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Tales of a Veterinary Spouse, Episode 2: It swallowed what?

March 21, 2013 by 31 Comments

“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”–Peter Steiner.

Dharma Sackler"I prefer horse poop."

Dharma Sackler
“I prefer horse poop.”

It was 8:30 AM on a Monday morning and my car’s FM radio was blaring the “oldies” station out of Hartford.  I was about to switch channels and look for some jazz, when the DJ’s voice blared out a challenge I simply could not resist.

“This morning, we are asking our listeners to call in and tell us what outrageous or funny things your dog has eaten or swallowed, and we’ll play back the best ones on the air.”

I never call radio stations.  Never.  Well, hardly ever.  This had to be an exception.  I am so getting on the air, I thought, I have a professional advantage.

I did, and the DJ had a field day with it.  Below are my three favorite “I can’t believe it ate the whole thing” stories. The first two were used on the air, the third one Cheryl contributed for this post.

1. Clean insides make great doggie colonoscopy prep.  The owner was panicked.  The dog ate an entire box of Brillo pads!  No kidding.  What to do?  Believe it or not, they were not toxic in the least to the mutt, and they were simply passed within a couple of days.  A freak occurrence, you say?  Well, my wife insists she has seen this at least twice.  Keep your Brillo pads safe–they are very afraid.

2.  I now pronounce you dog and wife.  It was an emergency call on a Sunday evening: “My diamond engagement ring is missing,” the dog’s owner lamented, “I laid it on the table and it disappeared a few minutes later.  DoRING you think the dog could have swallowed it?”  Maybe.  My wife instructed the owner to bring the dog in Monday morning for an X-Ray.  There it was, square in the middle of its abdomen.  The extrication solution?  Choice A: megabucks for surgery.  Choice B: follow him around with a pooper scooper for the next few days.  They chose the latter and eventually got the ring back, stinky but none the worse for wear.   My daughter, ever on the uptake with this stuff, took the x-ray to school for the one of the greatest “show-and-tell” stories of all time.  Oh, and by the way, the dog was a schipperke, just like our little imp in the first image above.  Unfortunately, with ours, the horse poop caption is quite literally true.

3. This too shall not pass. The obvious  question, then, for Dr. Sackler, would be to identify the most outrageous thing a dog swallowed that could not pass.  What has she removed surgically that was almost beyond belief?

Answer: An entire rhododendron bush. Well, all the leaves and small stems, anyway.  It seems dogs can stomach Brillo Pads and diamond rings, but rhododendron is quite toxic.  I can’t imagine what that stuff looked like coming out of the dog’s gut.  Check that, I mean I won’t imagine.

Anybody out there have any good stories along these lines?  While I wait for responses, I’ll work on my next actual Millennium Conjecture.  Like that diamond ring, it seems to be lodged in my gut and will likely stay there until I can figure out how to pass it.

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Cosmic Quote #14

January 14, 2013 by 7 Comments

“I like the word indolence.  It makes my laziness seem classy.”–Bern Williams

www.savagechickens.com click image for more Olympics for the Lazy

http://www.savagechickens.com click image for more Olympics for the Lazy

In case you were wondering where I’ve been lately…

Stay tuned for a reblog of my guest post on The Blog of Funny Names (tomorrow) and a new BLAHS award that will let readers pick the winner (later in the week).

Happy 2013.

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Equations of Everyday Life#3–Media Attention Span (Part Two: The Big Bust Theory)

December 22, 2012 by 1 Comment

According to my calculations [the universe] didn’t start with a “Big Bang” at all—it was more of “Phhbwt.”–Dilbert (Scott Adams)

This kind of bust? Well...maybe....

This kind of bust? Well…maybe….

In the stirring first episode of this equation, we saw how the attention paid by the media to inane celebrity stories erodes naturally over time through a process I dubbed The Media-illogical Constant.   But like many scientific theories, it is more complicated than it appears on paper.     It seems that this equation works well in a comparative media vacuum, free from the interference of new, bigger and even more outrageous celebrity stories. And though a story may also, in the absence of said later distraction,  sustain itself through the generation of new angles, it can still disappear in an instant.  When a  bigger celebrity story comes along and wipes clean the public attention-span slate, the previous prime meme is sucked into a media black hole.  It succumbs to The Big Bust Theory. I may not be able to quantify this occurrence; but I can certainly give a primordial example.

