La Recette pour l’Amour

Posted on February 12, 2016 by admin

I’ve scoured the pantry of my heart

For morsels sweet to tell

About the honey-roasted tart

Who has me in her spell

O’er skin like large-curd cottage cheese

Falls vermicelli hair

As limp and oily as you please

To chuck-roast shoulders there

Those marbled eyes, prosciutto wads

Stuffed neatly in her face

Ripe eggplant lips, like okra pods,

Disintegrate in place

With fingers thin as pretzel sticks

She cleans two pie-crust ears

With corn-cob tongue she chastely licks

Espresso-stained veneers

Great feet like racks of baby-backs

A cauliflower nose

Those gams, like hams with turkey tracks

Turn cheddar in repose

Her breath a piquant nasal treat

Of eggs and sauerkraut

Her voice a satisfying bleat

That I can’t live without

In this, the larder of my soul

She’s just the meal I wish

From soup to nuts, my Noodle Bowl

Is quite a tasty dish!

Drivers complain about neighborhood tool

Posted on February 5, 2016 by admin

As if the morning commute wasn’t stressful enough already, a man contacted JCSO on the morning of Oct. 14 to report being menaced by a neighbor while driving to work. According to his statement, he’d seen the man – who apparently believes that his property rights extend to the public boulevard – standing in the middle of Larkspur Drive holding a hammer. Perhaps preferring not to know why, the complainant edged around the lightly-armed roadblock, prompting the man to brandish the hammer in a threatening manner. The officer barely had time to digest that testimony before the phone started ringing again. This time, it was a woman complaining that the hammer-wielding neighbor stood in the roadway until she stopped, then leaned on the window frame and told her “not to come down this road anymore.” She explained that she had little choice, but he was unmoved. “I don’t have time for this,” she told him, and drove away without further incident. When contacted by authorities, the road-hog said he’d put “No Trespassing” signs along the road, and flatly denied waving the hammer at his first detractor and exchanging words with the second. The officer advised the man that his was a case for the civil courts, to which he replied that he’d already been down that road and the deputy should just arrest him. That, explained the officer, “is what we are trying to prevent.”

Dogs in the News

Posted on January 29, 2016 by admin

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon, hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

Aldous Huxley

Near as we can figure it, Homo sapiens sapiens and Canis lupus familiaris have been bffs for about 35,000 years.

After sampling the genomes of wolves and dogs from hither and yon, scientists now believe the unique and intimate association between Man and Dog began at least 15,000 year earlier than previous supposed somewhere in Southeast Asia with the domestication of the Taimyr wolf. Given the long stretch of time since then, you’d think we’d have learned just about everything there is to know about our four-legged besties. In fact, until very recently our understanding of humankind’s closest animal companion has been remarkably superficial, a two-dimensional portrait more closely resembling ourselves than our pets.

True, humans quickly became adept at dog-handling. They used their animals to guard the camp and to bring down the mighty mammoth. They taught the doting beasts to watch the flock and fight by their side in battle. And they carefully and patiently bred their dogs to satisfy specific human needs and tastes, resulting in the more than 300 breeds that exist today. One thing people never did, though, is give any serious thought to what their dogs thought about it all.

“Dogs have been used as tools, and they’ve been kept as pets, but there’s been very little study of what makes them tick,” explains canine clinician Jean Weller. “We know a lot about what they do, but not why they do it. It’s only in the last 25 years that there’s been any real scientific research into the emotional and cognitive characteristics of dogs.”

Considering the bone-deep affinity that exists between peeps and pups, it’s hardly surprising that we tend to ascribe human motivations to our pets. For example, most dog-lovers assume that their beloved beagle wags its tail when it sees them because it loves them right back. Scientifically speaking, that’s taking a lot on faith. Is your dog really glad to see you? Or is it just excited because it’s almost supper time and you’re the only one who can operate the can opener?

While standard observation has softened the rigid “alpha” pecking order into a more flexible canine social hierarchy, neither has much to do with you and your dog. Behavioral research increasingly suggests that the relationship between person and pet is less leader-to-follower or peer-to-peer, and more akin to the bond between parent and toddler. To cite just one example, when frightened or distressed a dog will always and instantly run to its owner for reassurance. Dogs are also prone to jealousy. Studies indicate that when a dog’s owner showers undue attention on a third party, be they man or beast, more than 60 percent of the time the dog will find some quiet, sneaky way to disrupt that interaction and redirect its master’s interest back where it belongs.

