Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Confuse-a-Dog

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An old Monty Python skit posits a service called “Confuse-a-Cat.” (Veterinarian to anxious elderly couple: “I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused.”) I started to explain the whole thing but was laughing too hard to type properly; I’ll include the seven-minute routine in its entirety at the foot of this post, for those of you who don’t know of it — or just want to see it again.

I remembered this skit this morning, after an episode of complicated human-canine choreography. (A cat was involved as well, peripherally — and perhaps in confusion.)

The Missus and I share one car, which works well for us (with some periodic adjustments) maybe 97% of the time. But boy, that remaining 3% is a killer, and today definitely fell into the 3% basket. Without getting into the details, here’s what had to happen:

  • The Missus needed to use the car for an hour or two, starting at 8 a.m.
  • Our Yorkshire terrier Sophie — who normally goes to work with The Missus — had to stay home. She’s done this before, so it wasn’t exactly a crisis in itself. But there was a catch, or maybe two:
  • We have a housecleaning service come in every couple of weeks…
  • …and while Sophie is much much better at dealing with strangers than she was a year ago, she still completely loses it when a stranger first enters the house. (Translation: high anxiety for both dog and housecleaning personnel.)

The solution I came up with: I’d stay home with Sophie until The Missus got back with the car; this would help keep Sophie calm, or at least distracted. And because that part of the plan required separating dog and housecleaner as much as possible, we’d stay isolated in the upstairs offices (which we clean ourselves). And that part of the plan required that I get not just Sophie, but all her… her appurtenances upstairs with us. (This would be the same upstairs area where our dog-phobic cat lives, by the way. And where Sophie never visits, therefore, except accidentally.)

Some of the appurtenances involved:

  • a collapsible gate which I could set up at the top of the stairway, to keep Sophie upstairs
  • food dish and water bowl (and food and water, of course)
  • bouncy ball
  • dog bed (in the unlikely event that she’d want to sleep)
  • treats A, B, and C
  • the hard-rubber doggy gizmos into which we insert treat A, B, or C and thus make Sophie work for them, by God
  • various materials to enable prompt, sanitary handling of what we might call “dog spillage”

I also needed to take my shower and get dressed for work, pack up the various bags we bring with us each day, get a few things out of the housecleaner’s way, leave a note for her on the front door so she wouldn’t be freaked out by the footsteps and (probable) barking and yelping and reprimanding and pleading overhead, write a check for her, be sure I had a bottle of water for myself — and ditto my Blackberry, to keep me entertained (on the Web) while, as I hoped, Sophie would be entertaining herself.

I had one hour to do all the above. And I wanna tell you, I was sweating when done.

And you know what? If you want to completely reverse the behavior of a hyperactive little dog, this appears to be a great approach: disappear into the bathroom for a half hour and emerge clean and completely dressed; run around furiously, snatching up all of said dog’s everyday sacred objects and carrying them off to forbidden territory; setting up the hated collapsible gate at the top of the stairs; grabbing said dog herself and depositing her on the far side of said collapsible gate, in said forbidden territory; clamber over the gate yourself; flop (soaked and interestingly perfumed) onto the floor, alongside said dog; and there pluck from your shirt pocket a small black rectangular object which you immediately start poking at, madly, with your thumbs.

Worked great, I tell you. Instant and total physical inertia of the canine sort — the opposite of confusing a cat, in fact. And even though it didn’t last, it was thoroughly satisfying for those few minutes.

__________________

Here are the Pythons and their Confuse-a-Cat skit (and here’s the transcript, if you’d like to follow along):

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Enough Is Enough! (Er, Isn’t It?)

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From Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges (translation by James E. Irby):

[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes…

The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.

—-

Edit to add (2009-09-17): If you’ve already read this post and the postscripts which follow it, you already know about the book Mrs. West’s Hats. The author/photographer has kindly given permission for me to use an image from the book, which I’ve added to the P.S.

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Review: How Sex Works, by Dr. Sharon Moalem

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My review of this book is now online, over at The Book Book.

Short version:

  • Non-fiction, written by a neurogeneticist and evolutionary biologist.
  • Based on fairly current research. Informative. (Especially on the question of what makes you turn your head at someone, or not — at least if they’re within sniffing range.)
  • Not as provocative as you might imagine, not as clever as the chapter titles might suggest…
  • …but not bad. Okay.

One issue has already come up, related to my review rather than to the book itself. I wouldn’t mind hearing from others about it. Which is: Did I go too far in using asterisks to hide certain keywords (including the title’s most important word) from the hungry, Google-fed appetites of spammers, link farmers, and so on?

