dogtown commons

Single Black Cormorant seeking same. I enjoy sunset swims and diving for fish.

(Photo taken at Lake Merritt in Oakland, back when the skies used to be cloudfree.)

As part of our ongoing celebration of the contemporary American ethos, the Legal Affairs Department here at Dogtown Commons has passed along two articles exemplifying the strong sense of personal responsibility that makes our nation so great.

First, there is the prisoner in Colorado who tried to escape, but fell and hurt himself as he was trying to lower himself down an 85-foot building using tied-together bedsheets. Naturally, he has filed a lawsuit against the county sheriff, on the grounds that the authorities caused his injury by making it too easy to escape.

Next, there is the professional daredevil who climbed over the fence surrounding the observation deck of the Empire State Building and wanted to parachute down to a busy 5th Avenue. Naturally, he has filed a $30 million lawsuit against the Empire State Building Company, on the grounds that they endangered his life by preventing him from jumping and then defamed him by filing a lawsuit against him (their lawsuit was intended to discourage other publicity-seekers from imitating him, they say).

And in local news, I stubbed my toe today. I was walking the dog when it happened, so I plan to sue the dog for emotional suffering and possibly financial hardship too. My attorneys tell me I have a 50-50 chance of winning!

In a very interesting article in last week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the following anecdote (the “WISC” test is a widely-used kind of I.Q. test):

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories.

While Gladwell is citing the research to help rebut the arguments of “I.Q fundamentalists” who have come out of the woodwork yet again after recent comments by James Watson, the Kpelle story is also a cautionary tale that can be applied more generally: we are fools ourselves if we judge other people without first understanding why they behave the way they do. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t judge other people, only that wisdom requires judgments based on understanding, rather than ignorance. A trite point, perhaps, but one that is all too often forgotten when we assume that those with whom we disagree must therefore be evil or stupid. Sometimes those with whom we disagree are evil or stupid, but sometimes they just see the world in a different way that would be worth our while to comprehend.

Here’s some unsolicited advice: If you’re considering getting married, you should probably think hard about the decision. If the person you are considering marrying is a convicted murderer and rapist, you should probably think extra hard about that decision. If the person is a convicted murderer and rapist and has also changed his name from Jesse Crisp to Jesus Jihad, then — just my two cents here, mind you — you probably shouldn’t think about marrying them at all. Here’s how the Oakland Tribune summarizes the background of Mr. Jihad, who will soon face trial for stabbing his wife to death and then severely wounding her sister and a 15-year-old relative in July:

Jihad was sentenced in 1973 to a life behind bars for the murder of the sailor in Alameda. But he was paroled in 1987 and changed his name from Jesse Crisp to Jesus Jihad.

About six years later, Jihad was convicted of raping his 19-year-old step-daughter in Berkeley and sentenced to 19 years in jail. Once again, however, he was released early and placed on parole after serving a decade in prison.

Police say he met Hendricks about three years ago and they were married for about two years.

Can someone remind me why it’s not legal for one law-abiding and nonviolent man to marry another law-abiding and nonviolent man, while it’s perfectly okay for a murderer to get married again after being convicted of raping his stepdaughter?

Forget baseball. Shopping is the real national pastime. Thanksgiving is no longer a holiday so much as an excuse to increase our personal debts buying redundant electronics. The traditional thanksgiving meal is now mere preparation, like a marathoner having a big bowl of pasta the day before the race, or like a family fueling up the ol’ SUV before making the long drive to Disneyland. And camping out in a mall’s parking lot for a 4 am opening just isn’t going to cut it anymore (that’s so 2005):

For shoppers looking to get a jumpstart on Black Friday, CompUSA stores will open their doors on Thanksgiving from 9 p.m. to midnight.

The stores are offering shoppers early deals and a slice of pumpkin pie. Also new this year are the expanded deals on CompUSA.com. Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday, CompUSA.com will have a one-day, online only sale with special deals not available in stores and free shipping on select products.

Not to be outdone, however, some clever consumers have realized that there’s no reason for the traditional thanksgiving meal to be a pre-marathon pile of pasta when it can be more like a nutrition bar wolfed down during a pit stop in a NASCAR race:

Hoping to bring shoppers out early and get a jump on the holiday shopping season, many stores ran pre-Thanksgiving sales. Target had a four-day sale Sunday through Wednesday. Best Buy, HH Gregg and Michaels ran similar promotions.

It’s not that I’m ungrateful. There is still a lot to be thankful for. For example, this year I am thankful that there will still be plenty of cheap crap left for me to buy after the long weekend is over, so I can sleep in as late as I want on Friday morning, still satiated and content from the traditional thanksgiving meal.

Behold the geniuses keeping us safe from terrorism:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.

Full story here.

A website called Walk Score rates the walkability of any address on a scale from 0 to 100, using google maps and based on how many stores, schools, parks, restaurants, etc. are nearby. It’s a clever little site, and while it obviously doesn’t account for things like crime rates or proximity to mass transit, the scores seem to be pretty reasonable as ballpark figures. My current location gets an okay but unexceptional grade of 72, which seems about right. A few places I used to live, mostly in New York, scored in the high 90’s.

It got me thinking about what other data I’d want included in the algorithm if I were actually using it to choose my neighborhood. Average annual days of sunshine? Average annual temperature? Quality of the local architecture? Average number of trees per block? Average number of barking dogs behind chainlink fences per block?

[Photograph above is “The Long Walk” by Bernard Fallon, taken in Liverpool in 1969. More information here.]

UPDATE later Friday evening: The site is back up. So the paragraph below is now moot.

I was planning to email Paul Cobb to ask about the future of the Oakland Post last night, but www.postnewsgroup.com was leading to an error page. It is still leading to the same error page. That address was working as of a couple weeks ago. If anyone knows anything about this, or has an alternative web address that works, I welcome information in comments below, or by email to dc(at)dogtowncommons.com. As I said in last night’s post, it would be a shame if the paper was shut down. I hope the website problem isn’t an ominous sign.

The LA Times published a story under the byline “Dog Davis” on Thursday. It’s not the first time that lovely byline has appeared in the paper. His website has an “About Me” page, but it doesn’t answer the obvious question: what’s with the fantastic name? (Our default theory: must be Norwegian!).

This is how you sell products: “This will save you time.” Time for what? Well, so you can watch ads for more products.

More from Michael Pollan in this interview from May 2006