mail), but this was the anti-dog food so it was OK. It worked. The dogs put their teeth on the tree but quickly recoiled. They looked again at the tree in horror. Here was a tree that fought back.

Alas it didn't work long. Five minutes later I was in the house and looked out the window. The dogs were furiously licking the tree trunk, all the while grimacing, like kids trying to swallow their broccoli just to earn their dessert. It became a battle of wills between humans and canines. The only thing that eventually stopped them was a wire fence I built around the maple, five feet tall and with sharp edges at the top to prevent the dogs from reaching at the branches or climbing over the fence.

I did a similar thing with two lemon trees I planted last fall. Same battle with the huskies that ended with the same type of fence. But then I got complaints that the trees looked ugly -- not the trees themselves, but what was the point of planting something nice and then surrounding it with unsightly barbed wire? I reasoned that a tree with barbed wire was better than no tree at all, but I knew I was only stalling. Last week I thought that the lemon trees were big enough and strong enough that I could take the fence down. at least around one tree as an experiment. The dogs watched with more than passing interest. They were already scratching the dirt to decide where they would bury the lemon loot they were about to harvest. They went on the web searching for a lemon meringue pie recipe. After the fence was removed, I retreated to the house and waited.

The huskies attacked with a vengeance. Nine months of pent-up frustration went into every bite. The lemon tree mounted a vigorous defense. It had low enough branches that the dogs couldn't get to the tree trunk. And unlike the bitter apple paste which could be licked away, it looked like the lemon branches were bitter to the core, outside and in, so the dog lick strategy no longer worked. The canines circled the tree looking for a weak spot but found none. After an hour of assault, they finally gave up and rested, after drinking down a large bowl of water to wash off the sour taste of lemon, and probably of defeat. Yesterday I triumphantly freed the second lemon tree from its enclosure, and all the dogs could give me was a bored look of resignation.

I don't know what devious schemes are still going on in the dog heads, but for now it's Lemon Trees 2 - Huskies 0, and Humans 3 - Huskies 0. Muahahaha!

2006-06-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks AAA
I took the car to work yesterday. I normally drive the truck, of course to compensate for my inferiority complex and because I have lots of money and like to waste it on gasoline. And because I want to harm the environment and contribute to global warming. Yes, I've heard all those things before, and am guilty as charged. But yesterday morning when I was on my way out the door, I took a quick look at the truck fuel gauge and found it between "empty" and "positively empty." Since I didn't have time to stop for gas, I had to go with the car, even though it didn't exactly match my macho image. Ha!

Then on my way home I stopped by Circuit City to get a DVD for the dogs. As you probably know, the 2005 Best Movie of the Year, "Eight Below" is finally out on DVD. It's a true story about a bunch of husky dogs surviving in the Antarctica after their humans abandoned them for safety during a major storm, and featured Oscar-caliber performances by well-known star actors such as Max and Shadow. The dogs here have been talking about the movie for months and breathlessly anticipating its arrival on DVD. Their conclusion was that this was more than a "rent it" due to the tremendous replay value. They have been digging for coins and gold in the backyard, hoping to find enough to buy a plasma television for the doghouse. I kept telling them that it's a big waste of money getting a color TV to watch huskies in the snow -- black and white should work just fine -- but they reminded me that I was the one wasting money driving a truck. How do you argue with such dog logic? While in the store I was tempted to skip "Eight Below" and instead get them "Garfield the Movie," but decided to stay with the safe plan because the Garfield humor may be short-lived, and the dog bite marks will be much more permanent.

But I lost track. I came out of Circuit City, got in the car, backed it up and thought it wasn't driving right. Not just that it was a car, but it was going bump-bump-bump. I got out for a look, and found that the right front tire was flat, as flat as Dolly Parton is not. I was a bit upset, but thought, no problem, I just had to put on the spare. Then I looked in the trunk. First the spare was not a standard tire but one of those compact, training-wheel things. And there was no jack to be found. I checked again in the trunk, under the seats, inside the boxes with extra motor oil, but definitely no jack. Now I was really mad. Who in their right mind would take the jack out of a car? Well, I could think of a few, but mentioning them here would be as life-threatening as bringing home "Garfield the Movie."

Just then I remembered that I have AAA membership. Now I have to admit that joining AAA is one of the more sissy things I've done, but my excuse is that I travel a lot, and I like their maps. But I've never used them before. I found the AAA card and called the 800 number on my cell phone. An operator answered promptly, speaking more Hindu than English, but he was helpful, polite and seemed to understand the highway and street system perfectly well. He said that a truck would be over within an hour. In less than ten minutes, a tow truck pulled up. The driver got out and quickly swapped the tires, even made sure that the spare was pumped to the right pressure.. He was friendly and jovial, despite having to work on a Friday night when the rest of the world is starting their weekend. He looked thoroughly confused when I gave him a tip, but graciously accepted it. With that, he and I were on our ways.

At home, the dogs were glad to see me, and happier to watch their fellow movie stars on the DVD. And they were right. It was a great movie, even after they watched it the third straight time. I was happy too, that the entire flat-tire incident was so free of hassle and lasted no more than 30 minutes. So thanks Disney, thanks Max, thanks Shadow, and especially thank you AAA. And next time, I'll stick with the truck and make sure there is a jack in every car I drive.

2006-06-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

Deodorant Man
Father's Day is never as big as Mother's Day, and I wonder why. Most of the dads don't seem to understand either. InteractiveDadMagazine conducted an online survey of 400 men and found that four out of five believe Father's Day is just as important a celebration as Mother's Day. But that's like asking dogs if they want lots of Cheez-It; the answer is always yes, and you don't need a poll to know.

The email advertisements I get certainly confirm my thinking. Albertson's supermarket has a steak sale, Circuit City is offering 15% off on camcorders and digital cameras, and Costco has specials on golf bags and Norelco electric shavers. But overall, not the commercial frenzy you get for Mom's Day. And that's not surprising. I read that according to the National Retail Federation, stores predict that consumers will spend only $9 billion on Dad, compared to the nearly $14 billion they lavished on Mom. And AT&T said that like Mother's Day, Father's Day is also one of their busiest days, except that many more calls made today will be collect calls. Probably the "Dad, can you come bail me out of jail? Don't tell Mom" type.

This week two events finally made me understand why. First, the birds are back. As I wrote last year, there is a family of bluebirds that have adopted my home as their home sweet nest. That, despite the dogs constantly trying to make the birds their special catch of the day. The birds have built a small nest in a planter hung under the gazebo, about eight feet off the ground. The plant and flowers must be providing shade and respite from the hot sun for the birds, and the chirping sounds give plenty of entertainment for the huskies who want to be like birds and fly up to snatch away the little ones. I forgot to mention the chick babies, maybe three or four but they make more noise than the entire Tom Cruise fanboy club, either crying for food or just intentionally driving the already nutty dogs more insane.

The point of the story here, though, is that while Mom Bird spends day and night in the nest, fixing it up with more branches and leaves, and feeding the babies and protecting them from monsters below, Dad is simply and utterly useless. He flies around from one tree to another, once in a while swooping down close enough to the grass to tease the canines, but mostly he stands at the top of the gazebo scanning the landscape, trying to look macho and manly. If he had a flat screen TV, I bet he'd have the World Cup on right now.

The second event happened at the supermarket yesterday. I noticed that Mitchum anti-perspirant and deodorant sticks now come with a new label on the cap, that says: "If the hardware store is your idea of shopping, you're a Mitchum man." Not exactly the stuff of Socrates, but that slogan does sum up the essence of man quite nicely. No need for flowers, fancy dinners and collect calls. What makes man happy is Home Depot and a deodorant stick, and freedom to go around and bother the dogs.

2006-06-17T06:09:00.000-07:00

Pardon me, do you speak English?
Surely you remember the cartoon where Bugs Bunny used his long ears to dig a hole through the center of the Earth, and came out on the other side in the middle of China. Or was that Daffy Duck using his beak and surfacing in Japan for a bowl of duck ramen. But now there is a web site, digholes, that shows that it was more likely that they would have ended up somewhere in the ocean between Africa and Australia. Even if they took a left turn at Albuquerque. And who said you cannot learn anything from the web.

Then there is Henry Mora in Montclair, California, who didn't believe that and wanted to find out for himself. Actually, his story is that he bought himself a $600 high-power metal detector and it beeped like crazy in the front yard of his house. So he thought there was gold under the lawn and decided to dig for it. After all, the eBay company that was advertising the contraption promised that it was perfect to search for "treasure chests, coin caches and hoards of gold." Mora was lucky he didn't hit the iron sewer pipe, but two weeks later, he had a hole 60 feet deep and big enough for ten people. And the pile of dirt grew to almost as massive as his entire house.

And still there was no gold. This called for firm measures. So Mora hired two helpers who set up an elaborate system to go even deeper. They used ropes, pulleys and buckets to move the dirt, and cut several shelves into the hole like staircases so they could get in and out easily. Throughout this "whole" time, the detector continued to beep louder and louder. And the helpers told him that they had done this before in Mexico and found huge treasures, and they could be just inches from striking it rich. Kinda like standing in front of the slot machine in Las Vegas. Come on, just one pull, one more shovel, this could be the big one.

Then a nosy neighbor looked in and called the city. Montclair, which is about an hour from Los Angeles, must be a peaceful city with nothing for the government to do, so police, city inspectors and firemen all came over at once. They promptly decided that the job site was unsafe and immediately stopped the treasure hunt. They said that the cave was too unstable and in danger of collapse and swallowing the men inside, and ordered Mora to fill it back in. Mora has said that he will comply, but he was reluctant and still thinking about new ways to find his gold.

This is a secret so don't tell anybody, but the dogs here have decided to form a partnership with Mora, called Hidden Treasure Mining Company. No buckets, no pulleys, no ropes. Just an army of Siberian Huskies and their furred paws, well trained in excavation technology, that will tunnel deep under the house and hide the dirt so well that no one will ever know. At a minimum, there's got to be a few bones buried somewhere. Like that country song goes, we are going to find "all the gold in California," and with a little extra husky power and tenacity, all the gold in China, India and Japan too.

2006-06-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

Computer Addiction
If you think you are wasting your life away on the computer, meet Kentaro Shimada and Tai-Yang Hsu.

Shimada is a 33-year old Japanese who is jobless and homeless, but instead of seeking shelter under bridges or moving to California like most people, last year he visited an Internet cafe in Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture. And decided to move in. These cafes are somewhat common in Japan and many other Asian countries. They are open around the clock and offer customers access to computers and DVD and video game players. And of course coffee and simple food like spaghetti and cucumber pizza. Kinda like Denny's but with computers and edible food. If you miss the last train of the night or just can't wait to read the latest edition of my blog, that's the place to go.

But, I digress. Shimada got himself a booth at the coffee shop and made it his home sweet home from August to the end of the September. During that time he ran up a tab of over 520,000 yen -- or 4500 American presidents if you prefer. No matter how you count it, that's a heck of a lot of soy sauce ramen for one person. After the two-month extended stay, Shimada tried to leave without paying, but was promptly arrested and thrown in jail where the food is free, but apparently there is no Internet.

Now on to Mr Hsu. He is a 37-year old Taiwanese with a better strategy to avoid paying. Hsu was unemployed like Shimada, but he had a home in Taipei until his wife kicked him out following an argument. So like men everywhere who are banned from home he got on the Internet, at RS Cyber Cafe in Tamsui just outside Taipei. There he spent his time smoking, eating instant noodles, playing video games and surfing porn. OK maybe he didn't surf porn but he did search my blog for fluffy French poodles and Floo-Bees vendors. Other than that, for three months he lived the dream life of every man, free and totally unburdened. Then one day last week he complained of breathing difficulties and soon after succumbed to a heart attack.

So if you are not spending every waking hour of every day on the computer at an Internet coffee shop, reading weird news and inconsequential dog diaries while slurping ramen, you have nothing to worry about. You are not a complete computer junkie yet.

2006-06-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

Heroes
Daniel Mazur, of Olympia, Washington, set aside his second trip to the top of Mount Everest, to save a fellow mountaineer who was given up for dead by his own team. Mazur is a climbing guide and had two paying customers with him when they came across Lincoln Hall just two hours from the summit on May 26. Hall's team thought he died the previous day and abandoned him on the slopes. When Mazur found him, Hall was just sitting there without hat, gloves, sleeping bag or tent. It took Mazur and his group four hours to help Hall out of his predicament, giving him food, drinks and oxygen, and assist him in the return to base camp.

Just two weeks earlier, a British climber, David Sharp, collapsed from lack of oxygen about 1000 feet into his descent from the summit. About 40 climbers are believed to have passed him without stopping, unwilling to jeopardize their own adventure. Sharp, an experienced mountaineer, was doing a solo climb. He was on a well traveled route when he apparently ran out of oxygen soon after reaching the top. Based on climbing logs, dozens of people must have crossed his path but ignored him except for a group from New Zealand that stopped briefly, gave him oxygen and continued on. Sharp was found dead the next day.

The second hero is Michael Rubin from Coral Springs, on the edge of the Everglades in Florida, who jumped into a pond to rescue his 6-month old golden retriever from the jaws of an alligator. Rubin was taking Jasmine for a jog one morning last month. The puppy was running free ahead of Rubin when he heard her yelp, and realized that the 7-foot alligator had snagged her and was flipping her over. Rubin got in on top of the alligator and started punching it furiously in the head until he was finally able to pry the puppy away. Jasmine was rushed to the vet for treatment, but except for a few cuts and puncture wounds, is now in good condition.

Here's to you, Daniel Mazur and Michael Rubin, my heroes of the day.

2006-06-04T05:59:00.000-07:00

The Failed Power of Umbala
We have a fairly large cafeteria at work. By cafeteria standards, the food there is not all bad, but once in a while, we need to get out for a bit of authentic Mexican or Korean fare outside. Since the area is dense suburbia, it is not easy to go out for lunch and get back in less than an hour, but we usually come close.

The trick is to bring Dilbert along (names have been modified to protect the innocent). You see, Dilbert is a funny character, but more importantly, he has an amazing, almost psychic ability to change traffic lights to green in our direction. No one knows how he does it, but if we are within sight of an intersection, he would close his eyes and chant "Umbala Kawasaki" and somehow make the lights stay green, or switch from red to green just as we arrive. I have no idea what's behind "umbala," but I think that the Kawasaki part was based on the well known motorcycle commercial "Kawasaki - Let The Good Times Roll."

Dilbert is serious about his enormous power over traffic lights and goes into a deep trance whenever called upon. At one time we thought that he had hidden on him a traffic light changer, the type used by police and ambulance drivers in emergencies, but nobody has found it, and Dilbert does his meditation with his hands open toward the intersection, almost as in prayer. Doubtful as we are, we are glad it works.

Until Friday it always did. We were coming back late as usual, and were about 100 feet away when the light suddenly changed to yellow. Everyone turned and looked at Dilbert accusingly, but he protested that nobody had asked him to chant that time. He was right, of course. We had all assumed that we would make that light easily. But Dilbert missed the next one even when we did ask him to make it green. And another one right after that. By well over 200 feet. Not even close. Dilbert was embarrassed and thoroughly confused, and looked defeated as if Luke Skywalker had just found that his light saber ran out of battery.

At the fourth light, last one before we reached the office, Dilbert was totally focused, and enunciated the words Um-ba-la Ka-wa-sa-ki slowly and repeatedly, his hands alternately closing and opening again like he was trying to flash the traffic light from red to green. We all watched him with concern, in awe of the Master trying with all his might to gather his fading powers. Alice who was driving, slowed the car down as much as she could, to give the light a chance to turn green and let the Master redeem himself. But it wasn't meant to be. We inched up to the line of cars waiting at the light, and had to wait a good minute before the green came on again.

It was truly sad. We patted Dilbert on the back, but he was inconsolable and near tears. We were witnessing the end of an era. The good times were finally rolling to a dead stop. Flat tire and out of gas. I wonder if Dilbert has a son we can invite to lunch next Friday.

