Tucker the Weird Dawg, R.I.P.
Tucker left us this morning about 8:45, a victim of too few red blood cells, or perhaps too many white ones. You know that he was the best dawg in the whole world, as all of our dogs are to all of us. He was good to me in my last time of need, and I tried to be good to him in his. I left home this morning with a dawg and returned home with just a collar. It hurts.
His last days were not good, but he was as comfortable as he could be made. He was treated with love and respect, and given all the love (and treats) that he could stand. He has had all the love he could stand for the last five years, if not all the treats. He was a rescue dog, and there was no way to know how bad his first years had been. Therefore, we always erred on the side of love.
The vet and his staff were wonderful this morning. They have a room for this sort of thing, called the Quiet Room, with a thickly padded vinyl mat covering most of the floor, partially covered by a large towel. All of the necessary arrangements were handled in advance. Tucker was carried out of the room and catheterized, then carried back in. The vet and I petted him, and spoke quietly to him. I gave him one last treat and nodded to the vet, who injected an overdose of anesthetic, then backed away. I was holding his head and petting him gently about sixty seconds later, when the vet pronounced him dead.
I am typing this through tears that will not stop yet, even though I know I did the right thing. He was beginning to suffer, and he did not deserve that. He deserved only the best, and I hope that he felt he got it during his years in our home.
Long live Tucker the Weird Dawg.
Tucker the Weird Dawg
Tucker is an English Springer Spaniel, the third Springer that I have been proud to house, feed, and love. Tucker was also my third Springer rescue, this time from the amazing people at ESRA, the English Springer Rescue America organization. There is little point in getting a dog if you do not rescue it. There are so many that need to be rescued, from a pound or a rescue group, and too few people to do it.
Tucker had somehow wound up out on his own for a long time, and then went the limit of time before death at two animal shelters before being recognized as a Springer and saved by ESRA. I adopted him after they had already cleaned him up and groomed him, though he was so, so thin. A dog that weighed 60 pounds when things were going well, even after a week of good ESRA food and the ridding of some intestinal parasites, still weighed just 45 pounds.
He responded quickly to love and a steady diet. He had separation anxiety in the worst way; he did not want to be left alone once he had discovered love and regular meals. He did not want his people to leave him, ever. He was soon back at 60 pounds and happy, perhaps for the first time, though he was seven or eight years of age.
He would occasionally wander off, if you were lax and let him. This was not running away, it was each time a slow jaunt into the surrounding neighborhood. He would quickly make a human friend that could read, who would call my cell phone number from his tags. I would then go get him and he was always overjoyed to see me, his adopted dad, and ready to go home. His new friends were always sorry to see him go.
A year or so after we adopted Tucker, I was diagnosed with cancer. It turned out to be very serious indeed. After a very long time in surgery, and after two weeks in recovery with numerous complications, I finally got to go home., though I was far from well. Cancer had aggravated my multiple sclerosis mightily, and I was not anything close to well. Tucker, his sad eyes always on me and always staying as close to me as he could get, did not leave my side for 75 days except to eat and eliminate.
Tucker, now 12 or 13, was diagnosed today with leukemia. There is not much that can be done. A few medications to ease his final journey, perhaps better food than his usual health conscious dry meals, because Tucker does like his food. A little more attention, if that is possible. More hugs, more rubs, more scratches. I can expect more sleeping, and less movement. I can expect him to be puzzled, because he cannot possibly understand why he feels so weak or why he is in pain.
My job now is to do for Tucker what Tucker did for me. My job is to see that my good boy is happy, and that he is well fed, and loved in the time he has left as a living organism. My job is to take as good care of Tucker as he took of me. My job is to recognize that point at which Tucker’s life is no longer pleasant, and to take him gently on his last ride to the vet. My job is to hold him as he gets that final injection, and as the pain and infirmity are finally over. My job is not to cry where he can see me, because that would make him sad.
My job is to love him as much as he loves me.
101 things about me
There is a “meme” going around herein people write eight, or sixteen, or twelve things about themselves. I have not yet figured out why this is important. However, I thought I would give it a try. I am a natural over-achiever, so it got a little out of hand. There follows 101 random things about me.
