Books Lying Open
• Patricia Cornwall, Portrait of a Killer
• Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Unemployment.

When I Grow Up:
• I will become better at understanding your needs. 

Curse of the Day:
• May you accept your fate.

This information at first depressed me further, but upon further reflection I'm glad to know it.  One time it was like, "Maybe she still doesn't really like him that much."  Four times it's over, she's gone, end of story.  No point in clinging to any misguided fantasies about possibly being the BF now.  Being as we'd discussed things previously and had both agreed that we weren't good for each other, and I had never said a jealous word about her dating, and she was constantly trying to encourage me to go date myself, I really had/have no reason to be bothered by anything she does with this guy.

And yet I was.

Actually, what really upset me was her saying that the BF had a pulled muscle in his back, and that while they sat around naked and talked and listened to music she rubbed his back with oil for upwards of two hours.

Just typing that now I physically ache, at the thought.  I would sort of like to have sex again, but it's not that high a priority.  When it happens, goodie, but I've never found it all that unbelievable an experience. Women tell me that once I'm in love it will be all that much better.  We'll see.  Or maybe not.

However a massage, from someone who is good at it, is something I will crawl through broken glass for.  Especially if that someone is a woman who cares about me, and I get to reciprocate.  If I were offered a two hour massage vs. two hours of sex, I would really have to give it some serious thought.  I mean given the design of male anatomy, it's not exactly difficult to achieve orgasm.  Try giving yourself a back rub though.

Anyway, the female in question didn't see it as any big deal, "his back was hurting." she said.  And I'm sure that's true, but I found it funny that the mention of the massage drove me to such distraction.  Far more than any description of sex would have.

As for the update yesterday, there was a good email. It's from Mike.

Hey Flux,

I've been reading your blog for awhile now, and until today I've agreed with almost everything you've said. When I read today's update about 98% of guys being willing to have sex with all of their female acquaintances if the situation arose, I couldn't help but wonder how you could think that. A little further down, I realized what your reason was when I saw that you've never been in love, and didn't know what it was.

What your female friend described as love, isn't. It's infatuation, obsession, or co-dependence, any of which can be a component of love, but do not make love in and of themselves. For me, when I'm in love, I know it because I DON'T think about sexual activities with any other females. If I'm in a relationship with a woman I'm in love with, I wouldn't have sex with another woman under any normal circumstances (i.e. without something weird, like a guy threatening to shoot me if I didn't have sex with her, etc).

Love means that you care about another person more than about yourself and will choose to do things that make her happy instead of making yourself happy (though making her happy will accomplish that, but could be along with other suffering). Love is not something you "are willing to do anything to keep," because for one, that's selfish and (as mentioned above) love is not selfish, and also love maintains itself. If you are really in love with somebody, that love does not go away unless you find out something about the person you were in love with that changes your impression of who they really are.

I can't argue the point, since I have no first hand experience, and I think that is a pretty good definition of love, at least as it's depicted in movies and books.

I will bring up the fact that so many/most men cheat, whether they are married or just dating, and that's cheating; actually going through with it.  My example in the blog was a purely hypothetical mental consideration, in a perfect situation where it wouldn't ever be found out, wouldn't be a recurring thing, etc.  The only thing you'd have to deal with in the (unrealistic) scenario I described was your own feelings of guilt for cheating.  And IMHO, men are largely creatures of instinct and impulse, and tend to value the momentary joy over the long term potential consequences. And if they knew there would be zero physical consequences, just mental ones, I think there would be a lot of, "What she doesn't know won't hurt her." rationalization going on.

Some news.

Weird panties she's got on. Her jacket has strings hanging down from it, and I thought one was wrapped around her hip at first, but I guess her knickers (being as it's in London) just have three straps on each side, or else maybe she's wearing panties over a thong, or something odd like that.

The woman has clearly lost it though, as these two additional pictures will demonstrate.  They are scans from the March issue of some UK magazine, and show Courtney in nothing but very small knickers, running around downtown London, lying in the street, screaming for her bikini-waxer to "wax my anus", etc.  Here's one, and here's two. A class act all the way, is Miss Love.  Let's hope Frances Bean was left back home in LA. And that she has some nice grandparents who can raise her after mommy is dead/in prison. 