2006-06-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

Naked Revisited
Unlike many eco-terrorists such as, ahem... Alaskans, the Japanese seem to have taken this global warming business very seriously. In April 2005, the government started a "Cool Biz" campaign to encourage office workers to ditch their suits and ties and wear short-sleeve shirts to work. The concept is that the cooler attire will let people feel more comfortable in the hot and humid climate of Japan summers, and allow building owners to raise air conditioning settings to 82 F. That will reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, so there is more oil left for people to buy and drive more Toyotas and Nissans. Which creates more work for car salesmen and auto mechanics, and therefore makes all of us happier. I don't know why, but you know it's true.

Then in August a tree-hugging group kicked off a "Water Scattering" operation to urge urban business and home owners to wet areas in front of their buildings and houses, also with the aim to reduce overall city temperatures and make the warm weather more bearable without air conditioning. Their reasoning was that if it's too hot, you take a shower, and that idea applies to cities too. Sidewalks need a good drenching periodically to stay cool.

Buoyed by all that success. the government came back in October with a new promotion they called, naturally, "Warm Biz," asking people to dress in layered clothing and wear sweaters in the autumn and winter, so indoors temperatures can be cut to 68 F without sacrificing comfort. The environmentalists were all excited until more people started wearing furs made from endangered Sumatra mountain raccoons (I know you've never heard of them. but that's just the point. They are indeed a very rare and endangered species. Almost non-existent).

I was not happy because they rejected a superb idea I submitted. My proposal was to simply use the Celsius system in the summer and Fahrenheit in the winter. 28 C sounds a lot cooler than 82 F in July and 68 F somehow seems warmer than 20 C in December. It's just an illusion, but isn't that exactly the business of government, making us feel good, just like Britney Spears?

But, that was last year. The new theme for staying cool this year is loincloths. I kid you not. An upscale, very traditional department store in Tokyo called Mitsukoshi, is advertising sumo-style loincloths as the preferred attire for men in the hot summer months ahead. Their claim is that loincloths provide "good ventilation" and "less constrained movement." How do you argue with that? Clearly cavemen were way ahead of their time. Click on the picture above to observe movement. To boost their popularity, the store is now offering loincloths patterned with polka dots, little goldfish and of course, for the man who has everything, fireworks. The only thing missing so far is Britney wearing one, and then my life will be complete.

2006-05-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

The Pre-Memorial Day Picnic
We had an early Memorial Day picnic yesterday, but not the way we had planned. Let me back up and explain.

For a long time we have been looking forward to a backyard barbeque this coming Monday, which is a combination Memorial Day and symbolic start of the summer. It's been a tough and rainy winter, with more wet days below 60F than we consider acceptable in California. Now the sun is out in full force again, the smell of cut grass is in the air, and generally it is just too nice to be eating inside. If we are going to cook anything, it has to be grilled, and it has to be outdoors. Dogs and people were in complete agreement. Then suddenly it all changed yesterday, and it looks like we won't need that barbeque after all.

We went to Costco to get ready, armed with a long shopping list. Lots of barbeque things on the list, but not only that. Also things for the patio, plants, computer, camera and iPod things for the people, and chew things for the dogs. Dogs by their nature know how to be happy with less. Then we got to the store, and the plan ran into an unexpected glitch. There were food sampling tables at the end of every aisle, tempting the not-so-innocent with tasty morsels and delicious sips of drinks in little paper cups, and the carefully organized shopping project quickly disintegrated into a major food hunt.

There was tri-tip steak, grilled shrimp, tuna salad, artichoke hearts, granola snacks, four kinds of sausage and chicken franks, and three types of chips including my favorite crinkle cut vinegar flavor that burns a hole in the stomach but is indescribably delicious. To wash all that down, they were offering various flavors of ice cream and a cappuccino mix in ice that was better than anything I've had at Starbucks.

We circled the booths like famished vultures, talked with the servers to be polite and keep them distracted while grabbing another piece of the wild salmon with a sneaky underhand motion. For two hours we moved from table to table, sometimes breaking up only to go back for seconds and thirds, but otherwise it was simply time to stuff your face. We recovered just long enough to look at the iPod things, and grab a few dog toys and a rotisserie chicken before it was closing time and we got kicked out. I didn't know until then that an indoor picnic could be as much fun as an outside one, and a lot cheaper.

The consensus this morning is that the dogs are happy with their new toys, and the people still have enough barbeque food left in them until Independence Day. And I feel like there is a wild salmon swimming inside me gobbling down bits of artichoke hearts.

2006-05-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

Is that you Lakpa?
People do crazy things to celebrate big accomplishments, but never this crazy. A Nepali sherpa, Lakpa Tharke, decided to strip and stand naked for three minutes after he reached the summit of Mount Everest this week. The mountain is still very tall, even though it shrank last year, so it must be extremely cold up there, a lot colder than, for example California or Delaware or Fairbanks. And therefore shrinkage is probably severe up there, as the mountain itself has shown.

But it wasn't just the sherpa who was shocked at what happened. Now the Nepalese Mountaineering Association is upset and wants the government to throw Lakpa in jail to teach him not to get naked randomly anymore. The reason is that most Nepalese Buddhists consider Mount Everest, or Sagarmatha as they call it, a goddess. According to official records, 1345 people have successfully climbed the mountain since 1953, but climbing the goddess is encouraged, whereas getting naked on top of her is unacceptable. Some guys just have no manners whatsoever.

2006-05-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

The Weird Race
We are talking about a foot race here, but it might as well be about the people who live in San Francisco. On the third Sunday in May of every year since 1912, they hold a 7.5-mile run called Bay to Breakers. It starts from the Embarcadero business district on the San Francisco Bay side of the city, follows through Golden Gate Park and ends at Ocean Beach on the Pacific shore. The race is not particularly difficult except for a hilly section at the 1/3 point, but otherwise the course is flat and slow through city streets during the first half, and the large park in the second.

But that alone wouldn't be interesting, and would not befit San Francisco. It was founded as a way to help lift the spirits of city residents after the 1906 earthquake, and over the years, they have discovered new ways to celebrate the wackiness of the state and the city, and bring the cuckoos out of their closets and into the streets for at least one day. There is no other race I know for which a plea is broadcast on television a week in advance: No pets, no alcohol, no nudity. And in this city, that is interpreted as an open invitation to come as you are in your birthday suits, and bring dogs, snakes, geckos, parakeets and fish in a bowl that you balance with a turban on your head, and pull along a keg. In other words, the largest, strangest outdoor Halloween party in May.

Among the bizarre events expected annually, you have:

The running Elvises (this is the younger, non-wheezing version but with same big hair)
The Floating Tiki Bar (apparently without Jimmy Buffett)
Bay to Shakers (another cocktail mixer on wheels)
The Tortilla Toss (thousands of tortillas thrown like frisbees at the joggers)
Naked girls in a mobile shower (part of the "Bare-to-Breakers" crowd, a group dedicated to complete wardrobe malfunction and living by the "Why Not?" principle)
and the usual assortment of Dikes on Bikes and other celebrities like The Governator (muscular guy who mumbles in German) and the Assman (to remind you what city you are visiting this week).

But most eye-catching are the centipede teams that consist of 13 connected runners (by rule the last one must wear a stinger of "appropriate size and toxicity," and the group must execute a 360-degree spin called a Lenichi turn in the park without intentionally sticking the stinger into other runners). And let's not forget the "Breakers to Bay" procession of chowderheads who dress up in salmon outfits and run backwards from the finish line through the crowd back to the start, where they get to "spawn" feverishly until they die of exhaustion (don't ask).

The weather forecast calls for a light drizzle today. I think I'll sleep in and mow the lawn afterwards. I meet enough loonies every morning on the way to work, and don't feel a strong desire to run into more of them on a day off, especially if they look like naked Elvises and wear stingers.

2006-05-20T06:27:00.000-07:00

The Sub-Species
Every sensible person knows that cats are troublesome animals. but this proves it beyond reasonable doubt. A dentist in Washington has lost his practicing license because of poor sanitation conditions in his examination room. The state Department of Health started the investigation early last year after receiving complaints against Dr. Henry Kolsrud from his employees and clients.

According to their findings, he did not sterilize dental instruments properly between use and did not train his staff adequately. Furthermore, he allowed a cat (eek!) to roam throughout the dental office, and he kept cat food in a refrigerator next to dental supplies. And finally he scooped up cat poop and vomit with the same spatula he normally used to mix dental paste. Last May the state stopped his contract to provide medical care to low-income patients, and in December they charged him with professional misconduct. Two months ago, the 82-year-old dentist agreed to surrender his license and retire after more than 50 years of dentistry practice.

So there you have it. Cats are ugly, evil things. They are dangerous to your health, and bad for your career. And if you think that dog breath stinks, just ask one of the doctor's patients. They are still gargling with Listerine every day, trying to get that feline taste out of their mouth.

2006-05-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

Your Mother Wears Army Boots
Mother's Day is traditionally a day of hand-made cards, flowers, Sunday brunches or long-distance phone calls when the kids are all grown up.

But this is the age of the Internet and things are different. Mother's Day is another day for companies and stores to try to make a buck. For a month now, I've been flooded with emails about sales, discounts and special gifts for special Moms. Some of the offers are quite traditional, of course. You can order cards and flowers online through Hallmark (bouquets from $19.95, save 20% last week and 25% this week). 1-800-FLOWERS.com doesn't seem to love Mom as much, but they still offer 15% off. And Walgreen's loves Mom best with a nice bouquet for $7.99, this week only.

Albertsons has great offers from their deli in case kids want to make breakfast in bed for Mom without ruining it. How about a pastrami sub and potato salad, Mom? For the more decadent side, Cold Stone Creamery wants Mom to have a Strawberry Sensation ice cream cake, for $3 less than usual. Starbucks claimed in a mass email that a little birdie told them that Mom would just love a Starbucks card -- maybe the bird has avian flu before I've never heard of such nonsense before.

Circuit City has gifts for the "Modern Mom," you know, the one who prefers to save up to 12% on select digital cameras, camcorders and large televisions $299 and up. Cambridge Soundworks has another perfect gift because Mom deserves the best: their perfect gift, coincidentally, is a Cambridge Soundworks Radio CD 740 so Mom can listen to AM, FM and her very own MP3 in the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen, places where she belongs. They also have a Creative Zen Micro Photo and MP3 player so she can lovingly look at pictures of her family on a color screen -- quite charming, actually, except that the screen size is about the size of a thumbnail, perfect for microbe moms. Amazon has gifts with brain and beauty, just like Mom, with free shipping for qualifying orders of $25 and above. Dell has the perfect Entertainment PC for Mom, in case she wants to watch DVDs of classics like Joan Crawford Mommie Dearest movies.

The list goes on and on. But nothing seems to beat the offer from Home Depot. They want to thank Mom for all she does with a special gift, a 30-piece Do-It-Yourself tool kit for only $39.99. It has just about everything Mom can possibly need, a hammer, a pair of pliers, a small level, an adjustable wrench, one screwdriver and assorted screws, and a spackling knife, all of that in a handy blue plastic case. All that is missing is a roll of duct tape, and Mom can do everything herself, just like she always does. And if you already have the DIY kit, you can certainly re-gift it for Father's Day. We really do love you Mom.

2006-05-13T06:02:00.000-07:00

The Space-Time Continuum
A University of Connecticut physics professor now believes that time travel is possible. Obviously he is not the first person with that idea, but Professor Ronald Mallett offers an actual way to achieve it, and has designed an experiment to prove the concept. The method is, he says, to "swirl" space as you would stir coffee in a cup, but using a laser beam to do the stirring. Because space and time are related, when you swirl space, you also swirl time. He suggests that you can test with just a few subatomic particles -- you know, things like muons, leptons and mesons, or Bush's brain (OK, stop that, bad dog bad dog) -- and if you spin them fast enough, you could move them a few nanoseconds ahead. Not that anyone would notice, but you will feel enormously accomplished. Go ahead, try it.

The idea sounds simple enough but it is well grounded in Einstein's theory of relativity, so who is going to argue? Well, a few people actually. First there is Pat Robertson who believes that the time has come to send everything not into the future, but back to the Stone Age. Then there are scientists who argue that with a small device like Mallett has built, the effect would be so infinitesimally tiny that it would be impossible to measure. And therein lies the beauty of science: You don't have to prove yourself right, you just have to make it hard for the other guy to prove you wrong.

Not that I think that Mallett is wrong, of course. Many people have been using a time machine for years, and the machine is called Google. When you blog, for example, you can choose any posting date you want, five months ago or two weeks from now, and your little bits of wisdom will just float in cyberspace to their intended points in time and lodge themselves there. And with a few keystrokes, you can edit your post date and fling everything backward or forward at will. Time, really, is never a fixed thing. For example, this post could have been created in the third century when men were men and dogs were wolves, but you'd never know for sure, and I'll never tell.

And I'm certain you can guess that dogs, as an advanced species, have some of the most sophisticated skills in time travel, more than any human can ever dream of. The technique to the untrained eye is sometimes called "chasing your tail." Basically you stand in one place and spin yourself silly, but the trick is that you have to do it really, really, really fast, for two reasons: First you are not talking about just a few subatomic quarks here but a 70-lb husky dog with a big fluffy tail. Second, there is this conversion rule that one human year is equal to seven dog-years, so we dogs naturally fly through time a lot faster than human sloths. See you tomorrow. Or yesterday.

2006-05-07T06:39:00.000-07:00

An iPod Original
The iPod is hot, it's in. It's in as much as Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise are out.

And of course everyone wants to jump on the iPod bandwagon, especially politicians. Two weeks ago, in a speech on American competitiveness at Tuskegee University, our President Bush said that the U.S. government actually helped develop the iPod. He said, and this an exact quote: "The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." It's nice to know where our tax dollars are going. I was thinking that we were spending it searching for Osama or his weapons of mass destruction, but in reality, we were doing all the right things, furthering the careers of Britney Spears and LL Cool J.

And in Silicon Valley, truly the birthplace of the iPod (well, right after Washington D.C.), there is a candidate running for mayor of the city of San Jose, on a platform of innovation and government reform. Michael Mulcahy is running as an outsider -- he has never been in government and in fact has no voting record, and he promises to increase competition for city contracts and ensure government accountability. A radio ad that keeps playing every morning during my commute goes something like this: "What would Silicon Valley be like without competition? Competition creates innovation. Otherwise we keep paying more for the same old stuff. Innovation is the heart and soul of Silicon Valley, but most politicians still don't get it. That's why we need Michael Mulcahy as our next mayor, because we need innovation and reform in San Jose city government." So far so good, but wait until the closing slogan: "We live in an iPod world. We can't afford an eight-track government." Huh?

Our government is full of progressive people. And copycats. Maybe that's what's wrong with them.

2006-05-06T19:43:00.000-07:00

I need a ginsu knife
I woke up this morning with a horrific headache, made myself a cup of coffee and crawled back to bed. It all started yesterday. I was at work talking with a couple of people when suddenly this nauseated feeling hit me like a 5-ton truck. For a brief second I thought I was going to hurl right then and there but fortunately I was able to hold it down. I am sure the two guys are still wondering if they said something that got me so upset. All day today I've stayed mostly in bed, except for brief trips to the bathroom to gulp down handfuls of Tylenols. It is a real shame to feel like a hangover when you haven't touched a six-pack of Ozeki sake in a while.

But this story is really not about the headache, but about the wonder of daytime television. Not soap operas or game shows, or Jerry Springer episodes about mothers who share teenage boyfrtends with their daughters, but the amazing stuff you can buy while just laying in bed. They had an infomercial today about a Flavor-Wave Deluxe^TM oven which uses a halogen lamp to supposedly cook better and up to 50% faster than a conventional oven. The claim is that this is a revolutionary technique that combines conduction, convection and infrared cooking. The halogen light lets you drive heat uniformly all the way to the center of the food, from french fries to small steaks or large birds. And unlike microwave ovens, the process doesn’t burn or dry out the outer layer before it cooks it. They had cooking demos of pizzas, broiled lobsters, pork ribs, and Thanksgiving turkeys. This thing was really the all-in-one miracle cooker.

And that's not all! With purchase of the Flavor-Wave Deluxe you get free a "Le Presse" food cutting tool which dices, slices, juices, chops, cores apples, and makes baby food! Turns cabbage into coleslaw or potatoes into french fries. Makes crabcakes, burgers, and even gourment sausage. They say that these are tools used by 5-star restaurants around the world! And you can have it right in your home for only 4 payments -- no, wait, only 3 payments of $33 plus shipping and handling if you order today.

