Stevie: To me, it’s overrated. I mean a dog’s personal space is approximately 0 to 1 inches. That’s totally okay with me.

Stevie: Things get really exciting at close range.

MO: No way Jose. 0 to 1 inches is less than what chickens are comfortable with. And they “flock,” whereas we “pack.”

Bing-Bing: Actually, you guys both suck.

so rad!

And it gets cooler. You can take a screen shot of your shared screens taking a screenshot with your shared screen!

“It is the nature of scientific study of non-human animals that a few individual animals who have been thoroughly poked, observed, trained, or dissected come to represent their entire species. Yet with humans we never let one person’s behavior stand for all of our behavior… we are individuals first, and members of the human race second…

By contrast, with animals the order is reversed. Science considers animals as representative of their species first, and as individuals second. We are accustomed to seeing a single animal or two kept in a zoo as representative of their species…”

from “Inside a Dog, What Dogs See Smell and Know,” by Alexandra Horowitz.

After reading my friend’s recent blog post titled “And Now for a Little Biracial Rage,” it seems like in actuality some humans do see other humans (of a different race) as representatives of that race first, and as individuals second. But all this “seeing” is in the guise of power, with race simply being the whitest, most convenient ax to wield. Humans tend to privilege vision over everything else, and so that means when one looks different that’s what other people are going to latch onto. Plus it’s simply too hard to take the time to learn about other people’s experiences, which (in my opinion) are really the things that make up one’s identity.

Besides, race and identity are fluid things, and made convenient only when necessary. Notice the recent hubbub surrounding our President coming out for gay marriage. This puts gay Republicans in a conundrum, as it does black conservative Christians. What the conservatives want is for the black community to put race aside (“Aw come on, just this once”) and not vote for the person who is trying his darnedest to help their race, and instead condemn him for something totally abstract like thrusting a rainbow fist in God’s face, whereas the gay Republicans (who I think are Republicans for mostly fiscal reasons) have to wiggle about deciding whether their capital gains tax and other pocket lining issues are more important than voting for the first standing president in the history of the U.S. to support their cause. Yup, it’s a toughie.

What all this means, is that race and identity are tools. Just like the argument of how guns don’t kill people, bullets do, telling someone (who’s half Chinese) “You don’t look Asian to me,” is not a comment on race as it’s a statement proving the guy who said it is a dickwad. Not only is he dismissing her actual identity, he’s also judging her by what she looks like based on an identity of his own fantasy, and in that visual judgement is also an opinion on how she should behave, given her self-proclaimed membership in the race he’s an expert in, and boy let me tell you he knows the Asians, as in he’s received some juicy Asian back rubs and bowls of Moo Goo spicy chicken. And I’m sorry to say, but it’s got to be a guy, a white guy, and he’s probably single (or soon will be), and he’s trolling Southeast Asia for a reason, and in the words of my dear friend living in Hong Kong “These mother scratchers, once they start dating locals, they can never go back to an opinionated western girl.”

The ease of how these things are said and taken lightly reminds me of a recent Meet the Press where Rachel Maddow brought up some facts regarding how women were getting paid less than men. Alex Castellanos answered with the nastiest kind of condescension. He said “I love how passionate you are,” which is just about one of the most belittling responses, one, because it reduces the presentation of facts to a mere display of emotion, and two, because it’s disguised as a complement.

So this brings me to the woes of MO, my bi-tri-multi-racial dog. In the dog world I assume she presents her identity clearly, as dogs tend to do, that of trouble-maker-chase-extremist, and it makes most dogs just want to slap her, but when it’s humans she encounters, they tend to pull the “you don’t look Asian to me” on her because they’re just looking at her, as opposed to watching.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten in terms of raising a rescue dog (or any dog) is to “See the dog, not the problem.”
Or in other words, “Train the dog you have, not the dog you think it should be.”
Or, “If you can’t be with the one you love, don’t fake it by pretending to love someone else who kinda looks the same.”
Clearly this memo hasn’t gotten around very much.