It  was 1994 and  two key dates in that year represent the ground zero points for the archetypal media big bust.

The Tonya Harding Fiasco

On January 6, 1994 a man named Shane Stant swung a lead pipe at figure skater Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, causing sufficient injury to Kerrigan that she was forced to withdraw from the US championships.  In and of itself, this would have kept the cable news and sports channels going for weeks on end, but it was only the beginning.   Within a few days, the dastardly deed was traced back to associates of one Tonya Harding, who just happened to be Kerrigan’s main rival at the competition.  The frenzy was on. All throughout the spring and summer the story took more twists and turns than a Dickens novel.  (You can read the entire timeline here).  The name Tonya Harding was on every front page and every evening news lead.  On and on into the the spring and early summer, it reached the point that many–yours truly included–wished she and her story would just go away.

Be careful what you wish for.

The Big Bust: June 17 1994

oj-simpson-mshot-700217Just when you thought there would be no end to the Harding nonsense–no “return to normalcy” to quote another famous American named Harding–the story imploded.  On  June 17, 1994 cable news channels broadcast, live and in living color,  an event so momentous that it interrupted the broadcast of the NBA finals.  It was the pursuit by the LAPD of O.J. Simpson. (Case timeline here.)

Poof. The Tonya Harding story was gone from the front pages and evening news leads, never to return to such prominence again.

As for trying to create and algorithm that describes this phenomenon, it has so far escaped me.  In the same manner that the laws of physics seem to break down in the singularity at the center of a black hole, all measures of media (and public) vacuity in the face of these kinds of events defy calculation.  The equations yield infinities.  If you have any ideas, feel free to post them here.  But have no fear, this scenario has given me yet another idea.  It’s clear that two of the biggest media attractors going are inane celebrity antics and sensational crimes.  When the two combine, as they did in both the OJ Simpson and Tonya Harding cases, the effect just screams for its own equation…and this might ultimately yield the mathematical solution to The Big Bust Theory.

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Time Out: Remembering Dave Brubek

December 6, 2012 by 9 Comments

“I like to play  dangerously… where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.”–Dave Brubek

(Note:  The title of this post provides an apt, if inadvertent double entendre.  I have used the title preface “Time Out” for posts that don’t readily fit into my existing threads.  “Time Out” also just happens to be the title of The Dave Brubek Quartet’s signature album.  It was issued in 1959 and became the first million selling jazz album ever.  It is one of the greatest classics of the genre).

Brubek on the cover of Time, November 1954. NO! I do not remember it, I was four years old.

Brubek on the cover of Time, November, 1954.

I never met the man, yet somehow I knew him.     In one of the choral groups I sang with in high school we performed a Brubek composition (yes he wrote choral music, too).   Our director actually tried to get Brubek, who lived in a neighboring town,  to make a guest appearance to conduct the piece at our concert.  He was unavailable.  I never gave it much thought then, though Brubek’s Greatest Hits was the first jazz album I owned–and in fact the only jazz in my collection until I was in my forties.  I did not see him perform live until I was in my 50’s and he in his 80’s.

Below are two videos, courtesy of the Litchfield Jazz Festival, where I saw Dave Brubek perform twice.  The first video is a promotional piece that begins with Brubek performing in the 2005 festival.   In the shot of the audience applause that follows the visual of Brubek you’ll see two audience members stand up near the back.  I’m pretty sure the partially obscured one farthest back is me.  In the second video, taped at the 2008 festival, NPR interviews Brubek and Paquito D’Rivera.  There was no seating in this tent.  I was standing in the front row, about fifteen feet from Brubek during the entire interview.  I witnessed history that day.

Dave Brubek was an icon, a living legend.  He was not just a great artist, he was one of the great ambassadors for the arts.  He died yesterday, one day short of his 92nd birthday, in the same hospital where my wife was born.  So near, and yet so far away.

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Equations of Everyday Life#3: Media Attention Span (Part One: The Media–illogical Constant)

November 30, 2012 by 30 Comments

“It was my biggest blunder.”–Albert Einstein on his cosmological constant concept.