If I don't feel better by tomorrow, I think I am going to order a brand-new kitchen.

2006-04-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

My kingdom for a castle
It is well known that Japan is an expensive country, especially for housing. With a population of 130 million living on a land smaller than California, most of it mountainous and earthquake-prone, it is no wonder that tiny apartments and condominiums (called "mansions" in Japan) can cost millions, hard to believe even for Californians used to housing sticker shocks.

That's no longer true. There is a large house that's been for sale in Japan at a very reasonable price, 41 million yen or 360,000 Bush dollars, give or take a few currency exchange percentage points. The bonus is that the three-story house was built as a honest-to-goodness castle, in feudal-era castle style atop a tall hill with steep rock walls. Inside, every room is decked out in traditional Japanese design, complete with tatami mats. However, the rest is modern construction and offers all current creature comforts and conveniences (maybe including musical toilets).

The castle was built only 15 years ago by the president of a construction company who had to put it up for sale when his business ran into financial trouble. The main drawback is that the castle is located in the small village of Yatsuo in Toyama Prefecture, in snowy country on the western side of Japan, fairly far away from the big cities like Tokyo and Osaka. That's probably why it has been on the market since last June, waiting for the next warlord.

So if you have always thought that your home is your castle, here is your chance to make it real. The commute might be a little long, but the view is spectacular. You can see it in the picture above left (click on it to increase floor space), and buy it from the real estate agency Shimada Jyutaku. Just remember that samurai, geisha, moats and crocodiles cost extra.

2006-04-29T22:07:00.000-07:00

You Are No Dog
I don't know why some people think they are good enough to be like dogs.

First there was this electrician in Oakland, California, who was arrested last October when he was caught working in the nude. A customer had hired Percy Honniball to do some wiring work, and came home early one day only to find Honniball in the house completely naked. He explained to police that he decided to strip before crawling under the house to avoid dirtying his clothes, and because working nude gives him a better "range of motion." Maybe he was wanted to use his Sawzall, and it was more ergonomic that way.

Honniball's reason may have been totally believable, but the cops still charged him with indecent exposure, with an extra penalty for having a strange name. This is the fourth time in six years that he has been arrested for working nude, and it cost him dearly. The homeowner in this case paid him for the job he completed, but deducted $200 to change all the locks in the house. And now he might have to go to jail where working naked is never a very good idea.

Then last Saturday a 23-year-old guy named Michael Urbano in Hayward, California -- yes, people are weird in California -- came home supposedly drunk and high at 2 in the morning, couldn't find the keys, and decided to climb down the chimney. About 3/4 of the way down, he got stuck. His cries for help eventually woke up his neighbors at 6:30 am, who summoned police because they thought he was a burglar. After the cops found him, they had to push him up from the bottom of the chimney while also hooking him and pulling him up from above. If the hook caught him only in the nose, he was lucky, because when they finally got him out, they discovered that he was completely naked. He said that before starting his chimney adventure, he took off all his clothes to "reduce friction." Apparently that wasn't enough to ensure a smooth descent. He is now also in jail on drug charges, maybe sharing a cell with his naked buddy Percy. They can compare war stories and wounds when they get bored.

Today's message is: Put your clothes on, people! Naked is for dogs. And a man has got to know his limitations.

2006-04-23T09:18:00.001-07:00

The Gadget Generation
The dog is out of town on a top-secret mission, so today's dumb blog is written by his slave. With none of the usual wit or charm. And past the 6 am deadline because the lazy bum decided to sleep in.

We live in an age of gadgets -- laptop computers, handheld computers, cell phones, pagers, personal digital assistants. OK wait, maybe not PDAs anymore. They were all the rage a few years ago. Everyone in this Silicon Valley had one or wanted one. Or was just waiting for the next model to come out, because it can flash, beep, vibrate, and beam you up. In meetings you sometimes see people writing on the board in the Palm handwriting code called Graffiti (which represents each alphabet letter with a unique unistroke character). At parties and conferences people exchange email addresses by synch-ing up their PDAs. It was the new social handshake, only more geek and a lot more obscene.

But, like many fads, PDAs didn't last long. The ones that are half PDA, half phone like the Treo, or that can receive and send emails like the Blackberries are still around, growing even. Without those features, most people found it easier to jot things down in a paper notebook or on a napkin, rather than having another thing in their pockets or hanging from their belts. And so companies started getting out of the business. Sony dropped their Clie line (the dumb name alone was enough to kill it). Then Handspring merged with Palm when they found out there wasn't enough business for both. Now rumor has it that Dell is planning to take their Axim line off the market too, and that would be another clear signal of the sad and impending death of the PDA in its present form.

I have a Palm m500 I bought years ago but used very little. It was one of the smaller and lighter models at the time but had only a monochrome display so I got it cheap. For a while it was convenient to use it to store phone numbers and addresses, as a kind of Rolodex that you can carry with you, but it soon became more hassle than help, so I started taking it with me less and less. Now it is actually the uncool gadget to have around, because it is so, so... 2000, and there is no point to have it if you can't synch yours with someone else's. Maybe I should eBay it, as mint condition. And get an iPod instead. I hear it's the in thing now.

2006-04-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

Doggie Houdini
I wrote last week about a golden retriever in New Hampshire that was on the loose for two years, only to get trapped again with a piece of ham. This was a total disgrace for the canine species and a hot topic in dog blogs the world over. How can a dog give up a life of freedom, ignore the call of the wild and visions of running carefree in open meadows, all of that gone in a brief instant in exchange for a small slice of smoked meat? That, simply couldn't be.

Then another news item came in that showed that there is still hope for dogdom, not all has been lost. Two weeks ago in Virginia Beach, Virginia, animal control officers put a bulldog named Rosco in the slammer when they caught him attacking another dog. Rosco had just jumped a fence at his home to get out before he got into the altercation with the second dog. At the animal jail, he wasn't happy being locked up. By the next morning, he was gone.

The officers are now guessing that he chewed on and bent the latch on his outdoor pen, and pushed the door open. After that he still had to jump high enough to get on top of a seven-foot concrete wall, and squeeze his way through several layers of barbed wire to get out. Rosco left no good-bye note, no taunting threat to the kennel keepers, but his triumph was unmistakable. Hasta la vista baby!

Sadly it was really hasta la vista. A day later the cops found Rosco at a lake four miles away, too exhausted to run away or fight back. He is now back in the kennel, this time with a big padlock on the door to prevent his Houdini act. The latest report is that he is still in jail, waiting for his trial for canine assault and prison escape.

There is a Free Rosco Fund being set up to support a rescue squad to help get Rosco out. The special commandos are Siberian huskies, well trained in the science of yard excavation and night escapes. The tunnel is already half-way to the cell. We break out tonight. Don't tell anyone, and don't you blog about this.

2006-04-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

The Road Warrior
Many people including me complain about their commutes in California. The roads are crowded, the other drivers are crazy and rude, and the weather is terrible as it's been in the last few weeks. All of that combined makes for a depressing way to spend a large chunk of your life so your can make enough money to live here.

But that was before I read about Dave Givens who won first place in the "America's Longest Commute" contest sponsored by Midas, an auto repair company. Givens drives 186 miles -- one way -- to go to work, from his home in Mariposa, California to his company in San Jose (also in California, but after that distance, he could have been two states away). He has been making this 372-mile commute journey which takes him seven hours each day, five days a week since 1989.

Givens says that he loves his job at Cisco, but doesn't want to give up living on his ranch in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near Yosemite National Park. His prize is $10,000 in gas money (that should be good for two weeks in his case), some free car maintenance service from Midas and cooking lessons from George Foreman, Midas's ad man who doubles as failed boxer and grill machine marketer.

Compared to Givens I really have nothing to complain. My commute does seem to take three hours, but I am thankful it's only 16 miles each way. The dogs can actually run faster.

2006-04-15T21:04:00.000-07:00

Round and Round We Go
People sometimes wonder why dogs chase their tails or circle around a spot several times before they lay down. But is it only dogs who do silly thing like that?

This week a Drug Enforcement Agency employee sued the government for supposedly releasing to the public a video that was embarrassing to him. In April 2004, Lee Paige was demonstrating gun safety rules to children at a youth meeting when he accidentally shot himself in the thigh. He was waving a gun talking about handling precautions but forgot that the gun was still loaded. Someone in the audience captured the incident in a video and submitted it to the DEA, but it was leaked and became widely circulated on the web. Paige says that he is now the target of ridicule everywhere he goes, the "biggest joke on the Internet." The lawsuit accuses the government of violating his privacy and seeks an unspecified compensation amount. What he did to himself was dumb, but it doesn't mean you have to go tell everyone.

And two months ago, Curtis Gokey, a municipal worker in Lodi, California, sued the city for $3600 of damage to his car when a city truck backed into his car. The only problem was that he was the driver of the truck at the time, and admitted that the accident was his fault. When the city denied his claim, saying that he can't complain against himself, his wife Rhonda filed a new claim under her name, for an even larger amount, $4800. She said, "I'm not as nice as my husband is."

The moral of the day is, Stop making fun of doggies. They might chase their tails, but at least they are minding their own business. And they keep the lawyers out of it.

2006-04-09T06:31:00.000-07:00

The Pillars of Riches
Saratoga, California is an affluent town of multi-million dollar homes where live top executives of the Silicon Valley and Asian business moguls who want to keep a second home in the U.S. (By the way, million-dollar homes are just slightly better than middle of the pack here, so they are not even worth mentioning). Like all rich communities that have money left over after paying the politicians and the teachers, and paving roads until they are satin smooth, they have to think of something catchy next, a signature project that says loudly that we are filthy rich and we have cash to burn.

Some places build bridges. Saratoga built stone pillars. On the median of a wide boulevard connecting Saratoga and an adjoining town, Sunnyvale, they decided to erect 13 pillars, part of a $3 million city beautification undertaking. As you enter the city, you first encounter four waist-high, stubby boulders followed by a cluster of nine bigger ones about nine feet tall, perhaps suggesting that you have reached the top of the money pile. This public art work cost $40,000 which is really play money here (90% of that is probably designer fee since the structures appear to be nothing more than Home Depot rocks and mortar).

Now that it's all finished, nobody likes it. In a recent survey, only one in 80 city residents thought it looked okay, an approval rate lower than Bush has been getting this year, and you know that spells big trouble. High school students have their pillar jokes. More serious critics derided the pillars as Stonehenge wannabes, or a creation out of the Flintstones, the subject of ridicule in a town most careful about its prestige and image.

Then there was the matter of bad luck. In a city split 70% "Westerners" and 30% Asian, the Westerners didn't like the fact that there were 13 pillars in total. The Chinese complained about the four smaller rocks at the front, since the number four symbolizes death for them. And feng-shui experts said that the design violated basic harmony principles and because it didn't flow smoothly, did not provide good life energy to the surroundings. And Madame Bousseau the Psychic looked at her crystal ball and proclaimed that the tapering tops of the rocks may attract unwelcome visitors from the ether.

Even the mayor and members of the city council who originally voted in favor of the project, are now unanimously against it. They talked about covering the pillars with latticework and vines, or placing wooden beams across the pillars to soften their appearance, but in the end, voted to spend another $15,000 to simply knock down the entire thing. One councilwoman, Kathleen King, summarized it best, "You can't gild a turd."

I took a quick poll of the many designer dogs favored by the rich in the area, and they also agreed that the rocks should go. In the competition of dog marking, the cute poodles and bison frises always lose to blue-collar big dog invaders from nearby cities, like Siberian Huskies. I hope they replace the pillars with lots of tall trees, or lots of fire hydrants. It's good for the feng-shui.

2006-04-08T06:57:00.000-07:00

An Utter Embarrassment
A dog escaped from his yard and was on the run for two years, surviving by raiding garbage cans and getting handouts from neighbors. So how do you capture him?

That's what happened to Sam, a golden retriever in Stratham, New Hampshire, who ran away from his home with Reg and Dennis Sklarski in 2004. He didn't go far but stayed in the nearby woods and spent his days and nights just cruising the roads. Over the months and years, neighbors often spotted Sam and called the Sklarskis, but they were unable to track him down and entice him back. In January, they brought in experts armed with infrared cameras and tried to trap him with a remote-controlled net, but to no avail. They then used a helicopter to do aerial searching but missed him repeatedly with a tranquilizer gun. Short of calling in the FBI and Homeland Security, they were nearly out of options.

In March, the SPCA got involved and set up a new trap with their own remote-controlled net. All the town folks who had been leaving food out for Sam agreed to stop. It took five weeks, but on Wednesday, volunteers spotted Sam in the area and watched him approach the contraption on a video monitor. Sam was cautious. He sniffed the air and the ground and looked from side to side, and slowly crept toward the food dish. When he was directly under the target, they dropped the wide net. He still almost managed to get away, receiving a cut lip in the attempt, but he was finally caught. The bait? A big, juicy piece of ham.

It's just sad beyond belief. For two years, this dog did the species proud, being sly, cunning and resourceful, surviving tough New England winters and living the good care-free dog life. And to give up all of that over a piece of ham? Totally shameful. Let me tell you, a Siberian husky under the same circumstances would have been halfway to Nome, dining on wild rabbits, coyotes and buffaloes and generally living the high life. And if they wanted to catch us, it would have taken a lot more than ham and a stupid net. Maybe ham with Cheez-It on top, or perhaps a ham candlelight dinner with a husky babe at the very minimum. Now, would someone rub my belly, please?

2006-04-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

Are we floating yet?
I wrote yesterday about the persistent rain we've had in California during March and even now going into April. Californians are thoroughly confused, and that goes well beyond their legendary inability to drive on wet roads. There is probably not a single umbrella or raincoat anywhere in the state. Life here normally comes to a standstill when it rains. People stay home waiting for it to end -- usually in the next two minutes, but this time it hasn't stopped in the last two months. And since houses in this area tend to be small with even smaller yards, people are just going crazy with adults, kids and beasts all crammed into tiny spaces. What's a sun worshipper to do?

A Dutchman, Johan Huibers, seems to have figured it out. He is building a replica of Noah's Ark, and plans to set sail from his home near Amsterdam in September and navigate the canals of the Netherlands. So far he has used 1200 trees and spent over a million dollars on the structure which is about the length of a football field, supposedly one fifth the size of the original (which was built large enough for cyclops and gargantuans). Huibers is doing that, he says, to renew interest in Christianity and teach young children about the Bible. The ark will be part religious monument, part floating zoo.

He said that the idea came to him in a nightmare that Holland was flooded. Just as Noah built an ark to save creatures of the world, Huibers plans to house 300 farmyard animals on his boat, including horses, lambs, rabbits and chicken, most of them baby animals to save space. No huskies though. He is probably justified in his fear that the dogs will exercise their natural superiority and dominate (through eating) the other animals, and leave him with a petting zoo full of huskies -- nothing wrong with that, but their howl might keep him and the Mrs. up at night. Like most wives, she was already thinking that her husband's ark has a few screws loose and has told him to go "dig wells in Ethiopia." That must be the Dutch equivalent of "pounding sand" or "flying a kite," except that in this case a well will just produce even more water than we know what to do with.

At any rate, I agree with Huibers. The rainy situation calls for firm action. I am on my way to Home Depot for more lumber and duct tape, and we set sail tonight. Are you with me (or are you with the weather terrorists)?

2006-04-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

Check the calendar, check the map
When you are born in California or move permanently to the state, the first thing you get is a California Bill of Rights, which basically says that you are entitled to sunny blue skies and 75F weather year round. And when I say sunny blue skies, I mean exactly that -- just vast stretches of blue and nothing else. Kids in California have no idea what it's like to look up at puffy white clouds floating in the atmosphere and imagine cow heads, space ships or Janet Jackson having another wardrobe malfunction. It's better for their mental health that way. There are other minor things also, like two "pho" (Vietnamese noodle) restaurants and Chinese supermarkets in every neighborhood, a Costco store every ten miles and an Ikea every fifteen.

Of course you also get a second bill which requires you to pay at least half a million dollars for the tiniest old shack about to fall over every time the ground shakes (I almost forgot, shaking is another thing you get for free). You must also pay a 20% price premium for very regular gasoline so that sheiks can build their castles in the sand and Alaskans can put up bridges to somewhere nobody lives (Alaskans get upset when you call them bridges to nowhere, and they retaliate by calling you ex-cats and dirty names like that).

