Spero Consulting

‘Whatever’ Category

The Bane of Basenjis

We usu­ally work late into the night, but rarely shovel snow at 3:00 AM.

This morn­ing is an exception.

The snow has been accu­mu­lat­ing for the past eleven hours, and we’re not sure of the offi­cial mea­sure­ment – we’d guess at least a foot so far – but when we threw our Basenji bitch into the night, she splayed her legs and her paws didn’t hit the ground. (Don’t worry, other dog lovers, we quickly retrieved her and found our boots and coat and began shov­el­ing. Also, being West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, noth­ing is flat, and there is imme­di­ately two steps down so the depth was dif­fi­cult to estimate.)

Our other Boots, Our Poster Boy for the Credit Cri­sis, didn’t make it out­side the first time. When we opened the door, they both stood there star­ing at the vast, cold white­ness, and when we grabbed her, he made a run for it – in the oppo­site direction.

They (and we) hadn’t been out­side since the snow began to accu­mu­late, and we fig­ured that there would be about six inches on the ground – not easy for a Basenji, but not worth shov­el­ing until the morning.

Boy, were we wrong!

So, while every­one slept, we shov­eled the walk­way from their exit door to their entrance door and a bit of the patio. With drift­ing, it is already 18 — 24 inches in places, and accord­ing to the weather radar there is no let up in sight.

For­tu­nately, we live on the top of a hill and even when the tem­per­a­ture is in the high twen­ties, the snow is light and fluffy – well, as light as two feet of show can be. (For some rea­son, a few hun­dred feet of ele­va­tion makes a HUGE dif­fer­ence in the con­sis­tency of it.)

If you live near the East Coast, good luck and be care­ful on Saturday.

And So Is ‘Gay’

In fact, stu­dents of his­tor­i­cal lin­guis­tics could tell you that many other words are homo­graphs, too, and those stu­dents could also explain seman­tic change, includ­ing the pejo­ra­tion and recla­ma­tion of words. (Don’t be a fool, you know where this is head­ing.)

We doubt that we have much in com­mon with Pres­i­dent Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, but we do sym­pa­thize with him for the grief he is tak­ing for using ‘retarded’ as a pejorative.

Was it poor judg­ment? Sure. Should he have known bet­ter? Of course. Are we ital­i­ciz­ing homo­graphs? You know it. (Actu­ally, because we are lazy and didn’t major in lin­guis­tics, only the homo­graphs that are easy to iden­tify and only the first time, but we’ll stop now.)

So, while polit­i­cally we tend to agree with his crit­ics like Sarah Palin, in this case we think that she and all the other cyn­i­cal or pious grievance-​mongers should grow-​up, shut-​up and go away.

If you are aggrieved by some­thing that a stranger said about some­one else in a place where you weren’t approx­i­mately six months ago, then you, dear reader, are either a cyn­i­cal, politically-​motivated d.b. or you are a humor­less scold – pos­si­bly a bit too sen­si­tive and pos­si­bly with deep emo­tional problems.

In fact, it would do every­one – indi­vid­u­ally and col­lec­tively – much good to remem­ber that on occa­sion, every­one behaves like a butthead, but there is a huge dif­fer­ence between mali­cious behav­ior and sim­ply mak­ing a mis­take in the heat of the moment.

In our mind, that dif­fer­ence is nearly anal­o­gous to Saint Fran­cis de Sales’ dis­tinc­tion between sin and imper­fec­tion; how­ever, in this case we have a dif­fer­ent ‘Fran­cis’ quote in mind. That would be one spo­ken by Sargeant Hulka in the 1981 movie, Stripes. When one of the recruits states, “… Any of you guys call me Fran­cis, and I’ll kill you,” the good sergeant replies, Lighten Up, Francis.”

So, lighten up, Sarah and posse. There are too many impor­tant issues where he is on the wrong side to worry about a silly one like this one.

For the past few weeks, it seems that every day we hear at least one news pre­sen­ter or com­men­ta­tor com­plain that would-​be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab, stopped talk­ing after he was “read his Miranda rights.”

We find that very irri­tat­ing because as a for­eign national and enemy com­bat­ant, he has no such rights; so, they could not be “read to him.”

