I biked to work again today. It wasn’t as cold today (~54°) as it was yesterday (~49°), so I was able to wear the jacket Grandma gave me instead of my big Land’s End coat. I also got smart this time and brought my backpack; my dinky purse and camera bag are swallowed by the thing, so I was easily able to include my breakfast (bowl, spoon, and Apple & Cinammon oatmeal) as well. When I head home in a few hours, I can stuff my jacket in there too, as it’s supposed to get to like 75° today.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep doing it every day from now on; that’s a big adjustment. But I didn’t feel exhausted when I got here, which is promising. There’s one point on Pleasant Home that is annoyingly uphill, but it doesn’t last too long, and it’s much better on the way home. I think I can really keep this up; I just don’t want to burn myself out right at the beginning.

Yesterday I ate leftover pizza for lunch and then had Chinese food for dinner (Hunan Cafe rules, although the crab rangoon was overcooked). This bumped my weight up by 2.5 pounds this morning, but as long as I’m good from now on that should only be temporary. (The number could be off anyway, as I was unable to, er, properly use the restroom this morning. Maybe I’ll take Cheryl’s advice and start eating pineapple before bed.)

(Side note: I just revised two ellipses out of my last paragraph. Down with the ellipsis!)

Anyway, biking to work is a good thing. I’m glad I’m doing it. It guarantees that I will get at least some exercise every workday!

From Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough:

An expensive MRI machine at Virginia Mason Medical Center sustained at least $200,000 in damage when a metal floor buffer was mistakenly placed nearby and was sucked in by the machine’s powerful magnets, a television station reports.

That would have been something to watch.

This very funny parody mashup of BoingBoing and Clerks brightened my day. (This also helped.)

I decided to bike to work today, because when you’re upset about something it’s great to try new things and risk being killed in a traffic accident. It wasn’t that bad. I had sidewalks to retreat to when necessary, and it only took about half an hour. It was cold, so I wore my coat. Pedaling up and down hills and avoiding cars in the cold gave my mind something to focus on other than the thought that woke me up in tears this morning.

Last night when I called to tell Dad Happy Birthday, he said, “I guess you know about Gaila.”

I didn’t, not specifically. But she’s my dog. To not know would indicate a lack of personal responsibility. “About the thing on her lip?” I guessed.

“Yeah. It’s just gotten so big, and she’s slow and uncomfortable, and we hear her whimpering every now and then, so I guess we’re gonna put her down soon. Put her out of her misery.”

I had no response to this, other than a belated, “Oh.”

He went on like that for a minute, explaining the reasons. I asked if the thing couldn’t just be taken out, and Dad said, “No, not without removing half her face.” Dad sounded like he was about to cry.

I managed to say, “Well, if you’re going to put her down, let me know when so I can come.”

“Okay,” Dad said, sounding a little surprised. “Mom said you probably wouldn’t want to.”

“She’s my dog,” I said. “I want to be with her.”

“Okay,” Dad repeated, and went on to suggest that maybe it’d be better if I decide when I’m able to come, and we put her down then. “Best to do it on a Friday,” he suggested, as though we were arranging a luncheon. “I don’t know if vets are open on Saturdays. And then you’ll have the weekend and you can get home before Monday.”

“Okay,” I said.

Even after we had things decided, he kept talking about why it was best to put her down. He was trying to convince himself, and me. I believe him. There isn’t a person alive who hates the suffering of animals more than my father.

He kept repeating the phrase “put her out of her misery”, and he brought up other dogs–a stray near Pat and Wolf’s that had been run over by a backhoe, its rear leg hanging by a scrap of flesh, screaming in pain as Wolf shot it and unfortunately missed the first time; Misho, and how he was put down at 14, when he was unable to move or take care of himself or even get outside to relieve himself. I think Dad was crying at this point, or at least he was unable to hold it in as well.

“But it’s my birthday,” he said suddenly, sniffling. “We shouldn’t be talking about all this depressing stuff. I’m sixty years old!”

“Are you really?” I said. I think my voice reflected admiration; that’s what I was going for, at least, but what I was thinking was, Dad is old, and someday he’s going to die, too.

We didn’t manage to get off the subject of Gaila, in the end, so I wrapped up the conversation as quickly as I could, and we hung up. Sean came home. I told him that I was going, and that Mom didn’t think I would want to go. He said, “I wouldn’t think you’d want to go, either. It’s less painful not to.”

