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Eww.

Last week we discovered that our aged dog Alex had tapeworms! The vet gave her a dose of praziquantel, which cures the infestation in a single dose by dissolving the buggers.

Tapeworms are pretty interesting once you get past the ick factor. You get them by ingesting them or their eggs. They attach to the lining of your gut and absorb nutrients from the food you’ve eaten. Since they reside in a stream of predigested food, they need no mouth or digestive system of their own! Apart from robbing you of some of the nutrients you should be getting, you can have a tapeworm and never know it. But in worse infestations you can become seriously malnourished or suffer intestinal blockages. Tapeworms can grow to dozens of feet in length.

We have no way of knowing how bad Alex’s infestation was or how long she had it. However, days after she took the medicine, she is noticeably sturdier on her old legs. She has been just skin and bones for many months, but we put it down to her advanced age and decreased appetite. Could it have actually been due to tapeworms? It’s too soon to know whether she will recover noticeable amounts of muscle mass, but when I walked her yesterday we went to the fourth house down, then crossed the street and returned on the other side. We haven’t taken that route for months! And it’s about twice as long as the longest of her more recent walks.

The Maggie Show

I knew that after stuffing myself into insensibility during last night’s Thanksgiving feast (not without remembering to be thankful) I would have interesting dreams, and they did not disappoint. I remember only fragments of some of them, but all of this one:

I was in an Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. Also in the pool were my friend Maggie, and the actor William H. Macy. It was Maggie’s daytime TV aquatic talk show, broadcast daily from that pool, and Bill Macy and I were that day’s guests.

Macy did a watery reading of a David Mamet soliloquy or something. My shtick — a bit déclassé after Macy’s performance, but I gave it my all anyway — was to take the deepest breath I could (which, this being a dream, was supernaturally large), submerge my mouth, and blow into the water, producing a jet of bubbles and propelling myself backward, describing an erratic curve through the pool like that of a balloon losing its air.

As soon as the dream was over, I woke up. Even though it was only 4:30am, I was wide awake.

What does it mean?

One morning in the seventies

One morning in the seventies, when I was a little boy, I woke up and walked straight into the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom as usual. As I got ready to pee I heard my dad at the dining room table doing some morning paperwork, drinking coffee, or whatever. I determined to sneak up behind him and surprise him. I peed silently onto the bare porcelain (not noisily into the water in the bowl). I then tiptoed gingerly out of the bathroom and crept oh-so-quietly around the hallway corner into the dining room. My dad was seated in his usual spot at the table, facing away from me. I closed the last few feet with uncommon patience and stealth. My dad appeared completely unaware of my approach. The floorboards didn’t creak. The fabric of my pajamas didn’t rustle.

The instant before I was prepared to scream, “YAAAHHHHH!,” without looking in my direction, he handed down from the table a handwritten piece of paper. It said:

You forgot to:

Flush the toilet;

Wash your hands;

Brush your teeth.

Thus did my dad cement in my mind another many years of certainty about the supernatural ability of parents to know what their kids are up to — something I’m now trying to get my own kids to believe.

Where next, Mr. Bond?

The new Casino Royale is a great movie, not because it shows us how Bond became Bond per se, but because that story is a compelling one. As has been much remarked, this new film is a “bold departure” from the formula of the last four decades, including the entries in the Bond canon that were themselves supposed to be bold departures but weren’t, really (e.g., The Living Daylights). Mick LaSalle gets it right in his review for the SF Chronicle:

He’s a working-class guy who has made his way into upper-class circles but retains some residual coarseness that will never smooth out.

So does Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com:

We’re meeting Bond near the beginning of his career, just after he’s been promoted to double-0 status, and he’s clearly having trouble putting his thuggish instincts to use in international espionage.

He’s a super agent not because he’s the pinnacle of refined British gentlemanhood, but because he’s emphatically not and sees a chance to be — a tough guy with enough brains to know he can be more than just a tough guy, he can be dangerous, and wants to be. His dedication to Queen and country isn’t pure virtuous nationalism, it’s the dumb, grateful loyalty of a cared-for brute. It rings much truer this way.