1. I am the only member of the Frawgish race.
2. I became a half-orphan in 1992.
3. I have been ejected from the continent of Europe.
4 .I have several pins helping to keep me together.
5. I was once a Viking.
6. I own a tailhook.
7. I read every non-fiction book in my elementary school library.
8. I once yielded to stress and shot a telephone.
9. I did rodeo for several years but never learned to rope worth a crap.
10. I was once a monarch.
11. I once dropped conversational French because I could not get my mouth to make those sounds.
12. I programmed for 35 years and never took a programming class.
13. I once fell three stories off a roof into a rock garden.
14. I have a brother five years younger and a sister five years older.
15. I went to a high school that would not let guys take typing. I’m still bad at that.
16. I had a career as a safety engineer between careers in the software development business.
17. I had the only Austin Healy 3000 in Nebraska for a short while.
18. At age eight, I buried a time capsule in the bank of the Missouri near a power plant in north Omaha. I have no idea what was in it and don’t really care.
19. I have driven non-stop from Pensacola, FL to Portland, OR, except for gas and coffee stops.
20. I inherited a single oddly arched great toenail from my father.
21. My last name should be VanderHeident.
22. I like to write poetry but kind of suck at it.
23. My favorite color is blue. I’m a guy. My dryer lint is blue.
24. I once lived in San Francisco and worked in Philadelphia.
25. I got my first real job at 13.
26. I have been been drinking espresso since 1973, mainly mochas.
27. A man named George Horni used to build engines for me. His girlfriend would not marry him because she refused to become Tammi Horni.
28. I like to read plays aloud, especially Shakespeare but will try most any of them…
29. I have written two novels and begun a third.
30. I earn part of my living writing blog posts on technical subjects.
31. I live an interesting two years in Geneva, Switzerland.
32. I love to paint, especially abstracts of southwestern scenes, but have not done anything new for several years.
33. I played football for 10 years, seven years as a fullback.
34. I owned an ugly green big Chevy Blazer known as Thunder Truck for 19 years and almost 400,000 miles. It had a Horni racing engine with 650 horsepower and just over 700 foot pounds of torque. In low range, it would pull the gates off hell.
35. During the time I had the Blazer, I bought and sold maybe 20 other cars.
36. I was one of the first 50 people to sign up for the CompuServe Information Service in 1980.
37. I still own the 150/300 baud accoustic coupler that I furst used on CompuServe, hooked first to a Heathkit home-brew system, then a very ritzy Radio Shack TRS-80.
38. I have a largish collection of frog items, sent to me by a wide variety of people, most of whom met me on the internet.
39. I had an IBM 360/25 as my first personal computer.
40. I love being places where my license plate does not match everyone else’s.
41. I love reading and books, an ingrained habit acquired well before the advent of popular television, which may be why I prefer the former to the latter.
42. I will hate it when real books are no longer common, but will probably live to see it.
43. Most of my forbears on my fathers side, from which I have the most obvious genes, lived to be quite old, many well over 100.
44. Like many people, I feel that there is entirely too little available time in comparison to the number of available books.
45. My favorite development project used sonar to do quality assurance on General Electric industrial diamonds.
46. That was the most software I ever wrote for a project, a bit more that 2 million lines of Pascal (not my idea) and assembly language.
47. I have a Springer Spaniel named Tucker the Weird Dawg, a rescue dog with a great personality to make up for a low dawgie IQ.
48. I stopped smoking on June 18, 2004.
49. I almost refuse to wear clothing with someone’s advertising on it.
50. Much of the time, I am listening to my (currently) 893 favorite tracks, on shuffle.
51. I once unknowingly landed a C-47 on half the required main landing gear. Big mistake.
52. I have been Kermit D. Frawg on line since 1981.
53. I really enjoy cinnamon toast.
54. I once paid almost $3000 for a 1 megabyte Winchester disk drive.
55. Most of my life, I have been able to get by on four hours of sleep a night.
56. I did not like Chinese food before I moved to San Francisco in 1970. That quickly changed.
57. My favorite meals ever were abalone steaks, which have become quite rare and hard to get.
58. I was a drug counselor for the YMCA in California.
59. I moved back to the midwest after the Bay Area became too full for my taste, measured by being unable to easily find a parking space at Safeway in the mid-afternoon on a week day.
