oyal readers of Third Age Thoughts will well remember, but new recruits (and disloyal old readers) might not know, or care, why I stopped putting out new blog posts in 2020. There were probably many reasons, but the proximate cause of my stopping was Louis. We had recently gotten him as a 12 week old adorable puppy, and what with walkies, poopies, feedies, and cleanuppies, I suddenly found myself deep in the red, creative-writing-time-and-energy-wise.

Baby Lu-lu

I’m not complaining. It was a good time, if exhausting. Louis, who is incredibly cute, was even cuter as a baby, as this picture shows. (The picture also shows that I was much balder back in 2020 than I allow myself to believe I am now. Fortunately, memories, especially memories of how much hair I don’t have, are mercifully short. I’m starting to forget already. But I digress.)

When Louis was a baby and had to pee every few hours, I would stay up late with him to take him for his midnight stroll. I would put on the TV something with a little slow movement and soft voices, to keep me from falling asleep too deeply while simultaneously not jarring me or Louis awake with sudden noises. This was December, and the Curling finals were on each night late, and they suited just fine. While I started airing them almost as a backg­round screen­saver, I soon found myself sucked in to that fascinating, if weird, sport. I thought it was like shuffleboard, but really the eye and skill demanded make it seem more like pool, like those trick pool shots that are always popping up unrequested on Facebook. Sorry, on “Meta”.

I picked up the lingo: Curling is one of the few professional sports in which the command “Whoa!” is part of the official patois. I learned that each inning is called an “end” no matter where it occurs in the game, and that the speed at which you slide a stone is called not its speed, but its “weight”. The curving trajectory that a player imparts by spinning the stone isn’t called “English” like in pool, it’s called “curl” (hence the name, Curling). I don’t know why they don’t call it English; maybe it’s because the term originated in English Canada and it’s the same reason they don’t call them French fries in France. (Third-agers will remember decades ago when Congress tried to change the name of French fries to “Freedom fries”, because they were miffed that France didn’t like that we invaded Iraq. Don’t you wish Congress was as states­man­like now as it was then?)

Kerri Einarson

I even picked a favorite team: Team Canada women’s curling team, hailing out of Manitoba and captained (or “skipped”) by Kerri Einarson. She identifies as Métis, which is an officially recognized Canadian indigenous group, interesting (to me) because of its mixed European (mainly French, I think) and native American ancestry, formed in the mid-18th century during the height of the North American fur trade.

ANYWAY, why am I waxing nostalgic for 2020 and puppy Louis? Because we have decided, against the advice of virtually everyone we’ve told, and our own better judgement, to get another new puppy. Or maybe I should just say we’re getting a new puppy, because Louis, cute and playful though he still is, isn’t really new, or a puppy, any more.

Our journey to second-puppyhood has been plagued with so many setbacks that it’s hard not to believe that the universe is sending us a message: Don’t do it! In December, Louis bolted while walking with Kathleen (there were extenuating circumstances; it wasn’t pure Louis evil), and Kathleen took a very bad fall and broke her pelvis. We were working with other ailments that were active at the time, maybe related to her auto­immune diseases, and the new injury and old diseases each made the other much harder to manage, and to live with. We’ve had a very hard time, one of the worst six months of our lives together (and we’ve been through some hard patches in our over forty years of matrimonial bliss).

We had picked out a puppy, a cute baby sister for Louis, and were only four days from bringing her home when Kathleen had her accident, and it forced us to scuttle the whole deal. She had a significant period of immobility and constant pain, and a much longer time of convalescence, ahead of her, and we just couldn’t have a puppy underfoot. It was hard enough with Louis, who spent a lot of time during the next few months in Doggie Day Care.

Kathleen

Six months later, Kathleen is still not fully healed, but she’s up and walking short distances. Our first choice puppy had long since gone to a different forever home, so we restarted our search despite the wailing of well-meaning friends and neighbors (these people said we were crazy to get another dog before Kathleen’s injury—you can imagine what they’re saying now).

Tom Hanks

The Day Care that Louis patronizes somehow found itself with a brown miniature poodle as a permanent guest. I think the circumstances were similar to those in that movie where Tom Hanks couldn’t get out of the airport and had to set up house there. We thought about this situation for about a week, then called: “We’d like to come up and take this doggie off your hands! We’ll be up in fifteen minutes!”. Less than five minutes later, they called back. “I’m sorry, while you and I were on the phone earlier, my coworker was finalizing a deal with another family to take the dog. He’s gone.”

That’s twice now that Fate had prevented us from adding a dog to our family at the last minute, but we kept trying. We saw another little schnauzie-looking thing at a small dog rescue site, but once again, by the time we were able to make it down there, he had been snatched up.

Sean Connery

Now that’s three times, and you know what they say: “Once is happen­stance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” (And by “they”, I mean Ian Fleming in the James Bond masterpiece Goldfinger.)

But we would not be deterred from our quest, despite all reason, and a clear message from the universe! The heart wants what the heart wants, and in this house, what the heart wants is PUPPIES!

So we reached out to where we got Louis, a farm where they not only breed dogs, but also train them (some of them) to be service dogs. We picked out a little Cavapoo who they promise will never grow beyond half of Louis’s current size, and we arranged that she would stay there to get obedience and self-discipline training for about three months before we pick her up. We named her “Phoebe”.

Phoebe

We’ll be getting her after she has mastered the fields of heeling and sitting, with a minor in not knocking Kathleen over and breaking her pelvis. Meantime, we’re having long awkward talks with Louis so he won’t be surprised or jealous to have a new baby in the house, and understands the importance of being a Good Big Brother. I’m sure that’ll go just fine, but I’ll keep you posted.

Toodles,
Dorn
5/29/2024

athleen has been watching shows about Swedish Death Cleaning, or as they say in Sweden, Din mamma är norsk grisuppfödare. For those of you for whom this blog post is your first foray into the internet in several years, Swedish Death Cleaning is the new house­keeping meme, taking over from Marie Kondo’s The Unbearable Magic of Tidying Up, or whatever it’s called. It’s a uniquely Third-Age-and-up concept that starts with the premise that by your age you have filled your house to the brim with useless stuff.