¤ The Rosenthal case just ended, and he was found guilty of growing much pot, and might get life in prison.  What makes it interesting is that basically the minute the trial was over, most of the jurors became outraged once they heard the full story, that the man was obeying state law, growing pot for distribution to people with medical reasons for toking up.  Which is legal in California and almost a dozen other states, but is still being prosecuted by the federal government.

There is a lot of news about this from Northern California, and it's always somewhat outrageous, where local cops and prosecutors won't arrest or press charges against anyone, and the DEA buses in federal cops from hundreds of miles away to kick down doors in cannabis buyers' clubs and arrests the AIDS and cancer patients there. 

When the feds find some prosecutor willing to try one of the cases, the jury invariably finds the person innocent, since most people are fine with medical marijuana use.  So how do you get a conviction?  Well, you get a corrupt judge who won't let the defense present any of the relevant evidence.

The San Francisco Federal Court jury found Ed Rosenthal, 58, a columnist who has written many books on marijuana, guilty on Friday on three counts of growing marijuana. The judge in the case refused to let jurors hear Rosenthal's defense: that he was growing the drug for medical use, something legal under state law while illegal under federal law.

"We obviously came up with the wrong verdict," jury member Marney Craig said in an interview on Wednesday. "Ed Rosenthal did not get a fair trial.

"Nothing we can do can make up for the fact that we are sending him to prison."

Craig, a property manager who is also 58 years old, is one of several jurors who complain that they were not told that Rosenthal was cultivating the weed as an "officer" for the city of Oakland's medical marijuana program.

Judge Charles Breyer did not allow defense lawyers to introduce testimony on that issue because growing marijuana for any reason is a federal offense.

One of the beauties (and curses) of the jury system is that jury makes the law, to some extent.  If they want to find a person innocent, they can say he/she is innocent, and damn any evidence to the contrary. The prosecution might have video of the murder, a confession, eyewitnesses, fingerprints, etc, but if the jury is sympathetic to the defendant, they can say "not guilty" and that's that.  See OJ Simpson, for one example.

So while Rosenthal was clearly guilty of what the government charged him with, since he had a whole warehouse full of pot plants, the jury could have found not guilty, if they didn't agree with the law he was being prosecuted under.  Which is why the judge wouldn't allow the defense to do their job and discuss the circumstances of the case.

You have to hope this one gets thrown out or a retrial on appeal.  At least I hope so; a miscarriage of justice was clearly perpetrated, no matter how you feel about pot smoking.  What if there were some federal law that murder was always murder.  You kill a robber in self-defense, which is a state law, but you get tried in Federal court, and the judge won't allow you to mention the knife that was against your throat, or the death threats you were receiving the whole time.  I'd say you'd be pretty well screwed.  Just like Rosenthal.

¤ The first episode of The Animatrix is now online, and has been for a few days.  Which is odd, since I've not seen any news of it on movie or geek fan sites.  The link to it directly is problematic since it's a pop up and in frames, so just go to the main Matrix page and then click the left side graphic for The Animatrix.

While I love Anime, and I loved the Matrix and am eager for the two movies later this year, this first Animatrix episode is pretty boring.   It's well animated and directed and such, but it's um... historical.  Presented as a documentary of how artificial intelligence came to be, it shows how the machines ended up in total war with mankind, (it's mostly humans' fault for mistreating their robot servants).  The problem is that it's just very dry, and could have been related in about a 30 second intro, rather than a 10 minute cartoon. I also didn't buy most of it, since there's no hint at how human programmers were able to move from machines that follow programs to self-willed, autonomous, free-thinking robots.

There is some lacking logic, with no mention of why they wouldn't have put emergency override switches in them in case of emergency, or why humans would try to kill them all, let a bunch go, and leave the robots alone long enough to retaliate.

I can see why this was the first one they posted, since it's the beginning of the background info, but it being so uninteresting can't help sell too many copies of the DVD.  And next month is part two of this historical documentary, which I don't expect will be much more interesting than part one.

I shall quote some, as well as freelance quite a bit, as is my habit.

You may have noticed a unique, pungent odor when you open a new bag of pet food -- what is the source of that delightful smell? It is most often rendered animal fat, restaurant grease, or other oils too rancid or deemed inedible for humans.

Restaurant grease has become a major component of feed grade animal fat over the last fifteen years. This grease, often held in fifty-gallon drums, may be kept outside for weeks, exposed to extreme temperatures with no regard for its future use. "Fat blenders" or rendering companies then pick up this used grease and mix the different types of fat together, stabilize them with powerful antioxidants to retard further spoilage, and then sell the blended products to pet food companies and other end users.

