Photo of the Week

Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time...

 

Greenspan is Shocked, Shocked!

I was listening to the radio today, and had the "pleasure" of listening repeatedly to Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress about how his ideology / world view seemed to have a flaw in it. How he was "shocked" that absent regulation, the bankers would so betray their shareholders as to get into a pickle with credit-default swaps and other instruments and endanger the livelihood of their institutions.

Are all economists this stupid? First the whole nonsense about trickle-down economics, when a giraffe could tell you that if consumer spending has been what's buoyed the economy for the past umpteen years, through the dot-com burst and other travails, then you're best off ensuring the masses keep more of their money, rather than letting the rich trade money as they gamble in the stock market. Now this eminent banker is stunned that people who make their money by engaging in risky behavior, and who never actually suffer the consequences of their company getting into trouble ("thanks for the retention bonus, Mr. Bankruptcy Judge!"), would do anything else?

The corporate liability shield is what will destroy this world: people who direct the companies should absolutely be held liable for what they direct their companies to do. No one will take a chance? Maybe that'd be better. People would act properly if they knew they'd pay for acting improperly.

Photo of the Week

This week we have Alice, seeking to prove that any photo can be improved if you just include a cat in it:

Photo of the Week

This is Sophie. I've got a total love-hate relationship with this cat. She's gotten me so mad I've injured myself. Believe me, this picture lies.

Photo of the Week

An homage to summer-now-past:

Interesting Commentary on White Privilege

This is a different category of white privilege than mine, I think. Interesting commentary from a guy named Tim Wise that my sister sent me and my sweetie found online.

Photo of the Week

Moonrise at Gasworks

Holes I Have Known

They come
into your life
by chance?
by luck?
by design?
I can't tell.
They cuddle, and frolic,
and work their way deep
deep
into your life.
So when they go
they leave a hole
that never fills.
You just learn
to walk around it.

Island Time

Island time is marked
by the horn on the ferry.
As I sit on my butt,
on my back
on my front
on the water, in my kayak
without a watch, or a phone, or a care,
and the day spins away
with the osprey and the gulls,
the horn intercedes
every hour
telling all who will listen
that it's too late
to get off of this rock.
Better luck next time.

Photo of the Week

Well, ok. So maybe not "week". Or at least, not a week on this planet. I will not be discouraged.

 I like photos that tell a story, especially when it's one from ordinary life, like this one.

Photo of the Week

I'm conducting an experiment. On myself. Each week, I'm going to post at least one photo I've worked on recently. Every week. At least one. We'll see how it goes.

One of the things I love about our fishing shack is the abundance of wildlife, and the usually peaceful space it occupies (except, of course on the 4th of July). Sometimes it gets a little racy:

Usually, though it's beautiful. There are deer walking across the harbor at low tide. A seal comes in a few times a year. A family or convocation of otters haul out on our neighbors' docks. Bald eagles soar and dive, with their "entourage" of starlings, crows, finches, and an occasional hummingbird. My favorite, though, is the pair of osprey that nest high up in a cedar tree behind our house. My brother, the avid ornithologist, had been telling me about how osprey and eagles sometimes tangle, and last June, they did just that. In front of my house:

Yes, the eagle is flying upside down. No animals were harmed in the production of this photo.

Death is Taxing

I was telling a friend recently that death is a magical, though haunting, thing. I've never had to deal with violent death, and actually have only limited experience with humans dying in my life — I've been to only one funeral so far — but there are 8 urns in my house with what's left of 6 cats and 2 dogs, all of whom I loved very much, and each of them died so differently.

Bob was my first. She was my first critter, as an adult, and she died when she was 8. Lymphoma. Survived for 18 months on chemo. Went downhill fast. She was such a bad-ass. We had a bittersweet final day together, hanging out in the backyard in the sun. She went and sat under her geraniums, while I sat on the grass and talked to her. Late in the afternoon I was lying on the grass and she came out and, with difficulty, got on my chest. We lay there for a little while. Eventually I bundled her up, and we went to the vet, where they gave her two drugs to put her down. She was peaceful as she left, except at the very end, when she gave a loud gasp as her brain stem took over trying to live. It haunts me to this day.

