"The matter of the dog."

In the novel Watt, by Samuel Beckett, Mr. Watt works in the home of Mr. Knott. Mr. Knott is served lunch and dinner daily, and whatever is left over from those meals is eaten every night by a dog. Mr. Watt considers, at length, how such an arrangement might have been arrived at, reviewing and rejecting various possibilities. He then presents his understanding of the current arrangement, in a single sentence (found on pages 78 through 80 of the Grove Press edition):

"Passing on then to the solution that seemed to have prevailed, Watt found it to be roughly this, that a suitable local dogowner, that is to say a needy man with a famished dog, should be sought out, and on him settled a handsome annuity of fifty pounds payable monthly, in consideration of his calling at Mr. Knott's house every evening between eight and ten, accompanied by his dog in a famished condition, and on those days on which there was food for his dog of his standing over his dog, with a stick, before witnesses, until the dog had eaten all the food until not an atom remained, and of his then taking himself and his dog off the premises without delay; and that a younger famished dog should by this man at Mr. Knott's expense be acquired and held in reserve, against the day when the first famished dog should die, and that then again another famished dog should in the same way be procured and held in readiness, against the inevitable hour when the second famished dog should pay nature's debt, and so on indefinitely, there being thus two famished dogs always available, the one to eat the food left over by Mr. Knott in the manner described until it died, and the other then for as long as it lived to do the same, and so on indefinitely; and further that a similar young local but dogless man should be sought out, against the day when the first local man should die, to take over and exploit, in the same way and on the same terms, the two surviving famished dogs thus left without a master, and without a home; and that then again another young local dogless man should in the same way be secured, against the dread hour of the second local man's dissolution, and so on indefinitely, there being thus two famished dogs and two needy local men for ever available, the first needy local man to own and exploit the two famished dogs in the manner described as long as he lived, and the other then, as long as he drew breath, to do the same, and so on indefinitely; and that lest, as might very well happen, one of the two famished dogs, or both the famished dogs, should fail to survive their master, and follow him at once to the grave, a third, a fourth, a fifth and even a sixth famished dog should be acquired and suitably maintained at Mr. Knott's expense in some convenient place in a famished condition, or that better still there should be at Mr. Knott's expense on some favorable site established a kennel or colony of famished dogs from which at any time a well-bred well-trained famished dog could be withdrawn and set to work, in the manner described; and that on the off chance of the second poor young local man's passing over, into the beyond, at the same time as the first poor local man, or even before, and stranger things are of hourly occurrence, a third, a fourth, a fifth and even a sixth poor young local dogless man or even woman should be sought out and by fair words and occasional gifts of money and old clothes as far as possible be secured to Mr. Knott's service eventually in the manner described, or better still that a suitable large needy local family of say the two parents and from ten to fifteen children and grandchildren passionately attached to their birth-place should be sought out, and by a handsome small initial lump sum to be paid down and by a liberal annual pension of fifty pounds to be paid monthly and by occasional seasonable gifts of loose change and tight clothes and by untiring well-timed affectionate words of advice and encouragement and consolation, attached firmly tor good and all in block, their children and their children's children, to Mr. Knott's service, in all matters touching this matter of the dog required to eat the food that Mr. Knott left, and exclusively in these, and that to their care the kennel or colony of famished dogs set up by Mr. Knott in order that there should never be wanting a famished dog to eat his food on those days that he did not eat it himself should be once and for all handed over, for the matter of the kennel was one that touched the matter of the dog."

flecks of dried mud

We've praised here before the wonderful care our dog received at a student veterinary clinic. Today I want to share a valuable lesson I learned there.

One day I took in the puppy because he needed inoculations. As a responsible pet owner, I had kept track, and knew it was time for some shots. When the vet trainee asked me what was wrong with the dog, I replied that nothing was wrong, and that I had brought the dog in for scheduled inoculations.