These fats are sprayed directly onto extruded kibbles and pellets to make an otherwise bland or distasteful product palatable. The fat also acts as a binding agent to which manufacturers add other flavor enhancers such as digests. Pet food scientists have discovered that animals love the taste of these sprayed fats. Manufacturers are masters at getting a dog or a cat to eat something she would normally turn up her nose at.

So that black, used motor oil-looking goop that oozes out of the MickeyD's FF machine at the end of the day, or the slimy scum they scrape off the grill, or the drippings from raw fish before it's fried, etc. All of that waste gets siphoned into these 50 gallon drums which sit out back of your local Royberto's Taco Emporium for six months, until they are finally full and sucked out into some tanker truck.  Where they mix with other, even more foul goo, before being boiled and distilled and reprocessed and sprayed on your Friskies or Kibbles 'n Bits. And you're grossed out when Fido pushes around the floater in his water basin?

The whole topic of nutrition and health in pet food is an interesting one, and one that most pet owners do not want to be bothered thinking about.  It's hard enough to stick to a healthy diet for yourself, so worrying about the shit in a bag of Alpo is more than most people are willing to bother with.  I've talked to health nut type people who have researched it and would no sooner feed their dog/cat Alpo (or any other major brand) than they would feed themselves McDonald's.

There are health food type pet foods, or you can feed them what you eat, with a higher concentration of raw meat, of course.  Or there are even vegetarian pet foods, with soy and rice and other such stuff.  Supposedly dogs love baked potatoes, and can be quite healthy with no meats, though it seems counter intuitive given the diet of wild dogs and wolves.

The thing is, what's in that sack of Alpo isn't anything approaching quality animal parts.  As the article says, it's rendered grease, by products like intestines and ligaments and skin, and lots of surplus filler crap, like grains unfit for human consumption.  To make dry dog food, that garbage is ground up and then processed like breakfast cereal, puffed into crunchy shapes and sprayed down with oils and greases to make it smell like flesh, or at least like something an animal will eat.  They have such sensitive noses that good smell is as or more important than the actual taste.

People just assume that pet food is healthy and meat and something like kitty evolved eating. But it's not, it's nothing like an actual bird or mouse or raw egg or cricket or whatever else a cat might catch. Kitty's wild 300th generation grandfather didn't live on reconstituted pork skin and ground horse esophagus, coated in recycled French fry grease. 

The other thing that probably factors in is that most pet breeds today are mutations that would not survive in the wild.  I don't know how much their digestive systems have changed over the hundreds of years of selective breeding and mutation since they were domesticated, but I would assume at least somewhat, given that they have been so mutated/evolved in appearance and size and weight.

Animals do not live to an old age, normally.  They mature very quickly, become sexually active as soon as they can, and generally die in their prime from an accident or disease.  If they live longer, they are generally dead as soon as they can't fend for themselves anymore. There's not a lot of "taking care of your aged parents" in the animal world, and no hospitals with angioplasties or blood transfusions or antibiotics.

So pets, on average, live far longer than wild animals, and wild animals seldom live long enough to worry about whether or not their diets are healthy. They eat what you can catch, and they eat it fast before someone bigger takes it.  Which is to say that with wild animals, much like teenagers and single men, what they do eat is no real indication of what they should eat.

And it's pretty well known that animals can't take real quality raw meat all the time. Dogs get digestive problems if you feed them just fillet mignon, since it's too thick and meaty for them to process in a timely fashion.  Wild dogs would be eating all sorts of smaller animals, like mice, and chewing on grass and bushes and leaves and roots and such out of hunger, and that stuff helps them digest the big logs of flesh they gorge on when they made a nice kill.

So in a way, the fillers and grains and puffed air and such crap in commercial dog foods are useful, since they are digestible.  However one thing you hear about with more quality dog chow is that it's got a lot more nutrients and calories and therefore the animal needs to eat less to stay healthy.  And will not get fat, or spend as much time eating or shitting.  But is the food nutritious?

Not really.

Dr. Randy L. Wysong is a veterinarian and produces his own line of pet foods. A long-time critic of pet food industry practices, he said, "Processing is the wild card in nutritional value that is, by and large, simply ignored. Heating, cooking, rendering, freezing, dehydrating, canning, extruding, pelleting, baking, and so forth, are so commonplace that they are simply thought of as synonymous with food itself."