When you pass away (that’s the “death” in Death Cleaning), your kids have to get rid of it all. They have no use for it, and are not bound to it as you were by habit or sentimental attachments. So if you really loved your kids (the premise continues), you would do them a favor and relieve them of this unpleasant bit of posthumous housekeeping. Throw it out now, and everyone wins!

We’re not zealots, but we have been cleaning out stuff that we’ve kept for so long it’s hard to imagine life without it, especially as it will never break or wear out, because we never actually use it. A case in point is the large collection of photographs we’ve accumulated over the years, documenting weddings, births, graduations. And vacations, oh so many vacation photos.

Our most recent pictures are online, stored somewhere in the cloud. It wasn’t that long ago (in Third-Age time) that we were storing all our pictures on CD. Remember those heady days when digital photography first replaced film, and your camera could suddenly take thousands of images at a time instead of just 20 or 30? You could take hundreds of shots of that mountain goat, or sunset, or halloween costume, secure in the knowledge that when you got home you would discard 99% of them and just keep the one or two perfect gems. Yeah, right.

For sheer cubic footage, our photo archive is dominated by film-based, printed-on-paper pictures, and the most treasured of these were always carefully mounted in a Family Album. Kathleen’s been saying for years that we should get a good quality scanner and, if we can’t bring ourselves to just throw away most of these pictures, then at least digitize them so they don’t take up any physical space, and throw away the redundant paper copies. I finally gave in, and found that she was right (as usual).

So I have been scanning in our photos, one Family Album at a time. I say one at a time, but actually I’m still scanning the very first Family Album. It’s our oldest, containing pictures of Kathleen’s childhood and long-departed relatives. Back in those days, every photograph was the culmination of someone’s hard work and planning, so I’m expecting many fewer “should-never-have-bothered-keeping” photos than I’ll find in our later Family Albums.

Here are some highlights I’ve come across to far. This is Kathleen’s mother Rose, somewhere around 1920. Kathleen tells me she heard that back in the early 20th century, itinerant photographers with ponies would prowl the streets of Brooklyn looking for children to pester their tired parents for a picture on horse­back. It was the in-person, on-foot equivalent of what we Third-Agers will remember from the commercials-disguised-as-cartoons that hypnotized us every Saturday morning, or the Tik-Tok clickbait that today’s kids must navigate. Will the children never be safe?

This is Rose’s lifelong friend Rosemarie Carbone in 1930. She’s noted for two things: first, years after this picture she became god­mother to Kathleen’s brother Joseph. Second, she’s related some­how to the Carbone spaghetti sauce empire that’s still going strong today. There’s a whole saga in there I’m sure, but I don’t know any of it.

Nanny

Kathleen sometimes recounts stories that her maternal grandmother “Nanny” used to tell her when she was very young and they would do chores together. Mostly they were about people that Nanny knew. She told the story of their neighbor Maria, who worried that she would never get married. Every night Maria would pray to St. Catherine (Nanny would pronounce it “Kat-a-RINE”), the patron saint of old maids.

(Interesting side note: Catherine was a 4^th century saint who was sentenced to die for her faith by being placed on a revolving torture machine. She was saved from this fate when the torture wheel miraculously broke. So they just beheaded her. I don’t know exactly what the torture wheel did, but I can imagine it was pretty grisly, given that they named the “Catherine Wheel” firework in its honor.)

Maria (Nanny’s story goes) had a St. Catherine statue, before which she prayed dutifully, but to no avail. Finally, in frustration one day, she said the good italian girl’s equivalent of “screw it!”, and threw the statue out the window. Soon she was summoned to the door by an angry knocking. A young man was there, red with fury, carrying in his hands the pieces of the broken St. Catherine statue. “You nearly killed me with this! It just narrowly missed my head!” Apologies were made, tempers were cooled, and eventually, Maria married this young man. “And” (Nanny would beam), “he owned an entire apartment building!”

This story is too good to be true!, you may think, but no, it’s real, and here’s the proof: Maria’s wedding photo. That’s her, third from the left.

Below is another shot from the Family Album. Young Kathleen is with her parents (in the top row), her Aunt Josie, and her paternal grandparents Giuseppe and Vincenza. Kathleen was almost named Vincenza, she says, but happily avoided this fate when her mother fixed on Kathleen instead, to prevent fighting over naming rights among relatives (not the grandmothers themselves, they were too genteel for that).

Giuseppe was by all accounts an awful man, but he did provide some of the genetic building blocks for Kathleen and our kids, so I’m grateful for that. He also had the foresight never to bother getting naturalized when he immigrated from Italy, right around the turn of the last century. By Italian law, this means that his descendants, even though born in the United States, are eligible for Italian citizenship, and need only demonstrate their relationship to Giuseppe to be recognized by the Italian government as citizens.

I’ve been working (very slowly) on getting Kathleen’s italian citizenship recognized. This is for purely selfish reasons, you understand: by another Italian law, anyone married to an Italian citizen can themselves apply for Italian citizenship! I can see myself in my sun-baked villa in Sienna, with grape vines and chickens running around, enjoying my breakfast of espresso and a cornetto in my coffee-stained white t-shirt, ready to sit around the piazza with the other old men watching the world go by. Crazy, you say? Yes, crazy come una volpe!

I would write more on my quest for a new foreign identity, but I suspect I could stretch it into a blog post all its own some day, especially if I actually make any progress. So I’ll end my exploration of our Family Album here with a little puzzle. I’m sure you’ve realized that the title of this post, “Flamy Malibu”, has nothing to with what I actually wrote about. That’s because that isn’t really the title. It is in fact an anagram of the title. Can you possibly guess what the true title is?

Thanks,
Dorn
5/2/2025

Author's note
Before getting into our regularly scheduled blog, I really have to share with you something I read last night in the April 20 Washington Post. I like to try to keep abreast of the evolutionary turns the language is taking, but I gasped out loud with delighted surprise when I read this sentence (not even the full sentence, really) that Chris Richards had written in his review of Taylor Swift's latest album:

"...Swift’s new ballads are sour theater, fixated on memories of being wronged and stranded, sodden with lyrics that feel clunky, convoluted, samey, purple and hacky."