Well, the student took my claim that nothing was wrong with the dog as a personal challenge. He performed the most thorough veterinary exam I have ever seen, using a stethoscope, two small flashlights, and, yes, a fine-toothed comb!

Finally, after perhaps twenty minutes, he was elated. "Do you see this?", he asked me, triumphantly holding up one of the dog's pinnae, and pointing to some tiny brown flecks in the ear. "Yes," I acknowledged.

"That's dried mud," he explained. "The next time your dog is playing where there is mud, when you get him home, you should moisten a washcloth in warm – not hot, not cold, but warm – water, and gently remove the mud before it dries."

And then, his professional existence justified, he made preparations to provide the inoculations we'd come in for.

From this, I learned that many professionals see their job as fault-finding. And indeed, when a manuscript goes to journal reviewers, or a grant application goes to a grant review panel, or a research protocol goes to an institutional review board, it is a near-certainty that among the reviewers will be some who will not be satisfied until they find the dried mud.

adventures in minimalism

Long ago, before google, I belonged to an internet writers' group that ran as a listserv. Members contributed stories, mostly autobiographical, which were distributed without editing or annotation; everything happened via email. Many of the members wrote daily. I too contributed regularly, but in a minimalist vein, sending in, for some time, an almost-daily report consisting, in its entirety, of either:

Breakfasted; walked dog.

Or:

Walked dog; breakfasted.

The choice depended simply on in which order I had done those two things that morning.

One Saturday, it happened that my wife woke early and walked the dog without me. So, I contributed, on that day, to this story-writers' list, an email that consisted of a single-word sentence:

Breakfasted.

In reply, I received, from people in many nations, emails asking – some quite anxiously! – about the health of my dog.

Dog-blogging: A beautiful millisecond.

[Backyard yesterday. Nikon 20 mm f/2.8 lens on D700 camera. Shutter priority: 1/1000 s at ISO 3200 gave f/10. Continuous autofocus, single exposure. Shot "blind" (without looking through the viewfinder) while crouching, camera held out, at about knee level, close to the dog. I am watching the dog and trusting the camera to do the same.]

Under the influence.

Heraclitus said that you can't step into the same river twice, but sometimes I wondered whether I was photographing the same dog twice, thrice, and more.

I like to photograph Bucky. Sometimes, though, I found that I would take a photograph of him, and it would look very familiar:

(July)

(October)

(November)

(Click any image for full-screen.)

Old dog, new photo. If you photograph the same dog, repeatedly, how different can any new photo be...?

Last weekend, I visited the Yousuf Karsh exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (USA). In spite of my familiarity with some of Karsh's truly iconic images (his portraits of Churchill & Hemingway, for instance), looking at his prints moved me. Wow. What exquisite compositions! What use of light - and darkness - to frame, and to highlight!

After visiting the exhibition, I took these two photos (click any image for full-screen), indoors, by available window-light; I think they are different from all my earlier photos of Bucky:

Thank you, Mr. Karsh!

And thank you, Bucky.

opera in a barn

Sometimes it's dangerous to rely upon a small N. But other times, it can really pay off.

The Barns at Wolf Trap, in Vienna Virginia, is a special performance space – two eighteenth-century New England barns, relocated and repurposed, joined such that one barn houses the theater and the other barn houses the bar – that seats fewer than four hundred people. The Wolf Trap Opera Company (WTOC) is a summer opera company dedicated to the development of promising young singers. Each summer WTOC stages two or three operas in the Barns - mainly baroque operas, which were written for smaller ensembles; the "pit" at the barns is small - with three or four performances of each.

It's a treat to see opera in a hall this small, because opera is usually produced in much much larger halls. At the Barns, events onstage become more intimate and less remote. And, for each WTOC production, if you ask how many people saw that? You multiply the audience size for each performance, times the number of performances, and get a total N of a bit more than one thousand. This is maybe twenty times smaller than for a major opera company, which fills an almost ten-time-times-bigger hall for maybe three-times-as-many performances.

