Okay, so I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, and I’m still doing some figuring out and tweaking and all that sort of thing. I don’t particularly like the new page design, for one thing—color good, layout not so much. Expect changes over the next few days as I fiddle with it. One thing I’ve noticed right away, though, is that when you look at the main blog page, links within entries are not clickable—you have to go to the individual entry itself to get the link to show up as anything but text. I’m sure there’s a) some perfectly good reason for this, and/or b) some nice workaround, but till I have a few minutes to figure it out, that’s how it will work. One step forward, two steps back…or “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” or some other applicable adage.

I think I’m completely in love with this:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1541732.html

I particularly like the idea that it’s going to be there for 20 years. But only 20 years, and no more. (That’s assuming it lasts that long. If nothing else, if it really is knitted, it’s going to be unrecognizably filthy within a year.)

Wow, two short, snappy posts in the same day, and no navel-gazing. Perhaps I will eventually get the hang of this blogging thing after all.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Darby Conley’s “Get Fuzzy,” my favorite current comic strip, has been running a series of strips on cat facts this week, including some very funny ones, and a few that I, despite being a noted cat weirdo, did not know. My favorite, I think, is this:

“An average 15-year-old cat has slept 10 years.”

I know, of course, that cats sleep, and need to sleep, an average of 16 to 18 hours per day. I’d just never seen it framed in those terms, and when it’s put that way, it just reaffirms why cats are cool. After all, most days I wish I could sleep for about 10 years…

I was about two-thirds of the way into a very, very long post about the Speedies, old pals of mine whose single “Let Me Take Your Photograph” is now being featured prominently (after a remix) in a commercial for HP that’s been getting a lot of airtime. And in typical fashion, I accidentally leaned too hard on some damn button or touchpoint or something on my friggin’ laptop keyboard, and the whole damn thing disappeared. I’d like to reconstruct it, and I will…but not now. For one thing, there’s a pretty gosh darn exciting tennis match taking place right now (Blake leads Agassi two sets to one, holy cow), and for another, I need to think about sleep soon.

Damn laptops, I hate the stupid things, at least the IBM variety. I will get back to this, though, because hearing that unexpected sound from my past every few minutes during this last week of US Open coverage is weirding me out in all kinds of ways.

I’ve got about a million things I’ve been wanting to post, from thoughts about events in the Middle East to my personal first sign of spring to some musical ramblings, but in addition to having been away for part of last week/weekend, I’ve also been pretty shell-shocked following news last week of the death of my friend Dan Bentele, who left us on March 2 as a result of complications from a seizure disorder. More than a week later, I’m still reeling a little (and My Favorite DJ™ just dedicated Lucinda Williams’s “Pineola” to Dan, which got me choked up again).

I’m a little surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, at how hard Dan’s death has hit me. He was an online friend (though I saw him a few times a year, generally, since he lived in St. Louis and I’m there fairly often), and as such, he wasn’t part of my day-to-day life, so theoretically, it’s not the same thing as losing a “real world” friend. A few other online acquaintances have died during my years on various music lists—there was a very troubled young man named Alec Horgan who killed himself shortly after a bunch of us met him at Twangfest, and there was a great guy named Mark Domsic, a veteran noncommercial radio DJ who died of a heart attack, and a brilliant, likeable, unusual Postcarder named Robert Morris, who died far too young for reasons unknown (unknown to me, at least). And in all those cases, I grieved but wasn’t quite sure how to grieve, because these were people I didn’t know well, exactly, and yet their lives touched mine enough that I felt their loss.

(Oh, geez, now John is playing “Let the Mystery Be.” I’m going to be weeping all over the keyboard in a minute here. )

It’s somewhat different with Dan. For one, he was one of the first online friends I made, way back in the AOL days before I even had real Internet access—late 1993, I’m thinking. We had a mutual friend, a lovely gal named Jenny Lau, who used to work for the Bodeans, so I was predisposed to like Dan before I even had any correspondence with him. He was enormously likeable, as it turned out, so I didn’t even need the predisposition to like him.

(And now it’s “Windfall,” which I was singing in memory of Dan as I drove to work this morning. Need to pause for a second to fight back the tears; I am at work, after all.)