Harry was next. A big sweet lug of a dog. Bernese mountain dog + australian shepherd, we think. He'd been with us less than two years. He'd been reluctant to jump up into the truck for a couple weeks, and we finally took him to see the specialists in San Leandro. His abdomen was distended, and turned out he had a few liters of blood in there. He had hemangiosarcoma. Cancer of the blood vessels. They operated on him to take out his spleen, which was a mess and had been leaking blood. Shortly after, he bled out of his liver while we were back at home having picked up my brother and his family from the airport and settled them in. We'd been at the vet's all day. They called at midnight to tell us he was having trouble and wasn't likely to make it. I've never driven so fast nor run so many red lights and stop signs. We got there just in time to see him off. It was the night before thanksgiving.

8 months later, Rosie died. While we'd been away for a week, she hadn't been eating. Important note: cats that don't eat for 72 hours are in great danger of developing hepatic lipdosis — their body starts turning their liver into fat. Hard to recover from. Took her to those specialists in San Leandro. They wanted to biopsy her liver to confirm, and to be safe they tested her blood to make sure she had enough clotting factors of the kind the liver uses. Put her under, did the biopsy, and put in a nasogastric tube so I could force her to eat (she'd been carefully throwing up her appetite-stimulant pills, and I'm really good at pilling cats). She was still out of it when they brought her out to me, but she had to go home because the specialists were transitioning to the emergency medicine people. Her nose was dripping a little blood from the stitches that held the tube in place. On the way home she was flopping around in her carrier. I thought it was because of the anesthetic wearing off. Bob had done that when they'd done the exploratory surgery to confirm the cancer. As I was on the phone with a vet nurse friend trying to figure out how to put the food down the tube, I realized Rosie wasn't breathing. Another mad dash to San Leandro, but she was gone before we got there. I can still hear her flopping around, though mostly I remember her alive. She was just 4 years old.

Madelyn died a year later. She was 15. We knew it was coming. Didn't make it any easier. She'd been getting thinner and weaker for a while. On The Day, she tried to get out of the yard, but I wouldn't let her. We took her upstairs to bed, laid out a towel. Lit some candles. Talked to her, petted her. Her systems began to fail. She was scared. We did what we could to reassure her. Got a box so she could be in a smaller space. Cuddled her. She couldn't move much. Around 4am she sat up, scratched her ear, did this odd forward stretch with her forepaws in the air in front of her. Brought her paws together in a slow-motion clap. Then she lay back down. Shortly after, she stopped breathing. 5 minutes later, her heart stopped. Letting go is hard.

Amanda and Sammantha, Madelyn's girls, died about 10 months apart. Amanda ended up in my office, curled up in a corner. She lasted through the night, with us on the floor. When she started seizing, we called the vet. No final gasp, just a cessation of seizing. Sammantha wasn't feeling well through the day, then she got up on the couch and curled up. We called our friend Annie at 1, and she, bless her, came over and gave Sam a single injection. Sam never moved, and we put her in a basket still curled up.

That was 2002. Jake came near death that year, but happily the next death wasn't until 2007 when Max died.

That brings us to July 17, the day that Ferghal died. This one was hard, because he clearly wasn't ready to go, and we weren't ready to be without him. He was 13, and getting wobbly. He'd had a series of what we assume to be strokes, but had recovered from each of them, but each time not quite to where he'd been. His last week he'd had trouble walking. We bought a wagon to take him down to where he usually did his business. On the Monday, he rallied and, stubborn pup that he was, insisted on walking around a lot. He got massive edema in his foreleg as a result, which we managed to get down through heat, range of motion exercises, and other things. But he didn't take many steps after that. Wednesday we took him for chiropractic and acupuncture, and he wasn't looking good. I carried him everywhere. Wednesday night it was clear what path his body was taking, though he protested. We lay on the living room floor with him, with candles lit. He lay on his side, and had regular full-body spasms that would last maybe 3 seconds for a contraction, after which he would bark in protest. This went on for a couple hours. He wasn't eating. He was in distress. But whenever one of us got up and went somewhere, he lifted his head a little to follow us. It was clear where this was going, but our sweet vet, who would come to the house to give him acupuncture, wasn't prepared for this, so there was nothing we could do to help him along where he was refusing to go. We were absolutely not going to bundle him into a car so he could be put down, when he wanted to be with us. So we stayed together, on the floor, all of us fitfully dozing between protests. Finally at 11 another sweet vet was able to come. Even though he didn't want to go, his body wasn't giving him any choice, so we said our goodbyes, and the vet gave him something that rapidly put him to sleep, then stopped his heart. After a few minutes, his bladder sphincter relaxed, but we had a towel ready (had had one by him since the night before). It still hurts.