60. I worked my way back to Kansas from California doing entrepreneurial software projects in Palm Desert, Las Vegas, and Austin, TX.
61. I am an avid photographer and once made part of my living taking photos, mainly for magazines and textbooks.
62. My sister taught me to read, starting with the funnies, and I had graduated to real books before I was 4 years old.
63. I spend way too much time on Plurk.
64. I loved living in Moss Beach, CA more than any other place I have lived.
65. I am the proud owner of an internally lit pink flamingo.
66. I once owned a gay male dog.
67. I love devils food cake with dark chocolate frosting.
68. I own every book written by Frederik Pohl, many of which are autographed first editions.
69. My first car, purchased in Omaha for $25 in 1963, was a 1947 Chevrolet coupe with an odd dent in the left rear fender. I found that exact car on a used classics lot in San Mateo, CA in 1982, for sale for $5,500. I had given it to a friend.
70. I was born in Omaha, NE and left as soon as I reasonably could.
71. I once owned a company that built homes and did commercial remodels in Omaha, and did a large remodel job on Henry Fonda’s home.
72. I lived most of my life in the San Francisco Bay area, mainly down the coast below the city.
73. I went to school on a National Merit scholarship. I’m not all that bright but I was one hell of a test taker. 
74. I commuted between San Francisco and Columbus, OH every two weeks, on average, for almost three years, in Thunder Truck at first, then via the Delta Airline and Screen Door Company.
75. I had very wavy hair until I had cancer surgery and now it is almost straight.
76. Last time I filled out an IT knowledge questionnaire, I found that I could write code in 20-odd programming languages.
77. I love physics and the associated sciences.
78. I have an underdeveloped sense of my own importance in relation to the universal scope of things, probably with good reason.
79. I love horses almost as much as dogs.
80. I used to build furniture, but stopped several years ago. I don’t know why.
81. My cursive writing is so bad that I print everything, almost, but can do that quite neatly.
82. I really like Oreos, but think that natural almonds are my favorite all-around snack.
83. I have had very few nicknames, but was called “Rowdy” for a while late and just after college.
84. I love classical music but have been too lazy to amass a good collection of it.
85. I regularly wear out the “N” key on a keyboard first.
86. I have had the same cell phone, an old Motorola Razr, for well over two years.
87. I moonlighted as a sous chef for a few months while a friend’s shattered leg healed.
88. I had a friend named Russell that was the last train robber ever arrested in California.
89. I once hired a programmer called Big Frog even though he told me up front that he refused to work on days when the moon would be waxing gibbous. It proved a good decision.
90. I love to cook, mainly French, Italian, and Cajun, but will try most anything.
91. That said, I am not a very good baker.
92. For some reason which I cannot explain very well, my current favorite food is Drunken Noodles with chicken, medium hot, from Zen Zero in downtown Lawrence, KS.
93. I was on the board of directors for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for four years.
94. My left leg is almost an inch shorter than my right leg.
95. That came from a bone condition called osteomyelitus and kept me out of the Naval Academy, to my great relief and my father’s great consternation.
96. One of my most prized current possessions is a container of pure maple syrup.
97. I delivered meals to AIDS patients in San Francisco for several years.
98. The music of Django Reinhardt captivates me.
99. I moved from Windows to OS X on a 15” MacBook Pro six months ago and am quite pleased that I did.
100. I started with Windows in 1986 and put up with Microsoft until 2008. I am a patient man.
101. I met many of my friends in the last 25 years on the internet. Most of them call me Kermit.
Advisory Bullshit
It occurred to me again today how many people there are trying to tell us how to live our lives. Doctor Phil. The Dali Lama. Every inexperienced academic on the planet. The Federal Government. Oprah Winfrey. Fox News. John McCain. (okay, so those last two are telling us the same things) Cereal boxes. New age self-improvement books. Newspaper columns. Talk shows. Organized (and unorganized) religions. The Marketing Machine. Bloggers. The media in general. The “style” section in particular. Movies stars. Athletes. Everybody.