The fact that an FBI agent read or explained the Miranda warn­ing to him does not con­fer those rights upon him.

The largest error was not or is not that he was given a warn­ing that did not then and does not now apply to him. Instead, the largest error is that he con­tin­ues to be treated as a crim­i­nal rather than as an enemy combatant.

So, the ini­tial FBI error (of attempt­ing to con­fer rights upon some­one who does not have them) is cor­rectable. Instead of com­plain­ing about the actions of FBI agents on Christ­mas Day, crit­ics should con­tinue to focus on the wimpi­ness and stu­pid­ity of the Obama admin­is­tra­tion for con­tin­u­ing to treat an enemy-​of-​the-​state like a shoplifter.

Mr. Obama, take your inau­gural pledge seri­ously, and send him to Gitmo.

This post is apro­pos of noth­ing and merely idle spec­u­la­tion on our part.

Since the start of the new year, we have writ­ten sev­eral times about intel­li­gence fail­ures and bad infor­ma­tion designs.

With the recent news and those recent posts per­co­lat­ing in our head, we watched the tele­vi­sion show, NCIS, last night. In the episode, the intel­li­gence network/​community inter­cepts an e-​mail in real-​time from DiNozzo’s father – the perfectly-​cast Robert Wag­ner – because he men­tions a com­bi­na­tion of key­words related to the case under investigation.

When asked how they came by the infor­ma­tion (about the e-​mail and from where it was sent), Gibbs, the team leader, replies, “Ech­e­lon,” which accord­ing to Wikipedia, is sup­posed to be a mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem for var­i­ous types of communications.

Now, it’s likely that the gov­ern­ment mon­i­tors some (or pos­si­bly many) types of inter­net traf­fic, includ­ing e-​mails and web sites of sus­pected ter­ror­ists and ene­mies of the United States.

There’s a lot of traf­fic and a lot to mon­i­tor (and a lot to block if you are so inclined – just ask the Chi­nese government).

That made us won­der how such agen­cies would elim­i­nate cat­e­gories to search. In par­tic­u­lar, if they do mon­i­tor e-​mail, we won­der if they mon­i­tor spam or unso­licited bulk e-​mail. We won­der because those widely-​broadcast mes­sages would to be a cat­e­gory that is very easy one to elim­i­nate. In other words, we could hear some ana­lyst say, “it’s just some spam; don’t bother with it.”

In that case, it would seem to be an excel­lent way to send coded mes­sages. Like BBC radio broad­casts dur­ing World War II, a seem­ingly innocu­ous – albeit, in this case, offen­sive and annoy­ing – email mes­sage could be sent to thou­sands or mil­lions with only one intended recip­i­ent capa­ble of decod­ing its true mes­sage. No need to encrypt it and draw sus­pi­cion. In fact, many of the other recip­i­ents would never open the mes­sage and, depend­ing on their spam fil­ter set­tings may never even know they received it.

Pre­sum­ing our intel­li­gence agen­cies do mon­i­tor cer­tain types of e-​mail, we won­der if they do com­pletely ignore spam, and if so, whether any­one takes advan­tage of that fact?

We applaud Google and its threat to leave China as a response to recent hack­ing attempts.

Last month, we wrote about A Rise in Inter­net Hack­ing Attempts at this site, and all of those hits seemed to orig­i­nate from within China. (Whether they were spoofed or not, we can’t tell.)

The num­ber per day peaked over the Christ­mas break and has since decreased.

We have no idea if there is a rela­tion­ship between what Google dis­cov­ered and what we noticed here. We doubt it because we’re tiny and have almost no fol­low­ing and in two years have writ­ten only four or five posts crit­i­ciz­ing China. How­ever, we have not seen sim­i­lar attacks at any of the other sites that we maintain.

We would like Google to pub­lish a list of offend­ing IP addresses to shine fur­ther light on the issue and so that folks like us can see if there are any matches.

Once upon a time, many years ago, our queen and chair­man worked with some­one who asked, “how big is an eight-​inch cake?” More than twenty years later, we still laugh about it, and when we’re together and hear a stu­pid ques­tion, we’ll look at each other and ask, “now, exactly how big is an eight-​inch cake?”