I suspect when the time comes, I will be like Ferghal: not ready to go, and fighting it all the way. I started a poem last year, which I may finish some time, about envying the dead of Hiroshima, but I think the process of dying is important. It's the inverse of birth, but like it in many ways: a painful and magical transition. Several people I've talked to about these experiences have said the loss is why they don't have pets. The loss, though, is the price of all the joy. I don't know why the world is set up so all good things must end, and nothing good happens without a price, but that's the way it is. For all the joy and love they've brought me, I'm willing to pay the death tax.

Happy F****** "Birthday"

I used to enjoy July 4th. When I was growing up, the Regent Street Neighborhood Association held a little parade over by the high school, and my father and brothers and sister and I would march in it in the band. My brother and I played the kazoo, if I remember right, and my dad would always play the big bass drum. We'd get together at a neighbor's house a couple times before the parade to "rehearse". Good times.

That was before I took on some dogs who have issues with fireworks. One runs around the house (inside or outside, and I do mean runs around the house) barking madly, while the other quivers and shakes. A third dog has started being scared of the banging too. Living on Bainbridge Island doesn't help, because we're near the Suquamish reservation, which means miles upon miles of fireworks for sale. (Now the local Ace Hardware store has gotten into the act, hosting a fireworks stand for four days. Not helpful. Not hardware, man.)

So these days I have this to say about July 4th: how very fucking apropos that we celebrate the marketing, not the achievement, of independence, and we do it with crap that was invented in China. Bite me.

It's the little things that count

When I was in philosophy class in high school, I was assigned the Determinism side of the Free Will vs Determinism argument, and argued it well enough to get some of my classmates really upset. I'm a big believer in Free Will, but there are small things that happen in our lives that can radically alter the trajectory of our lives, and it really makes me wonder. Let me give you three examples of insignificant things that happened in my life, my father's life and his father's life, without which I certainly wouldn't be who I am today, as I likely wouldn't exist.

Let's start with the squeaky hinge in the hospital room of my mother's grandmother. She was in the hospital for a check up and the squeak was really annoying. My father's mother worked in the hospital, and her father owned a hardware store, so she knew how to fix things like squeaky hinges. Now it happens that at the time, she was looking for a place to stay. She got to talking with my mother's grandmother, who it also happened had a room for rent in her house. You see where this is going.

My mother's father played the cello, sometimes with my father's father. My father's mother and my mother's father I believe had started some sort of relationship when he went off to America, as part of the all-Germans-aren't-so-bad tour following WWI, where he met my mother's mother and got engaged. They came back for a visit, and clearly the relationship with my father's mother was going nowhere, but my father's father's first wife had recently left him with two kids, and my father's mother decided to marry my father's father instead.

My dad is the 7th of 8 kids, and at some point was on a train with his father when they passed Hamburg. It was the middle of the night, when my dad should have been asleep, but he and his father were both awake as they passed a factory outside of town. My grandfather told my dad that the factory belonged to Uncle Otto, my mother's uncle, and my dad filed this away. A number of years later, my dad finds himself in Hamburg, having decided not to go back to East Germany. He's got no job, and no place to live, but he remembers Otto and his factory. He goes to the factory looking for Otto, but Otto isn't there. The foreman decides to have pity on him and gives my dad Otto's home address. He goes there, but Otto isn't home. His wife, however, is charmed and says he should stay for dinner, which he does, and shortly thereafter is working in Otto's tire factory.

At some point, Otto's niece Matilda comes to town, and Otto asks my dad to show her around. He does this, and is smitten. They get engaged some time after this and he comes to America, sponsored by Otto's brother (my mother's father, who went to America all those years ago).

As for me, I owe my marriage and current life to a quarter. My sweetie and I met in a production of Much Ado About Nothing (she was Hero, I was Claudio; it was like Romeo and Juliet, but flakier and without the death), for which she would not have auditioned if the quarter to decide between auditioning and going to Fiddler on the Roof had come down the other way.

So, don't sweat the small things. Just know that you never know which one will send you down the rabbit hole. (and I mean that in a good way, sweetie :)

Ode to Fur

(to the tune of Carry on My Wayward Son)

Go away you wayward hair
What you doing in my ear?
Gonna pluck you out of there.
Don't you grow no more!

What is it about age = increased fur? At the same time your eyes are getting weaker, you're expected to focus on little (sometimes not-so-little) hairs growing out of your ears? It's not like there's any depth perception possible, either. For my money, this is proof that there is no god, or there's no reason to worship him/her.