You have to love ‘ol Albert.  It’s not that he admitted he was wrong.  It’s that he turned out to be wrong about being wrong. In other words, the cosmological constant turned out not to be such a big blunder after all.  He thought that there must be a force in the universe that counteracts gravity and prevents a static universe from contracting on itself.  In 1917 he dubbed it the cosmological constant.  Then came Hubble’s discovery in the 1920’s that the universe is expanding, which was closely followed by the big bang theory (the actual theory, not the TV show), and out the window went Einstein’s constant.   But then, in 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and–bingo!–the cosmological constant, now referred to as dark energy, was reborn.

So what the hell does this have to do with the current equation?  It’s also a constant, and it might turn out that it is as slippery and elusive as dark energy.  The difference though, is that this one describes contraction, not expansion; more specifically, the contraction of media attention over time as pertains to inane celebrity behavior.  I call it:

The Media-illogical Constant

If you’ve had any physics education, you’ve certainly heard of the inverse square law.  It applies to any number of physical properties, gravity, light, radio waves, sound or the attention level of undergraduates to a lecture in a large hall.  Simply stated, as one travels away from the source, the intensity of the force or signal decreases by the inverse of the distance squared.  A similar equation can describe the rate at which our tabloid-minded western media lose interest in stupid celebrity hijinks.  The equation is the same as the inverse square law with one modification:  just substitute time for distance.    Quite simply, it looks like this: 
inverse squareIn plain English:  the intensity of the media attention is proportionate to the inverse of the time since the story’s emergence to national (or international) attention, squared.  So when Lindsay Lohan gets arrested–yet again–the media attention four days after the story will be 1/16th of what it was when the story broke.  [Are you are wondering why this equation just doesn’t use an equal sign instead of a proportional to sign? It beats me.  But one immutable rule of these posts is to always use the coolest looking symbol possible.]
.
There are, of course, caveats–aren’t there always?  This theoretical pronouncement exactly works, if, and only if, there is no significant obstruction or interference from other media events, whether or not they involve inane celebrities.  This is the same as applies to physical properties measured with the inverse square law.    Place a brick wall between the light source and your measuring device and all bets are off.  Likewise,  a bigger story may come along and completely drown out whatever Lady Gaga has been up to lately.   I have a name for this phenomenon and resulting calculations–pretty cheeky of me since I haven’t even invented it yet.  I call it The Big Bust Theory.   Depending on the stories involved, this may or may not be a double entendre.  Either way, part two of this post will deal with that equation.  It’s coming soon to a blogoshere near you.
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Cosmic Quote #10

November 9, 2012 by 20 Comments

“Do you realize that if it wasn’t for Edison we’d all be watching TV by candlelight?”–Al Boliska

Image Credit: Doug Savage. Click for link.

If Sandy wasn’t enough, no sooner did our power come back then, in succession over the next few days, one  of my two office desktop PCs died, followed by the monitor for the other one, followed by my cable modem.  Then the icing on the cake was my business phone land line going dead.  If it wasn’t for broken technology, I’d have no technology at all.   At the rate this is going, I will soon be sending emails via pony express.

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Hurricane Rerun: The Sackler Laws (Part 2 1/2)

October 31, 2012 by 8 Comments

Here is part two of the rerun which began on Monday.  If the northeast USA has been washed away by the time you read this, consider it my last will and testament.  If not, brace yourself for something new by the weekend.

The Laws of Kid and Canine Chaos

“Having kids is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.”–Alan Bleasdale

Part B: The Equation of Kid Chaos.  As the number of kids in any household or otherwise confined environment increases, the chaos generated by said kids increases logarithmically.

As we saw in Part A of this law, The Equation of Canine Chaos, dog generated insanity increases exponentially as dog population increases.  With kids it is infinitely more complex; so we see:

Heaven help us! (even if we are not pious)

When n=1 then Ck=1, but when n>1 then Ck=10n-1

So…n is the number of kids present in a given environment, and Ck is the potential kid-generated chaos in that environment.   In plain English?  The potential chaos increases by an order of magnitude with each kid added!  In other words—for the mathematically challenged among you—two kids may be 10 times as chaotic as one; three may be 100 times as chaotic; four, 1000 times, and so on.