But those sunny blue skies are beginning to seem like a cruel illusion, just like the Alaskan bridges. This March, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland and just about every city in the Bay Area broke records for the highest number of rainy days in the month. San Francisco had 25 days of rain out of 31, and San Jose had 21. Thunderstorms, creek floods and landslides everywhere. Precipitation is up 30% over average. I know it's not a lot compared to some other places, but doggone it, we pay for our beautiful weather, and we expect it.

March was supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, but it's pouring again today, and the forecast is for more of the same next week. So much for these dumb lion and lamb animals. How about weather for huskies? It is painful to watch the guys tiptoe around in the grass to do their business. Those dainty big feet are made to run a thousand miles through snow to Nome, not to dance around in wet mud.

One time many years ago we were traveling through the Southwest of the U.S., visiting New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. Those states have very similar landscape in places, and the trip was getting long and tiring. There were days when we got up in the morning and went out to the car, and looking at the unfamiliar surroundings, we often had to stop ourselves to think, where are we today?

So really, where are we today? What happened to our California? And if you have our Sun, we want it back.

2006-03-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

I Didn't Write This Blog
Most people seem to believe that the web can be a very anonymous place. Unless you choose to reveal your true identity, you can just make up some silly username, and email away, chat, blog and live an imaginary life without anyone knowing the real you or your dirty secrets. If you like to listen to Patsy Cline or Jessica Simpson in your spare time, that's between you and your iPod.

Well that's not true anymore. For example a federal prosecutor named David Lat in Newark, New Jersey (where there is a great need for prosecuting) pretended to be a young, sexy female associate at a law firm and started an irreverent gossip blog called Underneath Their Robes about judges, including Supreme Court judges. That went on for nearly a year until he included too many details that allowed readers to figure him out. He was soon forced to resign. The judges were not pleased (the rumor was correct -- some don't wear pants under the robes), and his blog followers were upset that he wasn't really a sexy female writer.

Then this week in Iwate, Japan, a policeman also had to resign when his blog identity was exposed. Almost three years ago, he went to the police stockroom and took photographs of official-issue handguns, and posted them on his web page. The idea, he said, was to generate more interest and traffic to his blog, because the guns looked so cool. Poor guy, he must be leading a pathetic, boring life, if he has nothing to write about and has to resort to pictures of guns to bring in readers. Why can't he post about his trip to Barnes and Noble or to the ice show like everyone else? But, this is Japan where guns are cool (unlike in the U.S.) He even went to the trouble of blurring parts of the gun pictures, but some nosy person still recognized the source and turned him in. Today he is still boring, but unemployed.

Which leads me to my confession for today. I am really not a dog, not even a guy as some of you apparently think, despite my love of big motors and duct tape. I am actually a female triple-murder convict in Lompoc state prison. I am told that I look a lot like Marilyn Monroe (at least in the front). I do have some back hair, but I am nowhere nearly as cute and fluffy as the picture above would suggest. And I don't have a job, so you can't make me resign. So there.

2006-03-25T08:47:00.000-08:00

No-Poop Alert
Last Sunday a 15-year old boy in Batavia, Ohio, was shot dead by his neighbor for walking across the neighbor's lawn. Larry Mugrage was on his way home when he supposedly took a short cut and was confronted by 66-year old retiree Charles Martin in front of his house. According to police, Martin then shot the teen twice -- the first shot missed but the second hit him in the back below the shoulder blade. Martin calmly called 911 after the incident and said simply "I just killed a kid."

Martin complained that he's been harassed by neighborhood kids including Mugrage for years, and he finally "just blew up." Residents of this well-kept suburb of Cincinnati say that Martin maintains his lawn with meticulous care, measuring his grass length to the inch. He has been upset and called police previously when he felt that his lawn was invaded or violated by neighbors when they were mowing their own lawns.

I know that this blog has often covered poop topics and indulged in juvenile toilet humor -- after all, poop is one of the many things dogs do well, besides eating, sleeping, breeding, blogging and sled pulling (of course not necessarily in that order). But the message today is No More Poop. Or if you absolutely must go, look left, look right, check for anal gun-toting homeowners first then dump fast. Dig a hole and hide the evidence. And best of all, wear Kevlar-reenforced underpants when you roam the neighborhood.

2006-03-19T06:50:00.000-08:00

Sweet Huskies
The last few months have been a very busy sports season for huskies. First the Yukon Quest in Alaska and the Winter Olympics in Italy, then back to Alaska again for the Iditarod which is about to conclude in the next day or two. Now comes basketball.

Your first reaction might be "Basketball?! What are you talking 'bout Willis?" but it's really true. Huskies are in basketball too, and doing quite well, thank you very much. Yesterday the University of Washington Huskies edged out Illinois in a slight upset, 67-64, to advance to the "Sweet 16" of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Today, the University of Connecticut Huskies will go up against Kentucky. There is no guarantee, of course, but Connecticut is seeded No. 1 while Kentucky is No. 8, so if things go as predicted, there will be two Huskies teams in the Final 16. No other species is as well represented, no Indians, bisons, lions, eagles, grizzlies or stupid wildcats.

That just goes to show how tough and athletic huskies are, in addition to being just good-looking, humorous and charming. Not to mention modest too. Ski, run, shoot, blog, outdoors, indoors, we can do it all.

There remains a human conspiracy against dogs in football and baseball. That is quite a problem since huskies have a strong need to play year round. But man is trying to keep us down with silly ball throwing requirements, using the lack of opposable thumbs to put canines at an unfair disadvantage. We are not too worried though. There is a petition under way to change the rules of the games -- upon acceptance, balls must be chased down and caught by mouth only, with tail wagging. We'll see who wins now.

2006-03-18T05:26:00.000-08:00

Hail to the King
Jeff King won the 2006 Iditarod on Tuesday, completing the 1112-mile brutal journey in 9 days 11 hours 11 minutes 36 seconds. He'd already won the race three other times and finished in the top five an impressive nine times. However, the last previous championship came in 1998, and recent runs have been dominated by non-Alaskans, Doug Swingley from Montana and Robert Sorlie from Norway -- it's amazing that the Norwegian dogs have to fly all the way to Alaska and still win.

King started racing in 1980 and finished 28th in his first Iditarod attempt the next year. Since then, he and his dogs have logged over 100,000 miles, four times the circumference of the Earth, almost half the distance from here to the Moon, the length of seven gazillion dollar bills placed end to end, or the amount we have spent in Iraq to stop weapons of mass destruction, that sort of things. No matter how you measure it, a long way, a lot of hard doggy steps.

The winning time this year wasn't the fastest, not even in the top five. The record was 8 days 23 hours achieved in 2002. But this year's run has been among the toughest, with bitter cold and pounding wind most of the way. It's just possible that global warming hasn't quite reached Alaska yet thanks to our good friends at Greenpeace (don't email me; register your complaints at 1-800-NO2-ANWR). Last Friday when King reached Ruby, roughly 2/3 of the way home in 30 below weather, he looked like a grizzled old dog himself, all bundled up in thick fur, his face wind-burned and a big block of ice hanging from his mustache. It was almost as if he was on the last rung of evolution from man to dog. No wonder he deserves so richly to win.

2006-03-12T05:42:00.000-08:00

The True Path of Evolution
Unless you never went to school or are a television evangelist like Pat Robertson (or both), you probably grew up learning that from amoeba evolved fish which later became amphibians, then reptiles, then monkeys and finally man. Somewhere in there we ended up with George W. Bush and Angelina Jolie, but it was not exactly clear how. The basic idea in this theory is that creatures went from zero legs to four legs then back to two. The illogic of this sequence has never been explained. People were too busy debating things like creationism and intelligent design, and ignored the real issue. Mostly they were happy to think that man (or usually woman) came out on top of the food chain -- a very human-centric and probably wrong vision, of course, but it suited them just fine.

Well now there is new, contradictory evidence. British and Turkish scientists recently discovered a Kurdish family in a remote corner of southern Turkey who can walk naturally only on all fours. The five brothers and sisters, age 18 to 34, can stand up on two legs but only for a short time, with both knees and head flexed. They typically move on two palms and two feet, but rather than walking on their knuckles like chimpanzees and gorillas, they use their palms like heels with fingers angled up from the ground. The scientists believe that this behavior allows them to protect their fingers for more delicate and dextrous activities so important to mankind.

While the scientists are continuing their studies, I think that this finding provides the critical missing link needed to resolve the two-legs vs four-legs puzzle. The two-legs phase was really a failed, temporary experiment of nature, and things are now returning to the four-legs standard. The complete evolution flow turns out to be amoeba-fish-amphibian-reptile-monkey-man-dog, and this family in Turkey is in the final step of making the ultimate transition from man to dog. First they change the way they walk, pretty soon they will be scratching themselves with their rear legs, sniffing each other's butts, and they will start barking and howling like dogs do. It is dog, not man, that frolics happily at the apex of the evolution race.

Remember that you read it here first. By the way, I would like to be known from this point on as Charles Darwoof. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a school board meeting to go to...

2006-03-11T22:50:00.000-08:00

A Canine Tribute
It's well known that dogs get no respect. Shadow didn't receive the Oscar for Best Actor this year, and Chevy didn't win gold at the Torino Olympics. What a travesty! It's a vast human conspiracy. I strongly demand an independent investigation commission.

Last year the newspaper USA Today ran a series on the top ten worst jobs in sports -- "worst" as in toughest and most under-appreciated, and coming in at No 5 wasn't Bode Miller, but it was the Iditarod sled dog. I bring this up because we are entering the second week of Iditarod 2006, and these canine athletes deserve a lot more recognition and press than Barry Bonds and similar flops have been getting.

A few supporting facts: For this race, a dog and 15 of his buddies have to pull a sled and musher over 1100 miles of Alaska wilderness from Anchorage to Nome, through steep mountain climbs, frozen rivers and open sea ice. They endure the most extreme conditions -- this year's weather features mostly sub-10 to sub-40 degree temperatures in the interior of Alaska, and they wear nothing but their own fur and an occasional bootie. The top teams run at 14 miles per hour, certainly no less than 7-8 mph in the most difficult sections, faster than some people travel on a bicycle. If recent trends are any indication, the winners will likely make the trek in less than 10 days, reaching Nome sometime on Tuesday. Even the slowest team will complete it in about 14 days if they don't scratch.

So I would say that USA Today got it almost right. Except that the Iditarod dog should be number 1 among tough athletes, but we won't quibble. But everyone who reads this should take the opportunity to give your doggies, big and small, couch potatoes and active huskies like me, an extra biscuit (with a generous dollop of Cheez-It on top), and a good dose of ear and belly rub tonight. If you don't, I swear, I'll sic Bode on you.

2006-03-05T06:01:00.000-08:00

The Power of Poo
Oil barons and sheiks everywhere must be trembling in their sandals this week. Maybe Alaskans in their snow boots too.

Scientists at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan just announced that they have discovered a way to extract gasoline from cattle dung. Their method is to process the cow dung in a pressure cooker at 300C, in the presence of metal catalysts that remain top secret, like the Kentucky Fried Chicken herbs and spices. Perhaps they used the same ingredients for the cow dung that the Colonel used for his chicken -- how do you really know it's not true?

I feel sorry for Mrs. Tanaka when her husband scientist returned the pressure cooker he borrowed one day for some "quick and simple experiment at the lab." No wonder men are always told to stay out of the kitchen. This does remind me though, that the Japanese seem to have a special fascination for cooking poop. I don't know why -- could it be the seaweed and the tofu they eat?

But, I digress. The yield is not bad. They got 1.4 milliliters of gasoline for every 100 grams of cow dung. Now multiply that by the 550,000 tons of poop produced annually by Japanese cattle alone, and plug all of that into a supercomputer to take out the metric nonsense. I came up with over 2 million gallon of premium 89-octane liquid, enough to power all the SUVs in California for a round trip from Los Angeles to Yosemite on Memorial Day weekend, without using dog sleds.

Now I am sure everyone must be wondering about the smell. Not to worry. Another group of Japanese researchers at Sekisui Chemical Co. has successfully extracted an aromatic ingredient of vanilla from cattle dung. Did I mention that these folks are obsessed with poop? Nevertheless, this ingredient, vanillin, can be used as fragrance in shampoo and candles, or to make cow dung gasoline smell like Betty Crocker Rich and Creamy^TM chocolate cake. Unless, of course, it already does.

2006-03-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

The Usual Suspects
Police in West Bend, Wisconsin, are searching for criminals who made off with about $26,000 worth of beer from a delivery truck two weeks ago. The thieves drove away a semi trailer loaded with beer parked at a distributor lot around February 17, and returned the empty truck four days later. According to company inventory, the loot included 384 24-packs of Miller Genuine Draft cans, 560 18-packs of MGD 12-ounce bottles, 980 18-packs of MGD 12-ounce cans and 40 24-packs of Miller Light 16-ounce plastic bottles. This must be the honest, Midwest kind of criminals that care about only the beer and not the truck.

The sheriff department is aggressively investigating in order to prevent the biggest party ever held in Wisconsin. They know they will have a bad case of law and order if a nasty argument of tastes great-less filling were to erupt among temperamental cheeseheads. By using time-tested crime-solving procedures, police started focusing on a short list which initially included the 9,574 male residents of the small town, minus kids less than seven years old. By further narrowing down to people who drink cheap tasteless beer, they now have only 8,992 suspects left to pursue. If they haven't caught the criminals by next week, their plan is to bring in search dogs. I have volunteered just in case. Burp...

2006-02-26T05:35:00.000-08:00

Siberian Huskies at the Movies
Dogs are going places. In case you haven't noticed, there is a movie out about Siberian Huskies doing typical Husky things, like thriving in brutal cold weather and being smart, strong and heroic. The movie, Eight Below, centers around sled dogs that have to fend for themselves in Antartica's frozen tundra when abandoned by a team of researchers during a severe storm. The "Eight" in the title refers to the eight canines in the movie, not the temperature which is probably minus 172, where Celsius and Fahrenheit no longer matter.

This magnificent tale of courage is based on a true story, and that shouldn't surprise anyone who knows dogs and huskies in particular. You are not going to find cats (ha!) even try to survive the California outdoors. Maybe penguins are tough, but all they do is march, then stand there all winter and breed. The amazing cast include six siberians and two malamutes, Maya, Shadow, Max, Dewey, Buck, Old Jack, Shorty and Truman, and a few human supporting actors... whose names I forgot, Jerry and Davis something. Fortunately people are mostly off the screen so the dogs can do their thing being charismatic and brave.

Eight Below was top dog at the box office last week and will probably stay there all year. The current competition is a romantic chick flick "Date Movie," a pathetic remake of "The Pink Panther" and a man-monkey story in "Curious George." If there is any justice in this world, Shadow should win Best Actor at the Oscars this year. After all, he combines the rugged looks of Clint Eastwood, the exotic charm of R2-D2 and the legs of Sharon Stone. All four of them, unshaved (Shadow, that is, not Sharon. I think).

2006-02-25T06:01:00.000-08:00

Siberian Huskies at the Olympics
It took a long time, but the Olympics have finally decided to let the dogs in. No, we are not talking about Bode Miller and we are not talking about dogsledding as a winter sport at the Torino Games.

What happened is that Daron Rahlves, a member of the U.S. Ski Team, and his wife Michelle, have a Siberian Husky named Chevy. The dog is their constant companion so it's natural that he would go to Turin also. Since they are staying in a motor home outside the Olympic Village, there is enough room for the couple and dog and no one is complaining. Officially Chevy is not a member of the squad, but he has an authentic badge issued by the U.S. Olympic Committee with his dog grin picture on it and labeled "Chevy Rahlves -- Security/Skiing." Most of the time though, he gets through security gates and checkpoints with just the usual patented Husky face lick. Click on the picture for extra nose action.

Chevy tried to enter the giant slalom event last week but was kicked off when the Americans caught him fraternizing with the Swedish Babe Ski Patrol. That doesn't bother him much though - he's still got the same number of medals as that other guy Bode.

2006-02-20T06:02:00.000-08:00

A Sticky Solution
People sometimes laugh at duct tape as the universal repair tool for men everywhere, but really, what would you do without duct tape?