This evening, while she is recov­er­ing from a cold, we went to a local pizza shop to fetch din­ner. While we were wait­ing for our order to bake, we over­heard the cashier who was on the tele­phone. Pre­sum­ably, she was answer­ing that very com­mon ques­tion, “what sizes are your piz­zas?” because she said, “a large has twelve cuts, a medium has eight cuts, and a small has six cuts.” She almost seemed annoyed that she had to explain it.

We laugh when we ask the same ques­tion and get an answer denom­i­nated in slices. Now, we don’t need the answer to be expressed in square inches (or even some­thing for­eign like square cen­time­ters), but we would like to know the diam­e­ter. That tells us a bit more about the size than the num­ber of slices.

We think that if we ever open a pizza shop, we’ll make only twelve-​inch piz­zas. So, when peo­ple ask “how large is a twelve inch pizza,” we’ll answer that there are three sizes: six, eight, and twelve cuts, and that our twelve-​cut pies cost twice as much as six-​cut pies because, you know, there are twice as many slices.

We wish you a happy, healthy, pros­per­ous, and peace­ful new year.

In par­tic­u­lar, we make that wish for two groups of espe­cially brave indi­vid­u­als: (1) our fel­low cit­i­zens of the United States, who defend our nation, espe­cially those in harm’s way in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other loca­tions through­out the world, and (2) the brave Iran­ian freedom-​fighters who only want what we enjoy and often take for granted: free­dom from tyranny and oppression.

May each of you have a blessed new year.

(The Other Net­works Are No Better)

Our younger princess wanted to watch the Rose Parade this morn­ing; so, we tuned into NBC’s broad­cast and half-​dozed next to her while she watched.

That’s when we heard the promo for an upcom­ing episode of a show that we’ve never watched. Some guy asks, “How was the sex?” Some girl answers, “It was like mak­ing love to Amer­ica.” At least, that’s what we think we heard.

Now, we’re not sure what her answer means. She didn’t say any­thing about receiv­ing pay­ments from the coun­try; so, pre­sum­ably she is not a pros­ti­tute – just a slut. Tak­ing her at her word, pre­sum­ably, she has some type of addic­tion or com­pul­sion, and we’d infer that she very likely car­ries a mul­ti­tude of STDs.

Now that’s must-​see TV!

No one has ever mis­taken us for a prude, but really, what elementary-​school-​aged child needs to be exposed to that?

… And the net­works won­der why they con­tinue to hemorrhage viewers.

It’s dif­fi­cult enough to com­mand the “Mute” but­ton on the remote dur­ing sport­ing events when we’re fully awake. We do that because we see no rea­son why we need to explain to some­one in a pri­mary grade about the use or need of Via­gra, Cialis, or dual, cast-​iron tubs in out­door set­tings.¹

So, we ask: why should it be nec­es­sary to main­tain such vig­i­lance or pre-​screen what should have been a “G-​rated” broad­cast of a “G-​rated” parade?

It shouldn’t be nec­es­sary. We sus­pect that some­one who (1) hates fam­i­lies or young chil­dren and (2) has extremely poor judg­ment chose to run the spot. Per­haps the grownups are on vaca­tion dur­ing the hol­i­days. Per­haps, not. Regard­less, it makes us won­der: what’s wrong with those people?

Per­haps, sub­se­quently, one of the parade announc­ers apol­o­gized for the inap­pro­pri­ate pro­mo­tion. We doubt it, and didn’t get the chance to see; our lovely, quick-​fingered wife switched off the set before we could.

We doubt that she is the only mom that did.

For the last six weeks or so, we’ve seen a huge increase in the num­ber of inter­net hack­ing attempts of our site.

We don’t take it per­son­ally, and we doubt those attempts are related to any­thing that we do or say, but we have very nice ways to track both “eye­balls” and robot vis­its to this site; so, we notice such things. We’re sur­prised that the trend at our site, which we first observed in the begin­ning of Novem­ber, seems to be accel­er­at­ing in recent weeks. (If we did take it per­son­ally, we’d be a bit flattered.)