News flash. These people are all wrong.
They all have an ax to grind. They all want to look extra smart, or want some slice of your money, or want to exercise control over you, or just want to convince you that their way is the one true way. All of them are mouthing generalities which have nothing to do with you in particular and very little to do with human beings in general. They all want you to do things that are to their advantage and don’t even bother taking you into consideration.
You are the only one like you that there is. That uniqueness is much more than a platitude. The complexity and fine structure that makes up an individual human being is a truly awesome thing to behold, and is utterly impossible to fully comprehend. The best that the platitudes, old wives tales, and conventional “wisdoms” can do is try to play games with your mind for the advantage of the utterer. Pay them little mind.
There is a nugget of “truth” in all of them, if you are the “average” person. Of course, no one is average and there are no easy answers. If you’d like, have a look at what people have to say. If you have enough grains of salt, there is probably something to take away from everything anybody ever says. But that something is probably too general and too small to be of any real value for the specific you.
It should also be noted that looking endlessly at every platitude that comes into your field of vision is probably not a good thing. If you are looking for and at these things, you are probably trying to learn and improve yourself, which is an excellent objective. But the best that platitudes can do is set you to thinking about someone else’s truth and how it may apply to you, if at all.
The truth is, in order to improve yourself, you have to understand your own fine structure and not someone else’s. You need to study and understand yourself. There will never be time to compare yourself against everything. And even more importantly, you will need to actually do something to improve yourself. Pondering platitudes endlessly is an excellent way to waste the rest of your life. After some reasonable period of reflection, get off your butt and do something. If it’s wrong, learn from it and change what you do next accordingly.
Inaction leads only to more inaction. Only informed action leads to life. So stop reading this, right now, and go out and do something.
Saccharine Sex
I understand that sex sells. I understand that there is a great deal of interest in the subject generally. But I do not understand why the most popular take on sex appears to be about as sophisticated as the jokes in high school sophomore biology. Please do not get me wrong. I think sex is wonderful. It is one of the closest moments that two or more consenting adults will ever share. But to me, it is a participatory activity rather than a spectator sport, something to be done and not something to be talked about (and snickered about) ad nauseam.
Yet, women with cleavage are used to convince men to buy cars. Men with two day’s growth of beard are used to sell everyone everything. A human adult wearing a minimum of clothing is seemingly worth more than a cure for cancer. We concentrate on pornography at the expense of the important issues of our time. As a race, we seem to prefer the snickering winks and nods of sophomoric innuendo to all else.
This is true wherever people gather, but is especially true where people gather with fewer inhibitions, such as athletic locker rooms, large women’s rest rooms, and the World Wide Web. In a chat room, or in any such conversational site , the second best way to draw a lot of responses is the use of sexual innuendo. The best way is also via sexual innuendo, but the same innuendo uttered by a woman.
In all of those venues, the sophomoric wit may be amusing the first time, but the same people tend to repeat the same tired lines, time after time. I don’t know what it is that drives otherwise seemingly reasonable people to such conversational depths. I do hope that these mindless repetitions are not carried out by these same people during the actual act, if they do indeed ever participate in the actual act.
Fortunately, one will occasionally find a bit of witty double entendre, or even a few words of stimulating erotic conversation, though these are rarely free of stereotype. Such exchanges can be fascinating, though they are rare. Most of what passes for talk about sex in these venues is dreary and repetitive in the extreme. It is sad that such a fascinating and basically human subject is cheapened so often by so many, rather than cherished.
Voting Critically
It is getting harder every day to discuss politics, simply because the electorate is too polarized. I believe that to be on purpose, a ruse to keep people from talking about the things that matter. Politicians want this situation to be commonplace, in order that we stay disgusted with the process and don’t look at it too closely, or begin to think that we can repair the current abysmal state of government. The mainstream media is certainly complicit. They talk about what the politicians want to talk about, which has nothing to do with meaningful issues. It’s all fluff.
We are kept focused on non-issues; the age, color, or sex of candidates, not what they believe about critical issues. We don’t even talk about critical issues. We talk about the difference between pro-life and pro-choice, two meaningless word-sets if I ever heard any, and not about the deeper societal issues around sex and birth. All issues are polarized, all have buzz-words, while most mean nothing. They are words and phrases meant to confuse, sound bites meant to divide us into ever smaller groups.
