A curious creature isn’t he?

His name is Buddy. Buddy is in our care for a week or so while his owner companion is out of state for the holidays. He’s a mature dog and pretty smart, even gets along with Lucy, which is important because although Lucy has a very, very long fuse when it comes to aggression, she can bring out her whoop-ass when necessary, and Buddy is no match for her in that respect. Buddy discovered that this past summer when we watched him for a few days. He was in the backyard with Lucy and thought it would be good fun to nip at her ankles, and then run away when she turned to stop it. Of all the things Lucy playfully tolerates (nearly everything) ankle nipping is not among them. The Happy Wife said to me when I got home, “One minute they were playing, and the next I look out the window and Buddy is on his back, with Lucy’s mouth around him pressing him to the ground.” She didn’t mean to harm him, only to stop him, to let him understand in no uncertain terms: Don’t do that anymore. And just like that it was over and they continued playing.

It’s a model of the kind of swift justice quickly followed by detente that we (qua humans) envision for ourselves after a transgression. It’s what people mean, I think, when they say, “You can learn a lot from a dog.”

…

I finished our annual holiday newsletter today. It goes out via snail mail later this week to every victim recipient on my mailing list. If you wish to be added to the mailing list email me your snail mail address, or just wait a few weeks, I usually post a link to the pdf version here.

Here’s Lucy at Kincaid Park after a fresh ten inches or so:

Bigger.

She freaks me out whenever I see her “on point” like this. Peering into the woods possibly transfixed on a belligerent winter moose ready to commit a precious quantity of its meager caloric resource to a thorough stomping of me. Because there’s no way a moose could catch Lucy. You know what they say, when fleeing from angry wildlife it’s not critical you be the fastest in the group, just don’t be the slowest.

For the life of me I don’t understand how a 1,500-2,000 pound herbivore sustains itself through winter up here on dessicated twigs, branches and the occasional pastiche of wilted underbrush.

Anyhoo, turns out Lucy wasn’t pointing at anything in particular. Nothing I could detect anyway, when I turned and glanced into the woods fearful I’d see said moose rising like an apparition from the snow, hackles up ‘n ready to charge.

…

The men who wear the blue shoe covers are in the house today. The Happy Wife says the carpet really does appear cleaner after they’re through, but I wonder. If you expect a cleaner carpet you’ll see a cleaner carpet, no? An example of confirmation bias I think. Yet after years of marriage, and desirous of many more, I know better than to press my point of view on this. Plus the men with blue shoe covers left two new pairs of blue shoe covers for us to wear as we pad about on wet carpet. No extra charge, such a deal.

Just now the men are leaving. I overheard one man’s reassurance to the Happy Wife that the rug which he’d cleaned in the living room may not look like it’s been cleaned, but see here, if you turn on the light you’ll see it really has brightened up.

But of course!

Bless her, before they left the Happy Wife offered the men samples of her Christmas cookies, little white powdery balls of goodness.

Note to self: Careful what you ask for.

Presently snowing here to beat the band. Really, we have plenty now to insulate and reflect. Enough already!

A sad loss to our community was announced Saturday. Jens Hansen will be missed. I’ve mentioned how much the Happy Wife and I have enjoyed during our many years in Alaska sitting at the bar at Jens restaurant, drinking, eating, and carrying on with the staff and patrons, many of whom are regulars. Jens was an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. A native of Denmark who moved to Alaska at age 24, he worked and saved as a chef at a popular downtown hotel for twenty years, until finally opening Jens in midtown where he and a quietly dedicated staff (many have worked there since the restaurant opened in 1988, a year before I moved to Alaska) have steadily provided fine food, wine, and good times.

Whenever Jens was present and learned one of his guests was having a birthday, his signature thrill was to put on the the Beatles’ song, Birthday, and turn it up real loud, much to the chagrin of his wife, who’d quickly dash over to turn it down, only to have Jens turn it back up when she left!

We will miss his gravelly voice and joyful spirit.

Godspeed, Jens, Godspeed.

In light of his opportunistic comment that the availability of guns makes mayhem easier, after an NFL player shot and killed his girlfriend and himself, Bob Costas will want to include cars as mayhem contributors, given the reckless use of one was recently responsible for the death of another NFL player.

I’ll be taken to task by some for saying this. Wait a minute, they’ll say, the clear intention of the former was murder (and suicide), the latter, while evidently reckless, was nevertheless an accident. That’s a fair point (although legally it’s not being treated as an accident). But then the Costas objection should be corrected: Bad intentions lead to mayhem. Because intentions originate in a human mind, not the barrel of a gun.

Besides, we don’t know if, absent the availability of a gun, the murderer would not have simply chosen a substitute weapon, like a knife, the weapon of choice of another famous football player with bad intentions who used it (evidently) to kill his ex wife and her friend.

What’s the word for that crusted plug that clogs the nozzle on the ketchup squeeze bottle? The one that resists the even flow of the tomatoey goodness until it can’t no more and then suddenly BAM! everything is red except the target meatloaf, and the counter and back splash look like the Tate-LaBianca murders. Equally hard to clean up from, too.