MO (and me, since I have to suffer the human part of the conversation) have had plenty of encounters with people telling me (not asking) what breed she is. Most people that declare what breed of dog I have must feel pretty self-satisfied, but they don’t realize that even if they were right, even if I bent over in a total and absolute kow-tow, it wouldn’t do me a wit of good in terms of understanding MO’s behavior, or MO in terms of how she should live her life.

They say “That’s an Australian shepherd” and when I say “Well, actually she’s got some gouda and aged gruyere and possibly some ham in there,” they say “NO. She’s definitely an aussie. I’ve had two. I’ve a good eye for them.” Some say “Whoa, gotta watch out for that cattle dog,” and when I say she’s “50/50 butter and duck fat,” they say: “NO. You see her coat? (how can you not?) See how she’s trying to herd?” (uh, actually, I’ve seen what she looks like when she is herding.)

Sometimes (when people do ask) I offer this explaination: “MO’s mother bit her owner and was taken to the shelter where she promptly bit a shelter worker right after they found out she was pregnant. There were four pups and MO is the only one with a merle coat, and they tell me the mom was a German Shepherd/Chow.” And they say “NO WAY she’s any of those,” as if they were there in that back-alley-south-central-Los-Angeles point of moogoomaculate conception with a freaking DNA strip.

Even when I had to register her to take obedience classes I was chastised for writing German Shepherd/Chow as her breed. Turns out I should have written “All American.” It’s pretty hilarious to think which part of a German Shepherd and a Chow is American!

All of this is frustrating and stupid and annoying, but the really critical part is, (other then why has no one told, (or asked) me about her double life as Canine Sherman) what difference does it make what breed she is?

What is breed going to explain in terms of her actual identity/experience? Will her being a “full-on” whatever breed explain her permanent fear of strangers and her facility at defusing a naked squeaker? Which is a more authentic part of her identity, the fact she spent the first six months of her life learning all things dog from twenty some dogs and so can read other dogs in an instant, or the fact that she looks, or doesn’t look, like a German Shepherd/Chow?

Even with Stevie, people will often say “My, what a pretty border collie mix.” I just lower my head and say, “Thanks, but she’s only a regular border collie.” Good God. At least I don’t get thanked for being so damn passionate.

We’ve had some good roasts with our buddy the Behmor, but this morning we pushed our luck too far. We tried a pound of Sweet Maria’s Satpura Fold on P4 and it barely made it to first crack. While this makes for a very sad batch—tight fisted pebbles actually, clinging to their chaff the way CEOs are with their IT dollars—I could hear the worms in the compost cheering “More for us! More for us!”

Not so fast little red crawlers, it’s spring time, which means the strawberries are booming, but the slugs are having their way with them before they get a chance to turn red. Turns out the Internet says coffee grounds pass through the slug’s slime barrier and they die of nervous exhaustion!! c-c-c-coffeeeeeee!

Turns out the Internet also says coffee and caffeine have no effect whatsoever on slugs! So true the Internet is bunk for so many things.

In any event I’m game to try, besides, there’s a chance I might be able to trap the largest, most dangerous garden pest, known in these parts as the moogoo.

I thought I’d talk about the color purple, and how it looks so good here with a merle coat, but how i’ve always hated the color. Purple, the non-color, the yicko, the bleh. And no, this isn’t a post about me growing older and having a soft spot for that hue, as in that silly “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple” poem, the line of poetry which sums up my life is and will always be:
“I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

And so, since purple is not very interesting to talk about, other than it definitely makes you look fat (not red, not blue, just large) and that it’s proof I inherited two recessive genes, as I can’t metabolize the bright betacyanin pigment from eating beets so my pee comes out the color of the ribbons awarded for agility titles…

…let’s talk about the other “P” word: pickles!

About a week ago a friend of mine told me about her recent stay in the hospital where a lot of the workers were immigrants with just the worst stories about getting ditched by their husbands, defrauded by their own people, reamed by their own kids. My friend learned from one Russian woman that if you hollow out a radish and fill it with honey and leave it overnight on a radiator, it was a cure for something, she (my friend) just couldn’t remember what. Turns out some people say tuberculosis, and the Internet says “whatever ails you.”