Mom called a little later.

“I was just wondering what you and Dad talked about, because he said you were coming up here, and I would love to see you, but I wanted to make sure that was really what you wanted to do.”

“She’s my dog,” I said, stubbornly. “I’m going to be there with her.”

“I was going to tell you,” Mom said. “I just didn’t know how long we wanted to wait before we did it.”

I’m not angry that neither my mother nor my husband thought I would want to be with my dog in her final moments. I am hurt and confused.

I wasn’t there for her when she ran into that piece of rebar. I didn’t pick her up and take her to the vet. I was there at the first vet, who refused to even do a simple X-ray. The second vet was out of town and I didn’t go, and it was Mom and AJ who decided her leg should be amputated. All I did was arrive after the procedure and watch her hop pathetically, painfully towards me and the van.

Even before that I gave up on her. I stopped trying to train her, I stopped keeping her in my room. And then I left her behind when I moved away.

But she never gave up on me. She always knew that she was my dog.

And so I’m going to be there. I’m going to sit with her, let her lie in my lap. I’m going to stroke her and tell her that everything is fine, and that she should just relax and go to sleep. I’m going to stay with her and feel her heart slow to a stop, hear her last sigh of breath.

She’s my dog.

Many writers, like the author of the goofy dog article I mentioned yesterday, try to hit that snarky, intelligent-next-door-neighbor-y, snide, clever tone that will have readers laughing out loud.

And some writers actually manage to do it. Check out this bit from Matt Feeney’s article “Beauty and the Beast: Why are fat sitcom husbands paired with great-looking wives?“:

It’s not that there aren’t handsome or sexually desirable men on sitcoms, but these men are typically marked as terminal bachelors, like Ted Danson on Cheers. To the extent they have anything to do with family life, they tend to skulk around its outer margins like coyotes. On Two and Half Men (CBS, Mondays, 9:30 p.m. ET), Charlie (Charlie Sheen) is handsome, successful, and wedded to promiscuous bachelorhood, but he gets to enjoy some nourishing familial scraps since his loser brother (Jon Cryer) and scampy nephew moved themselves into his pad. (In keeping with the Maxim ethos of these shows, the brother was abandoned by a woman who thinks she might be a lesbian. It would be emasculating for male viewers to see a man dumped for being completely undesirable, and, besides, lesbians are so hot.)

I may not agree with all of this guy’s points, but damn is he funny, and sharp as a tack.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing links today to “Rats Can Tell Human Languages Apart, Study Shows” over at Yahoo! News: Science.

David Beaver over at Language Log weighs in on the subject:

The researchers, Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon, and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, are sensible people, and do not take a Dolittlian inter-species communication or new age conclusion from this. Rather, they think it is evidence that in the development of human language, features already present in the mammalian auditory system were co-opted.

I am intrigued by the study, and I have the impression it was carried out carefully and effectively. But personally, I never had any doubt whatsoever that in the development of human language, features already present in the mammalian auditory system were co-opted. Moreover, I’m skeptical that Toro et al‘s study shows this. The problem is that Toro et al don’t actually know which features of Japanese and Dutch were the ones that mattered, the relevant differences between the two languages that are more easily extracted forwards than backwards.

That was (essentially) my reaction (though mine was a more gut instinct response, and not nearly as eloquent as Beaver’s). Obviously, languages are different. They have different rules and patterns. They sound different. Just like you can train an animal to respond to verbal commands or sounds, you can train them to recognize the patterns in language. That’s all that happened here (though, as Beaver suggests, we really don’t know “why” yet).

Doctorow, on the other hand, is interested in the possible applications:

Rats can be trained to differentiate between Dutch and Japanese speech. If this is perfected and the black plague comes back, warring linguistic groups could use this to deploy targeted biowar vectors. I’m sure there are other applications as well, of course. But: Dutch-seeking plague-rats — w00t!

Those poor Dutch, they just can’t catch a break. ;>

Apparently in Nara, they burn down all the grass on Mt. Wakakusa once a year. From Mainichi:

About 130,000 spectators were enchanted to watch the annual grass burning on Mount Wakakusa here on Sunday night.

Officials in Nara set off some 200 fireworks at about 6 p.m., and then set fire to dead grass remaining on the face of Mount Wakakusa.

Check out that picture! I’d like to go see this someday.

From Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough:

Britain’s Ascension Island has been without post since October because the Royal Mail has been sending its mail to South America.

