Entries from August 2005 ↓

…is that so many of them live with egomaniacal, stupid, violent, macho idiots.

This article really, really pissed me off. Because I know people like this. People who want to make their dogs violent, uncontrollable killers.

I used to live in a fairly pleasant working-class neighborhood in the North Bronx where every male from 12 onwards either seemed to have, or want to have, a pit bull. I saw many a teenaged boy get his first pit pup, and in polite park or street conversations, they’d brag about his lineage, his red nose (”they’re the craziest”). I had relatively similar one-sided conversations with men of all ages around there, many of whom had been raising pits for years.

At the local Vet’s office, nearly every dog person who came in had a tough dog and a little dog. A shih-tzu and a pit; a chihuahua and a rottie. One for the lap, and one to protect the lap, presumably. Of course, most people loved the tough dog and cuddled it just as much. Most people just liked dogs.

When I first got Sasha, he played happily with lots of these pits. I met many a sweet-natured pit bull. I knew some of them grew to be unmanageable, even as they were adorable pups. But others didn’t.

Over time, we’d encounter more and more nasty humans with nasty dogs, almost always pits. Their people would do things like threaten and bully other people out of the dog park, so their dog could be alone there. Or they’d instead encourage unwitting folks to let their dogs play with what turned out to be violent dogs. A breach of dog park rules, let alone human decency.

One woman seemed to have a nice pair of pits, and my dog played happily with them, until one of them nipped the other a bit too enthusiastically, and he bled. The scent of blood on her brother seemed to make her crazy. She lunged and angrily barked at him, as I hastily got my dog out. I was horrified. The owner did not seem to see a problem with her actions. But me and my lot hightailed out of there, as she tried to control her dogs on their leashes, one dripping with blood.

I learned to avoid the tough owners and their tough dogs, and my dog learned to fear and hate pits.

Still, the dog park was mostly decent, and 95% of people and their dogs were the salt of the earth.

Then one day I was with a spanish-speaking South American friend I’d met there and her mutt, who understood commands only in German: “Sitz, Mackie!”

They had lived in Austria previously, with her German-speaking partner, which explained the dog’s linguistic orientation. To this day, my own dog responds to Sitz!, the word of German he learned by watching Mackie.

My dog is bilingual in one word.

I am sure she must have given him a treat when she told him to sitz. Heck, if I brought enough treats, he’d probably take classes at the Goethe Institute.

And you have to love a mutt named after “Mackie Messer,” Mack the Knife from the Threepenny Opera. But I digress.

Anyway, the worst incident was when this friend and I arrived to find an eerily-realistic human form hanging from a tree in the dog run. A bundle of rags for a head, a shirt, pair of pants, pair of shoes, all stuffed, hanging 4-5 feet off the ground from a rope noose. As we approached, we only gradually came to see that someone had not actually hung themselves in the dog park. A nice guy we knew and had often walked and talked with came along soon after and we reported it to the cops patrolling the park. It was taken down.

The hanging dummy meant that they’d been training pits to attack human bodies, right there in the dog park. I did not go there much after that.

Incidentally, this was before 9/11. I never saw the nice guy again, and did not know his last name. (If there’s one thing having a dog does for you, it’s that you meet and talk to an awful lot more people in your neighborhood, people you usually never really get to know.) I knew he worked somewhere in lower Manhattan, perhaps even the WTC, and because of this, I will always, always worry about him. I hope he just moved away.

That’s one of the legacies of 9/11 for me: wondering about people you didn’t run into after that. Wondering if anyone you knew, but did not know well enough to check on, was lost.

I was just explaining to the Sicilian why I put a slice of bread in his cookie tin. (Lemon thins from Ikea, if it matters. I can take or leave them, which is why I buy them, if you know what I mean.) The cookies were getting a bit stale. The bread took the stale out; I just replaced it. All is well.

The other magic kitchen trick that I know is this: if your soup / stew is too salty, add a raw potato. It will soak up the salt. (And that’s why if you ever eat a soup or stew that is too salty, it will be the potatoes that are the saltiest part.)

That’s all I got right now.

You got any tips for me? Non-kitchen tips are probably the most interesting.
Discuss.

Note to Marketing gurus in charge of new products: Sushi Pork is much, much worse an idea than blue frozen french fries. Or neon yogurt in a tube. Or, for our Scottish friends, deep fried Mars bars. Sushi Pork is the bad marketing idea that kills. Okay, I am pretty sure deep fried Mars bars also kill. But they are doubtless tastier and you will die a long slow artery-clogged death, not from a quick painful bout of food poisoning.

Hmmmm… I know someone was just goofing off. Or perhaps got their vowels mixed up. But I liked the sign. Nevertheless, despite knowing as I do that it’s a gaffe, the idea of sushi pork still makes me kind of nauseous.

Truck in the East Village, Spring, 2005:

Back of the same truck:

… is that you can’t ask the “suspect” questions; he’s dead.

So, according to Britain’s ITV news, Jean Charles De Menezes did not run away from police, or vault the ticket barrier at the tube station, and was not wearing a padded jacket. He walked slowly into the station, wearing a jean jacket, and picked up a free paper.