Over the years, we corresponded one-on-one less frequently, but we were always at least vaguely in touch, and as mentioned, I saw him in St. Louis regularly (and at SXSW a couple of times too). He always had a hug and a smile and a bunch of questions for me about how I was doing, etc. He knew how much I love St. Louis, and he was always trying to come up with job ideas for me there. He also promised to come up for a Chiefs game sometime, though sadly, that never happened. He was the consummate good listener, which meant that I knew less about him than he did about me, but I did know that he’d worked in a bank but left to teach English as a second language, that he loved working on his family’s farm with his brother, Doug, and that he was very close to his family even though they didn’t share his politics. I could never figure out why he was still single; he was practically the definition of A Catch.

Reading people’s reminiscences about him on various lists, I was struck by how many of them had similar things to say about Dan: “He was one of the first people to introduce himself to me at Twangfest,” “He took me under his wing at SXSW and made sure I met people,” “He always came up and shook my hand and reintroduced himself, as if I’d have forgotten who he was.” That was Dan—a guy with a big heart, a big smile, and an easy way with people that made running into him an unalloyed pleasure; he was one of those rare people who never really met a stranger.

It’s painful to write about him in the past tense, and I can’t help feeling that he had a lot left to do in this world, but on the other hand, he lived every minute of his life to the fullest, something I admire tremendously because I know I don’t do it. I’ll miss him. I already miss him. Rest in peace, Dan.

(Talking to my dad about this last night, I found out that he had also learned of the death of an old friend recently, a friend from Peace Corps days. He worked for the Peace Corps back in its earliest days, in the early ’60s, and when he started talking about the memorial service for the woman who died, the list of names of people who were there took me back to a time in my life that I remember fairly vividly (considering I was just a toddler at the time) and very happily; they’re names to conjure with, for me, and the news of the death discombobulated me a little. It’s been a very disorienting week or so, for a number of reasons, the rest of which I’ll get into later.)

Google Fight is the best (or worst, depending on your perspective) Web distraction I’ve come across in ages. (Curse you, Marcia!) It’s a very simple concept: you enter two words or phrases, then click for them to fight each other. Little animated stick figures engage in a brief fistfight, with one KOing the other, and the results appear; the winner is whichever keyword gets the most hits on Google. Simple, but totally addictive.

Among the things I’ve learned from Google fighting:

Good triumphs over evil.
Love beats money, though not by much.
Poor vastly outnumbers rich.
The Beatles best the Rolling Stones.
Wilco roundly defeats both Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo, but Jay Farrar whups Jeff Tweedy.
And alas, love does not conquer all. But reassuringly, time heals all wounds, or at least beats them up.

There are some interesting inconsistencies depending on wording and part of speech. For instance:
Dogs completely trounce cats, but cat beats dog.
Judaism loses out to both Islam and Christianity by a very large margin, but Jews are more popular than Jesus. (Joke, it’s a joke, don’t get offended.)
Christian outnumbers Islamic, but Islam handily beats Christianity.

Anyway, it’s dangerously distracting. As an antidote, I’m sending myself to Get Back to Work, which I learned about from Jamie’s blog and which I’ve actually been using quite a bit—for whatever reason (guilt, I think), it works well for me. Thanks, Jamie.

This (scroll down till you get to the February 16 column) is a worthy read. And he’s right, completely…even though Carlee is an amazing dog.

For the second year in a row, a dog I actually liked won the Westminster Kennel Club show. In both cases, it wasn’t my initial favorite even among the 7 Best in Show candidates, but it won me over completely during the final judging. Last year’s winner, Josh the Newfoundland, was just irresistible, and he was close to a perfect specimen of the breed (which is a breed I love, though I wouldn’t own one unless I lived in a much, much bigger house and had access to a lake or something). This year, I was rooting for the gorgeous border collie in the Best in Show competition, though I liked four of the dogs, an unusually high number for me: I would have liked the Tibetan terrier even if it hadn’t been a particularly good example of that sweet breed, just because I was so thoroughly delighted to see something other than a poodle come out of the Non-Sporting Group (more on this in a paragraph or four); the Great Pyrenees was quite lovely, and they’re such likeable dogs (though again, a breed I wouldn’t own) ; and the German shorthair pointer’s excellence was clear even in a very tough Sporting Group class. (I love that breed too, and I might even own one given the opportunity; I’ve never known one who was anything but thoroughly good and loveable and trainable.) But I was still rooting for the border collie, because it was a beauty and because I think border collies are amazing creatures, with their hypnotic stares and their preternatural intelligence. I once saw a demonstration at a fundraiser in St. Paul where a border collie herded a bunch of chickens, and I’ve been hooked on them ever since. Yet again, I don’t think I’d own one, at least not as long as I have cats (i.e., for the rest of my life), because a) I wouldn’t want the dog herding the cats around, and b) I’m not sure I’d have the time and energy to give the dog the opportunities to do herding work that it would need. (Plus sometimes they can be bitey.) But I’m in awe of them.