Processing meat and by-products used in pet food can greatly diminish their nutritional value, but cooking increases the digestibility of cereal grains. To make pet food nutritious, pet food manufacturers must "fortify" it with vitamins and minerals. Why? Because the ingredients they are using are not wholesome, their quality may be extremely variable, and the harsh manufacturing practices destroy many of the nutrients the food had to begin with.

Cereal grains are the primary ingredients in most commercial pet foods. Many people select one pet food and feed it to their dogs and cats for a prolonged period of time. Therefore, companion dogs and cats eat a primarily carbohydrate diet with little variety. Today, the diets of cats and dogs are a far cry from the primarily protein diets with a lot of variety that their ancestors ate. The problems associated with a commercial diet are seen every day at veterinary establishments. Chronic digestive problems, such as chronic vomiting, diarrhea, and inflammatory bowel disease are among the most frequent illnesses treated. These are often the result of an allergy or intolerance to pet food ingredients.

To conclude my musings on optimal diet; it's clearly not the crap in the box/can, but neither is it what animals eat in the wild, where many are malnourished.  Nor is just giving them more of what they'd eat in the wild necessarily the answer, since "whatever they can catch" isn't really a balanced food pyramid.

I would think that the best food for your pet is some sort of scientifically formulated diet with a wide variety of nutrients and supplements. As you'll see if you read the full article I've been quoting from here, there are lots of cases of pets getting sick and/or dying from various problems with pet food.  Not just contamination, but lacking odd things like Iodine. The pet food companies have historically known nothing whatsoever about pet nutrition needs, and have just bagged or canned up whatever sort of meat and fillers they could obtain the cheapest.  That seems to be mostly changed today, but for the price of pet food (generally pretty damn cheap if you don't go with designer types) you can't expect too much quality, I don't suppose.

The obvious benefit to feeding your pet healthier food is that they will not get sick, will have more energy to play, and will live longer. Mice can live 50% longer just by going to a lower calorie, healthier diet.  With a few decades more research, we may find out that cats and dogs could have been living 25% or 33% or 50% longer all along, if we'd just been feeding them the right stuff, in the correct amounts.

Given that people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on surgery and organ replacement and other such ridiculous expenses for their pets, not to mention all the toys and furniture and treats (which may well be unhealthy and shortening their lives), I would think that getting their pet on a really healthy diet would be a bigger priority than it seems to currently be, given how many people just dump a bunch of Alpo in Rover's bowl and figure he'll be fine.

I don't have a dog or a cat, and my pets get complete extremes of diet.

My rats eat everything, basically anything I eat if there's a bit left of, I give to them, along with their staples of canned corn, rice, and alotta dry rat chow, which I'm lucky to see them eat half of. (The half they like.)  They get almost no sugar and very little salt, and not much meat, and aside from probably being overfed, they couldn't ask for much better.

My snakes are the other extreme, and they eat one thing, and one thing only.  That thing being rats. Snakes aren't real big on salad. However given that most of the rats have been Hansel and Greteled on the above-mentioned diet, I'm assuming that's good enough for the snakes.  I've had them for 8 and 6 years, and both are very healthy, so there you are.

I doubt I'll ever own a dog, but if I do get a cat again some day (likely I will not have rats/snakes at that point) I would probably try to do some of their clever sample cat food recipes, but I don't know how long I'd stick with all of this:

Feed an adult cat as much as she will eat in 20-30 minutes. Refrigerate leftovers promptly. Feed adult cats twice a day. Recipe provides approximately 3 servings.

CHOOSE ONE PROTEIN SOURCE:
(meat amounts given in raw weight)

• 1/2 lb boneless chicken breast or thigh, minced
• 6 oz ground turkey, or minced turkey (dark meat)
• 1/2 lb lean beef, minced
• 1/2 lb beef, chicken or turkey heart, ground or minced
• About 3 times a week, include 1 chopped hard-boiled or scrambled egg
• Optional: once a week, substitute 4 oz organic liver for 1/2 of any meat source
• Optional: once every 2 weeks, substitute 4 oz tuna (packed in water, no salt), 6 oz sardines (canned) or 5 oz salmon (canned, with bones) for any meat source. Do not use canned fish as a protein source for cats who are prone to urinary tract problems.
• Optional: for cats needing a lower protein diet, add cup cooked white rice.

Supplement with goldfish, served Gollum style.

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