Here’s a sam­ple from one of our sta­tis­tics pack­ages from early this morning:

While there are a few legit­i­mate queries on the list, notice the attempts to access data­bases and upload files.

The best that we can deter­mine, and we’re no expert on the sub­ject, most of those attempts come from bots in China. (If they are not from China, then some­one is spoof­ing Chi­nese addresses and host­ing ser­vices because when we click on the blue num­bers shown above, we get “whois” reports, and they all spec­ify Chi­nese locations.)

To us, it is a reminder to keep strong pass­words, run server and appli­ca­tion exploit scan­ners, and deal with a qual­ity host­ing firm that’s look­ing out for us, in our case that’s Fused Net­work.

We have been exper­i­ment­ing with new graph­ics soft­ware and fil­ters and decided to up-​date our template/​theme at Spero Consulting’s web site.

The theme is mostly blue on 80% of the PCs at world head­quar­ters but has a strange, pur­plish cast on our other screens.

We will make changes as we find items that annoy us, and we ask reg­u­lar vis­i­tors and friends for feed­back and to report any prob­lems. Thanks.

So, we’ve seen the pre­views for the new “Sher­lock Holmes” movie. (Note that we are not using the quo­ta­tion marks in the pre­vi­ous sen­tence just to denote a movie title. No, we’re using them dou­bly in an ironic way, too, as “scare quotes.”)

For many years, we have thor­oughly enjoyed read­ing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short sto­ries and nov­els (novel­las, what­ever) regard­ing the remark­able detec­tive, his pow­ers of infer­ence and deduc­tion, and his faith­ful and obser­vant side­kick, Dr. Wat­son. (Remem­ber, it is the doc­tor who relays the occur­rences, events, and facts of the cases.)

We also enjoyed var­i­ous movies and shows fea­tur­ing the detec­tive, par­tic­u­lar the PBS series star­ring the late, great Jeremy Brett. That series was extremely – though not com­pletely – loyal to the orig­i­nal sto­ries. That fidelity, along with the excel­lent cast, made many of those episodes some of the best in the his­tory of television.

Sher­lock Who?

Based upon the pre­views that we’ve seen it seems that other than (1) the names of the two main char­ac­ters, (2) the late Vic­to­rian time period, and (3) the Lon­don loca­tion, there is lit­tle in the movie that was in Conan Doyle’s stories.

• Holmes hand­cuffed naked to a bed? No, we don’t remem­ber that.
• Holmes in a ver­sion of late 19^th cen­tury fight club? No, we don’t remem­ber that, either.
• How about Wat­son punch­ing Holmes in the nose while they sit in a coach because Holmes insults him? No, maybe its our bad mem­ory, but we don’t remem­ber that, either.

Per­haps the movie’s director(s) and producer(s) rewrote the sto­ries because they believe that they are far more clever and enter­tain­ing than Conan Doyle.

If that’s the case, then based upon the evi­dence that we’ve seen, their the­ory doesn’t fit the facts. That bad taste isn’t crim­i­nal, but it is egregious.

P.S. We won­der if the sequel will be named Sher­lock and Hooch or maybe Holmes and Scooby Doo Inves­ti­gate the Haunted House?

What’s Up with the Wuss Music in So Many TV Com­mer­cials Nowadays?

Since we’ve returned to West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, we’ve seen numer­ous reports in the local news about high lev­els of estro­gen in rivers and streams along with the coin­ci­dent dis­cov­ery of many her­maph­ro­ditic fish by folks who are inter­ested in fish gen­i­tals. (Given that the study of fish gen­i­tals has little-​to-​no prac­ti­cal value, these folks seem to be employed by uni­ver­si­ties and state gov­ern­ments, which we fur­ther sup­pose keeps them off of the street and safely away from the gen­eral public.)

Sup­pos­edly, the high lev­els of estro­gen are due to the wide­spread use of birth con­trol pills, and from that we sur­mise that estro­gen isn’t extracted from waste water at sewage treat­ment plants; so, it remains in the water at highly-​concentrated levels.

We sus­pect the vis­i­tor could read all about it on the web – well, not at our site – but we’re really not that inter­ested in the effect on fish. More­over, we don’t know if there were a lot of her­maph­ro­ditic fish in West­ern PA before there were birth con­trol pills.