Here is a case in point. A couple of German backpackers in New Zealand decided to buy a Toyota van for their travels around the country. After driving over 200 miles from Christchurch to Marlborough, they had to stop this week at a repair garage when the windshield suddenly collapsed. The shop folks were stunned to find that the roof pillars had completely rusted away, and supporting the van roof was nothing but a combination of putty, aluminum foil, kitchen steel wool and toilet paper painted over.

With help from the shop manager, the tourists were able to locate the former owner who agreed to refund half the selling price of the van, which was about US$ 850. Obviously the owner felt that he had stuffed at least $400 worth of toilet paper into holes in the roof pillars. I'm sure you realize by now that if that van had been fixed properly with just a $1 roll of duct tape, none of this series of unfortunate events would have occurred. Either that or they should travel by dog sled the next time. Duct tape and sled dogs are some of the few things guaranteed to be indestructible.

2006-02-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

Japanese DMV
Complaining about the Department of Motor Vehicles seems to be as American as arguing Coke vs. Pepsi (I dislike both, so sue me -- OK, that's American too). But, if you hate DMV that much, why don't you get out of the country and move to Japan? Seriously, you'll like their system much better.

Last month, a driver's license office in Fukuoka Prefecture in southern Japan mistakenly showed a porn video during a lecture on driving laws. Japanese drivers are required to visit the center and take a refresher class in order to renew their driver's licenses. About 1600 people were listening to the lecture in nine separate rooms at the time, and not a single person objected. Either they were dozing off or they were surprised to learn new, unusual techniques for blowing the horn and making an emergency detour.

An official at the center has apologized profusely and said that measures have been taken so that mistake will never happen again. From now on, the director will personally watch every DMV video himself to make sure it has no entertainment value whatsoever.

2006-02-18T06:33:00.000-08:00

You Lovable Huggable Tree
Because it's a brainy school, Stanford University doesn't have "ferocious Huskies" or "avenging Indians" for mascots. Instead, their mascot is a tree -- seriously, a redwood tree, based on the city of Palo Alto where it is located (The city's name means "tall tree" in Spanish). At football and basketball games, they have a woman dressed as a tree prance around as the band plays. It's hard to look menacing when you are a tree, so there is a lot of prancing and jumping, and not much else.

That's what you would think. Now the woman, Erin Lashnits, a senior student in biology, has been fired for being drunk on the job. Supposedly she was taking drinks from a flask inside the tree during a basketball game two weeks ago, and police said they could see the flask under the costume. They gave her a breath analyzer test and found that her blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit for driving. It didn't matter that trees don't drink and drive. A spokesman for the band said that "the tree's movement was consistent with that of someone who's had something to drink." Stanford people must know their trees better than most of us. Their decision was final: The tree was axed, and told to "leave."

I feel bad for Lashnits. After all, she was taking her job seriously to be like a tree, and obviously she needed to be watered. I am thinking to invite her to be a mascot for my household. The dogs are all in favor.

2006-02-12T06:05:00.000-08:00

All That Glitters
The Japanese seem to be fascinated with Olympic food. First McDonald's Japan introduced Torino-themed food such as cheesy potato balls and a chicken hamburger with tomato sauce. Now an Italian restaurant in Hokkaido, northern Japan has started selling a spaghetti (that makes it Italian) topped with a sauce containing pure gold flakes (that gives it an Olympic flavor). The idea is to show support for the nine athletes from the nearby Tokachi region competing at the Winter Games.

How noble. Each serving gets a sprinkling of about 0.1 grams of pure gold, and sells for 1600 yen (that's US $14 for you metric-challenged readers). Since gold is currently selling at roughly 10,000 yen per gram, that means each dish has 1000 yen worth of gold and only 600 yen of spaghetti.

By my calculations based on the cost of food over there, that works out to three strands of noodles, a teaspoon of tomato sauce, and since this is Japanese spaghetti, two slices of cucumber, five peas and a sprig of parsley. The chef, Naruto Azuma, worries that he will lose money if demand is too high. He just might have to cut down to three peas, and drop the parsley. Or he can buy a few pipe fittings from the hardware store and give each customer several shavings of bronze instead. That's what you get for not finishing first.

And here is this blog's contribution to our Olympic athletes:

Click on cartoon for bigger donuts

2006-02-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

Numbskull
Robert Peatie from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, was arrested last week for allegedly taking morphine from his mother's intravenous system just after she died. A nurse said that she walked into his mother's room at Cape Cod Hospital and found him standing next to the IV stand, trying to squeeze morphine from the drip bag into his water bottle. He asked for a minute more, and fled when she asked him to leave. Police charged him with larceny of a controlled substance and possession of morphine.

A judge has ordered Peatie held on $2,000 bail after a hearing on Wednesday in Barnstable Superior Court. His next scheduled court date is Feb. 17. I hope the judge shows some leniency. After all, poor Robert has just lost his mother and is feeling very numb.

On a different but very important subject, the cartoon below is being presented in honor of the Yukon Quest, also known as "Toughest Sled Dog Race in the World," which starts today in Fairbanks, Alaska and covers 1000 miles to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory during the depths of Arctic winter.

Click on cartoon for bigger dog

2006-02-05T00:05:00.000-08:00

A Giant Sucking Sound
The Sewer and Water District for the city of Star, near Boise, Idaho, asked all children in town to simultaneously flush their toilets yesterday at exactly 2 pm, to help them test the capacity of the newly built sewage treatment plant.

For the past few weeks, the District has been giving away packets of red Kool-Aid which they wanted the kids to empty into the toilets just before flushing. By their estimates, a red surge should hit the treatment facility 30 minutes later, and if things work as designed, the water should come out clean, clear and completely potable on the outlet side. At stake is whether the $5.2 million plant upgrade is capable of supporting the town growth, from just 650 people in 1990 to more than 3000 now.

Since The Big Flush of Idaho was completed only yesterday, there is no final conclusion yet on the results. But I don't know why they went through all that trouble. First, it was a silly and dangerous idea to suddenly move so much water. It could have shifted the center of gravity of the Earth, changing the spin speed and accelerating global warming. I heard that our planet is really fragile. Second, if they really must test the sewer plant, they could just wait until Superbowl today. If the plant can take the tidal wave of beer flushes at half-time, then they can be sure that it can handle anything. Or they can simply ask us dogs. We would have been happy to tell them to not worry, the toilet water is perfectly drinkable even without Kool-Aid and without treatment.

2006-02-04T03:23:00.000-08:00

Il Mac Grande Terribile
To celebrate the upcoming Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, McDonald's Japan plans to launch three "Italian-themed" food selections during a one-month promotion period starting next week.

The first is an espresso-flavored milkshake, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. The second is bite-sized cheesy-potato balls. My guess is that it is french fry paste formed into little balls and topped with Cheez Whiz -- at least that's what I would do if someone asked me to make cheesy potato balls. The third offering is a tomato-stewed chicken hamburger. Now I don't understand why there is chicken in hamburger (although I suppose it's better than soy), and why some people seem to think that just putting tomato into anything makes it Italian. Maybe they should throw in a few cucumber slices and call it Japanese-Italian "mixed" hamburger. As an aside, that was one thing I learned while in Japan, that "mixed" is the Japanese word for cucumber. There is "mixed" spaghetti, "mixed" pizza, "mixed" sandwich. Unless they also add corn, in which case it is called "mixed special."

Which goes to show that Japanese food is weird, but Italian food is weirder. The Italians eat cheesy balls and chicken hamburgers. I hope they don't get mad cow bird flu.

2006-02-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

Calvin!
Click on cartoon to enlarge

2006-01-29T06:05:00.000-08:00

Meow I help you?
A Japanese design firm is offering for sale or lease a robot receptionist -- the cost is 50000 yen or about US $425 per month, which they claim is 1/6 the cost of a human receptionist. If you have ever been to Japan, you'd know that the receptionist in many stores is there to just smile, and say "Welcome" when a customer walks in, and "Thank you very much" when he leaves. In Japanese, of course. In busier shops, they have two or three receptionists, and sometimes the store owner and the staff in the back also chime in, so you get "Welcome" in stereo, with Dolby 5.1 clarity. Quite impressive I think. And they do this with a lot more enthusiasm than an Alaska Airlines flight attendant greeting you onboard. Hundreds of times a day if they must.

So the requirements for a Japanese receptionist are tough. How do you clone a smile that says nothing of substance but appears pleasant and comforting all day long? The obvious answer is a cat. In this case it's a plastic cat, but they probably could have used a live cat with the same cheap effect. The company, Business Design Laboratory, came up with a Hello Kitty Robo, modeled after that well known Hello Kitty cat that is so loved by Japanese kids and adults alike, for reasons I will never understand.

You can go to their web page to learn more about the cat's personality (she loves baking cookies and her most prized possession is an album full of memories, just like Miss Universe, but she didn't say that she wants to help the children of the world). You can also hear short snippets of her voice. Turn the speakers down though -- she sounds shrill even for a cat, and she says things like "I can't wait to come to your home and talk with you." Whoa there, helloooo Kitty. There is also a whole page on how she displays her emotions by turning her head, raising her arms, or flashing her whiskers. Go ahead, try it, you can spend hours engaging Kitty in a very illuminating conversation. Just be careful -- she might know shorthand.

For me, I don't know. There is always this dog-cat rivalry thing. I might get in trouble for attacking her the first time she meows at me. I think I'd prefer something more like a Walmart greeter.

2006-01-28T06:15:00.000-08:00

What do you think you are, a dog?

Click on cartoon for larger view

Sometimes people try too hard to be like dogs, even when they know they don't come close as a species. Last Sunday in New York City, a group that calls themselves Improv Everywhere organized their fifth annual No Pants subway ride. The idea was to bring together 160 participants on the No. 6 train at 5 pm, and have them all drop their pants down to their underwear. Just for fun.

Now a few things about the group which was founded in 2001. First the "Improv" in the group's name is short for "Improvise," not "Improve" as some might think. On their web page, the group slogan is "We Cause Scenes" and they say they believe in having organized fun, making people laugh, and generally bringing excitement, chaos and joy to otherwise boring locales, and giving strangers a story they can tell for the rest of their lives. Why they are based in NYC I don't know -- it seems to me that places like Nebraska and South Dakota might need their help a bit more than the Big Apple. Aside from No-Pants events, they also do things like suddenly gather in very large numbers in a public place, and disappearing just as suddenly. Now you see them and now you don't. But, I digress.

Back in New York, the subway police were not impressed this time. One cop saw 160 naked butts and freaked out, and called for reinforcement. Then 25 more cops (including one named Panton) arrived to put the fun back into trousers. After the pandemonium, police finally won the Battle of the Little Bulge. Eight performers were arrested, handcuffed and issued summons for disorderly conduct. It will be interesting when their cases come up in court and police have to present the evidence -- Your Honor, Officer Panton will testify under oath that the defendant is a sorry-ass troublemaker.

2006-01-22T06:35:00.000-08:00

It's all downhil from here
Without a doubt, the Japanese have many customs and traditions that seem weird to us, for example cheese fighting and bull sumo. But now I wonder if there isn't something very practical in what they do, and perhaps we should start copying them.

A case in point is an annual event held in mid-January in the city of Tokamachi in Western Japan, a place known for its heavy snow and its exquisite rice and soba noodles. In this winter celebration at the Matsunoyama Hot Spring resort, two recently married men first get their faces painted with ink by other jealous single men, and then are thrown down a 15-foot snow-covered slope. Afterward the participants cover each other's faces with snow mixed with ash from a bonfire, in hopes of health and prosperity.

The tradition supposedly was started a long time ago by a man who saw his girl stolen by another guy, so he organized the face-painting and hurling event as a sort of revenge. More pictures and videos here. Just click randomly until you find the right links -- it's bad enough that you read my blog, I am not going to ask you to learn Japanese too.

In the interest of fairness, maybe there are a few things the Japanese should learn from us in exchange. First of all, revenge by face painting and snow tossing is for wimps -- come on, be a real man and go grab a gun, or at least a baseball bat and whack the other guy's kneecaps. Second, according to this Japanese tradition, the new grooms are pushed down the slope by other local people while their wives wait for them at the bottom of the slide. I think the wives should do the pushing -- and prepare the men for a lifetime of proper respect and learning.

2006-01-21T06:39:00.000-08:00

Shop Here, But Don't Drop Here
Satellite map services like Google Earth and Windows Live Local are adding a new dimension to advertising. We already have store signs, sale banners, highway billboards and the Goodyear blimp. The latest creations are rooftop signs -- not signs mounted on the top of buildings but corporate logos painted directly on roofs to be seen in satellite map photos.

One example is a Target store in Rosemont, Illinois, that has the well-known red and white bull's-eye logo painted on the roof over the entire store. Since it lies on the flight paths to Chicago O'Hare International Airport, it's guaranteed to catch a lot of eyeball attention, which after all, is exactly what advertisers are looking for.

So if you are one of the rich and famous who goes shopping by personal jet, or an alien space traveller who forgot to pack your toothbrush and needs to buy one, this is an easy way to help you find the store. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we could add a simple note to follow Interstate 90 West, then turn North on Higgins Road, go 2 miles and look for the sign. Pretty nifty concept. Or if you are gift-bearing Santa Claus who somehow misses my house, I'll be happy to paint milk and cookies on my roof for you. Just don't be an Air Force pilot on a bombing practice run.

2006-01-15T06:24:00.000-08:00

Mother-In-Law Nature
It's raining again today, and I think there is enough evidence to declare that this 2005-06 winter weather sucks. That is according to the official definition of "sucks," as opposed to "blows" and other advanced meteorological concepts. Oh I know it's only mid-January, and it's nowhere nearly as wet here as in Seattle (27 straight days of rain and counting), or Ketchikan, Alaska (over 200 inches of rain in a year). And I know there are places in Texas, Colorado and Oklahoma that are suffering from drought and fire, and can only wish they had some of our water.

But we live in California, and we pay for the privilege of perfect weather, 75 degrees and vast cloudless blue skies supposedly year round. Water should come only in aqueducts and plastic bottles. Or in the form of snow, something a dog can play in. It's pathetic to watch dogs tiptoe on the grass to find a relatively dry spot to poop (it's always drier on the other side of the fence, I tell them, especially under the neighbor's porch).

Every weekend for the past month, I've had to clean leaves out of the gutters (this is where the "weather blows" part comes in). And pick up dozens of palm fronds scattered on the lawn (fronds are those gigantic leaves of palm trees). Now one thing about palm trees. Perhaps they do capture the warm beauty of California, elegantly gracing Hollywood Boulevard, but that's from a distance. Up close they are as ugly and droopy as an actress without make-up, especially when they are planted in postage stamp gardens as found in most new homes around here. All you see is the huge tree trunk, and the swaying fronds are a hundred feet up out of sight, big and clumsy and ready to drop each time a strong wind blows. Palm trees officially suck.

The only good thing I can find in all this messy weather is that although it's been raining cats and dogs, I haven't seen any felines dropping in on my house. Yet.

2006-01-14T06:32:00.000-08:00

Doggie Heaven
2006 being Year of the Dog, I've been wishing for, among other things, fire hydrants every quarter mile. When dogs have to go, dogs have to go. I never really thought that would come true, since fire hydrants have been disappearing faster than rotary phones and highway call boxes, or clothing off Paris Hilton.

Yesterday on my way to work I drove past an industrial park where they were putting down new concrete sidewalks. It was difficult to believe but along several streets, there had to be new fire hydrants no further than every 200 feet. A good part of the area was still empty land or unoccupied buildings, and it was hard to imagine a reason for so many hydrants. Maybe someone forgot to tell us that our canine petition has been granted.

No matter what, it was a beautiful sight to behold. Row upon row of bright yellow fire hydrants so inviting that I thought of getting out of the car to christen them. This one is for Rover, that one is for Max, and KalKan after that, and the rest is mine, all mine mine mine.

2006-01-08T08:06:00.000-08:00

Biggest sale EVER
In April I wrote about a store in Fremont, CA (about 10 miles from San Jose) that was shrinking by half. Normally that wouldn't be big news, but Tri-City claimed at one time to be the largest sporting goods store in the world -- there was a sign outside the store saying so, so it must be true. They occupied two large buildings side by side, a total of 200,000 sq ft or about four football fields, and they were definitely big. They sold all sorts of things, for popular American sports like football, baseball and basketball, but also for sports played more commonly in European and Asian countries, like ping-pong, badminton and in-line skating. I looked there once, but there was nothing for dog sledding. Maybe that was their biggest problem.