Probably the most intriguing discovery on the canine front is that dogs can infer. It’s a simple thing, inference, and incredibly useful. Merriam-Webster defines it as the ability to “deduce or conclude from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements.” Humans infer a thousand times a day without consciously thinking about it. And yet our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees, can’t infer. Of all creatures, only people and dogs are able to predict an event or circumstance based purely on observation. It’s how your dog knows when the mailman is coming. It’s how it can tell you’re hiding a snack behind your back. And it’s why, even though you take your dog to the park every day at 2 o’clock, you can’t get it into the car for a 2 o’clock veterinarian appointment.

Curiously enough, dogs also have a well-developed sense of fairness. Austrian researchers devised a scenario whereby two dogs were made to perform the same trick, but only one was rewarded for it. The un-rewarded dog invariably began scratching and licking itself in frustration until the account was balanced. Interestingly, the quality of the belated reward didn’t appear to matter. Even if the first dog received sausage, the second was perfectly satisfied to be given bread. It was, it seems, the principle of the thing.

Three hundred and fifty centuries later and we’re only now finding out that our dogs know when they’re getting the shaft. There’s still a world of work to do, but early results paint a far richer, nuanced and loveable picture of Man’s Best Friend than the one we’ve been looking at since Paleolithic times. On the other hand, not every discovery has come as a surprise.

Neuro-imaging studies conducted by animal cognition researchers at Emory University have learned that the scent of its human master lights up the “reward center” of a dog’s brain, just as the appearance of a loved one does in ours. What’s more, canine MRI results suggest that, of all the complex universe of odors packed into their daily experience, dogs prioritize human scent above all others.

Those big floppy ears aren’t for nothing, either. Scientists at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest find that dogs are equally attuned to human vocal signals. Just as in people, “happy” sounds spark a pleasurable commotion in a dog’s auditory cortex, while negative noise tends to depress. And when your dog cocks its head to one side, it’s not doing it just to be cute. Dogs, we now know, are keenly sensitive to our every stance and movement. When in doubt of your emotional status, your pup will shift its head to remove its snout from its line of vision, allowing it to examine nonverbal cues from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Taking these findings together, scientists conclude that dogs aren’t merely skilled at perceiving and responding to your every temper and emotion, they’re biologically hard-wired to do so.

In other words, your dog really is glad to see you.

“I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

John Steinbeck

Technically, that’s called ‘brokering’

Posted on January 22, 2016 by admin

EVERGREEN – Responding to a reportedly suspicious incident on South Hatch Drive, a deputy passed a superannuated Ford pickup leaving the scene towing a hot tub on a trailer. When stopped on Buffalo Park Road, the driver said he’d purchased the spa from the home’s resident – a buddy of his from a downtown watering hole – and even produced a signed bill of sale. According to the home’s owner, however, the therapeutic bath was abandoned at the rental property several years ago by a tenant who skipped on his lease, and the fellow selling the article didn’t live there anymore, either. The landlord said he could have the hot tub, for all he cared, but that would definitely conclude the highly irregular yard sale. If he returns to that house, the deputy advised tub’s new owner, he’ll be in hot water.

Ancient Humor

Posted on January 15, 2016 by admin

Funny?

Q: What occupies the last six pages of the Lada User’s Manual?

A: The bus and train timetables.

This little chestnut used to have them rolling in the meat lines back in jolly olde Petrograd. Or take this timeless tittle from far Cathay.

Q: Why don’t airplanes run into the stars?

A: Because the stars can dodge.

An essential ingredient of humor is context. It’s hard to know why Kimye is funny if you don’t get TMZ, and tech-support gags fall flat if you’ve never been crushed by it. Unless you’ve been disappointed by Soviet industrial incompetence, or understand the nuances of Mandarin Chinese, jokes generated thereby might not seem particularly humorous. On the other hand, we’ve all driven a lemon at one time or another, and jokes about airline food are an important part of our collective social diet. Even if we don’t get the specific gag, we know where it’s coming from.