I really don’t know. Thought about it for weeks, in fact — and finally decided to err on the side of caution, mostly since I’m not the unlucky soul who’d be responsible for scrubbing away all the comment spam, and/or turning comment moderation on.

Opinions?

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Department of Unintended Consequences
(Animals & Technology Division)

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The Missus and I are not alone in having a dog who barks rabidly during thunderstorms. But alone or not, we do. She may be little, and her bark may be a mere yip! compared to the more conventional woof! of full-size hounds, but she is determined to scare the storm away.

(And you know what? You can’t argue with results. The storm always leaves.)

For the record, she also barks when dogs on TV bark, and she barks when doors slam on TV, and when she’s anxious for dinner, and when someone opens the front door from outside, and she barks when she’s happy and excited about a new toy or t,r,e,a,t being unwrapped.

Still, she was doing this new thing in the last couple of weeks which I couldn’t understand: she’d suddenly start barking for no reason. It was like her storm-barking: frantic, maddened you-better-stay-away-from-my-family barking.

I couldn’t understand it, that is, until the moment over the weekend when I just happened to— well, let me explain.

The Missus and I have new “smart” phones. I don’t know what The Missus is up to with hers, but by default, when my own phone rings it just rings. Oh, I’d done the obvious thing already — downloaded a ringtone, and aren’t I hot stuff for having figured that out?

But then my former boss was telling me about her phone, which is roughly the same model, and she asked if I’d gotten into customizing ringtones: really customizing them.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I set mine up to ring as usual whenever someone calls, and I’ve got a different ringtone for my Mama, and one for my sisters…”

That sounded (ha, no pun intended) pretty cool to me. So I did some research. And then took action.

Now, I haven’t gone as far yet as my ex-boss. But on a lark, I did set the phone up to play my downloaded ringtone whenever a call comes in… and to vibrate whenever an email arrived in the Inbox.

That was it, you see:

Notifications from Facebook: bzzzzzzz, BarkBarkBark!

Spam arriving: bzzzzz, BarkYipBark!

E-newsletter subscriptions: bzzzzz, YipYipYipYip!

In short, the dog was being driven slowly but unambiguously mad by the male human’s flaky experiments in telecommunications.

And all it took for the male human to figure it out was to move the phone from the coffee table to his hip pocket. And then, of course, to make a connection between the bzzzz! against the thigh and the YipYipYip! in the ear. We won’t discuss how long this last step took.

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29° 57′ N, 90° 4′ W

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As you know if you’ve been here for a while — even if you haven’t read the explanation of the blog’s title; just from reading the content — the mission of Running After My Hat might be summed up, sorta, like this:

Despite the inherent ridiculousness of the act, to pursue in deadly earnest whatever weird little distraction catches my interest.

You could hardly pick a more appropriate city than New Orleans for pursuits like this. And I guess the obvious place to start doing so literally would be at Meyer the Hatter’s establishment. Says my little Frommer’s guide book:

Meyer’s opened more than 100 years ago and has been in the same family ever since. Today the haberdashery has one of the largest selections of fine hats and caps in the South… Go outfit yourself like a proper gentleman caller.

(No, sorry, I didn’t go into the store. I think that word “proper” discouraged me from entering.)

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Very Dead Things, and a Small Box of Chocolate Bunnies

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If you’ve read my most recent Friday post, you’ve probably figured out that the early-1990s TV series Twin Peaks looms large in The Missus’s and my collective imagination.

(Actually, we have a habit of latching onto odd, off-center network series which don’t have a chance in hell of surviving past the first season or two — simply because of the confusion and venality of network executives. Don’t even get us started on American Gothic.)

When we met, online, in 1991, the show was in its first season. Prior to the premier, I’d read a review by — of all people — Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, and it made up my mind that I just had to watch that episode, even if none of the later ones. I can’t find this review online anywhere (even though, with my subscriber’s credentials, I’ve got access to the magazine’s entire archives; maybe I read it somewhere else?). But Kael was nuts about the premier episode; she wrote of the first glimpse of Laura Palmer as something like “quite possibly the deadest thing you will ever see on network television.”

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Her Little Voice

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[Above is the longer version of the Twin Peaks opening title sequence, including a fairly
 complete cast listing (at least for the recurring characters). The “official” and higher-
quality version, with a truncated theme song and cast listing, is here.]

[Note: Comments disabled for this post, for what will eventually be obvious reasons. :)]

From whiskey river:

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world — rock, bone, wood, ice — and elements of the real — not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself — inside stories and tales and dreams.