Having wondered all this time how the hell you hollow out a little radish I found huge black radishes at the farmer’s market this morning! A big throng of women were jostling for them, and in my imagination I heard them discussing all-things-radi in Russian and Armenian, but when I got closer it was just the tone of their westside-liberal voices ordering the guy to take the tops off that sounded foreign.

But I believe pickles have the same curative power, and yes, even the PURPLE ones that I can eat by the boatload from Zankou Chicken, so that will be my next project. In the meantime in less than 24 hours we’ll have tarragon/green garlic and chili-peppercorn pickles.

And this, my dear fellow rockstars, is PINK.

Yes it’s Guys, because the two IT Gals I have had to deal with have been so irredeemably mean and scary I can’t bear to meet any more. And if you think I’m throwing down some girl-hate I have to say I think the Gals didn’t start out mean and scary, they became that way because they had to prove themselves in horribly unnecessary ways plus I can only imagine what listening to the Guys go on and on about Honking Network Speeds on a daily basis does for your complexion.

Bad IT guys are not just crotch-pulsing, Mountain-Dew chugging dudes with expanding waistlines. They’re awful inside too. They can’t/won’t explain anything in plain English, which just proves that they don’t understand the concept, they can’t problem solve their way out of a paper bag, and they like it that way. In other words, chances are they don’t understand jack, but because they keep putting Band-aids on their systems rather than solve the problem, it means in a few months they’ll have to re-Band-aid, and in a few months after that they’ll have to re-Band-aid, and all this means job security. In effect they are holding their company hostage because the system they set up is so fucked up it can’t be fixed without a serious headache.
So what? So what.

A good IT guy pretty much works himself out of a job, and this is the answer to “Why are there no great IT Guys?” He does things right from the beginning, then sets up the system with a good eye on the future, and after awhile the powers that be will think he’s expendable. Yes, the boss will hum a show tune every time he passes the network room and sees all the little lights blinking green, but he won’t credit the IT guy. Instead he’ll refer to his own techie prowess, his years of PC noodling, his dog’s tip of the tail splotch of color, his wife’s lovely ass, everything except the person actually responsible.

This boss gets so far into his virtual cloud that he comes to believe he no longer needs IT. And he gets very smug because his first idea was to save money by getting the guy in the mail room to do IT part time without a salary increase. This latest idea, to punt the position altogether, is pure genius. Any douche bag can hit restart, he thinks, the fuckers practically run themselves. And this is where it gets funny.

Everyone knows when you run PeeCees there will come a day when Windows wants to Windoze. And when it does, this particular bossman—of a company so far up the 1% that if you think of the largest company you know, and then go bigger, you’d still be wrong—cannot do his job. But his job is important, it’s about making deals. DEALS!
And just like the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if no one’s around, you wonder whether a boss screaming at his offline computer makes a similar noise.

Let’s give this boss a grossly underestimated annual salary of 2 million (not including bonuses and % of the DEALS). This gives him (roughly) a daily rate of $8000. Let’s say he’s scrambling, bullying, trying to get “any stupid IT Guy” to come in to fix his shit so he can get on with his very important DEAL before it goes sour. Let’s say boss man was paying Good IT Guy $75K (grossly overestimated), so… if the PCMAN temp agency can’t get someone over there and his problem solved in nine days (!) he will piddle away the entirety of the IT Guy’s salary, plus forfeit the deal and his commission to boot.

Woohoo!

Oh, you people who fault John D’Agata for being a liar, a fact-molester, and a manipulative meany.
Oh, you “sharers” of videos, “thumb-uppers” of call to actions.
Lets get a few things straight.

- It took the US decades to improve working conditions for ourselves (and it’s still ongoing), even with a democratic system at the top.