But the increase in analytical complexity here is far greater than the math.  For dogs, the equation is for actual chaos and is a good average.  For kids, it is only for potential chaos, and is somewhere between an approximation and a wild guess.  For one thing, the interactions between children are so complex that they quickly become incalculable.  A good metaphor for this is Newton’s laws of gravity when applied to orbital mechanics of celestial objects: the interaction between two of them is precisely calculable, but as soon as you add even one more the math becomes intractable.

This does not even bring into the equation the question of other variables, such as age, upbringing, setting and proximity to bedtime.  Setting is particularly important.  For example, put 20 nine-year-olds in a catechism class taught by an angry nun wielding a ruler, and the chaos will appear so infinitesimal even the CERN supercollider would be hard pressed to detect it.  Now put the same twenty kids in an unsupervised free swim in a public pool, and you’ll pin the needle on the Richter scale.

But wait, it gets worse!  Dog chaos is pretty obviously measured by noise and activity; but with kids that doesn’t completely tell the tale.   Even when they are quiet there is no telling what’s going on in their little crania.  Take, for example, those twenty tykes in the catechism class.  They may appear behaved now, but what they are plotting to do to that nun when class gets out makes Lord of the Flies look like a sitcom.

This brings us to the most perplexing problem of all: putting multiple kids and dogs together and attempting to calculate what will happen.  It is not unlike trying to unify relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theory of quantum gravity.   In discussing this with my cousin Marion, I asserted that she could not imagine what the equation would look like.  Her sly reply was that she could not even imagine what the room would look like!  Not being one to back off from a challenge, I found this image which fairly represents what both the resulting math and the domicile will look like.

The Equation of Combined Kid AND Canine Chaos


With that,  have a great holiday week and brace yourself for more.

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Hurricane Rerun: The Sackler Laws (Part 2)

October 29, 2012 by 8 Comments

By the time you read this, hurricane Sandy will be pounding the northeast US.  I’m not one to let that stop me; this post has been pre-scheduled.  For those of you who have come late to this blog–or who need a reminder as to what inspired Equations of Everyday Life–here is the first part of two reruns.  If I don’t post something new within a week, send out a search party.

The Laws of Kid and Canine Chaos

“Chaos is inherent in all compounded things.” –Buddha

Part A, the equation of canine chaos: As the number of dogs in any household, or otherwise confined environment increases, the chaos generated by said dogs increases exponentially.

The math on this one is easy and so is the logic. Let’s start with an easy equation:

Cd=D2

Simply stated, where Cd equals canine chaos and D equals the number of dogs present, then canine chaos equals the number dogs present squared. So two dogs equals four times the chaos, three dogs equals nine times the chaos, four dogs 16 times, and so on.

As for the logic, that’s also easy. Assuming that dogs are a pack animal, then each chaotic activity started by one, will be joined in by the others. This includes, but is not limited to, barking, fighting, knocking over the trash, attacking the mailman, biting Aunt Millie, pooping in the hallway, stealing your lunch and whatever other crazy things canines do. So, if there are two dogs, it will happen twice as often and be twice as chaotic each time. If there are three dogs, it will happen three times as often and be three times as chaotic. You get the idea.

Disclaimer: this equation is an average. Obviously, geriatric dogs will create less chaos and puppies are off the chart crazy. The breed of dog is a factor as well. (See figure X, schipperkes, and figure Y—as in “why?”—labs)

Figure X. Schipperke [Pronunciation: skip-it; origin: Dutch, meaning little s&$^%#–er, I mean, “little captain”] Noun: 1. a furry black dog of Belgian origin 2. trouble waiting to happen

Figure Y. As in, “why do people keep these things?” (attribution of photo unknown)

Take for example, our own pack of three (if you can believe that) schipperkes. They have the uncanny knack of lulling us into complete complacency. Then a chipmunk runs across the lawn and our former state of quietude is instantly transformed into the canine equivalent of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. I’m sure insanity is zoonotic. You get it from your pets.