"Samey"! What a wonderful word, immediately obvious in meaning, but less than half the letters of its predecessor, "repetitious", just the thing for tired young thumbs. How'd I miss that? I'm'a have to look into this more, and maybe post about it.

Now back to "Schrödinger's Hair". 

I take Louis on a good long walk every day that I can, and it does us both good. We walk on local roads, Bayside boardwalks, park trails and forest hiking paths. If I’m not mistaken, it seems like there is less litter along the pathways than I remember in times past, which is very heartening. But there’s still some. There is one item in particular that I seem to find more often than any other, by far. Care to guess what it is? I won’t reveal the answer until the next paragraph.

Paragraph separator and pause-forcer

It’s not candy wrappers or empty cans of Red Bull. It’s those little elastic black cloth-covered rubber bands used to hold ponytails together. They’re sometimes known, I believe, as scrunchies. It seems like I see these on fully half the walks I take, and I have no idea why.

Is there some sort of fundamental flaw in its structure that causes it to work its way loose while the wearer is walking, then drop off without being noticed? Does its drab black color and unadorned design give off some “worthless” vibe that makes it prone to being thoughtlessly discarded, the way smokers used to carpet the ground with used filters and butts?  I just don’t know.

I probably first noticed these scrunchies on the ground because I use one for my own ponytail. I confess my first thought when I realized how abundant they were was “Neat! Instead of buying them at Walmart, I can just pick one up whenever I need one! Live off the land!.” Fortunately, my second thought was “eww. Cooties”

I have a ponytail because stopped cutting my hair in the Covid year, when Kathleen and I were strict quarantine observers. After the quarantine lifted, I noticed that my quality of life had not been impacted in any way by my lack of hair cutting, so I thought screw it! I just won’t bother cutting my hair any more since the act is not doing me any good.

I was perhaps channeling my inner child a bit when I decided this. Fellow Third-Agers will remember that back in the Age of Aquarius, hair was the medium of choice for expressing one’s defiance of one’s parents and society in general. I was a bit young in the 1960s for full-out rebellion, but I did make my dad crazy by refusing to wear my hair short. Ah, fun times.

In an attempt at compromise, my dad suggested had I could keep it long on the top if I cut it short on the bottom. Or maybe the suggestion was to cut it short on the top and keep it long on the bottom, I don’t remember.  At any rate I do remember being absolutely horrified to my bones at the thought of his suggestion. Funny about what horrifies you when you’re young. 

Now that I’m old, I’ve developed prejudices of my own. I particularly don’t like how the young people these days sport huge bushy beards they look like they are trying to mimic civil war heroes except with shaved heads. Kids!

I have this one hair style prejudice that is so specific that it feels like it came to me in a vision. When I was younger (I can’t remember if this happened when I was 5 or 50 or somewhere in between), I developed an abhorrence at the prospect that some day I would simultaneously have both a ponytail and bald spot.

This of course is exactly the look I’m sporting now, at least from the back. One of my neighbors pointed it out, and my forgotten vision came flooding back to me. Oh well, I’m old now, I don’t have to be horrified by anyone’s fashion choices, including my own.

From some angles, it’s not at all obvious that I’m nearly bald on top. Growing up watching the inexorable deforestation of my dad’s head, I was pretty confident of what was in store for me, but I feel like my hair has gotten something of a stay of execution. I’m not sure I’m any less bald than my dad or my baby brother, but I inherited from my mom (who probably got it from her Irish ancestors) the tendency to go white early, and my white hair captures more light, and gives a better illusion of fullness, than my brother’s or my dad’s darker tresses.

The discussion might be enhanced at this point by a picture of me. Because this post is all self-report (as opposed to, say, facts), it would be more informative if I provided a picture of how I see myself, rather than a photograph of how I objectively look. I assure you, though, the differences between the two are practically negligible.

It’s now been five years since the Covid hit, and almost five years since I stopped cutting my hair, and I’ve noticed something remarkable: I’m pretty sure that the overall amount of the hair on my head hasn’t changed in that time. Yes, my ponytail has grown longer, slowly. But at the same time the number of hairs making up that ponytail, and the average thickness of each individual hair strand, have reduced by an amount that seems to exactly counterbalance the length increase.

Amount of hair =
(length of hair) * (no. of hairs) * (thickness of hair)
= constant

Were I to graph the length of my ponytail length against the number and thickness of the hairs that comprise it, I predict it would extend asymptotically to an infinitely long ponytail composed of an infinitely small number of infinitely fine hairs.

I can already anticipate your objection to my prediction: both the number of hairs on my head, and my hair’s thickness (measured in, say, atoms), are positive whole numbers that can’t keep getting smaller forever. Sooner or later, one or both of these quantities must go from one to zero, and the asymptote ends.

Or does it?

I believe the hair on my head is getting so fine that it can no longer accurately be described using Newtonian concepts of particles and mass. As my hair gets finer and finer, its properties are becoming less particle-like more wave-like, and quantum effects must be considered. In other words, my hair is getting wavy. (Ha ha ha, “wavy”, see what I did there?)

Anyway, I have developed a theory that the material that inhabits the top of my head is approaching the point where it is best described as a probability cloud, and I’d like to figure out a way to test my quantum-hair theory.

If I cause my hair-cloud to interact with a macroscopic object, for example by dragging a comb over it, I find the hairs have collapsed back into their fully particle-like form and are stuck in the teeth. I believe this is called “quantum entanglement”. But there is a simpler explanation—that the comb simply yanked out some weakly-anchored normal Newtonian hairs from my dome—and Occam’s Razor requires that I select the simplest explanation. (Speaking of which, I gave up shaving years before I gave up cutting my hair, and that process has a physics all its own. For example, did you know that, like the poles of planet Earth, the human head has two cowlicks?)