I don’t like to badmouth entire breeds of dogs, but I don’t particularly care for bloodhounds—and I’ve had a lot of experience with them, because I worked briefly for some private investigators who ran bloodhounds, among other dogs. Actually, it’s not so much that I dislike them, I just don’t find very much about them to like. They’re not interested in people in terms of companionship; they just want to track. And they have a particularly unpleasant doggy smell. And of all the lovely animals in the Hound group, the bloodhound seemed like a disappointing choice for Best in Group. (If I thought this blog was widely read, I’d be worried about hate mail from bloodhound afficionados, but that’s the nice thing about having a quasi-invisible blog.) As for the other two…well, I’ll grant that there’s something kind of amusing about the bizarre rolling gait of the Pekingese; I’m just not convinced they’re actually dogs. I think they’re either mops with faces, or else—and more troublingly—tribbles. I’m by no means a Trekkie, having never seen a single episode from any of the revival series, much less any of the movies, but I’m familiar enough with the original series to know that tribbles are not good things to have masquerading as dogs. And though I’m even more loath to badmouth entire groups of dog breeds than I am to badmouth individual breeds, I can say that with very few exceptions, I don’t like terriers…and I especiallly don’t like tiny bitey ill-tempered little terrier breeds like Norfolks and Norwiches and border terriers…and I really don’t like Coco, the little Norfolk terrier who seems to make it to every single Best in Show at Westminster. I was so afraid that she was going to win this year…

But then something happened when they got into the Best in Show ring. Carlee, the German shorthair, completely blew the competition away. To use a basketball term, she put on a clinic. I don’t remember ever seeing a dog that was so close to perfection in terms of the breed standard and just in terms of her carriage and stance and overall look. She was just plain magnificent, and I think it was obvious to everyone in the crowd, as well as the broadcasters (the expert guy, David Frey, had picked another dog—the bloodhound, maybe—as his likeliest winner before the judging started, but just before the winner was announced, he changed his pick to Carlee. Her free stack was awe-inspiring, and she was so intently focused on the judge and the handler, and it was just a stunning performance. I don’t think there was any real question who was going to win.

As a strong supporter of animal rights and welfare (but not an extremist supporter; I resent having to add that, because most people I know who believe that animals have rights are not the extremist type at all, but I know that lots of people perceive anyone who even associates themselves with the phrase “animal rights” must be an extremist, and it’s just not so), I have mixed feelings about purebred dog breeding and showing. Fundamentally, I guess, I can’t fully support the breeding of purebred dogs when there are so many unwanted dogs—purebred and mutt—out there. But I’m the stepmom of a purebred German shepherd and the former-and-forever mom of a purebred Keeshond, bought from a breeder (and lost to me as a result of the breakup of my first marriage), and I understand the appeal of purebred dogs: the predictability of personality, size, etc., is important if you have kids or cats or just want to know what you’re getting yourself into, and that can’t always be a certainty with a mutt adopted from a shelter, though if you adopt one as a puppy, you have a great deal to do with how the dog turns out. (And you can’t completely guarantee how a purebred pup is going to turn out either, of course.) I’m a cat person first and foremost, and largely because of that, I know I’ll continue to own purebred dogs when Bill’s dogs are gone, because I know that a purebred Keeshond is less likely to eat or otherwise interfere with my cats than a shelter mutt, much as I believe in shelter mutts. Ideally, I’d own both a mutt and a purebred Kees, but whatever happens, I’ll get the purebred from a rescue group, because that’s another way of avoiding the whole purebred-breeding issue, or at least making up for it somehow.

As for showing, that’s a mixed feeling too. I know there are people who dismiss it as a beauty contest, but given that purebred dogs aren’t going to cease to exist just because some people don’t believe in breeding them, I don’t really have a problem with maintaining the breed standard by showing them, even if it’s for the ultimate purpose of making them desirable breeding stock. There is something to be said for maintaining the standard, if you’re going to have purebred dogs at all. And the dogs that make it past their first show or two absolutely love the show circuit; I have no concerns about the way show dogs are treated, and it’s a wonderful way for owners or handlers to bond with the dogs. Me, I prefer obedience showing to conformation showing, because it’s more relaxed and more fun, and training a dog in obedience is so rewarding for dog and owner. But I don’t have that much of an issue with conformation showing, and I never miss a Westminster show on TV.