Having recently warned of the dangers of relying on small N in other settings, today I'd like to celebrate the small-N WTOC productions. Simply because they are consisently as good as, if not better than, anything else in the world. [I have seen in total maybe two hundred opera productions, so I am no expert. But opera is something about which I do know more than nothing, and my job at NeuroCooking is to share my opinions.] Now, just how does this happen? How is it that the thousand or so folks who sit in a wooden barn over three evenings (or two evenings and a Sunday matinee) enjoy the sublime transcendence of a totally successful integrated artistic experience - combining words and music; singing, instrumental performance, oration, acting, choreography; sets, costumes, makeup, hair, props, lighting - more so (in your reporter's opinion) than the twenty thousand folks who (pay much more to) turn out over eight nights at most fancy state-of-the-art opera houses? I think the answer lies in the training mission of the WTOC – and in their excellence.

To save money, when I was in graduate school, I had my teeth tended by the student dentists at the dental school clinic, and I had my dog tended by the student veterinarians at the veterinary school clinic. These student clinics were not quick, but they were remarkably cheap, and the care was superb. Now, the primary mission of the vet clinic, say, was, in a real sense, not to take care of my dog, but to train the next generation of vets. And to do that, they gave my dog the best care in the world. Well, I think that the primary mission of the WTOC is not to please their audience, but to help grow the next generation of singers. And to do that, they consistently give their audiences the best opera in the world.

The WTOC is remarkably selective. Reminds me of some remarkably selective doctoral programs. If you ask, why do the best students in the world go there? They go because it is the best program. And what makes it the best program? Why, in large part, because they get the best students.

NeuroCooking friends, I hope to see you next summer at the Barns.

"Belgian-Style India Pale Ale"

Washington D.C. Pacifica radio station WPFW refers to the local professional football team as "the Washington professional football team" in order to avoid saying its name.

We would like to suggest, to those NeuroCooking friends who drink beer, that you may want to sample the remarkable 20th anniversary ale from Flying Dog brewery. But we will not print its name here.

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[Please note: All trademarks are property of their respective owners; their use here does not denote endorsement or sponsorship. Specifically, NeuroCooking is not supported by the good people of Flying Dog brewery, whose upcoming tour of fine establishments serving their superb ales you absolutely should attend, if you possibly can! To locate this "Belgian-Style India Pale Ale" on the Flying Dog website, see their online beer list, and click on the Latin "canis major".]

A Sunday prognostication.

We suspect that we are not alone in having a dog in order to walk around talking to ourself without being stopped and detained for evaluation; so, we suggest that the evident proliferation of cellphones, earbud headsets, & bluetooth earpieces presages a decrease in dog ownership.

No kidding.

We like much of what the folks at the Flying Dog Brewery come up with, but we cannot recommend their Double Dog "Double Pale Ale," because 11.5 % alcohol by volume is just too high for us.

Snomagadden status report

Snowmagedden, round I, gifted us with more than two feet of snow. The storm ended Saturday, but our road was not plowed until late Monday. Here's how it looked Sunday at around 5 P.M.:

The unplowed road was impassable by car or light truck, of course. Four wheel drive or not, you can't drive over (through?) several feet of icy snowpack. There was however a social trail, that started as a tire-rut early in the storm, running down the road. Here's how it looked Monday at about 10 A.M.:

Snowmagedden, round II, is here now, having arrived last night. How much snow fell overnight? Well, we keep a path shoveled out for the dog, from the back porch to the rear of the back yard, where we've dug out a small snow-room for him to, um, do his business. This dog-path is, after round I, a trench, with walls two to three feet tall. Here's how it looked around mid-day Saturday (as Snowmagedden I was still with us):

Anyway, today started with a pre-dawn shoveling out of this trench, for the sake of the comfort of Bucky (and all), perhaps four inches of snow that had accumulated overnight.

