Touched the weather widget on my phone last night to see the 5-day forecast. Present evening temperature? Minus zero (-0). I wondered how this differed from plus zero (+0).

No worries. By Saturday it will be 45°! Better yet, the weatherlady on TV said there is a 40% chance of Spring! Better than -40%, right?

Harry threw up late last night on the snow in the backyard. Happy Wife, who had gotten up to let him out, retrieved it, brought it inside, and inspected it like one inspects crime scene evidence. Nothing suspicious — undigested kibble and green beans. We were made aware when we adopted Harry that he has gastric torsion. This is a life-threatening condition in a dog when it occurs, but manageable over time if he survives. He’s a frenetic eater and to avoid another torsion event we deliberately slow him down by feeding him a handful of kibble at a time. If we fed him what we feed Lucy — beef, rice, beans — we fear he’d scarf it up way too fast for his own good. After last night we’re going to return to feeding him Beneful (from Iams), which, despite our misgivings, does appear to agree with his sensitive GI tract.

Oh, and would you look at that, the sun has just breached the Chugach mountains and is now beaming through the kitchen window. It’ll be with us today until 8:33 pm, past 9:00 pm come April. Take that winter!

Told you so, the lion and lamb forgot their order.

10-12 inches of snow last night, more in some places about town.

Was the national press a-twitter with our misfortune? No, of course not. But five inches and thirty-four in Cincinnati, a calamity!

Whatever.

Drove Lucy and Harry to Kincaid park for a walk anyway. Roads were unplowed, no visible pavement, an edgeless landscape of white. Navigation was by memory, or sans that, follow the driver in front of you and hope she knows. Even our 6-cyl, 4WD Outback, ordinarily an invincible beast, bucked ‘n chugged.

Alas, we arrived safely and pulled into the parking lot, steering to stay in the deep tracks of a vehicle that had gone before us, feeling the undercarriage shave flat the high mound of snow between. Harry’s a sweet boy, patient, well-behaved, good with other dogs, likes Lucy, etc. etc., but just park the car and grab a leash and he’s in the front seat with you anxious to get out before you know it.

We trudged through knee-deep (my knees) snow until we reached the established trail. Unless you didn’t know there was a trail, in which case your only clue today would’ve been that the snow was suddenly slightly less deep. I know these trails as well as anyone, so even covered in 10-12″ of fresh snow, boundaries indistinguishable, we navigated them with relative ease. Harry somewhat less confidently, tacking back ‘n forth on a long lead (temporary until we get to know and trust him off lead), and Lucy — The Streak — bounding effortlessly ahead, blazing trail. Total showoff that girl.

After the walk we drove back home and I fed the beasts. They both appeared tuckered out.

Some people have wondered why we did it, why adopt an elder Airedale? That’s a fair question. My answer is he’s a sweet boy and we were ready to give another rescue a chance, and I’m partial to Airedales. Plus Harry isn’t technically a rescue, he was surrendered by his family of nearly 11 years, for reasons we don’t really understand, but pretty clearly they took good care of him, he’s certainly a vital 11-yr old, and so Happy Wife and I agreed we’d like to care for him in his sunset years.

Q: “Sure, but aren’t you concerned, you know, given his age ‘n all, that, well, you know.”

A: It’s less about how many years you have left, more about how well they’re lived.

BIGGER.

Black tie pair.

BIGGER.

Black tie event tonight. Funny, coming up in the seventies and early eighties, being sneeringly sloven was the rebuke of choice against parental-approved dress code norms. It began with a boyhood disdain for pleated pants; looking nice for others — and who else could it be for, I’d thought, certainly not me — was a mark of obsequiousness, as far this young rebel was concerned it was. Unpressed corduroys, patch-worn the better, a tie dye shirt and sneakers bandaged with duct tape, those were the rags of revolt. I wanted to wear them everywhere!

Heroes change and norms follow. Sebastian and Joplin were cool, sure, but then Fleming came and brought us Bond, the James Bond, who got the girl, always. And why?

Cue ZZ:

Clean shirt, new shoes
And I don’t know where I am goin’ to.
Silk suit,black tie,
I don’t need a reason why.
They come runnin’ just as fast as they can
Coz’ every girl’s crazy ’bout a sharp dressed man

That’s why. And so it is still, you want the girl, you appeal to what sets them crazy.

Joplin ‘n Hendrix? Oh, they’re still here, brightly swirled tanks and tees folded and reverently laid in a drawer. Beneath my sock drawer! Ready ‘n waiting when wanted to awaken the rebel within.

But not tonight.