Instead, we wish to offer evi­dence that the estro­gen is being recir­cu­lated into the drink­ing water sup­ply (or at least the bot­tled water sup­ply) and is hav­ing a detri­men­tal effect on soci­ety. What evi­dence? We cite the music in many of the new tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials this Fall.

We don’t mean the Cat Stevens song for the Google cell phone. He makes Raffi seem like a sil­ver­back gorilla, but we sus­pect that song was writ­ten before there was much estro­gen in the gen­eral water sup­ply, and we have no infor­ma­tion about what the for­mer Mr. Stevens drank when he wrote that non­sense. (Actu­ally, if you want to sing out, shut up – unless you have a good voice or some­thing use­ful to say. Oth­er­wise, you’re just being a nuisance.)

We mean the song in one of the new Sub­aru com­mer­cials – the one where the dorky hus­band loses his sun­glasses in his hoodie – and we think in a Jeep com­mer­cial, and a few oth­ers prod­ucts, too. We can’t remem­ber the other ads that have the wuss music, because we tend not to pay much atten­tion to com­mer­cials. It’s more that we’ve noticed (and been both­ered by) the bad back­ground music despite not really pay­ing atten­tion to the set.

Last month, we wrote about another annoy­ing Sub­aru – the mean-​spirited one – in We Really Dis­like the Lat­est Sub­aru Ad. Yes, we really don’t like Sub­aru ads. Most of them remind us of the old Sat­urn ads where Sat­urn own­ers would go to Ten­nessee to hang out with each other: very, very dorky. If one has an over­whelm­ing need to affil­i­ate with other folks who bought the same econ­omy car, then one has deep, deep, problems.

The songs are all from the same genre, which we’d describe as wimpy, folksy, hip­py­ish, almost whiny, and very annoy­ing. Yeah, kind of like Cat Stevens, but even more fem­i­nine. (We’re not sure if they are pop­u­lar songs, and, in fact, we take pride in not know­ing.) Actu­ally, the song we men­tioned in the above-​reference post as being very evoca­tive of the typ­i­cal Sub­aru ad, is a canon­i­cal exam­ple of the genre: “I Gave My Love A Cherry,” which as the reader may recall, was the song being sung by the folkie in Ani­mal House before Blutto (John Belushi) grabbed his gui­tar and smashed it against the wall.

On sec­ond thought, we’re won­der­ing if, in fact, the fish researchers don’t have it wrong. They seem to imply a cau­sa­tion that per­haps does not exist. Per­haps, the fish became her­maph­ro­ditic by lis­ten­ing to the music, and the increase in estro­gen lev­els in the water is just a coin­ci­dence. (Unless, it is com­ing from the fish.)

We promise to update this post with the names of the other prod­ucts when we see those com­mer­cials, but there seems to be a fad start­ing, and we want to help crush it early on. Here’s one: the Radio Shack ad where some­one is singing some­thing about ici­cles falling. Here’s another one: an Ama­zon Kin­dle com­mer­cial. Here’s another: the Chrysler Town and Coun­try ad where the women go to the beach. In that one, the cam­era fix­ates on the lower back of one of the bikini-​clad women. To be clear, despite the insipid tune we have no prob­lem with that part of the commercial.

Or, It’s Hard to Win an Argu­ment against Fools!

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, we haven’t posted much lately. That is par­tially due to the fact that we have been extremely busy with both revenue-​generating activ­i­ties and non-​profit, vol­un­teer activities.

One of those activ­i­ties involves mit­i­gat­ing the effects of a decent-​sized mess cre­ated by oth­ers. (What other kind of mess is there, we joke?)

While pon­der­ing the effects of that effort, we thought of an inter­est­ing apho­rism; how­ever, as yet, we’re not sure if our cur­rent phras­ing is as pithy as we’d like. This one’s along the lines that “noth­ing is fool­proof because fools are so ingen­u­ous.” (We first felt the sting of that one many years ago when writ­ing Lotus 1−2−3 macros for com­mer­cial bankers. “How could they do that to my beau­ti­ful pro­gram!” we would fre­quently whine – with just cause.)