In this new Bond is a conflict for the ages, one that can speak to all of us on some level: the struggle to balance our animal nature and our rational nature; to somehow put the id to work in the service of the superego without smothering it altogether, which is something we tend to do in our over-civilized culture. Indeed, watching Bond keeping his snarling id straining at the end of its leash — and occasionally letting it loose — was the primeval pleasure of the original Sean Connery Bond movies. New Bond Daniel Craig embodies that even better than Connery did. (There, I said it.)

This is a fertile new storytelling angle on James Bond. My fear is that, having taken this bold step and won over so many critics, moviegoers, and dollars, the Bond franchise will retreat to safe territory again. But there’s no reason the next story couldn’t expand on the themes introduced in this one. Just to pick one obvious example, a theme for the next film could be “you can take the man out of the jungle but you can’t take the jungle out of the man,” á là Tarzan, or even Pygmalion. Bond, having earned entrée to the high-class world of international espionage, is made to feel out of place somehow because of his humble origin, but in the end learns that to earn one’s place is more authentic than to be entitled to it. (This is all subtext, you understand, while Bond does violent, unsubtle battle with some dastardly mastermind, the world hanging in the balance as usual.)

Four decades of an impassive hero inhabiting a world of spectacular chases, willing women, and gee-whiz gadgets is enough, no matter how much aplomb he brings to the table. Suave and imperturbable may be “what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like to have between her sheets,” and it’s fun to watch for a while, but story-wise it’s not that interesting. Here’s hoping that the most interesting thing in the next James Bond movie will again be Bond’s own psychology.

Old before his time?

Jonah and I woke up only moments ago wanting pancakes for breakfast. I told him I would make some for him but that I needed a few minutes first to drink my wake-up coffee, check my e-mail, etc. He said, “That’s OK, because I have to do some paperwork.”

(By which he means he needs to draw and cut out some new piece of artwork along the lines of this awesome “train.”)

Jones. Bond Jones.

Reviews for the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, are starting to pour in, and they’re almost uniformly glowing. Even the SF Chronicle loved it! They don’t love anything.

Time was, the Hollywood marketing machine had me squarely in its sights. Any decently assembled promotional campaign was enough to set me vibrating in my socks at the prospect of being first in line to see the latest essential release.

I’m long past that. I’m forty years old now! But I’ve still got a serious jones to see Casino Royale. My sister Suzanne, who long ago surpassed my own once-considerable movie-mavenhood, is coming to visit in a couple of days. She’d be the perfect Casino Royale viewing companion — but she’s vibrating in her socks so much that she can’t wait and is going to see it tonight.

Maybe while Suzanne is here, she can watch the kids while Andrea and I go see it. But Andrea and I get out together so seldom that it’s hard to justify spending two hours sitting still, neither looking at nor talking to each other.

What’ll I do? What’ll I do? (*smack*) Quit whining and do what James Bond would do: go it alone. Parachute in in the dead of night, get in, see the late show after the kids are asleep, get out, get the job done.

Update [18 Nov 12:40am]: Saw it. It rocked.

Dr. Harris is happy

In August I wrote of the impending closure of our pediatrician’s office. That has now come to pass. The private practice has been converted into an office of the HMO Kaiser Permanente, with two of the practice’s five pediatricians being brought into the fold, including ours, Dr. Harris.

In these times of widespread health-coverage horror stories it is a relief, and also a little embarrassing, that we were able to get Kaiser Permanente coverage for the kids at little added expense and without affecting the coverage we already had. So today Archer paid his first visit to Dr. Harris in his new, improved office to get a flu shot.

Andrea reports they were each excited to see one another, Dr. Harris showing off his new office while taking Archer for a tour, and Archer showing off his “monster shirt” for Dr. Harris. Archer was brave as usual getting his shot. As for lamenting the old practice: I assumed its demise would be cause for some sorrow on Dr. Harris’s part, but the staff told Andrea they’d never seen him so happy.

So once again, what looked in August like a crisis has revealed itself as an opportunity. Crisitunity!