I did a ton of research on dog breeds before my first husband and I settled on the Keeshond, including spending a lot of time at dog shows, and though there are a lot of breeds that would have worked out for us and a number that I fell in love with (Belgian tervurens, Australian shepherds, Pembroke Welsh corgis, schipperkes, shiba inus…I could go on), the Keeshond was the breed that stole my heart and has never let go. I’m resigned to the fact that a Keeshond will never win Best in Show at Westminster and may never, in my lifetime, even emerge from the Non-Sporting Group, which is almost always dominated by either the miniature poodle or the standard poodle (and I love standard poodles, don’t get me wrong, they’re wonderful, intelligent, even-tempered dogs—I just don’t think they should be in the same group as less well-known and popular dogs like Keeshonden and Boston terriers and the like, which is why I was ecstatic to see the Tibetan terrier win the group this year). And this bothers me just a little, which is more than it should, because I want everyone in the world to know what thoroughly delightful dogs Keeshonden are. Then again, if they became popular, they might be subject to the same overbreeding that so many popular breeds have endured, so maybe it’s just as well. But if you don’t mind the hair (and that’s a major caveat, though to be fair, the German shepherd I live with sheds more in a day than the average Keeshond does in a month), they are the best dogs on the planet. Sweet, funny, loyal, a little stubborn, smart, loving, loveable (they’re more enthusiastic about receiving affection and attention than they are about giving it, but that just shows they’re discerning), independent, alert, relatively low-maintenance, adorable, and—especially when they’ve been groomed just a little—extraordinarily beautiful. And they’re good watchdogs, though not good guard dogs; they’re also apparently slightly intimidating to some people, because they have a wolflike/foxlike look. (I used to love it when people asked me if my Kees was a wolf hybrid. “Yes,” I always wanted to reply, “she’s actually a midget wolf with extra fur.” Keeshonden stand about 15 inches at the shoulder if they’re on the big side, and they’re kind of solidly built; they could only look like wolves if you’d never even seen a picture of a wolf.)

If I had to find any fault with them, other than the fact that they can be a little harder than some breeds to housebreak, it’s that they tend to be one-person dogs. Not that they don’t like other people; my Kees adored me, and was fiercely protective of me, and totally bonded to me, and saw me as her alpha dog. But she was Eric (my ex)’s dog at heart; I was the boss and I was her mom, but he was her playmate, her buddy, and there was no question of who would keep her when we split up. I’m sure she misssed me (in fact, I have empirical evidence that she did, though it’s painful for me to talk about), but if I’d kept her, she’d have been miserable without Eric. Losing her, and losing access to her, was maybe the worst thing of all the horrible things about my divorce (and I should note here that my divorce was a) instigated by me and b) quite civil, though not amicable; nonetheless, it was horrible and painful and I’m still enduring the repercussions, even though I don’t have any regrets about it. The plain fact is that divorce sucks no matter what), and I miss her all the time. I don’t even know if she’s still alive, because my ex doesn’t want any contact with me; she could be, because she’d be 14 and Keesies often live to be 15 or more. But I might never know, which breaks my heart.

There are other breeds that I might like to own; I’m very taken with Pembroke Welsh corgis and especially with Australian shepherds—I’ve known quite a few of the latter and loved them all. But even if many things about my future are big question marks these days—where will I live, what type of job will I have next, etc.—one of the few certainties is that I will own Keeshonden again someday. And that’s Keeshonden, plural (the proper Dutch plural, fwiw). They’re the best dogs in the world.

But I’ve digressed pretty far from the original point of this post, which is: Way to go, Carlee! Long may you flourish, you beautiful girl.

…that HBO will be wise enough to go for a fourth season of “The Wire,” which just three seasons in can already be said, I think, to rank among the best TV series ever.

Baltimore’s City Paper has a fine list of 10 reasons not to cancel the show. My personal favorite (of their quotes, not of the whole series): â??I keeps one in the chamber, in case you pondering.â? â??Omar

I haven’t been this anxious about the fate of a TV series since…well, probably since “Homicide,” another David Simon creation. Guess I’ll cross my toes too.