Poor bastards!

I’m reading this silly article on Slate, “Grandpa Got a Dog…Oh, no!” by Emily Yoffe, and I’m noticing quite a few interesting turns of phrase. This one, however, really caught my attention:

When he [the beloved dog] died my mother pulled down the shades and went into a state of mourning. For years she wore a locket around her neck that was bursting with his coarse hairs, a piece of jewelry that looked like it was fashioned at Hogwarts.

I must say that I’m more delighted at finding a reference to Harry Potter in a Slate article than I am at the success of the metaphor. Because first of all, jewelry isn’t fashioned at Hogwarts–Hogwarts is a school. And secondly, assuming someone at Hogwarts did make jewelry, I have no idea what it would look like. The metaphor fails!

From Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough, who got it from UK Reuters, who apparently got it from Asahi (we’ll see if it ever shows up in my news feeds):

A 1,000 sq metre former bank vault under an office building in Otemachi, a central Tokyo business district, has been chosen as the site for a high-tech farm growing lettuce, tomatoes, herbs[,] strawberries and rice, the national daily Asahi said on Sunday.

The project is aimed at helping the Japanese capital’s jobless to train for careers in agriculture, the paper said.

Since they will be hydroponic farms, they could also help train future space explorers. (“We’re space explorers, and we need space!” -Keith, Voltron)

Personally, I think it would be cool to visit one. I hope they offer tours in the future.

From MSNBC:

Federal officials were investigating the cause of the wreck, but most officials were kept out of the area because of the toxic gas.

State and federal environmental officials have continued conducting air quality tests, finding either low levels or nothing at all a couple blocks away from the site. The crash site levels were higher.

“How high? We are not sure,” state Department of Health and Environmental Control spokesman Thom Berry said. The levels exceed the monitor’s limits, he said.

The evacuees will have to stay out of their homes at least until early next week. I wonder where, exactly, they are staying?

Cory Doctorow linked today to a fascinating explanation of sleep, entitled “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)“. Here’s a snippet:

Melatonin is secreted only at night (circadian clock time) and is not dependent on sleep. However, bright light tends to reduce melatonin levels. In summer, nights are short, thus the duration of the melatonin “signal” is short. In winter, nights are long, thus the duration of the melatonin “signal” is long. The duration of the melatonin signal is the cue that the circadian clock (this is in mammals only) uses to detect season, i.e., the changes in photoperiod (daylength) – information important for timing of seasonal events, e.g., molting, migration, hibernation, reproduction. Humans are only mildly seasonal – our ancestors about 70 million years ago were living in little holes in the ground, were tiny, were nocturnal, were seasonal breeders, and were hibernators. Some traces of our ability to measure photoperiod are retained in “winter blues”, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It is almost a form of hibernation.

Back when I was taking kung fu lessons, I was very interested in the body’s natural abilities, including the “internal body clock”. (I even wrote a Mary Sue in which I had mastered it. I also passed myself off as a man named Julien in the story…but I digress.)

I never actually discovered anything about the body clock, but this article reminds me how interesting our bodies’ natural systems are. I’d like to figure out the healthiest routine for myself, the one that would bring forth natural productivity. Analyzing sleep patterns will presumably help, as will sticking to a healthy diet. I suppose what I need to do is start compiling all the information I find on the subject.

One other part that struck me:

If you are asleep, this means you need it. If you are rested enough you cannot physically remain asleep or go back to sleep again. You are wide awake. Thus, when you see someone asleep, it is because that person needs sleep right there and then. Sleep is not laziness.

And here’s something scary.

The problem with jet-lag and shift-lag is dissociation of rhythms between cells in different tissues, i.e., your brain clock may resynchornize to the new time-zone/schedule in a couple of days, the clocks in your heart and lungs in a week, and in your stomach and liver in a month. In the meantime, everything in your body is desynchronized and you feel really bad. If you keep changing your work shift over and over again, you never get to achieve complete synchronization, leading to long-term effects on health, including significant rise in heart attacks, stomach ulcers, and breast cancer.

I now would very much like for Sean to stop working rotating shifts.

There’s far more information than just the above to be found in the piece. For example, the section “Treating Extreme Larks and Owls” is intriguing (and funny). I recommend everyone check it out.

MSNBC has an article. Brooke says it was on Good Morning America, too.

Things somehow seem even more sobering when you know that people outside your community are aware of them.