Curiosity killed the camera

Earlier today a co-worker sent a link to a pictorial of a camera being disassembled, the point being how fantastically complicated it is compared to the device we make. It reminded me of this story:

A couple of years ago, the hardware guru at work, Sue, let me sit at her workbench and use her tools to try to repair my Canon Powershot digital camera, a midrange point-and-shoot model. On powerup, a tiny servomotor was supposed to telescope the lens barrel out of the camera body (just as hundreds of models do). Mine had stopped operating smoothly. The barrel, or the protective shutter in front of the lens, would get stuck halfway through an open or close cycle. I’d already gotten an estimate on a professional repair that was prohibitively long and expensive. Might as well give it a try myself and, at worst, buy a new camera.

I thought that by disassembling it as far as the lens barrel, I might be able to dislodge any grit or whatever was blocking its smooth operation, provided it wasn’t actually an electrical problem in the servo or anything else. I took out the batteries, then started removing screws and laying them carefully on the workbench in a way that might allow me to remember how they were all supposed to be put back together. But I was only able to remove tiny bits of camera at a time. Dozens of removed parts later it still looked pretty much like a camera. It was like the dance of the seven veils.

Before long there were so many screws and bits of camera shell and buttons and retainer rings and spacers on the workbench that it was clear it would never all go back together. But I pressed on anyway out of stubbornness and curiosity. Until the camera blew up in my hands.

Yes, I had forgotten about the giant capacitor that powers the flash. It discharged painfully into my fingertips with a loud BANG, a tiny shower of sparks, and of course the magic blue smoke. And that was the end of that. Now a little pissed, I spent another minute or two manhandling the (now slightly charred) camera just to get a glimpse inside the lens barrel by any means necessary. When I finally ripped it apart enough, there appeared to be nothing obvious I could have done anyway to fix it. I swept all the pieces into the trash as the phrase, “No user-serviceable parts” repeated over and over in my head.

Call your brother!

Today’s my anniversary, both of the day that Andrea and I got married (seven years ago) and of the day we started dating (eleven years before that). This morning I got a congratulatory e-mail from my sister Suzanne that read in part:

Subject: Happy anniversary

…of the day you nearly gave me a heart attack.

The story:

Having been together for almost eleven years when we finally decided to get married (in a domino effect beginning with our friends John and Linda and then Scott and Patrice), Andrea and I dreaded planning a big wedding full of guests all of whom would say to us, “What took you so long?” So we eloped to Disneyworld. We were married in a small ceremony (witnessed by those same friends Scott and Patrice) beneath a palm tree on a grassy hill between Disney’s Polynesian Resort and the adjacent lagoon, with views of Cinderella’s Castle and Space Mountain in the distance. It was very memorable.

Coincidentally, Suzanne had a European vacation planned for the same period of time. Our wedding package included a limo ride around Orlando after the ceremony, and one of the things we planned to do during that ride was to call our families and surprise them with our happy news; but I had no way to contact Suzanne, whose European itinerary was fluid at best. However, I did know she’d be checking her Hotmail account from time to time. So before leaving for Florida, I programmed my computer to send her this e-mail message at 3pm on our wedding day:

Subject: Call your brother!

Hi Suze! Please call me ASAP on Andrea’s cell phone.

Poor Suzanne saw the message within two hours but had no way of calling for several hours more, during which time she was sure something terrible had happened! In my excitement before leaving for Florida it never occurred to me that my message could be taken that way. When I did finally speak to her, she tried to be glad about my news but was pretty annoyed at having worried all day for nothing.

Her annoyance was not improved by my laughter at her expense.

Andrea: Happy anniversary, I love you! Suzanne: Sorry again! I love you too.

Ibid update

Ibid (“incremental backups to infinite disk”) is a tool I’ve written for backing up files. When I first posted it (read about it here, download it here) it was at release number 18. Now it’s at release 24. Here are the changes between then and now.

If the same pathname is encountered a second time in one session, don’t treat it as a hardlink to the first time.
Restructure the ~/.ibid directory and add an extra level to target pathnames when many sessions begin to accumulate.
If the old session file was compressed, compress the new session file the same way.
For determining whether a file is a mere rename of one already archived, consider its size in addition to its device, inode, and modtime.
When running with –ensure, flag (in the session record) the files that have been verified as present in the archive, so that future sessions won’t have to reverify the same files.
Remove an extraneous newline from “ibid -D” output.

Still to do: a proper home page for ibid.