- John D’Agata has never claimed any more territory than that of the essay, and has never tried to massage facts in order to “underline a cause” or “raise consciousness” (in the Kony/Foxconn sense). His stakes are intellectual and insular, as he is playing with representation similar to the way certain photographers (Dorothea Lange, Jeff Wall etc.) have been doing forever. (Well, maybe not forever, but—*yawn*—the literary world can be so conservative. If they’re so banked on nonfiction telling the truth, then why are they insistent that fiction writers have experience, or better yet, an identity, in what they’re writing about?)

- The hubbub around Mike Daisey and his monologue “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”* and the fact (!) that This American Life aired part of it, stood behind it, reaped a shitload of PR from it, and then retracted it (with even more PR) as a bunch of lies is not doing the Chinese people a whit of good. I could ask: since when did TAL become a medium of truth rather than a radio show sharing personal experience, (I wouldn’t believe a word of David Sedaris for all the iPads in the world) but that would be sort of besides the point.

But so.

It’s one thing to fail to do any kind of fact checking, and quite another to be half-assed about it.

Hello Ira Glass, you can’t have it both ways (and yes, D’Agata can, as I will get to later). TAL explains in the apology broadcast that Daisey told them his translator couldn’t be reached and their response was “…because the other things Mike told us – about Apple and Foxconn – seemed to check out, we saw no reason to doubt him.” How can you, TAL, if you for one minute think you live up to journalism standards, fail to talk to the translator? Or even try to find her? Especially a story about human rights, especially since Daisey doesn’t speak Chinese at all? Plus, the statement that a working class person in China cannot be reached is a joke. The working class mainland Chinese can ALWAYS be reached. Miss a call and you miss making money. They don’t have voicemail, they don’t change their phone numbers (unless a number with a lot of “8″s in it becomes available, but then they can’t afford it – yes different phone numbers cost different prices in China), and they always always always answer their phones.

OK then, was calling China too expensive? Too hard to figure out the time difference? According to TAL’s Retraction podcast, all Rob Schmitz had to do was to google “Cathy and translator and Shenzhen” and she’s the first number that comes up.

Shoot me now, but the reason I think TAL failed to do due diligence was because they believed the story too much. They wanted it to be true so badly they willed it into truth. Yes, Mike Daisey lied to them. Yes, Mike Daisey stood on a stage and said “this happened to me,” but deep down TAL knew the show was going to be a ringer, and the listener response would (and did) shower TAL and NPR with buckets of good old-fashioned self-righteousness. Westside liberalism at its finest.

Why does this matter?
It’s the Chinese who will get screwed by this. Their very real concerns of worker safety and factory conditions have now been reduced—by the very people who wanted to help them—to a stupid battle over theatre vs. journalism. Has TAL or Mike Daisey considered that while they lounge around hogging the airwaves discussing the risks and rewards of journalistic rigor, (or not), these people with real or not so real poisoning, and quivering and/or mangled arms have to go back to work?

The factory situation is complicated, but the workers deserve respect. But respect is not a simple thing to arrive at after six days tooting around Shenzhen, much less a night at the theatre or a cozy podcast.

The workers are fucked. They live in shitholes. They have a government of corrupt maniacs which views them like an army of expendable ants. They work their asses off at the factories and with their first month’s wages they get to buy a mattress for their cot. The next paycheck gets them a pair of shoes, all of which have to be purchased at the “factory” store and this wonderful store, as you can imagine, is filled with discounts (“Only one!” “For you, special price!” “Hello, lunch!”) They—and you’ll never hear this on TAL—prefer/pray to get jobs at factories owned by westerners. Their preference of nationality as far as bosses are concerned is (from worst to best): Taiwanese, Hong Kong, mainland, western. Yes, Foxconn is Taiwanese owned, and yes, despite my better judgement, if one considers deep down that the Taiwanese, Hong Kong and mainland people are the same, then this is just another way to show that the Chinese are profoundly capable of being extremely cruel to their own people.