A few years ago they added patio furniture and garden furnishings such as large water fountains to the business, and their web site logo was changed to "World's Largest Sporting Goods and Patio Furniture Store." They could be the only such store anywhere, but why argue. In April, they dropped out of the furniture business, and closed one of the buildings which was promptly demolished to make room for some other construction which is still continuing today. At that time the sign at the entrance was shortened to simply "Tri-City." I didn't go in but as far as I knew, they could be selling Chinese take-out food inside.

I drove by the store yesterday, and there was a new big sign this time, "Sale - Going Out Of Business." It didn't say, but I wonder if it's the world's biggest sale. I'll have to come back and snap a few pictures -- I mean, how often do you get to witness such a momentous event?

I am worried for Fremont's reputation now. This store was one of Fremont's few claims to fame, the other claims being that figure skating champion Kristi Yamaguchi grew up there, and that the city was designated the healthiest city in the US by a men's health magazine a few years ago. Hardly exciting stuff. I am thinking that somebody should go there and open the World's Largest Cuckoo Clock and Garden Fertilizer Store. It doesn't need to be very big, but I bet it's never been done before.

2006-01-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

The Anti-Ant
I have an ant problem, or rather, I had an ant problem. It started last year during the rainy season -- otherwise known as California winter. One day a bunch of ants appeared in one of the bathrooms, most of them going in a line from one crack in the wall behind the sink to another crack next to the bathtub, but there were also many that were just scouting randomly around the floor. That drove me nuts. It felt like taking a shower with thousands watching, without paying.

I used some caulk to fill the holes but they'd just pop out of another hole. I put down double-sided tape to block their path, but except for a few dumb ones that got stuck, the ants just went up and around the tape. Home Depot had some expensive bait -- it was basically a plastic ant take-out restaurant with an entry and an exit. Inside was the bait which the ants were supposed to grab and take home, and poison their entire colony. Ingenious idea, except that it didn't work. Maybe the bait didn't appeal to them, or maybe the contraption was too slippery, but they refused to go in, even after I added sugar to literally sweeten the pot. That went on for about two weeks. Then I came home one day to find a procession of ants from the bathroom across the living room carpet to the garage. The next morning they were gone. I didn't know where they went, but it didn't matter. The ants were gone!

They came back this year, just after Christmas when it rained almost every day for a week straight, and they showed up in the thousands in both bathrooms. Enough was enough. This called for firm action. That meant going to the Internet, that vast repository of all of mankind's knowledge. Quite a few sites suggested using borax as an all-natural ant remedy. It sounded too weird and I always thought these home solutions to be of dubious value. But then powerful sounding commercial stuff hasn't worked, so I was willing to try almost anything.

The borax was a cheap bluish powder you can find at Home Depot, next to the pest control poisons. I mixed a small amount with some sugar, added warm water to dissolve it, and placed empty yogurt cups with this liquid inside along the ant paths. The short story is that it worked beautifully. A few of the ants drowned, but most of them must have carried the stuff back to their nests and killed the rest. I don't know if their heads exploded or if they died quietly, but it was a truly miraculous result. Within three days, there were only a few random ants left, and after a week, they had all disappeared. Better than Raid, better than Combat and caulk and double-sided tape.

I know now, to never doubt the power of the Internet ever again.

2006-01-02T07:15:00.000-08:00

1-800-CAT-WORK
OK, fair is fair. Occasionally a cat will do something amazing -- truly amazing, and not amazing because we expect so little of that sub-species. When owner Gary Rosheisen of Columbus, Ohio, fell out of his wheelchair on Thursday night and couldn't get back up because of osteoporosis, his cat apparently dialed 911 and brought police to the home.

When the emergency call came through but there was no one on the line, police went over to his apartment to check things out and found Rosheisen on the floor near his bed, and his cat Tommy lying by the phone in the living room. Rosheisen said that he got the cat three years ago and has tried to train him to call 911, but he wasn't sure if the training took. It appears that the cat did remember, and decided to jump to the rescue at the moment of crisis.

I have to admit that this is a pretty cool story. Although if it had been a dog, we probably would have given the man CPR (the dog breath alone would wake him up), or if we had to call 911, we would have stayed on the phone and explained the exact situation to the police. But that's because dogs are obviously superior to cats.

Now it does seem that cats can do a lot more when they want to -- maybe these freeloaders have been pretending to be totally dumb, feeble and helpless (not a major stretch for them), just to get out of doing things and earning their keep. From now on, we should train them to be guard cats, seeing eye cats, sled cats, police cats, bomb-sniffing cats (haha I like that), etc. so we dogs can get some rest and have more time for blogging.

2006-01-01T06:55:00.000-08:00

This Is My Year
2006 is the Year of the Dog, according to the Chinese, the Japanese, the Vietnamese and probably many other people too. And they all have very ancient cultures so they should know what they are talking about. Where they might be wrong is that I think every year should be a dog year, but we are still working on that.

Several things about the Dog from the Chinese Zodiac: The Dog is a giving, compassionate personality. He offers kind words, support and advice to friends and family. He is a listener, always available to lend an ear or a shoulder to a friend in need. Often Dogs know more about their friends than their friends know about them or even themselves! Dogs are incredibly attentive.

Dogs can be a bit overwhelming, due in part to their attentive natures. They can march in and take control of a situation, even when it doesn’t involve them directly. This can lead people to think Dogs are nosy or gossipy, but in reality, he just means well. Money and status don’t matter to the Dog. He is more concerned with the welfare of his family and friends and will do whatever it takes to help them out of a tight squeeze or a rough spot. Once Dogs determine a subject of interest, they usually master that before taking off for a new adventure. They like to finish what they start. They are honest and trustworthy people, ethically strong and morally kept. They make loyal friends and companions.

Dogs are easy to get along with and generally have a ton of friends. They are supportive and calming and make exceptional friends. They don’t hold grudges or bear any bad feelings towards anyone who has treated them respectfully and justly. Dogs are excellent listeners, offering an ear to anyone in need. They are held in high regard by their friends and are loyal, honest friends.

A few things we want during our year: We like raw meat, doesn't matter if it's beef, chicken, sheep, buffalo or kangaroo. We also like soft white bread with peanut butter. And squirrels and opossums to catch and eat -- the baby ones are most tasty. We like long walks on the beach and in the park, off leash of course. We want snowy trails miles and miles long with nothing but pine trees along the way. We like ear scratches and belly rubs after a hard run. We like traveling in SUVs with windows stuck half-open. We want fire hydrants painted bright yellow every quarter mile. And toilet bowls with automatic lid openers and music players -- playing the song "Who Let the Dogs Out?" over and over again. We want a permanent ladder to the top of the backyard shed so we can go up and have a howl chorus and wake everybody up at 3 in the morning, rooster style (Did I say we like to eat roosters?) And finally we prefer large keypads so we can write blogs easier with our big furry paws.

I am sure that the wish list will get longer, but that's a good start. You should all get going now. Oh and where did you put my breakfast kibbles?

2005-12-31T08:12:00.000-08:00

The Spirit of Columbus
I've been living in this house it seems like forever, certainly a lot longer than most Californians stay in one place. It's a one-story house, not big inside or out, but I didn't realize until recently that after all this time, there were places that I had never explored.

The discovery happened this week when I took advantage of the Christmas vacation to clean up the kitchen -- wash and reorganize the cupboard and other kitchen cabinets, throw out old food stuff and line the cabinets with new contact paper. Now that sounds about as exciting as a root canal, and that's why the job has been put off for so long, but this time orders were firm and I wanted peace in my corner of the Earth at least over the holidays.

One of the cabinets under the kitchen counter is somewhat hard to reach all the way to the back, so everyone has been avoiding it -- apparently stuff has been tossed in there but never taken out or looked at again, in an out-of-sight out-of-mind way. Quite a treasure hunt it was. First spider web everywhere, and of course where there was web there were spiders. I crushed countless tiny ones, and two big hairy guys the size of large walnuts. I felt like Frodo beating back the man-eater monsters in Return of the King.

Then five boxes of chocolate from Christmases past -- nobody here likes chocolate much (yeah I know it's hard to believe), so I guess chocolate presents were just put in there waiting to be "re-gifted." I don't know if we have a cousin or uncle, even on the "other side of the family" who wants crumbly five-year-old candies. And two wind chimes I got years ago from Japan, nice looking ones with an antique lantern design which I took out and hung under the gazebo -- the neighbors are going to love this. I hope they keep in mind that wind chimes are supposed to ward off evil thoughts, even after they listen to the cling-cling-clang sound all day long. Plus three dried-up pens, a box of 10 penny nails, and a roll of duct tape, apparently left behind by the previous house owners.

It took hours to remove the old junk, vacuum the cabinet, wipe it clean, lay down the contact paper and put things back nice and neat. But at the end, I understood how Christopher Columbus must have felt. I wasn't the first to discover the place, but I did reclaim a 5 x 5 ft piece of expensive real estate that time and man forgot.

2005-12-25T04:05:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Haiku

Warm rainy like fall
Snow flakes none I see
Is it Christmas already?

Big turkey in oven
Four hundred slow roasting
Hungry just watching

Taco Bell dollar sale
Chicken beef same low price
Faster than turkey I can tell

Crackers with goat cheese
Pumpkin or apple pie?
Another Pinot then decide

Tree up week ago
Perfect for a dog pee

Bright lights and warm glow

Wrapped presents stacked high
Chewy bone mine mine mine
But sled I want did not find

Merry Day to you all
No matter naughty or nice
I hope you got love (and no ties)

2005-12-24T06:20:00.000-08:00

Radioactive Man
An update on our citizen scientist who is trying to build a mini cyclotron in his home in Anchorage, Alaska. On Monday, Albert Swank unfortunately lost Round One. After a lengthy hearing, the Planning and Zoning Commision recommended that the city deny him a permit for the project. I say it's unfortunate because it is really a noble cause -- presently all radioactive tracer material needed to perform PET scans for cancer patients has to be flown in from Seattle, a drawback due to the short half-life of the substance -- and also because if he succeeds in building it in Alaska, that means he won't build it here, next to my house. Just joking, of course. I firmly believe that a man should be able to put a cyclotron anywhere he wants within his own home. As long as he paints it beige so it doesn't clash with the neighborhood color theme.

Swank has strong support of course, especially in the scientific community. That includes Richard Wahl, Professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins University which is donating the cyclotron, and Shawn Carlson, founder of the Society for Amateur Scientists, a group dedicated to "helping ordinary people do extraordinary science." Basically showing them how to make their own firecrackers. Carlson thinks that the cyclotron is no more dangerous than welding, for example, and people should get educated on the true risk instead of giving in to paranoia.

But most of Swank's neighbors remain opposed. First they enlisted an FBI agent to go ask questions, posing as a mailman, but the FBI man was spotted immediately and shooed away. Poor guy, he must have thought he was too smart to learn from Columbo. Did he forget the trench coat? Then the neighbors packed the city hearing and complained that Swank wanted to put a Three Mile Island reactor in the middle of a residential area. They pointed out that there are three schools, three churches and hundreds of homes nearby. And the final argument: The cyclotron can cause "death or blindness and/or sterility." Note the "and/or." It can make you die impotent. With that, the planning board decided against the building request. Sex wins again.

Swank hasn't said what he will do next. The cyclotron is being dismantled at Johns Hopkins and will soon be on its way. Maybe he should appeal, and buy everyone in his neighborhood lead underpants for Christmas.

2005-12-22T12:42:00.000-08:00

Christmas Sweets
If you bought chocolate last Friday from a See's Candies store in Saratoga, CA, you may be in for a special treat. One of the store employees believes that she lost a diamond ring while wrapping customer orders that day. The ring has a yellow and white gold band and holds three diamonds, and is valued at $3000. There were 600 customers visiting the store, and anyone of them could have unknowingly walked away with the additional nuggets.

To encourage return of the ring, Helzberg Diamonds, a jewelry store in the same parent company as See's Candies, has offered as reward any other diamond ring from one of its stores, up to a $2500 value. The story has been on the local news, but no one has come forward with the Saratoga lost ring yet. So if on Christmas Day you bite into a chocolate candy and crack a tooth, look again. It could just be your magically delicious lucky charm.

The Japanese have a different idea of how to mix diamonds and Christmas food. A department store in central Tokyo, part of the upscale Takashimaya chain in Japan, is selling a special fruitcake -- I am sure that all fruitcakes are special, but this one is truly extra special. It's a two-layer hexagonal fruitcake with rose color icing, and best of all, it's adorned with 223 diamond stones, including a five-carat heart-shaped one. Definitely not your Aunt Mabel's fruitcake passed down through five generations. The price is just 200 million yen, or about US $1.7 million, give or take a quarter. See the picture at left. Look, but don't touch. They stop selling it after Christmas, so hurry. It will keep at room temperature for up to a year. In a locked vault, I hope. And who says a fruitcake (no, not that fruitcake) cannot be a girl's best friend?

In related news, the Paris-based insurance and finance company AXA has concluded that for the second year in a row, Japanese will spend the lowest amount of money on Christmas presents among people in 11 countries surveyed. Comparing those between 25 and 54 years old, Americans spend the most, about $1340, followed by the British at $1060, then the Canadians at $860. The Japanese are dead last, giving only $160 on average. And only 57 percent of Japanese in that age bracket plan to give a present to their spouses, or boyfriends or girlfriends. Well, no wonder. Their gifts are just too damn expensive.

2005-12-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

Revenge of the Bird
Another day another boycott. People are strange, not cool and in-control like us dogs.

Over 100 people from 12 countries worked for more than a month to place 4.3 million dominoes in a chain so they can be knocked down in Guinness World Record style. I know it sounds terribly boring, but that really happened last month in the Netherlands where apparently not much else goes on (except in Amsterdam, but that's like another world). I am sure that sort of thing would appeal to Alaskans too, except they don't have 100 people and they are always busy building bridges instead of dominoes. A year ago the same Dutch group already got the official record with 4.0 million dominoes, but they wanted to try again for a better record. Most of us don't know, but domino toppling competition is intense.

But more drama and tragedy was yet to come. With only 200,000 pieces to go, a small bird flew into the room and caused 23,000 of them to crash prematurely. It could have been worse, but fortunately gaps were intentionally inserted into the chain to interrupt accidental demolition like this. The event organizers got upset and brought in an exterminator who promptly shot the bird dead. The little house sparrow turned out to be an endangered species, and animal rights and bird protection groups were even more outraged. They called for a boycott of the television company Endemol NV which sponsored the event. The exterminator received death threats. A ceremony broadcast on live TV to commemorate the bird attracted nationwide attention. And of course, a web site was set up -- as you know, there is a web site for everything, but this one managed to collect thus far over half a million visits and many thousands of condolence messages. All of this is still continuing. Maybe the Queen will lead an investigation commision next, looking for the hidden grassy knoll.

Which brings me to my confession today. I was sleeping yesterday when a fly was buzzing around my fluffy tail and woke me up, so I snapped at him with lightning-quick Siberian Husky reflex. I accidentally trapped him in my mouth and spat him out right away, but he was already woozy and died a few minutes later. I dug a small hole and buried him. I hope anyone who witnessed the incident would keep quiet, and not write about it in some dumb blog. I don't need a presidential inquiry into why and how I killed a fly.

2005-12-17T05:50:00.000-08:00

Feel the Burn
Food must be abundant on our planet Earth. First it's Americans who are obese, then Europeans, next comes Maggie the elephant in Anchorage, Alaska that needs to get on the treadmill. Now even penguins in Japan must be put on exercise routines to lose weight.

That's right -- king penguins at Asahiyama Zoo in Hokkaido, northern Japan, are getting so chubby that their keepers are taking them on 500-yard forced marches twice a day. Even then, the penguins are claiming that the webs under their silly-looking feet are so delicate that they can walk only on snow, so that limits their exercise season to the period from December until April. The rest of the year, they just snooze and get fat. Such a bunch of lazy slobs, unlike us sled dogs. These boys are pigs. P.I.G.S.