Thankfully the forecast calls for snow. Listen to me, grateful for snow. What gives? Well, it’s not because I’m a skier, I’m not, I’m a terrible skier. Closer to pathetic really. I want the insulation and light reflection snow provides. Especially the latter. We have a feeble sun this time of year and absent snow the dark ground absorbs all the light for itself. Making morning walks with Lucy less joyful.

And the world needs more joy, not less.

Here’s something: researchers claim they can detect colorectal cancer with a breath test. My dissertation research involved the study of human colon cancer. (Side note: If the malls are closed, you’re out of books to read, the chores are done, and especially if your normal sleep aid is failing you, please click the “About” link over there on the right, and look for the link to where you can read my dissertation).

Anyhoo, interesting article. Except I believe they understated the predictive accuracy of their test, unless they have more data than what was shared in the article, or a non-standard formula for accuracy.

The breath test analysis correctly identified 32 of the 37 patients with colorectal cancer and incorrectly diagnosed cancer in seven of the 41 healthy patients. Overall, the breath test had an accuracy rate of 76% in identifying patients with cancer.

In other words, 32 true positives (TP), 34 true negatives (TN), 7 false positives (FP), and 5 false negatives (FN).

Predictive accuracy = (TP + TN)/(TP + FP +FN + TN) = 84.6%

Some commenters to the article wondered if “shitty” smelling breath would produce a true positive. Ha ha, very funny.

5.8 magnitude. Epicenter ~30 miles from Anchorage. Across Cook Inlet near Beluga.

Caused the Cabernet in my wine glass to slosh a bit.

Update: Oh boy, we made the national news. Only two items fell from our bookshelf, a mask of peculiar origin (Happy Wife I’m sure knows the detail), and a small stalactite figurine. Lucy was home alone at the time. Brave girl.

Ice is slippery, and hard. Call me master of the obvious. Inattention and worn house slippers are no match for ice. At least I didn’t drop the mail when I fell. Unlike other contexts where falls occur, on ice there is no time to see yourself in slow motion, to think, damn, this going to hurt, or even to brace yourself. No. One second you’re mindlessly scuffing along, sorting the mail in hand, and then BLAM!, you’re down. Ouch.

Moon rising over the Chugach Mountains. Resurrection Bay is still. No sign of otters, which there commonly is during the day at this spot. Half mile from our beach house.

Three weeks until the days begin to get longer! Not that we’ve noticed the shorter days too much this winter. It’s been weird this year in the sense we’ve had bluesky for weeks now, such that everything this feeble sun has to offer is unfiltered by clouds, which we haven’t seen one of in weeks. Consequently, we have almost no snow, maybe an inch here and there, barely enough to cover Fall’s leaves. Recall last year we had a record setting eleven feet of snow.

… they may reveal insights into the holy grail of life — Immortality.

Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that his Turritopsis dohrnii [Jellyfish] was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared to age in reverse, growing younger and younger until it reached its earliest stage of development, at which point it began its life cycle anew.

Sommer was baffled by this development but didn’t immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word “immortal” was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer’s finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called “Reversing the Life Cycle.” The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism’s earliest stage of life, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.” This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.

A Typical (I must say amusing) Internet Comment Thread.

Ignited by this article at Reason.com re: Voluntary Taxation.

T o n y| 11.26.12 @ 4:48PM

Taxation is always about forcing. A voluntary tax is an absurd idea, especially coming from people who think people are always rational with their money.

I realize that if libertarians ever got off the hobbyhorse of condemning the poor and elderly for being moochers and started realizing it’s the wealthy who have indeed been “coddled” in recent decades, then there would be no point to you existing.

Mr. FIFY| 11.26.12 @ 4:51PM

And if/when you ever realize how much hatred you have of rich people, you might come to the conclusion that such hatred has been misplaced all along and that it accomplished absolutely nothing.

Which is what higher taxes will also accomplish.

Mr. FIFY| 11.26.12 @ 4:52PM

And all that on top of your hatred of straight people, too.

iggy| 11.26.12 @ 4:54PM

And the coddling of the wealthy is the direct result of the same welfare state that breeds low income dependence on government programs.
It’s almost like the problem you’re complaining about is actually your fault.

Mr. FIFY| 11.26.12 @ 4:57PM

Almost? Shit, iggy, you nailed it. Now Tony’s going to have to flop on his princess bed and cry himself to sleep.

T o n y| 11.26.12 @ 5:21PM

Don’t whine about my jocular heterophobia if you’re going to make these kinds of comments, butch.

Mr. FIFY| 11.26.12 @ 5:22PM

Fuck you, asshole.

Mr. FIFY| 11.26.12 @ 5:22PM

Oh, and it’s not jocular if you actually mean it.

T o n y| 11.26.12 @ 5:55PM

You really fancy yourself a telepath don’t you.

Mr. FIFY| 11.26.12 @ 6:05PM

Really, no. And neither is Chris Matthews.