(Rick Bass)

Not from whiskey river:

your little voice
Over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
or twinkling over to my side
Looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
Up
with the pale important
stars and the Humorous
moon
dear girl
How i was crazy how i cried when i heard
over time
and tide and death
leaping
Sweetly
your voice

(E.E. Cummings)

…and:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you
be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with
the same music.

(Kahlil Gibran)

And finally, who could argue with this?

One woman can make you fly like an eagle, another can give you the strength of a lion, but only one in the Cycle Of Life can fill your heart with wonder and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy.

(Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill, Twin Peaks)

…Okay, I said “finally” up there but, heck, as long as we’re on the theme we may as well go for broke:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is about 5½ minutes long.

[audio:falling_juleecruise.mp3|titles=Falling|artists=Julee Cruise]

Falling
(lyrics by David Lynch; music by Angelo Badalamenti;
performance by Julee Cruise)

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then I saw your face
Then I saw your smile

The sky is still blue
The clouds come and go
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then your kiss so soft
Then your touch so warm

The stars still shine bright
The mountains still high
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Falling
Falling

Are we falling in love?

Happy anniversary, Baby. ♥

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Damned Radiograph

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From the start of a recently deleted sp*m comment here at RAMH:

Whereas feelings are not viewed as ethical(that is, not judged to be good or bad), behaviors are . The radiograph will show you how many puppies she is having . Value your partner as your sexual friend and be an intimate team.

The hell with that, I say. If she’s having even a single puppy she’s got a lot of explaining to do… and you can safely strike the phrase “intimate team” from our implied contract, starting now.

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Notes from the Clearing

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[Above “homage to Miller’s Crossing” also represents a tip of the hat to Froog.]

So it’s been a year now: 365 days, 309 published posts [Editor’s note: 310, or have you forgotten that you wrote this one yesterday?], 1,295 comments (counting my own replies to comments, and occasional replies to those replies).

When I started Running After My Hat — the blog, not the activity for which the blog is named — I didn’t know, really, what it would turn out to be. I had a few ideas for “practical” goals, (almost?) none of which materialized, and one idea for… well, call it a spiritual goal.

I started my first blog in late 1999; it didn’t last long. (You can see a snapshot of it here, courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.) Since then I’ve worked on maybe a half-dozen others, some as the only contributor and some as a co-blogger. Without exception, I think, they’ve all been single-topic blogs: about politics, writing, or technology; blogs I’ve been paid to develop for someone else’s purposes; even a blog — currently open to just my siblings and me — for recording family memories we want not to be lost to the next generation.

Only RAMH, though, has worked out to be something like I really wanted to do. Like the creators of the Seinfeld TV show famously insisted about their product, RAMH is pretty much about nothing, at least nothing in particular, and so it’s turned out pretty much to my liking.

One of my favorite Web watering holes is the here often-touted Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast site. (Oddly, or so I keep insisting, even though 7-Imp‘s nominal topic — children’s literature, and especially illustrated children’s literature — even though this is a topic I know little about, nor spend much time following otherwise, I’ve found myself really at home there.) Not incidentally, in their blogroll you’ll find a link to RAMH; if you hover your mouse over that link, you’ll see one of the nicest and most unexpected comments anyone has made about this blog:

John E. Simpson shows us that “a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy.”

As it happens, they got that embedded quote from a page here at RAMH. I’d challenge the “manliest” and the “most sacred” seasonings in that clause, but will happily accept the ardour and joy side dishes. Throw in a bit of labour (especially of love) and the ridiculousness of pursuing one’s hat in the first place, and I’ll be satisfied indeed.

To wrap up this look back, and in connection with the section of this post which follows, I’ll offer these five as among my favorite posts of Running After My Hat‘s first year, for specific reasons best known to myself:

Finally, thanks, as ever — for things understood, and for things neither she nor the rest of you may ever pick up on — to The Missus. She’s indulged me a lot as I’ve tried to grow and maintain RAMH this first year.

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“Not Quite Jaundice”

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[This is the first of three brief posts on the experience of being sick, sorta-kinda-like, for four (sorta) days.]

From Catch-22:

Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.

A little over a week ago, I first noticed a not common but still familiar sort of weakness of the limbs. Flu, it said to me. You’re getting the flu.

Which I didn’t really want to be hearing: I didn’t want to hear it from the lips of someone knowledgeable, with pursed lips and horned-rim glasses and the overall demeanor, coincidentally, of a pharmaceuticals salesman, and I really didn’t want to hear it from a vague muscular sensation with no medical diplomas at all hanging behind its desk.

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