And now, us westerners, by trying to save them, to help them, have drowned them in an absurdist drama called the Real Housewives of NPR. Thinking about what is true, and who’s telling the truth (and it really is “tell,” since many in the peasant class are illiterate) in China is like asking a starving person (before he gets to eat) to twist the stem of an apple while reciting the roman alphabet until the stem breaks, and the letter that he was on will reveal to them the first initial of a person who has a crush on them.

Plus, TAL and Daisey have in effect pooped all over the real journalists, the ones over in China doing the legwork. Because now, if those journalists do uncover a hexane poisoning, or an under-aged worker, it will be an uphill battle getting anyone to believe them. So please, Mike Daisey, stop hamming it up and remember who you’re trying to help, and TAL, please read up on your Martha Rosler.

Social causes have their purpose, but the idea is to help. If the idea is to make workers conditions better, then do it by demanding better working conditions for Chinese factory workers. Do this with purchasing power, and do this by understanding the situation better, and do this, knowing that it takes more effort than a lot of us are willing to put in in order to really bring about social change.

Now back to John D’Agata. Why does he get to decide which facts must remain as facts and which facts can be tweaked? Because, like many visual artists, he has a system, and it’s rigorous and clear in his own head. And most importantly, he’s not asking us to help the Rwandans, or save the harpy seals. He’s simply asking us to think. His beef is with representation, not social issues. His description of the many years the nuclear waste would sit inside the mountain is neither an anti-nuke statement or an ecological one. The scale of the facts are too enormous to simply toss from one side of a political argument to another. Nobody stands in front of a Jeff Wall photo and sounds the alarm that Photoshop was involved, and nobody should pick up a John D’Agata book and fret over facts that may or may not be true. Most importantly, and this is where he is different from Mike Daisey and TAL, he doesn’t claim to be something that he’s not. He doesn’t take the (often ugly and predominately male) position that he’s the wonderful person that’s going to bestow knowledge upon you, that he’s the amazing guy that is going to teach you something. John D’Agata expects his readers to come to the table already smart and curious. And that, deserves a little respect.

Above is the taxi driver we met in China, from Guizhou, the poorest province in China, who told us firsthand (no translator needed) about the factories and the lack of mattress and the wire cots. He told us he left home to go work in a factory in Guangzhou in 1999, and couldn’t even take it for a year. He said that the worst crime to humanity, the absolute worst evil about the factories, the thing that really made him cry and come home, was that in Guangzhou the food was not spicy enough. “Not even close.” Imagine.

He did make a lot of money, however, but after refueling on Guizhou hot pot he partied like it was 1999 and blew it all in a single weekend in Nanjing, and doesn’t regret a single minute. I will bet too, that I can call him up on his cellphone and he’ll pick up and ask me what I’m having for dinner.

* Christ let’s end this post already. But wait there’s more. Foxconn doesn’t just make crap for Apple, it makes stuff for the PeeCees too. And Steve Jobs is not Apple, he’s just the founder. And all you radio people: stop pronouncing the “zhou” in Guangzhou or the “jing” in Beijing with a vibrating “g” sound. It’s Beijing, as in “Bay” “Jing” (J as in Jingle).

Don’t ask me why it took so long for us to invite the roaster into the household, what with all our other forays into quality beverages, but we finally did it.

We opted for the microwave-sized Behmor 1600 recommended by none other than my fanatic dentist, and started up the machine as soon as we checked to make sure our fire extinguisher was still charged. And the first thing we did was under roast some beans. Whoops.

Though I take full responsibility for being a little too trigger happy on the “Cool” button I have to say my confusion for when to stop the heat was partly due to mediocre descriptions for when “second crack” (the critical point in a roasted bean’s life) is reached. Most people describe “first crack” as loud pops similar to popcorn (basically the bean heating up and emitting CO2, hello—it’s farting) and “second crack” is softer, more like rice crispies (apparently the cellular matrix of the bean itself is getting fractured). Whatever. I just know the cracks started happening and I couldn’t tell whether they were popcorn-y or rice crispy-y, and all I could see was the giant warning in the manual of “Do not go 10 seconds beyond second crack or you will have FIRE!” and little pieces of chaff were flying about and landing on the heating coils and bursting into flames, and one timer was ticking down to zero and another timer was ticking up to infinity and things were just a little chaotic.