Sexual Harassment

I write this with trepidation, with due apologies to my wife, and fully aware of the vast difference between what I'm going to write about and true sexual harassment. But I write it anyway.

I am an honorable man. Happily married to a wonderful woman, who, like many people, has a jealous streak. I'm a photographer, and thus very visually attuned. More importantly, though, I'm a man, and thus very visually attuned. So I admire women, but not in a gross leering sort of way. I love the company of women, I enjoy their beauty, their grace, their voices, and of course, their bits and pieces. Being, however, an honorable man who does right by his sometimes-jealous wife, I try not to enjoy the bits and pieces too much.

Last Friday was not easy.

As I'm sitting in the cafeteria, I notice a pretty woman on her way to the dessert table. She's wearing a black-and-white horizontal-striped top and a pretty pink just-above-the-knee cotton skirt that's got some nice lines to it -- flared just enough to draw attention. As she walks past, I notice that it looks like the top is not actually a top, but perhaps a leotard, because I can see black and white stripes through the fabric of the skirt. But wait, the stripes are different. It's at this point that I realize that she's wearing zebra-striped panties that are showing through the skirt. Being, as I said, a man, and thus very visually attuned, well... you get the picture. Let's just say the lunch conversation was harder to follow until she was back at her table.

Now, here's the thing: I understand the concept of a hostile work environment, and I understand wanting to look nice (I've considered dressing nicer myself), but it seems like there's a line one shouldn't cross in a workplace, and zebra-striped panties under a translucent pink skirt is a serious Lorelei moment for those of us who are honorable men. Don't you think? Sexual harassment? Ya gotta wonder.

Impeach Them Now

It's funny how it's the small things that really get to you. How the camel's back really can be broken by something as insignificant as a straw. For nearly 6 1/2 years we've watched, and occasionally protested, as Bush and Cheney have degraded their offices and this country. For nearly 6 1/2 years these people who pledged to bring honor and integrity "back" to the White House have stained that building with rapacious self-interest. With the commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence, the camel lies immobile on the ground. The trail of high crimes and misdemeanors are clear for all to see. Congress should impeach them both. Do it now.

For an inspired rant on the topic, watch Keith Olbermann on MS-NBC.

Smokers are Idiots

These days I walk a lot. Up the hill from the ferry to the bus. From the bus to the office. Back again. I wait for the bus a lot too. Everywhere I go, I'm walking into clouds of smoke, because everywhere I go, there are people smoking. In cars with their windows rolled down. At bus stops with no-smoking signs. Huddled outside buildings getting rained on and shivering. What is wrong with these people? They pay $5 - $10 per day for the privilege. Interestingly, when you hear these personal finance gurus on Oprah, they'll talk about not buying a daily latte but I have yet to hear them tell someone they should stop smoking. $3,600/year is a heck of a lot of dough.

I've got no problems with people harming themselves, so long as I don't end up paying for it somehow. People should be able to smoke in their own homes (though if they have kids, it smacks of child abuse). Whatever. But not near me.

Look, if someone enjoyed sniffing nitrous oxide and walked around with a canister of it whiffing from a tube so that a bunch of it went into other people's lungs and left them woozy and disoriented, we wouldn't allow that. If someone wore a hat that spun a monofilament line around them to enforce a 3-foot personal space, we wouldn't allow that. So what gives with smokers?

Don't they feel stupid and manipulated and pathetic? That's certainly how I see them. If you're a smoker, you start out at a serious respect deficit with me. I've got friends who smoke, but it's definitely in spite of their idiocy; they're pretty special people, or it wouldn't be worth it.

People can do whatever they want so long as the only person they harm is themselves, but this smoking in public crap has to stop. It has to.

In Memoriam

We lost our eldest cat Max yesterday. Came home from running some errands to find him seizing on the kitchen floor, with foamy spit coming out of his mouth, eyes and head twitching, lying in a puddle of pee. Grabbed him up, wrapped him in a towel and sped off to the emergency room, but the reality of rural life is, emergencies don't get fixed when the ER is half an hour away, no matter how much you speed. Not that I think there was anything really to do for him.

Max came to us in 1997. Appeared on our porch one night. I said hi and gave him a good scritching, but didn't let him in. Two nights later he was back, meowing like a cat in heat, with a row of tomcats lurking in the street. Mari said we couldn't let the cat get pregnant and let Angela (yes, we named her) in the house, then we called our cat sitter who also ran a rescue group (we already had four cats at the time). As we were leaving a message though, Max walked across the desk and we noticed (finally) his cojones. We told the rescue lady's answering machine it didn't need to pass on the message. We tried changing his name to Angelo, but that didn't work; a couple days later, while we were waiting for the vet, he became Max, and Max he remained. Maximillian sometimes. Maxwell others. Maximus, too. But usually just Max.