We also need to consider that there are limits to the human capability to distinguish between degrees of canine chaos. At some point, the saturation point is reached, and the perceived chaos is effectively infinite. Beyond this, addition of more dogs to the environment cannot inflict any measurably higher degree of pain. These limits may vary with the individual. I, for instance, have lived with multiple dogs for years and therefor have a higher threshold of tolerance than the average person. On the other hand, my wife is a veterinarian and is effectively immune. Our dogs could stage World War III on top of her head in the middle of the night, and she would sleep through it. [NOTE: Part B, the Law of Kid Chaos, coming soon in a future post.]

Text in the post ©2012 Mark Sackler

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Time Out: Pearls Before Swine

October 26, 2012 by 13 Comments

“When in doubt, kill cute things.”–

Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine creator

This is Stephan Pastis

This is Stephan Pastis on Drugs

More than once in these pages, I have asserted an aversion to thinking “inside the box.”  But I must admit, I’m an amateur at thinking outside the box compared to Pearl’s Before Swine cartoonist Stephan Pastis.  His thinking, as implied by his daily comic strips, is somewhere between “outside the box” and completely sick.  You might deem it closer to the latter; he almost certainly does.  What else can you say about a guy who draws himself into his own strips, usually representing himself as being abused by his own characters?   He even draws outside the box literally. In one strip–which I unfortunately could not find a reproduction of online–he depicts two of his characters sitting on the bottom border of the last panel, feet dangling down from it, derisively tossing sunflower seeds at the strip below them on the comics page.  His characters know they are in a comic strip, and they milk it for all its worth.

The Players

The regular characters are anthropomorphic animals that go by the names of their species.  Pig. Rat. Goat. Zebra.  Here is a rundown.

Rat–The nastiest, most cynical and self-centered comic strip personage this side of Lucy van Pelt.  Rat is egotistical, superior, overbearing and mean.  He gains amusement at the expense of everyone and everything that isn’t him.   But his primary target is his roommate, Pig.

If you can’t figure out why I like this particular strip, you haven’t been paying attention to this blog. (Click for larger image)

Pig–Simple-minded and literal to a fault, Pig is the polar opposite of Rat.  That he lives with Rat, and puts up with constant verbal and physical abuse from him, is the source of many of the strip’s jokes.  Pig most reminds me of Gracie Allen.

Goat–If pig is Gracie Allen, then Goat is George Burns.  Intellectual and reflective, he is the perfect straight man to Rat and Goat.  It is, as you can see from the strip above and the one below, a toss-up as to what exasperates him more: Rat’s arrogance or Pig’s naivety.

Goat is a man after this blogger’s heart. Pig, not so much. (Click to see enlarged image)

Zebra–A neighbor of Pig and Rat,  Zebra is a man on a mission.  And that mission is?  To avoid being eaten by his next door neighbors, the crocodiles of Zeeba Zeeba Eata fraternity.   This is not too big a problem, because the Crocs, though scheming and conniving, are incompetent, downright dumb, and they also talk funny.  Unlike the other characters in the strip, some of these crocs actually have names.  Most frequently, that name is Bob.  Either there have been several crocs named Bob or Pastis has killed Bob more times than South Park has killed Kenny.  A  typical interaction between Zebra and his neighbors below.

This one reads like it was written for this blog! (click for larger image)

Guard Duck–I’m a bit reluctant to admit it, but this is my favorite Pearls character.   Rat and Pig wanted to buy a guard dog to protect their house.  They couldn’t afford one, so they bought a guard duck instead.  What they got turned out to be a cross between Elmer Fudd and Rambo.  I’m a peace-loving kind of guy, but GD is so over the top I just have to laugh.  A lot.

Stephan Pastis–Yes, Pastis is a character in his own strip.  He interacts with the other characters, fights with them and, most often, is abused by them.  The last scenario–abuse–most frequently occurs in the last panel following an agonizing pun.

Ouch!! (Click for larger image)

Add to all this a variety of running gags which sometimes include characters from other popular comic strips (Pastis is particularly fond of poking fun at Cathy and Family Circus), and you get the idea.  He used to be a lawyer; now he is completely nuts.  He seemed to have two options in life when he decided to leave the legal profession:  Looney Toons, or the loony bin.  He could still go either way, but I’m glad he chose the former.