The police were lying?!?

What next…

While riding shotgun in a car, I saw an astronaut walking the streets of Manhattan.

Perhaps s/he is looking for the Giant Hungarian Schoolboy.

30 stones is 420 pounds. That’s a lot of schoolboy.

Amazing the things you can catch in New York, with a lousy camera phone.

We don’t have many of them in my neighborhood. Back when I lived in the North Bronx, those suckers were always wailing — at 12:26 a.m. as it is now, there would be at least 2-3 of those bastards taking alternate turns at irritating everyone. Sometimes they’d all go off at once. And they all had different patterns, so you could tell how many there were.

There were the ones that went:

Beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww!
Beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww!
Beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww!

And the ones that go:

Noo-nee-noo-nee-noo-nee-
beow-beow-beow-beow-beow-beow
moooiiiirrrr-moooiiiirrrr-moooiiiirrrr-moooiiiirrrr-
kniu-kniu-kniu-kniu-kniu
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

And my personal favorite (if I have to have one), the ones that announce, with clipped enunciation,

This vehicle is protected by cobra. Step away from the vehicle.
KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW!

(pause.)

This vehicle is protected by cobra. Step away from the vehicle.
KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW!

I always picture a robot voice from some 50’s sci-fi speaking the first part. And then the “KNIW! KNIW! KNIW!” reminds me of a robot flailing around, shooting off lasers: “Exterminate! Exterminate!”

On and on, all night long.

But in my current, classier (if more industrial) environs, they are a rare occurrance. Why, the Sicilian’s car alarm went off once and we heard it from 1/2 a block away, disabled it immediately, and never used it again. That’s the kind of life you have in this neighborhood: quiet is prized, and neighbors try and keep it down, in my building at least.

So imagine how shocking it is that one of those suckers is going off now and has been for some time. It’s just a plain one, like an emergency vehicle siren.

Wait a minute: I just got up, verified the source of the noise was a building, not a car, and was just calling 311 so the city could have someone come and disable it, when the alarm abrubtly stopped. 311 is the city’s catch-all non-emergency call center. I’ve called them when I’ve found a burned-out car someone apparently abandoned (it was still smoldering), and when a colony of rats took up in the next street.

I also called them to try and get free nicotine patches during a recent health promotion, but I did not qualify. Apparently, I don’t smoke enough. That’s reassuring, I suppose.

What I really want to complain about right now is that suddently when I zoom Mozilla view to 120% of original size, I get layer-upon-layer of text: all the text from the page layered together in the space of 3 lines. 150% works fine, as do other settings. I have only noticed this with Typepad and Blogger sites (so far), not websites in general. The Verizon page, for example, works fine. Odd that. But the internets does not have a 311, and there is no-one to call. I fear contacting Mozilla would be too time-consuming, what with all those Amnesty International urgent action letters that will remain un-written, and calls to congresspeople so often un-made. I will just avoid 120%.

I did not used to be someone who bothered calling such numbers. Am I prematurely entering busybody old-lady-hood? Or just enjoying a bit of distraction from what I ought to be doing?

Right now, ladies and gents, that’s sleeping. G’night.

I had the strangest dream.

An older friend* asked me to come out to visit his friend for an evening, and so I did. The host turned out to be Tom Bosley.

My tired friend excused himself early, and Tom and I drank whisky. He said he was born in Northern Ireland, and emigrated at a young age, and not a lot of people knew that.** Having spent a great deal of time in N.I., I was fascinated. He produced news clippings of his boyhood, and his accent slowly came back. A little.

In the dream, I was thinking, “I have to blog this. Everyone will be so surprised I was at Tom Bosley’s home.” Amazing what the dream-you thinks might be interesting. Sorry now to disappoint, but I had to blog it anyway. My dream self told me to.

*He was an old friend in the dream. I have absolutely no idea who that person was.

**He’s not. Which is why they don’t. But when I woke up, I googled him, thinking my subsconscious was providing fascinating factoids as I slept. It wasn’t. According to google, he was in a frightening show with a sappy woman from Northern Ireland, but my dream, thankfully, left that out. And I am pretty sure I did not know that before I googled it. I have been happily repressing Roma Downey in my memory for a decade.

Note to self: the dream me is not psychic.

A UK man has been sentenced to 12 months conditional discharge, had his laptop and wireless cards conviscated, and been fined 500 quid for surfing the net off his neighbor’s wireless connection. I know I’m not the only one who’s shocked. As the BBC reported, “The perception in the past has been that borrowing a bit of bandwidth is cheeky but not really criminal behaviour.” Well, since the ISPs are the ones who suffer when we do not each have our own subscription, the times they are a changin’.

In other news, the BBC has been running a series of articles on the digital age: interviews with bloggers, podcasters, creative commons devotees; they’ve also been soliciting readers’ views on how the digital age has changed their lives. While some of those articles are rather superficial, I really appreciate that the BBC is taking this on as an ongoing theme. Some of the articles are more practical: this one on blogging while on vacation. Or their article on RSS feeds. Very hands-on.