Tonight at Raven’s Ball we men will set the ladies a-swooning, dapperly, in the convention of post six pm dress introduced during, and unchanged since, the reign of King Edward. Dear Readers, please, permit my indulgence: I will be dressed in a Tuxedo.

Spammers were all worked up today. They come in waves. Must’ve had >40 get caught in the ol’ spam filter just today. There are days when I want to reach back and tell them, “Look, if I want to buy the Happy Wife a pair of Christian Louboutin red bottom heels — and someday I may — I’ll e-mail you, ‘kay?”

Come to think of it, her birthday is nigh.Hmm.

But alas, I already got her a leather jacket,

which I must say goes quite well with the after-work smile and Sauv Blanc. That, and lately, her boo boo knee has her confined to wearing heels of a more modest height.

I do hope you don’t tire of me talking about her, and other sundry goings-on in our day-to-day life. I’ve never wanted blogging to become, for me anyway, anything but what it was originally intended to be, a fluid journal of personal thought. A public diary really. A motivation to write. I’ve never liked that long ago blogging was co-opted by many to showcase special interest, e.g., politics, and suddenly a blog had to have a theme, lest would-be readers were left to wonder: I don’t get it, what’s the point? Don’t get me wrong, when I go to Instapundit I go there with an expectation, to find content that interests me. I appreciate that. But it’s not a blog; not anymore it isn’t. It’s what I call a Linkery. And evidently a vector for selling stuff the sponsors of the site want me to click ‘n buy. Possibly Christian Louboutin red bottom heels.

Harry is coming to our house Sunday for his debut visit. It’s been less than a year since the Tan Man left us. I like to think Rufus would approve of us caring for Harry for the remainder of his life.

This just in — we’re probably going to adopt Harry.

Harry is an eleven year old Airedale.

Pictures from a party this weekend at our Beach Nest:

An old, abandoned AK rail-car ~200′ down the road from the Nest:

BIGGER.

Walk w/Lucy along the beach. Port and city of Seward in the distance, tucked in at the terminus of Resurrection Bay.

BIGGER.

Lucy on the berm. Can you spot the hide tide line?

BIGGER.

Another beached ‘n stranded jelly fish.

BIGGER.

Happy Wife ‘n girl friends beach comb.

BIGGER.

The reason I removed the Atlantic Monthly from the blogroll?

This: Men Who Idealize Large Breasts Are More Likely Hostile Towards Women.

For cryin’ out loud:

The problem is primal, so the research methods are not to be outdone. 

Huh?

361 white British men were “taken to a quiet private location” to look at women.

Kicking and screaming I suppose. Then again maybe they were men of the other kind. I’ll never know; the research paper, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, is behind a pay wall. Maybe the location was private because there was no Internet cafe in Jolly ol’ England large enough to accommodate 361 white British men assembled to ogle women. Or, maybe, the concern was that caffeine imbibition would bias boob assessment.  You can’t to be careful with your experimental design.

Not real women; 3D computer renderings. The men were allowed to rotate them 360 degrees. The only difference among the women was breast size.

Rotatable women! Isn’t the Internet grand!

The men were then asked to “make their ratings on a paper-and-pencil survey.”

Pencil & paper? Kinda old school, no?

Men then decreed, with paper and pencil:

Right, pencil & paper, you just said that, one sentence ago. We got it.

The most-preferred breast size is “medium.”

It you read that like I did it sounds like most of the 361 men preferred medium boobs. Not true. Only 32% preferred medium boobs. 68% preferred non-medium boobs. See, the men were shown 5 (rotatable!) women, differing only in boob size — very small, small, medium, large, very large. Less than half the men preferred large or very large boobs, only 43%, whereas the rest, i.e. “most” of the men — 57% — preferred medium or smaller boobs.

And then the very next sentence:

That’s the middle of the five images to the left.

Look, dude, don’t insult your readers. They can figure out for themselves which picture is the small boobs, which one is the medium boobs, and which one the large boobs, okay?

But wait, then the men were separately questioned about their attitude toward women on three “interesting rubrics” (“rubrics”? — go figure): 1) The problem of intoxication in women (versus men), 2) the motivation for female flirtation w/men — to tease or to hurt, and 3) women’s sense of culture & taste — better or worse than mens’. Consistent with credible research the author provided references for the “rubrics”, and encourages us to read them, because they’re interesting. Hey, don’t snicker, he’s an MD, the Atlantic’s “Health Editor.”

But really, who cares, all we want to know is the bloody conclusion anyway:

Swami and Tovée compared the results with the men’s preferences in breast size, which showed that “men who more strongly endorsed benevolently sexist attitudes toward women, who more strongly objectified women, and who were more hostile toward women idealized a large female breast size.”