I wish I could come up with experiments that could prove or disprove the existence of my hair probability cloud, but so far I haven’t thought of any. If any readers have suggestions of how I can further explore the quantum physics of hair loss, I would love to hear them. But I won’t shoot electrons at my head, or sit in a box with a cyanide pellet that will kill me if I am observed to be bald, so don’t bother suggesting anything along those lines.

Thanks for reading,
Dorn
4-23-2024

Spring was blossoming all around us, it looked like the number of vaccinated people was reaching a local maximum, and Kathleen and I got the urge to go out and see something!, like the old days. We felt like those people in the City of Ember [ref] who had spent two hundred years underground to avoid a plague that ravaged the surface world: in a word, antsy.

The Washington Post said that the Smithsonian was reopening its buildings and facilities, and further said that dogs were welcome in most of their outdoor places, so we thought, Let’s take Louis to see the National Zoo!

Although the zoo was open, entry was controlled by access passes that you had to get online. They were free, but were quickly claimed up weeks in advance, when they were offered. If you wanted a parking pass to go with that, you were talking more than a month in the future. And if on top of that you wanted a “Panda Pass”, the wait was almost two months if you could get it at all. The pass requirement was a hassle, but at least when we got there, the crowds would be lighter than back when they let just anyone in.

I haven’t been following zoo goings-on this year, but I reasoned that if these Pandas needed their own passes to go see, they must be something really special. Maybe like Fiona the baby hippo at the the Cincinnati Zoo, who is so adorable that it makes us want to go visit that zoo also, despite the ten-hour drive to get there.

Flash forward a month or two, when the passes we had ordered finally became valid. Kathleen, Louis and I drove into DC (which was in itself an adventure—we hadn’t been into DC in well over a year. Had it changed much? What’s this new bridge going up over the Anacostia River? Am I even going to be able to find the zoo from memory?)

My first impression on arriving at the Connecticut Avenue National Zoo entrance was the hordes of people going in! Couples, families with all their survival supplies balanced precariously on strollers, school or other groups with matching t-shirts in various stages of dishevelment (and this was just as they were arriving at the zoo–I shudder to think what they’ll look like by the time they’re leaving!). The place seemed as crowded as I’d ever seen it before the plague year. That’s a good sign that things are returning to normal, I guess.

We parked (it’s lucky they required advance parking passes; at least we knew we’d find a spot), and strolled in.

Louis was an immediate hit! It makes sense since the zoo audience was animal lovers, and Louis is an undeniably photogenic labradoodle puppy. “Best looking animal here!” one bystander told us.

(This is no exaggeration. Every time we’re out walking anywhere, I estimate about 90% of the people we meet feel obliged to say, “Aw, what a cute puppy!”. They all use the same word, cute, and of the 10% of the population that don’t exclaim how cute he is, I bet 90% of them are thinking it. I sometimes forget when I’m up late with puppy diarrhea or cleaning up yet another TV remote that’s been chewed to bits, but Louis is undeniably one cute animal. He’s got a puppy bouncy enthusiasm, a winning personality, and long, soft chocolate dreadlocks. He’s like a little grizzly bear cub, only even cuter.)

Everyone at the zoo wanted to come admire Louis, and many, especially the kids (of which there were many), wanted to pet him. Louis was having a great time despite the heat, and he hardly noticed that he was surrounded by animals he had never before seen or smelled.

We found the “Asia Walk”, which led to the Panda House. A couple of young zoo interns were taking a break at the entrance, so I asked if dogs were allowed on this Walk. “Well, yes, if they’re service dogs. Otherwise they aren’t allowed in the zoo at all.”

Uh oh! I guess I should have done a little research on whether the zoo fell into the category of “most Smithsonian outdoor places” that allowed dogs!

Louis was in plain sight next to me, at the other end of the leash, but I calculated that these interns were too comfortable sitting in the shade drinking their big gulps to pose a threat to our day out. “Well, thank you, forget I asked,” I mumbled, and we hot-footed it away from the Asia Walk.

It may have been coincidence, or I may have underestimated the interns’ dedication to law and order, but soon after we ran into a uniformed zoo guard. Like everyone else there, he was instantly enraptured by Louis’s cuteness, and before talking to us he had to give him a good rubdown and tell him several times what a good boy he was. Then he spoke to us.

Kathleen was more prepared than I had been with the interns.

Great answer, Kathleen, not least because it was true—we do have him in training (leash walking, and coming), and we do hope he will provide us emotional support. How could he not, he’s so cute!

I was grateful that we had left on Louis’s seat belt halter, because it looked a little like a service dog harness. But we were starting to get nervous. We tried to stay on the less-frequented paths of the park, but there didn’t seem to be any. People were everywhere, and they all wanted to ooh and ahh at Louis!

We passed the elephant yard, and Louis finally noticed the animals. Several elephants were ambling lazily outside, and one big bull also saw us—and Louis! He didn’t make any obvious behavioral changes, he was too cool and had been around too long for that, but he kept his eye on the little brown pup at our side. Louis saw him too, and just stood and gawked as the bull elephant casually sauntered over to the hay tree, which just so happened to be near where we were standing.

The air was charged with mano-a-mano nonverbal messages zipping back and forth between Louis and the elephant, even across the stretch of barrier that divided us. That old bull kept his cool, and never batted a huge rheumy eye. But the conversation was too intense for Louis. His resolved snapped, and he dissolved into a spate of nervous barking.

Busted! We quickly turned up our collars to prevent us from being recognized, and skulked off. I was intently watching the animals, Kathleen was engaging with the interested people we met, and we both were trying to project the auras of two service trainers disguised as ordinary tourists taking our student for a field trip. I didn’t feel very convincing.

Louis, meantime, was happy just scouring the grounds for other dogs to sniff and people to pet him and tell him how cute he was. His search for other dogs was unsuccessful, because as I’m sure you already knew, dogs aren’t allowed in the National Zoo.

Finally the stress of living a lie got too much for us, and we lammed it for home. We had missed a lot, hadn’t made even one complete circuit of the campus, and didn’t see any indoor animals at all, but it was still a fun adventure.