Forecasts for Snowmagedden II have recently gone down, from 12-20 inches, to only 8-12 inches. But wind gusts to 45 miles per hour 55 miles per hour [mid-day edit] are predicted to accompany the snow this afternoon. Best then, to shovel early. Like now! Neurocooking friends, would you like to stop by to help?

[Post-storm edit: Snowmagadden status report, part two, now available]

Because this ain't Hebrew. (Not that there'd be anything wrong with that).

We generally eschew photoshop. Sure, we'll crop a little, and rotate by a few degrees (to level things out), but otherwise we leave our images pretty-much as-they-were-captured-by-the-camera. But.

Yesterday we helped brew a batch of lager, tentatively named "Leaping Lurcher Lager". We plan to put our leaping lurcher photo, from May of 2009, on the label. However, in the photo, the dog is moving from right to left, while the label will, of course, read from left to right.

So, we will "flip" the image, such that, on the label, the dog will be leaping in the same direction as your eyes are now moving while reading this.

Our 2013 Top Eleven!

The top* ten-plus-one NeuroCooking posts of 2013:

1. Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like a motorcycle, or Gerald Ford, or Harry Potter... ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")
2. Title of the Week!
3. Don’t bring a data set to a food fight!
4. Edward I. Koch, 1924-2013
5. Mid-Winter Dog-Blogging!
6. Cooking with NeuroCooking!
7. "Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like ..." Part III. ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")
8. Your functional neuroimaging update (with study questions).
9. Brains are different like bikes are different.
10. Two Views of Christmas Afternoon
11. O Lucky Man!

Bucky, from "Mid-Winter Dog-Blogging!", February 12.

Self-strangling morning glory, from "O Lucky Man!", October 17.

Bucky, from "Two Views of Christmas Afternoon," December 25.

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*As ranked by number of pageviews.

formally speaking

Thank you, NeuroCooking friends, for your kind comments regarding our New Year's Day dog- and cat- blogging.

In response to an inquiry as to whether we might have a formal portrait of our dog, or of one of our cats, to coordinate with the perhaps-familiar black-tie photo of your NeuroCooking correspondents, we present this:

["formal portrait", May 2006]

Our 2012 Top Ten.

The top ten* NeuroCooking posts of 2012:

1. Best. Coffee. Ever.
2. Mid-June Dog-Blogging! (or, "SG-31R")
3. "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D" part II (or, "Do you want fries with that?")
4. "h" vs. "H" (and the Mountain Goats, Down Under)
5. e.g., "Rule number eight: exploit superstitious thinking"
6. Proofreading Is Important, Part XHYXHYXHYX
7. Applied what?
8. "If new-laid eggs wore wooden legs I should not laugh or cry."
9. "Finally, SUPEREGO-related neural activity was localized to lateral prefrontal and parietal cortex."
10. Seeing Is Believing.

Bucky, from "Mid-June Dog-Blogging! (or, 'SG-31R')," June 14.

Cherry tree, from "'AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D' part II (or, 'Do you want fries with that?')," March 25.

The Mountain Goats, from "'h' vs. 'H' (and the Mountain Goats, Down Under)," May 16.

Nope it ain't, from "Applied what?" September 27.

Warning, from "Seeing Is Believing," May 18.

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*As ranked by number of pageviews.

FOUND DOG!

Week-end Dog-blogging.

[11:43 AM today]

Halloween live!

Liveblogging Halloween from NeuroCooking's National Defense Headquarters in Kensington Maryland USA:

At 10:08 PM, we can report that we saw what we thought might be a trick-or-treater, but turned out to be a dog-walker.

Back-to-School Dog-Blogging!

Our new* AF Nikkor

28-105mm f/3.5-4.5D

is a small light affordable joy.

__________

*Ordered online from Adorama, the lens arrived yesterday (this is one of our first test shots); it is used, and the model was discontinued in 2006.

Autumnal Dog-Blogging!

(click image for full-screen)

Mid-week dog-blogging.

[Backyard, 3/24/10]