As long as we let it be about Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, man vs. woman, and so on down a long list, the politicians and the monied elite that have bought and paid for them them will have their way with us. Thay will have the control; we will be subservient. We will not talk about the important things that could make our lives better, could alleviate the suffering of citizens, and stop the bleeding of our institutions. We vote instead on buzzwords, wardrobe, and haircuts, not substantive matters. This ludicrous process is killing our citizenry and our country.
You can help to alleviate this critical problem. Pick an issue that means something to you. Figure out why it means something to you, exactly how you feel about it, and why. Then find out how the candidates feel about it. Read their position papers, the long versions. Dig into it. See if what they say changes your mind. Look at their records and see if it matches their words. Finally, decide which candidate is closest to your position, and is likely to stick to it.
Then select another issue. Repeat. Do until done.
Islands
When you are young and free of care, sometimes you see something especially shiny. You stop and pick it up, and look at it, and play with it. Usually, the shine goes away and you get bored with it. Sooner or later, you lose the shiny thing and usually don’t even care. Once in a great while, you find something good enough to keep, and so you do. Life progresses quite nicely in that fashion until you begin to understand concepts such as responsibility, and ethics, and compassion (that is, if you ever do.)
These concepts are good things, but they tend to gum up the works. Although you may continue to pick up shiny things, and even keep a few of them, it does not happen nearly so often. Instead, you tend to notice things that are broken. So you pick up those things and try to fix them, and to make them shiny. That sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.
Occasionally, you will run across a broken part of the society in which you exist, and you will work to fix that. That almost never occurs, at least to the extent that you will see the change that you believe to be best for society. That, of course, should not stop you from trying. A lot of things are so big, and so broken, that it takes a very long time and a lot of people to fix them.
If your tendencies are social at all, you will often find a broken person, and you will try to make them shiny, too. This happens especially if you feel you have a debt to pay, or if you believe in paying it forward. The problem is, most people don’t really want to be fixed, no matter what they say. The other problem is that unless you really know how to fix people, you won’t. The best you can hope for is an occasional success.
If you’re especially lucky, you may run across interesting and attractive people that are not very broken at all, although they may have a lot of questions, just like you do. Those people can be like magnets. One of the hardest parts of all is understanding that these people are on their own journey. You may get to walk alongside them for a while, but that is as good as it is going to get. They are as intent on their journey as you are on yours.
Sometimes all those things and people and causes that you have picked up get heavy. You want to just put them down, and start over. Sometimes you can do that, and sometimes you can’t. It would be especially good to find a like mind to walk with for a personal forever and share part of the load. In my experience, that doesn’t happen. With a new load, or an old load, you’re on your own. That is as good as it is going to get.
John Donne was wrong, in the end. Some people are islands, not because they want to be, but because it’s so hard to find someone that is going where you are going, at the same time you’re going there. You’re very lucky if you ever bump into someone like that. I’ve been lucky a couple of times, but just on the destination and not on the timing. That’s life, and that’s often as good as it’s going to get.
Islands are, by their nature, lonely places, and the walk seems longer when you’re alone. The periods just after the close brushes with people going to the same place, but at different times, are the hardest times to be alone. The island seems very small and the ocean seems very large. It probably is not good to stop, though. You just have to keep traveling.
Loving the Mixx
So, on the recommendation of people I knew from StumbleUpon and Twitter, I joined Mixx. At first, it looked a lot like Digg and Reddit. You know, read the articles, vote up or down, yadda yadda. But even during my first evening at Mixx, there was a much better feeling about the place than at any other (more or less) similar site that I had been to.
Maybe because it is still smaller, something which is not going to last for very long. It is simply too good to stay small. Whatever the feeling is, I somehow know that I am very welcome there. That’s one way to put it. Technically, the system is well designed and executed. The rules seem really simple and fair. The moderation of those rules seems equally fair.