The moral of this story is that when you are planning a trip, you’d be smart to do a little research on your destination, to make sure you’ll be welcome—unless you’re really, really cute, in which case you’re welcome anywhere.

Here’s a joke I stole from myself [here], adapted to this post.

A cop pulls over a car and notices that there is a grizzly bear cub riding in the back seat. "What a cute bear cub! But you know transporting grizzly bears this way is completely illegal. I'll tell you what, we're not far from the National Zoo, I won't arrest you if you immediately take him straight to the zoo with no stops on the way." The driver (in the original joke this was a Norwegian pig farmer, so let's keep that) promises to do so, and the two part company.

Several weeks later, the same cop pulls over the farmer again, and again there is a grizzly bear cub in the back seat. The cop tells the farmer, "You promised me you would take that bear to the zoo!" 

"I did!" she replies, "and he had such a good time that today I'm taking him to the Botanical Gardens!"

Thanks,
Dorn
7/20/2021

I only recently learned of the good luck properties of the four leaf May Apple (first chronicled here). Since then, I’ve been on quest to see one of these elusive bringers of good fortune for myself. My search was finally rewarded in spades on one of my countless dog-walks with Louis, through a damp, shady patch of lowland. I stumbled on a small patch of ground that sported quite a few of the lucky May Apples!

Why, after it being so hard to locate even one four leaf May Apple, did I find such a large number of them in a single spot? Surely that’s not just coincidence!

Lucky real estate

I can think of a couple of possible reasons why so many lucky May Apples would be clustered so close together. One possibility is that all of the four leaf May Apples there are related, descending from a particularly lucky bloodline (sap-line?). I call this my “Skywalker” hypothesis. The second possibility is that the patch of ground itself is somehow lucky enough to spawn a whole flock of these quadri-foiled lucky charms. This is my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. (On a side note, did you ever notice that “Shangri-La” is an anagram for “Sri Lanka”? Especially in Sanskrit.^[1] Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?)

I tried to think of a way I could experimentally determine if either of my hypotheses were correct. I reasoned that if the luckiness of these May Apples was due to the location itself, then I might be able to find some other manifestation of luck there.

Not being a trained botanist, the only other lucky plant I knew of was a four leaf clover, so I scoured the area for that. Never having found a four leaf clover in this neighborhood, I reasoned that if I actually found one in my four leaf May Apple patch, it would lend strong credence to my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. But I couldn’t find any, which didn’t really support or contradict either of my hypotheses in my genetics-vs-environment mystery. So for now, I can’t say why all these four leaf May Apples are living so close together.

It might have been fun to harvest some of the lucky May Apples and measure how my good fortune improved, but I decided I would leave them as they were, and see what developed. I visited the same spot a few weeks later, and found something strange and fascinating had occurred: some of them seemed to be trying to morph into five leaf May Apples!

One looked like it had budded a small fifth leaf, starfish-style, that was starting to grow next to the other four. Another had apparently started the process of spontaneously splitting one of the leaves down the middle (“blattfurcation”), leading again ultimately to a five leaf May Apple.

What in the world was going on?! Were the May Apples trying to morph into less-lucky varieties, and if so, why?

I developed two theories to explain this.

(1) Karmodynamics tells us that luck can’t be created from nothing—the plant must expend effort to produce the luck that might some day benefit the creature that harvests it, be it fieldmouse, caterpillar, person or leprechaun. It’s less clear to me how (or even if) this luck benefits the plant itself, so maybe it is just expending effort in an activity that has no real purpose. So perhaps evolutionary pressures favor the four leaf May Apple that can transform itself into something that doesn’t produce luck, so it can devote its energy into producing May Apple seeds or pollen or whatever such plants normally do with their energy. I call this my “Poison Pill” theory.

(2) My second theory is related, but it posits that the May Apple isn’t really changing its luck, perhaps it cannot change its luck. But it is changing its appearance to fool predators or harvesters that specifically target four leaf May Apples. (These harvesters are not just superstitious people or other two-legged sentient beings. Even an insect might develop such a dietary preference, if larvae who happen to prefer to munch on a four leaf May Apple are incrementally luckier in the fight to survive to become an adult, thus producing more luck-hungry larvae.) I call this my “Sad Sack” theory.

I confess I don’t know enough biology to figure out a way to distinguish which of my theories is true, or if there is a completely different explanation for these self-mutilating four leaf May Apples. Advice from any professional botanist among this blog’s readership on the subject would be gratefully accepted, and if this scientific mystery is solved, full credit will be given in a future post.

Next time: the mixed blessing of finding a four-leaf poison ivy.

Sharpen your vocabularity

It’s a truism (maxim, bromide, commonplace) that you can never have enough words, right? This week’s word-building section involves words with international antecedents.

The English of England is not exactly a foreign language, but when I used to read P. D. James mysteries, I would keep a notepad handy to write down the many unfamiliar words, like “numinous” and “importuning”. (On a side note, I love P. D. James mysteries because they are so severely unsentimental. They aren’t gritty or noir, just extremely staid and British. In one story, part of the murder plot revolved around whether tea should be brewed loose, or in tea bags. But I digress.) I’m sure you’ve experienced someone offering a boast disguised as a complaint—perhaps you’ve even tried it yourself now and then! If you have daughters, perhaps you’ve heard them complain “Oh, I just couldn’t get anything done! All the boys kept wanting to talk to me! It was very annoying.” There is a word for this structure of speech: it’s called Importooting.

Kathleen and I both struggle with hoarding issues, but we’ve been getting better. Last week we finally dumped an old rusty folding metal University of Maryland stadium chair. It only had three legs (the fourth had rusted through), was un-sittable, and in fact had never been sat on, had anything placed on it, appeared in a scenic yard tableau, or been put to any use whatsoever in all the time I knew of its existence, which must be more than 40 years.