Now, our recent efforts made us real­ize that: ignor­ing good luck, it takes less wit (and guile and clev­er­ness) to defeat the efforts of a wor­thy oppo­nents than it does to defeat the con­certed efforts of (a group of) unwor­thy ones.

Of course, we’re using the word ‘oppo­nent’ to sig­nify some­one with an dif­fer­ent pre­ferred out­comes (than one’s own) but not nec­es­sar­ily a sworn enemy for life. We have in mind col­leagues or co-​workers or co-​volunteers. One is most likely to observe such an out­come in a civil sit­u­a­tion, but for what we have in mind, the phrase “civil dis­course” gives too much credit to the other side.

We think it’s true because it is eas­ier to argue against a rea­son­able or thought­ful person’s posi­tion than it is to rebut the impulses and non sequiturs of shal­low, incon­sid­er­ate folks. The lat­ter are no-​win sit­u­a­tions. How does one argue against impulses, non sequiturs, or well-​known fal­lac­ies held dear as truth? Ah, if we knew that we’d attempt to share it with like-​minded Sen­a­tors and Con­gress­man as they try to pre­vent nation­al­iza­tion of health care. Given that, maybe one corol­lary should be: it takes less wit (and guile and clev­er­ness) to defeat the efforts of a wor­thy, intel­li­gent oppo­nent than it does to defeat a gov­ern­ment bureau­cracy.

Epi­logue: by the way, we started think­ing along these lines when we were explain­ing a sit­u­a­tion to a rea­son­able friend. We’re were relay­ing to him a con­ver­sa­tion with another per­son, in which we attempted to per­suade that party to change their deci­sion, which had quite messy impli­ca­tions. As we explained to our friend, our posi­tion was well-​reasoned, and our adversary’s posi­tion was not. If the dis­cus­sion were about the best defense to use in a par­tic­u­lar bas­ket­ball game, the other person’s posi­tion would be equiv­a­lent to, “we’re going to play zone defense today because it’s going to rain tomorrow.”

Our friend, being a bright, rea­son­able per­son – if a bit naïve – agreed with us and remarked that, “Well, what you said makes sense. So, they lis­tened to you and changed their mind, right?” We remarked that, sadly, no. Our friend’s con­clu­sion that we were suc­cess­ful was wrong, and our expla­na­tion to him was depress­ingly sim­ple: with­out our help, the third party had made a deci­sion based upon irrel­e­vant facts and had ignored rel­e­vant impli­ca­tions; so, why would they bend to rea­son when it was explained to them? They wouldn’t and they didn’t. Yeah, as the sub­ti­tle reads, it’s hard to win an argu­ment against fools.

P.S. We’re not writ­ing about folks with a deep under­stand­ing of game the­ory or what­ever, who are try­ing to act stu­pid or behave irra­tionally as a strat­egy. Some­times it’s use­ful and wealth-​maximizing to play dumb, but that’s a dif­fer­ent story for another day.

*Make that all GMs.

For sev­eral months, Chevro­let has been run­ning a com­mer­cial that com­pares it auto­mo­biles with sim­i­lar ones from Honda.

In it, Howie Long, the for­mer NFL star, com­pares three types of vehi­cles. Near the end of the ad, Mr. Long men­tions that Honda does make some­thing with which Chevy just can’t compete.…and the cam­eras pans to a Honda lawn mower. The viewer is sup­posed to laugh.

Now, we’ve used the same Honda mower for nearly as long as we’ve owned a Sub­ur­ban, and we only wish – if only, if only – that the Sub­ur­ban were half as reli­able as the Honda.

So far, the Honda mower has needed to be repaired once: this past sum­mer, after many, many years of ser­vice, the main gas­ket broke and engine leaked oil.

What of the Suburban’s unre­li­a­bil­ity? Let us count the ways. The Suburban’s folder in the file cab­i­net is over an inch thick. Here are a few of the break­downs and repairs that we can remember:

• Auto­matic trans­mis­sion? Why, yes, of course!
• Air con­di­tion­ing compressor(s)? Yes, both the front and rear.
• Elec­tri­cal sys­tem? Yes.
• Cat­alytic con­verter? Yep.
• Muf­fler! Uh huh.
• Rust? Affir­ma­tive – in a few spots no less.
• Wheel cylin­der? That too.
• Wind­shield wiper motor and con­trol? Yeah.
• Back door lock? Oui.
• Starter? Si.