Their exercise consists mainly of that ungainly side to side waddle, hardly enough to break a sweat. Some of the penguins even belly-flop and slide on the snow to avoid walking. And there is nothing to tone those flabby little arm-wings. As a svelte Siberian Husky myself, I have several recommendations: First make those tuxedo bodies watch that movie "March of the Penguins." If these guys understand what it's like to walk single-file 70 miles in minus 100 degree mind-numbing cold just to breed, maybe they'll be a little more motivated to earn their sushi. Or have them come to Alaska and watch us run in the Yukon Quest or the Iditarod, so they appreciate what real canine athletes do for fun.

And if after all of that, the penguins still refuse to shape up, I think we should send Richard Simmons over there to teach them. I bet Richard loves penguins.

2005-12-11T06:52:00.000-08:00

Extreme Multitasking
It was bound to happen sooner or later. We already have the musical toilet, so the computer toilet can't be far behind. Many Americans are now surfing from the bathroom, according to a study led by Dr. Jeffrey Cole of the Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California. It's impressive how deep these social scientists go in their quest for knowledge. They found that over half of those who use Wi-Fi at home have used it in the bathroom. It's all because of increased availability of broadband and wireless connections, they said.

It's amazing how technology has rapidly transformed home life, and taken away the few precious moments of personal reading and quiet contemplation people have left. The toilet is no longer the place to finish yesterday's newspapers or the latest Tom Clancy novel, but increasingly to download Madonna songs onto iPods or get caught up on blogs.

At least that's how people responded. My guess is that in truth, a much higher percentage of bathroom use of computers by teenagers goes to "medical research," no different today than in the past twenty years -- only the format has changed. But they will be disappointed one of these days if they should run out of toilet paper. Magazines are a much better back-up than a laptop screen.

For the record, this blog was written for your enjoyment from a clean desk in a living room. The television was on, but there was no Madonna, no Britney Spears and no Ty-D-Bowl Man involved.

2005-12-10T06:57:00.000-08:00

Numbers
Today's post is dedicated to numbers -- no, not pi, not e or Avogadro's constant or how many times Tonya Harding whacked Nancy Kerrigan on the kneecaps. We are celebrating the number 10,000, as in 10,000 visits to my humble blog, a milestone that was reached yesterday. Probably 1000 of those hits were my own, but that still leaves a pretty decent number of other folks, some strangers and some not, but definitely more than I ever expected.

It all started quite innocently in February of this year when I decided on a whim really, to start a blog first on Xanga. When that proved too restrictive, I opened a new one on Blogspot. It was initially more or less a diary, not terribly interesting, just a dumping ground of my thoughts and recollection of things I did during the day. Ten months and 165 posts later, the blog has evolved into what it is today -- I don't know if it's any more interesting or entertaining, but it's much less about me and more about weird things in the world that catch my attention. For a dog, that's a lot of things. It's also become a fun routine for my weekend mornings, to keep me busy while I sip my breakfast coffee and try to get the brain revved up

I never imagined getting 10,000 readers of anything I write, but the web is an amazing thing. Most people come here in search of musical bidets, poop neutralizer, Smokey the Bear or sumo wrestlers, or simply because they prefer reading my blog to doing real work. Others, more gullible, are drawn in by my majestic, smiley doggy looks and my witty observations. But whatever your reasons, I see you about 50 times a day, more on weekends when you must be bored and are looking for mindless stuff. This is the place. Thank you for spending your precious time and sharing your thoughts with me. Life would be very dull if I have only myself to talk to.

The other number we discuss today is 27 billion yen, or US $225 million. That's the minimum amount that a Japanese brokerage firm, Mizuho Securities, will likely lose as a result of a human error they made while entering a transaction involving stock of a recruiting firm called J-Com. They wanted to sell one share at 610,000 yen (approximately $5000), but mis-typed the order as 610,000 shares at 1 yen each (about a penny apiece).

Once they realized the mistake, they tried three or four times but were unable to stop the order, and within ten minutes, all of the shares offered were snatched up by quick-fingered brokers. The Tokyo Stock Exchange is insisting that Mizuho completes the order, and the company has agreed to honor its obligations. The current loss is already equal to its expected profits for the quarter ending in March, and can still rise once all of the orders are settled. The lesson today is, kids, stay in school and learn your arithmetic. And look both ways before you cross the street. There are hungry dogs out there, just waiting to bite.

2005-12-06T21:33:00.000-08:00

Prison bar code
If it's bad to be dumb, it's even worse to be a dumb thief.

Jonathan Baldino, a student at the University of Colorado, was arrested last week in Boulder and charged with one felony count of forgery and two misdemeanor counts of theft, when he tried to purchase a $150 iPod for only $4.99. His scam was to make copies of bar codes taken from inexpensive merchandise, attach the fake labels on big-ticket items and take them to the cashier. It worked -- once, but when he tried it a second time, an alert security guard at a Target store stopped him at the check-out.

Following his arrest, Baldino has expressed extreme remorse and asked for leniency. In a statement to police, he wrote: "I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry. Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!" In a follow-up letter, he said: "I am extremely sad now, and I just want to go to bed. Please let me sleep in my own bed tonight." If that plea doesn't work, he'd better hope that Bubba his cellmate likes the music he's downloaded to his iPod. Downloaded legally, I am sure.

2005-12-04T06:19:00.000-08:00

Alaska Meltdown
An Alaska man has met fierce local resistance to his plan to install a 20-ton nuclear particle accelerator in his Anchorage home. Albert Swank wants to build a cyclotron to produce the radioactive tracer material which is injected into people prior to their receiving PET scans for cancer diagnosis. He said that his father died of cancer and he intended to set up a community medical resource to minimize the suffering of other cancer patients.

His neighbors, despite their proclaimed live-and-let-live attitude, are not impressed. They worry about his expected large consumption of electricity and the risk of radioactive leaks -- a complaint letter even compares the danger to that of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. A community council has submitted an urgent plea to the Anchorage Assembly. A proposed ordinance to ban cyclotrons in residential areas is scheduled for a public hearing at the end of December. State radiology experts who examined the plan concluded that it can be done safely, but rushed through regulations to require proper operation and disposal of materials. Swank said the FBI also sent investigators but he refused to let them in.

The used cyclotron, considered a "baby model" since it's only 6 feet tall and 6 feet wide, is being dismantled at its current home, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Swank says it will be shipped in January whether he has a permit or not. So it appears that next year we will have a new explanation for global warming, and this time it's not sport utility vehicles, coal burning or cow methane. And if you need to find Swank's house on 10th Avenue near Delaney Park Strip in Anchorage, just go to Google Earth and look for a big red glow on the map.

2005-12-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

Remembering Sam
Sam the World's Ugliest Dog, died two weeks ago from heart and kidney failure, just short of his 15th birthday. He was a purebred Chinese Crested Hairless dog, rescued from an animal shelter over five years ago by Susie Lockheed of Santa Barbara, California. In the picture, he's the one on the left.

His hairless body, long nails, crooked teeth and Darth Vader eyes earned him the Ugliest Dog title at contests organized by the Sonoma Marin Fair and DogExplorer.com three years in a row, from 2003 to 2005. Although it was a close call this year, his first win was deemed a "landslide of mystic proportions." He has made television and radio appearances in Japan, New Zealand, Britain and of course, many times in the U.S., on talk shows and news shows. He has also spawned many web sites started by Susie and his many fans. His official blog site got 55 million hits in the first four months and puts mine to shame despite my Siberian Husky good looks and charm. Is there no justice in this world?

"I don't think there'll ever be another Sam," Susie said, adding: "Some people would think that's a good thing." Perhaps cats everywhere will also rejoice. Just as a dog was crowned Cat of the Year in 1998, the Ugliest Dog recognition should rightfully go to a cat. Any cat will do, but I nominate this hotel cat for his evil terrorist ways. Those of you who miss Sam can buy a photo calendar and other certified authentic Sam merchandise. That looks like the perfect Christmas present, better than any Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson calendars I have seen.

Also on the web (proceed with caution -- ugly pictures ahead):
http://www.samugliestdog.com/
http://samugliestdog.typepad.com/blog/
http://sam-the-man.net/

2005-11-28T21:26:00.000-08:00

International Junk
I never knew what foreign spam was like, until today. I received the following email from a Denmark address, and now I need someone to translate it. From the message, I would guess that Danish is remarkably similar to English, but not quite the same. I hope their spam has less sodium, and their enhancements have the same power to "renovate between whiles." Please underquote me, I think I'd like that.

Hello,
We acknowledge you for being our customer. Thus, we put wise you of information and renovates between whiles. On the basis of our records it seems probable that you'd like to see a refill. We feel hopeful to underquote you once more a meds' great suite, high-class service and products. If it is all right with you and you plan to make an order or to look over our specials and price-list, please follow the link: [link deleted]

In good faith,
Sale support department

2005-11-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

Cut out the Middleman
The Taiwanese have come up with a new dining concept. There is a one-year old restaurant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second largest city, that operates with a bathroom theme -- the name of the restaurant "Marton" sounds similar to "matong" which means toilet in Chinese. You sit on basic commodes (thankfully with the lids closed), and the food arrives in ceramic containers shaped like miniature Asian squat-style toilets. Two large decoration urinals are at the entrance to the dining room.

The most popular dishes are chicken curry and oyster sauce pork loin with chocolate ice cream dessert because, according to the restaurant manager, they look most like the real thing. Ice cream and shaved ice are available in two sizes, number one (small) and number two (large) -- they really do try to preserve the correct order. Coffee is served in western-style toilets, and you can take the cups home as souvenir.

The restaurant is doing so well that they are talking about opening new shops throughout Taiwan. There is no word yet on expansion plans to the US, but that seems like a great way to simplify the food input-output process for those of us still digesting Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie. And I hope the chairs come with seat warmers.

2005-11-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

Hotel California
Since we live in California, we get quite a few visits from family and friends, and from assorted "firemen" every year. Family and friends come to see the multi-million-dollar homes (they are astounded by the prices but disappointed in the actual properties), or the Golden Gate bridge (usually the same reaction), or the year-round sunshine and blue skies (worth every penny). Then there are the firemen who are here to "put out fire" -- help with trouble we didn't know we had. Depending on the size of the group and how much roaming freedom they want, they sometimes stay with us, and sometimes stay in various hotels in the area, abundant if not pricey. The firemen, of course, always stay somewhere else where their assistance is most appreciated.

One recent group chose a hotel in Palo Alto, about 30 minutes by car from my dog shed, and the place is called "Hotel California." At first I thought someone was joking, but it is a real bed-and-breakfast inn on a quiet street near Stanford University. Not the Hotel California of Eagles fame though. I saw no mission bell, no captain, no nightman, no champagne on ice. And definitely no mirrors on the ceiling. But it is a small cozy place with fresh-cut flowers in the corridors, original paintings on the wall, and since they get a lot of foreign guests from the university, framed currency of various nations on display in the upstairs lobby area. I saw bills and coins from France, Germany, Switzerland, Iran, China, Thailand, Japan, Korea. Curiously no Canadian money -- maybe they converted to American dollars when we were not paying attention.

You should watch out for the beast, however. It is a disguised as a cute gray cat that runs up and down the hotel stairs, does a lot of friendly meowing and purring, and loves to curl up in your lap. And just as you start feeling comfortable, it suddenly growls and bites hard on your hand. Devious little mutant creature I should have known.

All in all, except for the psycho killer furry monster, a very nice place, and this part is totally true to the song:

Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place, such a lovely face
There's plenty of room in the Hotel California
Any time of year, you can find it here.

2005-11-24T06:27:00.000-08:00

Happy Glutton
Last weekend Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi won the 2005 Krystal Square Off World Hamburger Eating Championship in Chattanooga, Tennessee by chowing down 67 burgers in just eight minutes. If you'll recall, he is the skinny Japanese dude who's won a string of well-known eating contests, including five consecutive annual Nathan's hot dog eating events, and a steamed dumpling and pork bun feast in Hong Kong this past August.

What sets the Krystal contest apart is that it was not a one- or two-day battle, but the culmination of 11 regional qualifying events that took place throughout the country this fall, so the 15 participants had to eat the same type of hamburgers over and over many times before even getting to the finals. This time, the outcome was not a guaranteed win for Kobayashi like it usually is. Rookie eater Joey Chestnut from San Jose was ahead of Kobayashi through most of the contest, at one point leading by six burgers, but faltered in the last minute and eventually lost by five. "Kobayashi is, without a doubt, the greatest eater ever to live upon planet Earth," said David Baer of the International Federation of Competitive Eating which sanctions more than 80 championships every year. The Tsunami took home the top prize of $10,000 in cash and, I hope, 50 cases of Alka Seltzer.

On a related note, today is Thanksgiving in the US. Whether you plan to have 67 hamburgers or 20 lbs of turkey, I wish you $10,000 worth of happiness with family and friends, including all the dogs (and maybe cats) you love. I already know where my money is going. As is my annual practice, I am turning on the house heat this morning. Everyone will gather around the furnace as we light the pilot, and watch the flame spread around the burner. There will be plenty of oohs and aahs and it will be exciting, just like Black Friday morning at Walmart.

2005-11-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

News splash
Toto, Japan's largest manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, has introduced the world's first musical toilet seat. Yes, you read it right, a toilet that sings while you are minding your business in the personal library. The upgrade comes only with the N5A model, the latest addition to Toto's Apricot line of toilet seats with integrated bidets.

The music feature is built into a control panel they call a "Sound Rimocon" which, in addition to managing the various toilet functions (more on that below), can play 16 pre-recorded music tracks, and also has a SD card slot with MP3 support in case you perform better with your own choice of music. Something appropriate for the occasion, like "Blue Water," "Song of the Boatman," or "Let this Mighty River Roll." Not boring elevator Muzak, but personalized bathroom entertainment. Kids may no longer have to learn the usual bathroom pastimes like reading poetry, watching the Ty-D-Bowl man swim, or playing fantasy games with cardboard tubes from empty toilet rolls.

The N5A is definitely a giant advance over the hole-in-the-ground toilet found in many Japan bathrooms not so long ago. Among other amenities are automatic opening and closing of the toilet lid (no wonder Japan has such a low divorce rate), toilet seat heating that can be programmed to warm the seat at pre-determined times (much better than throwing a log in the fireplace when you wake up on a chilly Sunday morning), and waste analyzer capability that allows it to regulate flushing based on the type of output (don't ask me how that works).

Don't get too excited though. Although the N5A was released in Japan early this month and can be retrofitted to just about any old toilet, it is not sold in the US yet, and it's going to cost you a whopping 180,000 yen or about $1500 for the privilege of crapping on Britney Spears. But that alone, I think, is almost worth a trip to Japan.

2005-11-19T06:25:00.000-08:00

Expensive cards
Back in July, Microsoft sued Google and Kai-Fu Lee when Lee left a senior executive position at Microsoft to join Google and lead a new research group they are starting up in China. One of the depositions made during preparation for the trial was made by Mark Lucovsky, another senior engineer who defected from Microsoft to Google in November 2004.

In the statement, Lucovsky recounted that when he met with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss his planned departure, Ballmer asked him to say that it wasn't to Google, but Lucovsky replied that it was. At that point, Ballmer "picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office," then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "F***ing Eric Schmidt is a f***ing pu**y. I'm going to f***ing bury that guy. I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google..." After Ballmer calmed down a bit, he tried to persuade Lucovsky to stay at Microsoft, arguing that "Google is not a real company. It's a house of cards."

The cards have gotten awfully expensive, probably all aces. Google stock went over $400 yesterday, a better than four-fold jump from its initial public offering price of $85 just 15 months ago. During the same period, Microsoft stock has been more or less stuck at about $25. It seems that Schmidt is getting buried in more and more money every day. Maybe Ballmer should get a bigger shovel and start digging a lot harder and faster.

2005-11-15T22:05:00.000-08:00

Thar she blows
This is really for my northern readers in Alaska and Canada, but I am so tempted to get two even though the last time I saw snow was on a wide screen television at Best Buy. The big news is that Honda has just released the HSM1590i which is the world's first mid-size hybrid snowblower with electronically controlled switchable operating modes. It features Honda's iGX440 engine, the world’s first single-cylinder general purpose engine to have a new electronic STR governor. The combination of electronic engine-speed control technology and Honda's hybrid technology, and the exchange of data between the snowblower ECU and the engine ECU allows for the regulation travel speed and throttle opening so that engine speed is maintained relative to load conditions. These new technologies have enabled Honda to provide this snowblower with a STi control function for switching between three selectable operating modes — auto mode, power mode, and manual mode — with the simple turn of a dial, allowing users at any level of experience to select the mode that best suits their needs.