There you have it, 155 out of 361 white British men are significantly more likely to be caught wearing a wife beater, the other 206, cooing and reciting poetry in the company of small to modest cup sizes.

But there’s more:

It’s the first study to make these associations. Which is interesting

If you’re like me, you’re annoyed by now by the author telling us what’s interesting. Usually we leave that up to the reader to figure out, you know, like assessing boob sizes.

Plus he’s a horrid writer, to wit:

Media portrayals, hegemony, and cultural factors of heteronormativity unique to these British white men. All not to overlook evolutionary, inborn preferences for reproductively viable mates.

Huh? If the point he failed to write is that the results should be viewed in the context of evolutionarily derived preferences, but of course! Who among us is capable of ignoring or overriding their genetically driven behavioral imperatives. Everything, all the time, is ultimately about making more and better babies.

My guess is the research is a bunch of phooey, but to be fair, I can’t say for sure given the paper is behind a pay wall, all that’s freely readable is the abstract. And no way am I plopping down $40 to read it. No, my snark is directed at the Atlantic for publishing this impeachable pile of dung. I used to enjoy the Atlantic. Anymore it reads like The Onion, only the Atlantic doesn’t get the joke.

Happy Wife was diagnosed with Patellofemoral Arthritis, aka boo boo knee.

X-ray indicates the bulb of bone A does not fit properly into the cognate cup of bone B. The margins of the two pieces appeared to me like the puzzle-piece margins of separated continents once joined together — two Gondwanalands after Pangea’s divide.

Prognosis? Good, if rested for three weeks or more, followed by strengthening of the quadriceps via low impact exercise (e.g., swimming, cycling) to relieve pressure on knee cap. Avoid squatting. :-(. Surgical corrections not recommended. Take two Ibuprofen and call me in the morning…

Bluesky day yesterday. Walked with Lucy at one of our usual places, the bluff overlooking Turnagain Arm where it spills into Cook Inlet and beyond. Snapped me a picture I did:

BIGGER.

The little white mound off in the distance is Mt. Redoubt. Lost her cool in ’89 and spit ash everywhere. Further to the right is a faint glimpse of the Tordrillo Mountains. Follow them south and they eventually give way to the Aleutian island/mountain chain, all part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.

About that Aleutian chain, the easternmost and largest island in the Aleutians is Unimak Island. It was the destination goal of a husband and wife from Seattle who decided one day in 2008 they’d like to walk to Unimak Island. From Seattle. Walk. Yes, walk.

BIGGER.

Like two snails they slogged, up the western coast of BC, eventually passing into Alaska, through Prince William Sound, over to Anchorage passing very near the bluff where Lucy and I stood, around the northern arm of Cook inlet, along the base of the Tordrillos, and ultimately on to Unimak Island. ~4000 miles. Took ’em a year and change.

Fascinating.

I sat on the couch with Happy Wife nursing her recuperative knee, Mel, our house guest, was in the comfy chair, all of us transfixed on the TV documentary of these two. We drank wine and shared a Klondike bar. By the end of the show I swore I would never again complain about a difficult thing in my life. Ever.

I realize it is unwise for a blogger to admonish his readership, but really, no comments on the adorable dog video? When I surfed to YouTube to embed it I noted that there were >115,000 comments there. But not a one here? Okay. Fine. Be that way.

Moving right along…

Alaska viewers may have their BS detector go off when seeing this picture. Hint: Taken by me this past weekend on the beach near our beach house:

Yes, you’ve seen this picture before. Big deal, a familiar roost for eagles. So what, nothing out of the ordinary, right?

Very well then, take that Snopes!

That last time we tripped down to the beach house was a couple weeks before leaving for Maui, so she’d been alone for ~6 weeks. All was well and I was pleased to see very little propane had been needed to keep her at a cozy 44°. Owing to the very mild weather in February/early March in the Seward area, I suppose. We’re installing a wood stove come spring which we expect will greatly reduce propane usage. At $3.50/lb this will be a good thing.

Elsewhere, I was pleased to see new evidence for a phenomenon I was already convinced was not only possible, but anecdotallly true, based on my considerable experience working for certain simian-like managers in corporate America — reverse evolution. The latest evidence comes to us from dust mites, tiny — though via electron enlargement one appears more like a giant claw sporting a helmet, right? — parasitic critters that have supposedly devolved into their ancestral form, no longer in need of the nooks ‘n crannies of your sofa or mattress to thrive.

Predictably, the comment threads were ringing off the hook — “Evolution is directionless!! Stop telling laymen this is backwards evolution. They’ll get the mistaken impression evolution means forward progress, improvement, and before you know it they’ll think humans are biologically better — or worse! — superior to dust mites!”

Have a nice day everyone.