But can the same be said of humor that predates the Pacer? Jokes coined before stewardesses? Jests made in an Internet-free vacuum? If there’s a commonality to humor, a binding thread that transcends language, culture and time, to find it we’ll have to look back a-ways, to an age as foreign to Carrot Top as it is to Yakov Smirnov and TJ Jin. To find the Mother Cell of humor, we must start at the beginning.

From the ancient soil of Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq, those merry madcaps of the science world, archaeologists, pulled a 3,900-year-old clay tablet inscribed with the world’s oldest known joke.

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.

A familiar theme, if not reassuringly so. And wags of the Fertile Crescent bequeathed to history plenty of other low-brow quips. Consider this proto-riddle left to us on a Babylonian student’s work-tablet.

Q: In your mouth and your teeth, constantly staring at you, the measuring vessel of your lord. What is it?

A: Beer.

It seems the Cradle of Civilization leaned more to Judd Apatow than Dick Cavett, and the otherwise sophisticated Egyptians weren’t much better. Ponder this gem committed to papyrus around 1,600 BC.

Q: How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?

A: You sail a boatload of women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.

It would be another thousand years before deep-thinking Plato, who may have been the first person ever to invest serious brain-time in the mechanics of comedy, dreamed up the Superiority Theory of humor which says that people will laugh at anything involving the foibles and misfortunes of somebody else. This, then, from the same penetrating minds that gave us Antigone, Democracy and the Parthenon…

Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, the man did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said “I’ve had a great loss! Just when he had learned not to eat, he died!

The Superiority Theory of humor was alive and well in 250 A.D. when Roman scholars Hierokles and Philagrios took quills to parchment and came up with the earliest known joke book. Titled “Philogelos” (“The Laughter Lover”), it’s a misfortune-loving treasury of 265 foible-filled anecdotes numbered and sorted with Roman efficiency into categories like “Intellectuals”;

No. 43: When an intellectual was told by someone, “Your beard is now coming in,” he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual saw this and said “I’m not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it’s not coming in by the other gate?”

“Misogynists”;

No. 246: A misogynist stood in the marketplace and announced: “I’m putting my wife up for sale, tax-free!” When people asked him why, he said: “So the authorities will impound her.”

and “People with Bad Breath”;

No. 234: A man with bad breath asked his wife “Madame, why do you hate me?” And she said in reply “Because you love me.”

Sigmund Freud thought to out-think Plato with what he called the Relief Theory of humor. According to Freud, jokes are a kind of release valve for secret desires. Take a guess what secret desire is hinted at in this riddle from the 10^th-century Codex Exoniensis, a compendium of Anglo-Saxon poetry enshrined within Exeter Cathedral.

Q: What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?

A: A key.

But not all ancient humorists assigned profound significance to their craft. Take 12^th-century Italian scholar Poggio Braciolini, author of “Facetiae” and the Middle Ages’ most popular comedy writer. “It is proper, and almost a matter of necessity commended by philosophers,” Poggio wrote, “that our mind, weighed down by a variety of cares and anxieties, should now and then enjoy relaxation from its constant labour, and be incited to cheerfulness and mirth by some humorous recreation.” Braciolini incites cheerfulness and mirth thusly:

Several persons were conversing in Florence, and each was wishing for something that would make him happy. One would have liked to be the Pope, another a king, a third something else, when a talkative child, who happened to be there, said, “I wish I were a melon.” “And for what reason?” they asked. “Because everyone would smell my bottom.” It was usual for those who want to buy a melon to apply their noses underneath.

While none of those antique rib-ticklers might strike the modern mind as knee-slapping, it’s easy to perceive the underlying comical construction of each. They all adhere, in their way, to what latter-day joke-meisters Victor Raskin of Purdue University and Texas A&M’s Salvatore Attardo pioneered as the not-at-all-funny-sounding “Script-based Semantic Theory of Verbal Humor” and later refined into the grandiose “General Theory of Verbal Humor.” As Raskin explained to the New Yorker just last year, “The idea is that every joke is based on a juxtaposition of two scripts. The punch line triggers the switch from one script to the other. It is a universal theory.”

And it appears that some contexts are universal, too. Some scripts, however, may be more universal than others.

No. 51: A doctor was talking to a patient. “Doctor,” the patient says, “Whenever I get up after a sleep, I feel dizzy for half an hour, then I’m all right.” “Then wait for half an hour before getting up,” said the doctor.

THINKING IS HARD

Let me ease your burden

Author Archives: admin