Still, it was a tough decision—it was an antique and a survivor (until now), perhaps the sole survivor of its entire clan of chairs. And it had a rickety charm to it, at once nostalgic and sad, kind of like Eeyore’s house in Winnie the Pooh. There is an adjective that describes this shabby broken-down appeal precisely: that chair is Wobbly-Sobbly. (The word derives from “Wabi-Sabi”, the Japanese term for craft or art that is intentionally crude, rustic, or incomplete.)

A Herptile (sometimes “herpetile”) is most simply defined as a creature who is the proper study of the science of herpetology: that is, an amphibian or non-avian reptile. (Wait, what? I thought all reptiles were non-avian reptiles! Are you telling me that birds are reptiles? I mean, I know they descended from dinosaurs, I’ve seen Jurassic Park, but I thought birds were in a class of their own. Some quick in-depth research (I googled “are birds reptiles?”) quickly settled the question in definitive internet fashion. The first four entries I read had the following three answers:
 (1) Birds are in the class Aves (“birds”).
 (2) Birds are in the class Reptilia (“reptiles”)—there is no class Aves.
 (3) There is no class Reptilia, because if there were, it would have to include birds, and that’s just crazy talk. Glad that’s cleared up!)

How often have you found yourself approaching a couple pushing a baby carriage down the street? “Oh, what an adorable baby!” you gush. You don’t really know anything about the child, but it’s an easy social responsibility to fulfill—at least in English! But there are some languages where you can’t even say that sentence without guessing the sex of the baby, and woe betide you if you guess wrong! The Italian for baby is bambino—unless it’s a girl, then it’s bambina. What do you do if it’s so swaddled up that you can’t tell? Guess wrong and insult the whole family?

Fortunately, the Italians have borrowed from another Latin community to provide the solution: if you find yourself in this fix, just say “such a lovely Bambinx (pronounced ‘bambinex’)!” The parents will take your caution in addressing their scion in such a gender-neutral way as a sign of respect.

Let’s see, how about ending with something germanic? Thanks to friend-of-the-blog (and friend) Kelly Samek for teaching me the German word for the comfort food you eat to make you feel better when you’re sad. It’s Kummerspeck, which is usually translated as “grief bacon”. It’s a near-perfect word that is only marred, in my view, by the fact that bacon is not my go-to food of choice for cheering me up. I don’t need fat, I need carbs! Or better, fat and carbs! Like macaroni & cheese, for example. That’d be, uh, “Kummer-käsen-nudeln”? I’ll keep working on that.

Thanks,
Dorn
7 June 2021

Footnotes
1. There is actually no reference supporting this assertion, and I’d be grateful if you don’t fact-check it.

The long covid winter is over, and with spring comes the promise of people, places and activities long banned and forgotten! Maybe, for me, it’s also time for blogging again!

Louis, the puppy we so rashly acquired around Christmas, proved such an inescapable drain on my time, brain- and blog-power that I couldn’t get it together enough to write. Our grandchildren are now adults, mostly, and I had completely forgotten the exhausting and sometimes heart-wrenching 24-hour attention one needed to keep babies (of any species) from inadvertently harming themselves or others.

But now, finally, two things have happened to change that: (1) Kathleen, Louis and I have all gotten our species-appropriate vaccinations, so at last we can leave the house and interact with the outside world, and (2) Louis is starting to grow up.

The relationship of dog-years to people-years has been extensively covered in this Almanack [here], but those discussions were all about physiological years. We haven’t discussed psychological dog years.

Louis is six months old, which we at the Almanack are told makes him the psychological equivalent of a “rotten teenager”. Our job has now morphed into watching him 24 hours a day to keep him from intentionally harming himself or others. Just as exhausting, but not as heart-wrenching because he’s a rotten teenager so we don’t care as much.

And Louis is a boy rotten teenager, which means he’s only concerned with two things: eating, and you know.

We’ve lost, or nearly lost, to his bottomless omniverous appetite: several dog beds, human chairs, stuffed toys, hard toys, all our throw rugs, a couple of remotes and my cell phone.

He’s also made “special friends” with all the legs in the house (chair, table, and human) as well as his stuffed animals and dog bed.

We talked to the vet about his manic incessant humping, but she allowed that this isn’t a medical issue—it’s a “lifestyle choice”. Then she gave us more bad news. We had been holding on to our sanity (barely) with the knowledge that when Louis reached six months, it would be time to get him fixed. But the vet said she’d just been to a vet seminar on the topic, and the new current wisdom is that it’s better to wait until he’s ten months, to give his bones time to grow right.

“How much does Louis really need bones?” we pleaded, but she would not be moved. Then she twisted the knife further with the observation that his humping is a learned behavior, which he would probably continue even after he’d been de-oystered. In fact the longer he does it before the cut, she said, the harder and harder the habit will be to break. (HA HA I said “harder”.) (I’m so tired.)

Louis’s favorite paramour is a big, boneless, shag-covered dog bed that makes him feel just right. I should have known better when I bought the thing—in hindsight, it’s so obvious that the product title, “Cozy Calming Bed” is just a thinly-disguised euphemism, like the “happy ending” offered at a certain kind of massage.

*   *   *

New Dog Products

“COZY” “CALMING” BED

Pamper your pet with our self-warming and “soothing” bed that is finished with a luxurious faux “shag” fur! Paired with deep crevices that allow your pet to “burrow”, your fury kids will have full, restful “sleep” for improved “behavior” and better “health”.

3D PRINTED STEAK

The world’s first slaughter-free ribeye steak has been produced using 3D bioprinting and real cells from a cow. Israeli company Aleph Farms has teamed up with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to cultivate a lab-grown ribeye intended to have the qualities, textures and taste of a real steak without killing an animal. “It incorporates muscle and fat similar to its slaughtered counterpart and boasts the same organoleptic attributes of a delicious tender, juicy ribeye steak you’d buy from the butcher,” Aleph Farms said in a statement.

*   *   *

Dog Walk Botany
with Professor T. Quarantino, BsD.