(Click for larger image)

If Pearls Before Swine does not appear in your local newspaper, you can follow it online  on GoComics or Yahoo Comics.  Pastis also has a WordPress blog.  A typically sick post example is here.

All cartoons in this post ©2012 Stephan Pastis;  Pastis portrait photo from Wikipedia;  all other content in this post ©2012 Mark Sackler

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The BLAHS #2: Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub

October 15, 2012 by 9 Comments

“To refuse awards is a way of accepting them with more noise than normal.”–Mark Twain (also attributed to Peter Ustinov)

The absolutely awesome BLAHS logo which adorns the tee shirts and refrigerator magnets awarded to the winners.

Thread update:   Since last we visited the BLAHS (BLog Awards Handed out by Sackler) I have been”nominated” for three more blog awards myself.   I used quotes around the term nominated because there are conditions behind accepting these particular awards. One must, depending on the award in question, “nominate” between five and ten other blogs for the award.  (You’ve probably seen many a blog boasting one of these awards:  Versatile Blogger Award,  One Lovely Blog Award, etc.). See, the thing is, these amount to the blogging equivalent of a chain letter.  If money were involved, it would be a Ponzi scheme;  the math doesn’t work too well.  If everybody nominated were to participate to the fullest extent possible, then within between ten and fifteen iterations there would be more awards handed out than there are people alive on this planet today.  How else would I be cited for three of them in less than six months of blogging? (Yeah, my ego is big, but not that big.)   Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate these other bloggers thinking of me, and will acknowledge them at the bottom of this post.   But I don’t do chain letters, multi-level marketing or Ponzi schemes, so I chose to create more noise by not accepting them.  (And at least my BLAHS are handed out one at a time, even if otherwise worthless).

Without further ado, the winner of BLAHS #2 is…

Ed Darrell of MILLARD FILLMORE’S BATHTUB.

What could be more appropriate?  The first BLAHS went to The Blog of Funny Names.  So why shouldn’t the next one be awarded to the funniest named blog I know, after the funniest named president that most of us have ever (or never) heard of?  To be accurate, though, it’s not named after Millard Fillmore himself, but after one of the oddest hoaxes in American journalism history.  It was promulgated by H.L.Mencken,  who on December 28, 1917 published a story in The Evening Mail, stating that the date was the anniversary of the installation of the first bathtub in the White House by Fillmore in 1850.  It was complete bunkum;  yet to this day it has repeatedly been cited as fact–as this link recounts in detail.  This account clearly proves that fact checking in journalism and history is not dead–it never really existed in the first place.  Mencken intended the story as a joke, and was stunned that it was taken seriously despite several obvious fabrications. Fillmore’s hometown of Morovia, NY certainly has a sense of humor about the whole thing.  They stage an annual Millard Fillmore Day which for years featured a bathtub race as one of the main events.

The great Fillmore himself. Sadly, no images of his bathtub survive.

“Secondhand, commonplace, mediocre, undistinguished: these are the words that spring naturally to mind as one surveys Fillmore’s brief rise from obscurity and quick descent into oblivion,”–Paul Boller in “Presidential Anecdotes.”

Back to the award, though. Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, the blog, touts itself as “striving for accuracy in history, economics, geography, education, and a little science.”  (Why only a little science, I have no idea).  But who cares?  Yes, the content is lively and interesting, but the name and premise it is based on is almost worthy of the award in and of itself.  Congrats, Ed, and keep up the good work.

The Prize

I promised to strive to find a completely useless prize for this award.  I almost did it.  I have fashioned a tee shirt and matching refrigerator magnet out of the logo which appears above.  Not useless?  Well, I figure nobody would actually want to show off this award, so the logo should do the trick.  Yes, I know, the tee shirt could still be used as a dishrag.  But short of a monogrammed piece of lint, this was the best I could think of;  I’m also betting somebody out there will think of a use for the lint.

Three Blogs of Note

These are the blogs that nominated me for the awards mentioned in the preface at the top of this article.  While I have chosen not to participate in these awards, I do appreciate their thinking of me–and I do read and recommend their respective blogs.

Sciencelens               Essa On Everything          The Art Frog

(Postscript:  It occurs to me that H.L. Mencken was also the author of many great quotes, one or more of which is bound to turn up in one of these posts.)

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