And so. There’s nothing like the sour-bellied recoil from an under-roasted coffee and the fact that you have no other beans in the house to help get over that learning curve. All it took was a little practice.

I have to say though, that “second crack” sounds an awful more like sizzling meat than any kind of rice crispies, and, since sizzling meat is the most familiar sound to me second only to the coffee grinder, that would have been a much easier sound for me to spot. In addition, what’s happening to the beans between first and second crack is that the sugars are undergoing the coveted Maillard reaction, which has something to do with deprotonated amino groups, but without which we’d have no browning of meats, toasted brioche or fried onions!

When we were traveling in China several years ago my dad often sent emails that started out like this: “since you’re in the area, why not go to…” When the next stop on our itinerary was Xian and the Terracotta Warriors, he made a huge deal for us to “not miss” the Banpo Neolithic Village, which showcased a matriarchal society dating back to 5000 B.C. (They call it a matriarchal society because “Women, the crucial labor force, were responsible for making pottery, spinning, and raising the family, while men fished.”) Although we were exhausted from seeing the Warriors, and disturbed at the parents who let their children (wearing the butt-less pants) pee on the dirt, and concerned for all the people who bonked their heads against the protective glass, we went. Turns out Banpo was incredible, and more amazing (shoot me now) than some Emperor’s maniacal dream to entomb an entire army of soldiers. The pottery had an eerie resemblance to Pre-Columbian pots,

the shape of this water jug “proved they understood physics”*

and best of all, they had a display of a “neolithic ball,” which was really just a rock, only they dated it to the neolithic period, just like the pottery, only it was just a rock.

When I told my dad that Banpo was better than the Warriors he wanted to know what I was smoking. I told him about the rock, and about musing over what the difference was between a really old ball-shaped rock and a slightly less old rock-shaped ball. His response was somewhere between the response he gave me when I told him I was going to art school, and when I told him you could see the Great Wall of China from the moon. If I could have seen his face I imagine it was closer to the art school moment.

Turns out, that kind of thinking was excellent practice for contemplating the rock that is currently on its way from Riverside County to LACMA to become Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass.”

They date Heizer’s idea of the piece to 1968, but it took him all this time to find the right rock and then move it. Not like the rock is in any kind of hurry. It’s the ideal (if not the heaviest) piece of found art, actually, where it’s been lying dormant for 20,000 years and now it’s art. Well, it’s not quite art yet, it’s en route to becoming art. Which makes the whole transport and the gawking and the engineering so fascinating. (And oddly worth all the hoopla.)

Like Duchamp’s urinal, which is art because it’s not being used for what it was intended for, the rock is actually art only when it’s exhibiting a non rock-like state, in other words, when it’s moving. Heizer’s own expectation for the finished piece is that when the viewer walks under the rock, the rock will appear to be levitating.

Some funny facts LACMA keeps pushing over and over:

- “At 340 tons, the boulder is one of the largest megaliths moved since ancient times.” and “The transporter is roughly 260 feet long and 32 feet wide. The large size of the transporter enables the weight of the rock to be distributed over 196 wheels, in such a way as to prevent road damage… LACMA has worked with numerous city, county, and state agencies in acquiring proper permits and establishing the most prudent route for this endeavor.”
They make it seem that in the olden days when megaliths of this size were moved frequently (and usually before supper time) the ancient people were not bogged down by permits and worries of road damage, thus they were able to do similar feats of rockery with less dependance on engineering.

- Read my lips: “no public funds or taxpayer’s money was used to fund this project.”

One dumb fact I keep pushing over and over. The grassy lawn slated to become Levitated Mass used to be a nice place to run the dogs. Just saying.

*why this water jug is genius: when you put it in water, it tilts and lets water in. As it fills up, it will straighten itself automatically. If you get tired as you carry it, you just jab the sharp end into the ground and take a break.