POPCORN BUSH. On a walk with Louis I came across what I think must be known as a movie popcorn bush, because that is what its smallish yellow-white blossoms most resemble. God, how I miss movie popcorn! We tried to make our own with some extra fine salt I bought on a quarantine ordering spree and that yellow powder in the Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese Box. It was pretty good, but it was more like convenience store popcorn than movie popcorn. (I also haven’t had convenience store popcorn during the Time of Covid, but I don’t miss it as much.)

MAY APPLE. Thanks to eminent biologist and faithful reader Leon Cammen for identifying last week’s mystery plant, a picturesque ubiquitous ground cover boasting up to 9 radially-symmetrical leaves, as the May Apple. Dr Cammen points out that 4-leaf May Apple DNA possess about 40% as much luck as 4-leaf clover, and since a May Apple is much larger than a clover, finding a single 4-leaf May Apple about as lucky as scoring a small handful of 4-leaf clovers! I have yet to see a 4-leaf May Apple on our dog-walks, but my search continues.

GRASS CAKES. If your walk takes you by a newly mowed lawn, you may be lucky enough to see some of these little patties that were ejected by the mower, made up of thoroughly chopped and matted together grass and leaves mixed with a healthy portion of rich loamy soil, and a bit of lawn mower oil to hold it all together. Dogs love these tasty treats.

Grass cakes also enjoyed a period of human vogue when I was young back in the age of Aquarius, providing the basis for the original veggie burgers in the seventies. The ingredient humus is often mistranscribed in modern recipe books as hummus.

Happy Spring all! Louis has been repeatedly been rescuing Kathleen and me from the twin evils of sloth, boredom, and sleep, and with our (and others’) new immune powers we are looking forward to emerging from our covid hibernation and maybe reconnecting with the outside world again. No more cowering-in-place for us, until the next catastrophe. See you then!

Thanks,
Dorn
2-25 April 2021

Kathleen met and fell in love with our new puppy Louis (pronounced “Louie”) from a picture of him she found on the internet. Just like Archie before him. And just like me, 45 years before that.

Louis was living at a labradoodle breeder/trainer’s house with his brothers and sisters. We had been thinking about adopting a new puppy to help complete our pack. Nobody could replace Archie, but we recognized we were better, happier people with a dog in the family.

We closed a deal as quickly as we could, then waiting anxiously until Louis was old enough to leave his mom and start a new life on his own. He would be 11 weeks old and ready on December 22, and we wanted him immediately after that. What could possibly be better than a puppy for Christmas!

There was but one significant obstacle to our plan: Louis lived in Kentucky, 700 miles away. That’s a good nine-hour drive, google says. We couldn’t just drive over and pick him up without violating our self-imposed coronavirus safety protocols, which included importantly that we don’t go into any public restrooms, anywhere, ever, until we’re vaccinated.

Why, oh why, didn’t we think about how we were going to get him when we arranged the adoption? It had been well into the fall and we had many month’s experience in not traveling anywhere that we couldn’t get back from before we needed a pee break. But too late now, we’ve made virtual eye-contact with Louis and now no one else will do, whether he lived in Kentucky or another world.

The breeders had the solution. For a few extra bucks they would arrange for an “angel” to fly from Kentucky to DC, round trip, bringing Louis as carry-on luggage. Pricey, but not as pricey as it could have been, and probably not any more expensive than us working out our own corona-proof road trip. We had a brief period of worry that nobody would be willing to brave an airplane flight so close to Christmas, but they found a stalwart soul. Problem solved!

Or almost solved—the question remained: were we brave enough to go to the airport to pick Louie up? Second only perhaps to a public restroom, it’s hard for us phage-o-phobes to imagine a scarier place than a large international airport at Christmastime, full of people from all over the world. Including people from England, home of the new improved (from the virus’s point of view) coronavirus variant that I call “COVID-1Q”^*.

The things we do for love! We made sure our travel “angel” was willing to meet us outside the airport buildings, at the passenger pickup curb. We bought some hazmat suits to supplement the face shields, masks and gloves that we wear to ordinary public places. We brought along some anti-covid wipes, and asked them to apply Louis’s flea medicine to his coat several days early, so we could give him a good covid wipedown the minute we got him without interfering with its effectiveness.

Then we waited. The days ticked by so slowly, as we waited for Louis to take up his new position in the Carlson pack. It was more stressful than waiting for Christmas! I practiced not getting any sleep (apparently Louis liked staying up until midnight, and then rising at 5 or 6 AM the next morning), and we bought two of every toy, treat, bed and jail we could think of, just in case.

The fateful day rolled around, December 23. Everything seemed to be “go” in Kentucky. We debated hopping in the car first thing in the morning, to make sure we weren’t late for the late-afternoon arrival, until we calmed down enough to realize that we’d be safer from the coronavirus vampires sitting at home than idling in a parking lot. We gave ourselves a reasonable amount of time and took off. And let’s just leave those tyvek suits behind, ‘kay?, they’re just too unwieldly (not to say silly-looking).

But where’s the beltway exit to the DC airport‽ Have they rearranged the entire city in the two years since I retired? We (Kathleen, Google maps and I) wound our way through the scenic part of Alexandria and finally found where they had hidden the new secret passageway to the airport. Some of our built-in spare minutes were lost, but we were still okay.

New scares awaited. The airport authority had apparently decided that the zombie apocalypse, with its drop in airline passengers, was the perfect time to set up construction crews to spiff up the airport. (This caused us some worry, but on reflection seems like a sensible decision.) Among the disruptions—the cell phone parking lot where we were to wait for our angel to let us know she’d arrived was closed for construction! More of our precious buffer minutes were lost!

The signs told us to go to the short-term parking lot, which they said was free if you were just waiting for a pickup. But that was within a multi-storey parking structure, which Kathleen felt was just too close to being trapped indoors with all those covid germs. So we exited there and headed for passenger pickup, planning to wait there. But oh no! Passenger pickup was closed for construction too! And unlike the cell waiting area, there were no instructions or detour signs here.

Where to go? The minutes were ticking by, and we were getting panicky! What if we can’t make contact and the travel angel has to make her scheduled flight back to Kentucky without making the dropoff! It’s hard to think when you’re frantic, and the whole airport complex, which must have circumnavigated four times looking for an opening, was starting to resemble one of those “imaginary prisons” that Giovanni Battista Piranesi drew (in the throes of a fever-induced delerium, it is said) back in the late 1700s.