But best of all, by far, are the people. It would be impolite to name names, of course, but I quickly found a substantial number of Mixxers to respect and enjoy. I have had some excellent conversations with people at Mixx, either in Mixx-mail or in comments. In the main, the major active players are bright, thoughtful people submitting a lot of good content, sometimes their own but usually not. Hell, at Mixx, even most of the trolls have a sense of humor.
So, right now, Mixx is an extraordinary place. I know that I’m planning to stay. Good people, intelligent management, clear policy, good content. Did I mention good people? There is very little to dislike. Some spam, which is quickly eradicated, and what site doesn’t have spam? Some trolls, but what site doesn’t have trolls, and even the trolls at Mixx seem to be of high quality.
Mixx gives away awards to their members. I have not been there long, but I already have two of them. In my experience, even the awards show good judgment on the part of management. I don’t know exactly how the process works, but they have given me exactly the right prizes, two just the same. Both are awards for being “Most Opinionated.” I cannot imagine anything more fitting for me.
The Process May Still Work
Democracy has been under vigorous attack from the highest levels of the Administration for seven years, for whatever reason. Even if they felt they were doing the right thing, the rest of us know that you can’t save the country by turning it into Communist Poland. Lech fixed that mess, and I hope we can fix this one. The way that the political process appears to be working right now gives me hope.
The Republicans have made the best choice they could have. Romney’s best quality is his hair. Although he is a personable whack-job, Huckabee is still a whack-job. McCain has a few issues, no pun intended, but I honestly feel like he has thought about all of the problems that we face and is campaigning on what he truly feels are the best answers for the country. That is all you can ask of a candidate, and puts him an infinite number of steps above the actions of Bush and Cheney. As I said to someone today, if Obama and Hillary get run over by a truck, I could at least vote for McCain.
On the Democratic side, I will probably vote for whoever gets the nomination at this point. Hillary would be a marked improvement over what we have now, but I think that she is working her own insider agenda, and I can’t see where it has much to do with us. As I have said before, where George wants to be King, Hillary want to be Queen. So I would prefer Obama, the only candidate with any chance to move things back to where our citizens are important again, and our freedoms have a chance to survive and even flourish. Obama is my man.
And there is more good news. The Democratic campaign has been a fairly clean one. I have yet to see an attack ad on the Democratic side. Both candidates have been talking about the issues that confront us, in the main. If Hillary could just get Bill to shut up, this campaign would be almost genteel. That makes me happy. We need to talk about the issues. We need leaders that believe in us and themselves, and don’t make all of their decision based on polls. The democratic process, with a small ‘d’, seems to be resurfacing after an absence of many years. That makes me very happy.
Post-Super-Tuesday Wednesday
So, how do I feel about things now that Super Tuesday is over? Naturally, I’ve thought about it and have an opinion or two. First, the Republicans. McCain is likely, now to be the winner. He is almost certainly the best they have. Romney is to be commended for having the best hair, of course. The odd man out that won’t go away is still Huckabee, a fellow who has an invisible man in the sky as a campaign manager. He apparently has captured the conservative whacko vote. I know, I shouldn’t beat around the bush so much. Sorry.
On the Democratic side, nothing changed, really. I’d have been happier if Obama had won big-time. but that was not to be, especially in places like New York and California. Hillary is just where she was, a tiny bit ahead of her only competition. I can hope that Barack Obama can get most of the remaining delegates, but that is just a hope. I believe that they are going to go into the convention very close to tied, with no candidate selected.
If that happens, I believe that back-room deals, dirty politics, and money (especially money) will get Hillary the nomination. Look at where her money comes from and you can tell she’s on sale. That’s sad, but it is the current state of American politics. The movers and shakers (the corporate rich) will move and shake, and Obama will be left out in the cold. I don’t believe that he is for sale, at least not yet.
Maybe, as one of the CNN wags said last night, Barack Obama is a movement and movements are hard to stop. I don’t know that that is true. The folks in charge have done a very good job of stopping the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the Black rights movement, the Gay rights movement, and any other movement that has any chance of loosening their iron control on the reins and whip that control this country.
I will still campaign for and stand behind Barack Obama. I can’t guarantee that my whole heart will be in it, though. Party politics as usual, combines with corporate greed, both well spun, may be enough to do him in.