We real­ize that the Sub­ur­ban does more and has more parts than the Honda lawn mower, but our expe­ri­ence with a Honda Odyssey isn’t very dif­fer­ent than the mower: no real prob­lems in nearly three years of use. More­over, the Sub­ur­ban did cost about 75 times as much as the mower.

So, while Chevro­let and its pitch­man may laugh and smirk at Honda’s mow­ers, we wish their vehi­cles could per­form as well. In fact, we’d set­tle for half as well.

The Smil­ing Dog

Usu­ally, if we men­tion a per­sonal expe­ri­ence, we try to link it to a broader point. Today, how­ever, we write for no other rea­son than to eulo­gize Bart, Bart, the Basenji part: our loyal non-​Basenji for the past fourteen-​and-​one-​half years.

After a brief, but sharp decline, Bart qui­etly passed-​away on Monday.

He did it with the same meek­ness and gen­tle­ness of spirit in which he lived his life with us. He waited for Jill to wake in the mid-​afternoon – she has the flu – and carry him into the grass in his beloved back­yard. He stood on all fours, fell to his right (near his favorite Alberta Spruce tar­get) and was gone.

Bart was at least fif­teen, which is a nice, long life for a dog. So, no tears were shed for what might have been – only for the lost com­pan­ion­ship. He had fourteen-​and-​half years with us, and he was pos­si­bly the luck­i­est dog that ever lived. He wasn’t lucky because he mirac­u­lously sur­vived an acci­den­tal death or any­thing dra­matic or trau­matic. No, he was lucky because he fell into it. Into what? pos­si­bly the sweet­est dog life there ever was: a large pack to play with, more human admir­ers than we’ll ever had, and dot­ing owners.

A half-​year before the old­est princess was born, Jill was doing breed res­cue work in St. Louis with B.R.A.T. or Basenji Res­cue and Trans­port. Our pack stood at five: four sleek Basen­jis in the prime of life and one very hairy/​furry, half-​Chow/​half-​New Found­land, who was aptly named, “Bear,” and who had an incred­i­bly knack for snatch­ing house flies in mid-​air.

Shortly after return­ing home from my Father’s funeral in the ‘burgh, Jill received a call from the St. Louis city pound that the dog-​catcher had cap­tured a Basenji: highly unlikely but pos­si­ble. She drove to the pound that sits in the shadow of the giant Bud­weiser plant in south city and decided that he wasn’t quite a Basenji, but might be part Basenji; so, we’d try to find a home for him if no one claimed him.

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Apro­pos of noth­ing, we note that for each of the past two after­noons we observed a rac­coon either stand­ing beside a busy sub­ur­ban road (yes­ter­day) or slowly cross­ing the road (today). Pre­sum­ably, it’s the same coon. At that loca­tion, there are no woods on either side of the road; so, the behav­ior seems a tad bit odd.

So, we won­dered: what are the odds that said rac­coon is not rabid?

We’d argue that they’re about the same as the gov­ern­ment real­iz­ing addi­tional tax rev­enue from employ­ees who received raises from their employ­ers because the employ­ers real­ized health-​care cost sav­ing under Sen­a­tor Baucus’s bill (and gen­er­ously gave all of the sav­ings to their work­force). As we under­stand it, the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office (CBO) pro­jected bil­lions in new tax rev­enue exactly for that reason.

Now, we ask: exactly how many firms have com­mit­ted to increase salaries once absolved of pay­ing health care costs?

We would haz­ard to guess that the num­ber is no higher than the num­ber of firms man­aged by rabid rac­coons. (In the off chance that we’re describ­ing your firm and your CEO is lost, then you may find him between Trees­dale and Pine-​Richland High School on War­ren­dale Road). Our advice: take thick gloves and a cage if you want him at the next staff meet­ing, but even then, don’t count on a raise.)