Those are impressive specs, but there is more. The redesigned auger housing cover and auger side discs significantly improve performance in deep and crusted snow, enabling the HSM1590i to remove crusted snow in about 30% less time than earlier models in power mode, and achieve top-level snow removal performance among mid-sized snowblowers. Now that's some serious blowing, but if that's still not enough for you, it does come with that extra-cost accessory in the back that can, just possibly, assist.

2005-11-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

Traitor
At the Weschester Cat Show in New York this week, a memorial service will be dedicated to a dog, attended by over 300 cats. The dog, a Schnauzer-Siberian Husky mix named Ginny, was already awarded Cat of the Year status in 1998 and died this past August at age 17.

In her life, she had a long and brave career finding and rescuing cats from dumb things as they are known to do. She has dug through boxes of broken glass to find an injured cat inside, and thrown herself at construction debris to help bring out cats that are trapped underneath. Until her death, she would go out with her owner, Philip Gonzalez, to find stray cats around the Long Beach, N.Y. area so he could feed them, and in some cases bring them home with Ginny. Gonzalez has written two books, The Dog Who Rescues Cats: The Story of Ginny and a sequel, The Blessing of the Animals: True Stories of Ginny, the Dog Who Rescues Cats. He also established a web site, Ginny Fan Club, to commemorate the dog and solicit donations to provide food and care for injured or lost and homeless cats.

While this is a pretty heartwarming story, it once again proves that we dogs are vastly superior to cats. They are just lame creatures prone to getting into trouble, and too feeble to help themselves. Sheesh, how many times do they have to fall into a well or get stuck up a tree? The only thing good coming out of this is that with Ginny now dead, the Cat of the Year award may go back to a real cat, so we don't have to share in their own shame. And one more thing that the cats are probably too dumb to know yet. Part of the Ginny Fund will go toward spaying and neutering of cats. Annihilating the entire species and improving the animal kingdom. Please donate generously. Muahahaha...

2005-11-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

It's not all raw fish, part II
You'll probably recall the story back in May about a sushi shop in Kunming, capital city of Yunnan province in China, that was shut down by the government for "spreading commercial activity with poor culture." The restaurant was serving sushi and other Japanese food arranged on the unclothed bodies of two female university students as they lay on their backs. They called it "feast on a beauty's body." We laughed then, not because there was such a restaurant in the first place, but because it was forced to close. After all, the owner said that the practice was based on ancient Japanese tradition, like the delicate wax-on wax-off technique taught by the highly regarded Mr. Miyagi.

But now we discover that a restaurant offering very similar service has come to Chicago, a place of little tradition and probably no culture at all, so the authorities will not be able to accuse it of "poor culture." Besides, there must be a First Amendment somewhere around here that protects our freedom of expression, even when it involves expressing ourselves by eating raw fish served on top of naked women. The upscale sushi shop, called Kizoku, is on Ontario Street and has been operating pretty low key for a year, but turned up the fanfare recently when they introduced "body sushi."

The meal is presented in a side private lounge at the restaurant and costs $500-700 (it was only 1000 yuan or $120 in China). You are seated among a party of four to six customers around a woman lying in the center of a dinner table wearing only strategically placed clamshells. Dishes are served in a all-you-can-eat buffet style (not all you want to eat), wrapped in bamboo leaves so they don't contact her skin. One model, named Tabitha (why are they all named like that?) recognizes that body sushi is "risque and edgy," but feels that it is just performance art. "I'm all about the theatrical," she says.

You definitely want to hurry and make your reservations. There is already a two-week waiting list. And I'm not making this up: The restaurant manager is considering adding male "servers" soon. Whatever you do, don't touch the geoduck.

2005-11-10T21:47:00.000-08:00

That hurts
Here is a follow-up to the story of Japan Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi receiving a traditional dagger called a "khanjar" from Yemen President Ali Saleh on Monday.

I thought that Koizumi might accidentally slip the dagger into his pants only as a most remote possibility, but little did I know, he actually did that. The evidence is in the picture to the left. For clumsy leaders, the US has Gerald Ford and George Bush, and Japan has their own Koizumi. I hope he doesn't turn himself into Japan's first female prime minister.

2005-11-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

Ah-nold
I hate Ah-nold. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that is, our Governor of California. Not because the state is in a mess -- I don't know that things would have been better had we not recalled his predecessor, Gray Davis. But I am upset with Ah-nold because my phone has been ringing non-stop for the last two weeks, and it's all his fault.

You see, we usually have elections every other year, national, state or local, or a combination of them. Two years ago, we had an unprecedented special referendum on Gray Davis, and that was when he was voted out of office and Arnold was voted in. The Terminator must have liked that, so this year, normally a non-election year, he decided to call special elections so we can vote on a bunch of trivial propositions that most certainly could have waited until next year. It's costing the state $70 million, probably a lot more by some other estimates, to have us decide a few earthshaking issues like teacher tenure, senior citizen prescriptiona and regulation of utilities. Yes, yawn. Really. For instance, for the proposition on prescriptions, I am not sure what we are supposed to decide, but the various groups for and against it are named "Californians for Available Prescriptions," "Health Access California" and "Californians against the Wrong Prescription." How are we supposed to vote against any of these groups that have such well-meaning names, except that they are on opposite sides of the issue? Same thing for "The Utility Reform Network" on one side and "Californians for Reliable Electricity" on the other side. It's like having to choose between the Pope and Mother Teresa. How do we?

For the last several weeks, there have been all kinds of groups and people who wanted to let us know exactly how. Every other television commercial features Arnold or John McCain (who looks like he could use a prescription himself), or some teacher, parent, firefighter or policeman telling us Yes on this and No on that. It was awfully confusing. And the phone has been ringing morning, afternoon and evening with pre-recorded messages, often with some guy with a thick Austrian accent who sounds so very much like our Gov'nor. Apparently because it's for political purposes, they are exempt from the do-not-call rule, and they sure know how to take full advantage of this freedom. Yesterday I finally got tired of the interruptions and unplugged the phone for good. At least until the elections are over.

I went to vote today, and I voted No on all the measures he's been pushing, not because of what they stood for, but because I was sick and tired of special elections, and sick and tired of all the silliness. And they'd better read my chad right. Hasta la vista Arnold.

2005-11-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

That tickles
Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh, left, presents Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi with a gift, an Arabic dagger called a "khanjar" during an official visit to Tokyo today. The khanjar is normally worn on an embroidered belt or a long strip of cloth fashioned into a holder. The prime minister, apparently not familiar with the custom, is trying to slip it into his pants. Is he thinking that the gift is some type of oversized sexual device?

From this site: "The shape of the blade was not decoration; in curving the blade Arab swordsmiths did decrease the contact area of the blade, but also increased the depth of the blade's cut. Furthermore, by adding a half round ridge to the center of the blade, they gave the blade great strength without adding much weight. The result was a weapon that was very light, very strong and cut deeply." I hope the two countries don't go to war over this incident.

2005-11-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

That will be $20.02 please
Amazon is preparing to launch next year a wholly new way of selling books. The program "Amazon Pages" will allow customers to purchase online access to books in digital increments -- one chapter, one section, or even one page at a time. You could, of course, still buy entire books in digital or printed form as you do today.

Amazon and a few other companies have already been offering electronic books but until now, there was no option to buy only portions of the documents. With this new capability, I suppose one day we will be able to call up a single sentence or phrase, or as they do on Wheel of Fortune, a single vowel per order. It might take a while and cost you a bundle to get through the complete works of Shakespeare, but you know it will be worth it. Just ask any English Literature graduate working at your neighborhood McDonald's.

But it doesn't have to stop at books. What about blogs? I imagine we should charge people for reading blogs too, especially the good, interesting and enlightening blogs (like this one). It doesn't need to be much, just a little something, enough to offer a cup of Starbucks to a sleepy blog writer on a cold Sunday morning. Anyway, that's my two cents. But, you see that nice picture up there? Since it's really worth a thousand words...

2005-11-05T06:52:00.000-08:00

You slacker
The advertising agency Ad Age recently analyzed the habits of American workers and concluded that one in four visits non-work blog sites (like this one) at work, and spends an average of 40 minutes per day on those blog breaks. Blog diversion has now become a favored mode of goof-off time, and some of the common sites are Wonkette (self proclaimed "Politics for People with Dirty Minds") and Fleshbot ("web magazine about pornography and the sex culture").

According to Blogads, a company that tracks online visits, traffic jumps at 8 a.m. Eastern time, peaks at 5 p.m. Eastern and then slides downward until the US West Coast leaves the office. There is a similar traffic collapse on weekends, and the reason is that given a choice, most people would rather prop their feet up and watch TV at home than reading dumb blogs (like this one). And the trend might get worse. Technorati now tracks nearly 20 million blogs, a number that has doubled every five months for the past three years. Pretty soon, almost everyone will have a blog, and there will be plenty to read and update during the work day.

So what's the solution? For starters, we could all go back to work, but I doubt that will happen. Or we could make blogs more work-oriented so you have a more plausible explanation for spending time here: "Hardware virtualization has been in use for a long time on mainframes, but until recently it has not been practical on most smaller systems, mainly due to performance bottlenecks. During the last 10 years, performance has increased dramatically, and we now have some decent platforms either available or upcoming on which to finally implement virtualization, for example Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, VMWare Workstation, or the open source XEN virtual hardware project."

Or my preferred way: We could install TV at work, so people would watch TV instead of reading silly blogs.

2005-10-30T06:29:00.000-08:00

What's wrong with these people?
I spent four days this week in Portland, Oregon, nicknamed the City of Roses. There must be something about the Northwest character since I see the same things in Seattle. Both cities are clean, and the people are nice.

City vehicles are painted with the logo "Portland - The City that Works", and I believe them. At the airport, wi-fi is available and free, not just around the major waiting areas, but even in the furthest and smallest terminals. You just pop open the laptop computer, and there it is, no password, no fee, no log-in. A light rail called the Max runs from one end of the city to the other, fast, cheap and convenient. In the morning, trucks power-clean streets and sidewalks throughout the downtown area. The only garbage I saw were plastic bags that blew out of a dumpster one windy evening, and a passer-by stooped down, picked up the bags and placed them back in the trash. And closed the container lid before he walked away.

The best part was that people were friendly and polite. I went out jogging one early morning, and just about everyone I ran into had a cheerful "Good Morning". Total strangers out in the streets at 5 in the morning are often the seedy and undesirable kind in any other city, the ones you look away from, the ones you cross the street to avoid, but not here. It took some getting used to, but it was a refreshing change. At the hotel, they put a big fluffy teddy bear on the bed for you to hug at night.

Only at the airport on my return flight did things go back to normal. There was the usual grumbling when the plane was late, and the sharp elbowing on the way to the gate. Because many of these people were carrying umbrellas (it was Portland weather after all), the pushing became extra lethal. On the plane, one guy was trying to shove a backpack the size of a body bag under the seat in front of him when the overhead compartment was full, and when that failed, he tried to put the bag in the small vestibule in the back of the plane and cursed at the flight attendant when she wouldn't let him. Come to think of it, he was probably a Californian going back to California. I know the type only too well. I see them every day on my commute.

2005-10-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

Stupid cats
Last week in Shizuoka, Japan, Akira Yano swerved his car to avoid hitting a cat that suddenly darted into the street. The vehicle slammed into of 37 kindergarten children and 10 adult teachers and supervisors. Thirty of the children and one adult were injured, five of them seriously. The group was walking along a two-lane road on their way to a museum of art right after 1 pm. The driver has been arrested on charges of negligence.

That once again proves that cats are mutation accidents and dumb, evil, terrorist creatures that deserve no mercy. Police should have charged the driver with bad thinking and bad decisions instead. When facing a choice of hitting 47 people or hitting one cat, he should have run over the cat, over and over again 47 times if necessary.

P.S. This message has been brought to you by United Dogs of America, a non-profit organization dedicated to the brushing, walking and feeding of smart animals like Siberian Huskies. We now return you to regular blogging.

2005-10-23T05:22:00.000-07:00

One track mind
Rats are smarter than you might think, but still pretty dumb. Let me explain.

New Zealand scientists wanted to know why rats are so hard to eradicate, so they released a rat they named "Razza" on a deserted rodent-free island, and then tried to re-capture him with traps. The rat was outfitted with a small radio transmitter so his movement could be tracked. For over four months, Razza evaded an arsenal of traps and avoided countless poisoned baits left by the researchers. He even eluded sniffer dogs brought on the island specifically to hunt him down. The scientists conceded that if Razza had been a pregnant female rat instead of a solo male, there would have been a rat population explosion already on the island.

They were about to give up when one day the rat paddled a quarter mile in open water (longest confirmed swim by a rat) to a nearby island where he finally got killed in a trap set up with penguin meat. And the reason for that ill-fated swim? No, it wasn't the penguin meat or the cheese bait, but mating season was starting and Razza was on the prowl (And here I was thinking that rat mating season is 365 days a year, 7x24).

But it goes to show how rats are just like people. Sex attracts, and sometimes sex kills.

2005-10-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

Treasure hunt
There must be a reason why the Japanese are so obsessed with garbage. They waste so much time separating garbage into tens of categories, from small metallic parts to large cloth items, unlike our basic one-dumpster approach best suited for simple-minded people. But now we know why.

On Thursday, a worker at a garbage incinerator plant in Saitama, Japan, found 31 million yen (nearly US $270,000) in the trash while sorting out woodchip and plastic waste. The money was mostly in bundles of 10,000 yen bills. Amazingly, he turned it in to police. They will now hold the cash for six months, and if the rightful owner doesn't make a claim, will release the money back to the garbage company and the honest worker. Of course, if the owner does want his money returned, he'll probably have to pay a large fine for mixing paper money with plastic. He'll be lucky to get back half.

2005-10-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

It's smaller than you think
That must be one of the most common disappointments of mankind, but this time we are talking about the tallest mountain on Earth. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping have determined that Mount Everest, or Qomolangma as the Chinese call it, is only 29, 017 feet above sea level, a good 12 feet shorter than measured 30 years ago.

They attributed the difference mainly to the fact that the previous survey team did not locate the summit's actual rock surface, but instead measured the highest point with layers of ice and snow included. This time, they figured out that the ice is 11 feet thick and corrected for it. Together with other adjustments based on more sophisticated satellite GPS and radar altimeter equipment, they arrived at the new mountain height.

They have checked and re-checked their metric conversions, and assured us that the mountain did not get shorter over the years because every climber was taking a rock home as souvenir. But it is quite possible that many climbers may have gone through all the trouble only to stand on the highest ice point but not the true rock peak, and may have to ascend again to maintain their bragging rights (That's a bit like debating which building is tallest -- with or without the antenna on top?)

In the meantime, the mountain is going into deep seclusion and getting psychological counseling. Twelve feet is a whole lot of shrinkage.

2005-10-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

Ancient leftovers
I've always wondered if Marco Polo brought noodles with him on his slow boat to China, or was that on his slow boat from China? Or perhaps he got them from a Polynesian mermaid he met out in the Pacific Ocean.

But now Chinese archeologists are claiming that they have conclusive proof that noodles were invented first, of course, in China, at least 4000 years ago. They discovered an overturned bowl under clay river sediments while excavating a site in northwestern China, and under the bowl, they found a small clump of what appeared to be noodles. The strands were thin and delicate, about 20 inches long, and looked to have been made from ground millet (a type of grass) rather than wheat or rice flour which are common modern-day noodle ingredients. Radiocarbon dating of material taken from the site on the Yellow River indicated that it was about 4,000 years old.

This may not be enough to end the controversy about the origin of noodles although it is believed that they didn't start appearing in Italy until 2000 years ago. To eliminate any doubt that their find was truly noodles, the Chinese scientists are still busy looking for packets of soy sauce and artificial flavorings but thus far they have been unsuccessful. That would definitely settle the question once and for all. Unless, of course, those little packets turn up saying Cup Noodles, and the Japanese jump in and claim that they were first.