Dogs succeed while chimps fail at following finger pointing
Ever since we watched Inside the Mind of a Dog, Sparky has been telling everyone that he’s smarter than a monkey because they said that dogs understand human pointing, and primates don’t.
There are times when I suspect that Sparky is stretching the truth. To start the new year off right, I challenged Sparky to demonstrate that he understands human pointing. It took some training, but he is getting the idea.
We just watched Lord of the Rings, and Sparky thought Gollum made a good case for eating raw fish and rabbits. Sparky wanted to post a picture as Sh-beagle.
Sparky wants me to feel better, so thinks I should lick his paw a bunch of times. He says that usually helps him.
It’s an obvious game. Nobody cares about dictionaries, so at the end of the year, dictionaries get some attention by coming up with a word of the year. Then, because journalists are lazy, they get a column out of it.
This is too mundane for anyone to address, but a couple of words come to mind that we use frequently, but just aren’t very descriptive.
I have a cold. That happens all the time to everyone. That’s too close to being cold. If I say a head cold, that is a little better. Doctors call it an upper respiratory infection, but that sounds too long, and could be a sinus infection, which is much worse. Just come up with a word that is definitive and isn’t dependent on the rest of the sentence.
Dream is another one. If someone says that they had a dream, you know a boring story is coming. If someone says that they have a dream, you know something important is coming.
In Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, he goes on to refute everything that the modern progressive holds dear. MLK wasn’t talking about something that came to him while he was sleeping. He could call it a fantasy, but that sounds disjointed from reality and conjures images of dragons and heaving bosoms. We need a word that means a future reality that we should work toward.
Does anyone have sleeping dreams of the type portrayed in media? Those dreams are always carefree fantasies that write themselves. Some people have vivid dreams and some have vague dreams. People remember them, or they don’t. Freud thought that dreams addressed an issue that came up the previous day. That sounds more likely.
I don’t know. The word “dream”, just sounds like a romantic notion that can be tossed into a sentence, and people can take it a bunch of different ways.
I’m still a sick puppy, but more operational. Frequent neti blasts, saltwater gargling and more sleep have done wonders. My sleep was fraught with mundane fever dreams, but woke feeling like I was over the hump.
Before bed, I tried some Vicks, and found that I couldn’t smell it. Peanut butter confirmed it. Does that happen for any reason other than the Wuhan flu? I’m not going to get a Covid test, because screw Fauci.
This morning, I can smell again, and my temperature is up just a bit. I still have chest corruption, but that is usually the last symptom to clear up.
Jimmy Carter just passed away at 100 years old.
I was sixteen when Jimmy Carter was elected, so wasn’t paying much attention. Carter got ridiculed for an incident where a rabbit harassed his fishing boat. That was a dumb story, but journalists don’t seem to be very smart.
Jimmy Carter was weak tea. He had a good resume, but was too idealistic to be effective. He grew up pretty poor, attended the Naval Academy and was trained on nuclear reactors. Carter was a good Christian and a good family man.
We tried Search and Rescue again today, and it didn’t go the way I expected.
To foster Sparky’s intellectual development, we started a new training exercise. It’s really just hide-and-seek, but Sparky likes it better if we call it search-and-rescue. He wants me to get him an orange vest that says, “RESCUE DOG”. I reminded him that dogs can’t see the color orange, but he doesn’t care.
Newsweek: Norovirus surge is worst in a decade.
This is slanderous. Why do we put up with such chicanery?
The norovirus is stomach flu. It causes intestinal distress for a couple of days.
The “noro” prefix refers to Norwalk, Ohio.
From Wikipedia:
In the United States, it is the cause of about half of all foodborne disease outbreaks. The virus is named after the city of Norwalk, Ohio, US, where an outbreak occurred in 1968.
Now come on, stomach flu wasn’t invented in Norwalk. That outbreak wasn’t noteworthy in any way, but some wag decided to denigrate a small Ohio town, and nobody did anything about it.
Covid started in Wuhan, China. It killed millions of people, but can’t call it the China flu because that would be racist. Norovirus is fine.
The fact that a bio-lab in Wuhan, China did just that kind of virus research, the lab protocols were known to be sloppy, everyone was called a conspiracy theorist for asking the question, and now, nobody cares where the virus originated, suggests it came from the Wuhan Lab. Why not call it the Wuhan flu?
Recall that initially, it was called a corona virus because it resembled a corona. Everyone thought that sounded sciencey, but the Corona beer people weren’t happy. We settled on Covid-19.
Norwalk should be known for it’s raceway, not for a common stomach flu.
I’m a sick puppy. My actual puppy is good as new. Sparky had been snorting quite a bit, but I gave him a can of Campbell’s chicken soup for breakfast, and that did the trick.
Sparky may never have actually been sick, but I am. It’s just a regular head cold, but I haven’t had one for several years. Covid was a socially distancing psyop, then I retired, so there wasn’t much exposure.
I’m in the darkest days of the head cold. That means I sleep, but not well. I’m impatient with TV or audio books. I don’t want to read anything. The repetitive nature of my photo digitizing project is appealing. I also may feel like generating some rambling posts.
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