He was a tuxedo cat -- by which I mean he was black with a white chest -- with some white on his paws and whiskers that would have made Salvador Dali proud: white, and long, and curved just so. Around that time I bought a silly screen saver that had a cat come on your screen and you could give it balls of yarn to play with, and it would jump on top of your windows, and meow. The tuxedo cat acted so much like Max, we accused him of modelling and not handing over his pay.

He was silly, with lots of toes to spare. His extra thumb, and toes, on his front right paw almost allowed him to grab things, like the refried beans from my take-out container. He loved going into pizza boxes, and once when I was carving a pumpkin for Halloween, he kept putting his head and paws into the pumpkin to get at the stringy stuff. (When I scan in the picture, I'll put it here.) When I'd come home from work, he'd come walking down the street to meet me. He liked to sit on the ottoman, half on my legs, and purr. Loved kids, just loved them. The only cat I know who actually approaches toddlers.

About 5 years ago, responding to a non-specific fever, the vet gave him 10mg pills of Baytril, an antibiotic. I noticed that his eyes seemed to be overly dilated and he wasn't tracking the peacock feather as well as before. I called the vet to tell him that, and he assured me it couldn't be the antibiotic doing it. Yet another lesson in trusting my instincts. I stopped the antibiotics the next day, but it was too late: Max was one of the one in 124,210 cats who was sensitive to Baytril at the recommended dose, and the side effect was retinal damage. The opthamologist that Bayer paid for said, "wow. I haven't seen that layer of the retina since vet school." A couple months later, when Mari saw him walking down the street completely oblivious to the car bearing down on him, Max became an indoor cat.

He did have his downsides, as we all do. He used his bladder as a weapon. If we weren't giving him what he wanted, he would look at us, turn his butt toward something, and let loose. The bookcase. The curtains (multiple times). The chair in which I was sitting. We tried various things, but in the end it was Paxil that mellowed him out. 2.5mg 2x/day. We called it Maxil.

He also used to masturbate on a cashmere throw we had on the bed. I don't know if that's really what he was doing, but it's the only word that fits the scene. When you were making his breakfast, he liked to rear up and bop behind your knee with his front paws. Only mildly annoying unless his claws were sharp, then I would push him away with my other foot.

He was goofy, as tuxedo cats tend to be. Climbing under papers. Hiding in boxes. Looking at me from the top of the (empty) china cabinet, or from inside the TV cabinet. He didn't move quickly, except when food was involved. He bulked up to 15 or 16 pounds (once, because his abdomen was so firm and swollen, at our vet's recommendation -- yes the same one who said the antibiotics couldn't be affecting Max's eyes -- we spent $500 taking him to a specialist, whose conclusion was that Max was fat; we made up a certificate to that effect and had both vets sign it). He had lost weight over the last year, down to 11ish. He loved to go outside when we would let him. Putting a harness on him was pretty funny, as he'd roll on his back and not move. So no walkies for Max.

What else can I say about Max, other than that I miss him terribly. We gave him a very good life, but I wish there would have been more of it.

E = mc**2

A reformulation for the technology industry: energy = mission times the square of the available cash. True in general? Maybe, though in the case of webvan and other .com singularities, the energy didn't actually go anywhere. But it is the case at Google. It's really quite astonishing the amount of energy at the place, especially in Mountain View, where there are so many people and so many of them moving places. From desk to meeting to tech talk to volleyball to food to foosball to the gym to the future. And people move quickly. And talk quickly. They make quick decisions and go on to the next thing.

The last time I felt so energized at work was when I was just out of college and building a graphical operating system that was going to bring the brilliance of the Mac to people with low-end IBM PCs. We were going to revolutionize the world of computing by writing a system in the oldest high-level language (assembly language), for old computers, that would let them do the most modern of computer-enabled tasks. If only we hadn't fired all the marketing people, they could have told us that people with old computers tend not to like buying new things. Ah well. Last I heard, the system was still being put on refurbished PCs and made available to people in developing countries. So maybe it is changing the world, in some way.

My point, though, is that it's wonderful to be at a place filled with people with ideas, energy, and the resources to make them a reality. Such a contrast from Openwave. Relativity, indeed.