The only place to pick up a passenger seemed to be at the passenger dropoff curb. We pulled in, immediately behind an airport police car with lights flashing, and hoped he was too busy with some other problem to notice that we were waiting right under the “No Waiting” sign.

We were in time. We called our angel, who was already wandering the airport, and told her of our new rendezvous point, and shortly after spotted her walking toward us with a bright orange backpack over her shoulder. In the backpack was Louis.

Louis took to me immediately, scoring me an immediate first goal in the “favorite parent” contest. I attribute this to my foresight in mailing the breeder a stinky T-shirt a couple of weeks ago to throw into Louis’s pen. (I offered to send something of Kathleen’s too, but she eschewed the idea. Ka-ching!)

Once he hopped into Kathleen’s lap, we forgot about our wipedown protocol. I told Kathleen, “he can’t have any covid, he’s TOO CUTE”. This isn’t dramatic license. I literally said those words out loud. (Don’t judge! This year, in this country, that is not the stupidest covid risk assessment I’ve heard. Not even close.)

The drive back home was mercifully uneventful. We let Louis sleep in a travel crate in the back during the drive home (“poor thing, he must be exhausted, taking two flights to get here”).

We (and Louis) took a while to recover from our respective travel adventures and start to get to know each other, but that’s a story for another day.

Thanks for listening, and Happy New Year!
Dorn
12/31/2020

It’s Christmas time! Are you and your dog ready? I think we can all agree that if anyone deserves to enjoy Christmas, it’s our dogs. They’ve got that good cheer even when the rest of us are grumpy, as might happen now and then, especially in a year with no movies, no restaurants, no travel, and no physical contact with non-nuclear loved ones. In fact, one could argue that they deserve Christmas more than we do!

So why shouldn’t they get it? A dog-year is only 52 days long (by the old rule that one human year = seven dog years). Why shouldn’t every dog-year include a dog-Christmas? If you agree, then your dog should be celebrating Christmas not only on Dec 25, but also on Feb 15, Apr 8, May 30, Jul 21, Sep 11, and Nov 2! Have you been short-changing your pooch??

Recent advances¹ in biological science involving telomeres and mammalian DNA methylomes and whatnot have shown a logarithmic relationship between dog aging and years as measured by humans (I mentioned this before here). That relationship can be expressed by

Maybe, if you really want to do right by your pups, you should start by synchronizing their dog-Christmases with their physiological ages, using the above formula. This will result in more Christmases per people-year when they’re younger, balanced by fewer when they’re older.

Here’s a handy calendar of nonlinear dog-Christmases, each indicated by an orange highlight. It assumes Fido was born on Jan 1, 2021. These logarithmic formulas go kind of crazy when you put in values close to zero, so I started counting only when the dog has reached one nonlinear dog-year old, on Feb 26 (let’s face it, anyone younger than one year old doesn’t really get Christmas anyway).

This is great! When the dog is just a puppy, it seems like almost every day is Christmas! This is so great, in fact, that I’m thinking maybe it should be applied to humans too. Imagine if when you were young, you didn’t have to wait a whole 365 days for the next Christmas to roll around?

So I took the above dog formula and stretched it out to match a human life span, and produced a formula that provides more Christmases when you are young, balanced out by less when you are old, so that by the time you reach age 70, you will have experienced 70 Christmases.

If you used this formula to calculate when to celebrate human-Christmas:

    you’d get 38 Christmases by the time you were ten years old!! You’d celebrate another eleven by the time you were twenty. Each decade there­after would be fewer, until in your seventh decade you’d only get three. That’s not very many Christmases for us old folks, true, but you got ’em while you were young and could enjoy them better. That’s fair, right?

But I’ve strayed from my topic of dog-Christmas. Okay, so whenever you plan to celebrate Christmas with your dog, what’s an appropriate present? Here’s the list of what’s most popular with pups in 2020 (to be fair, this list is pretty much the same every year):

FIRST CHOICE: treats or any food.

SECOND CHOICE: toys, sticks, shoes, or any other object in the world.

THIRD CHOICE: dog DNA test, a dental cleaning, or fake antlers. Literally, the best you can hope for with these gifts is that they don’t mind them much.

And what to watch when celebrating dog-Christmas? I looked, but found relatively few dog-centric Christmas offerings on TV. The 12 Pups of Christmas sounded promising. It’s a Hallmark-y romcom that was redeemed (IMO) by having both romantic leads be unapologetic jerks that got to stay that way even after they found True Love. But the titular Labrador puppies, while they provided high-grade puppy eye-candy whenever on screen, actually had nothing at all to do with the plot. Come to think of it, Christmas didn’t have anything to do with the plot either.

Raised by Wolves, a new sci-fi series on HBO, while it seems good, didn’t fare any better as a dog-Christmas show. But at least it didn’t have a bait-and-switch title. The protagonists were rationalists who didn’t believe in religious sentimentality, and the wolves turned out to be metaphors for . . . well, I won’t spoil the plot by giving too much away.

My best dog-Christmas find was that old stand-by, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. (Not any of the new, dreadful movies, though: it has to be the 1966 cartoon version, with Boris Karloff reading the story. Also acceptable would be simply reading the original story aloud to your doggie.) Now, this is a tale that can grip a canine’s imagination—the hero Max has adventures (snow!), existential crises (he has to wear fake antlers), and a satisfyingly triumphant conclusion (roast beast).

However, whenever, and with whom- or what-ever you are celebrating the holidays, may they be safe and joyous, and virus-free!

Till next time,
  Trentin “Tin-tin” Quarantino

Editor's note: did I happen to mention that Kathleen and I are getting a new puppy for Christmas? His name is Louis, and he'll be arriving on Christmas Eve Eve. What could be better than finding a new puppy under the Christmas tree! (Except of course there's no tree this year because, well, there's a new puppy.)


Thanks,
Dorn
12/15/2020