Doggone Shetlie!

Our backyard has no fence, just a thin strips of trees and underbrush between us and the people on the other side. And that was always fine. Told me where to stop mowing, for one thing. For another, Tralfaz the Giant Dog knew where the boundary was. Or at least, he DID know.

The new neighbors across the copse just got a little tiny dog that we think is a Shetland Sheepdog. What they call a Sheltie. Although it should be a Shetlie. They're not from Sheltand.

Anyway.

The Sheltie (if that's what it is) is as cute as anything you ever saw. The couple that owns the house will be out doing yardwork, and this little scamp will just poink here and there all over the lawn.

The problem is that Shelties wake up every morning with 1,000 barks in their stomachs, and if they don't get those barks out throughout the day, they will explode.

Actually, that's a myth. They only think they will explode. But they've always managed to get all the barks out, just in case.

Here's one of the varmints, courtesy of Shetlie --- uh, Sheltie International. 

So Sheltie's bouncing around giving off random barks at birds, squirrels, people, air molecules, whatever. Tralfaz himself, like many huge dogs, very seldom barks, and thank God, because his bark is like thunder. Sheltie's barking has worked magic on Tralfaz, who is an only dog, and LOVES other doggies. (And yes, he had his little surgery, so it's probably not the thing that would be making you wild, Mister.) It's a continual invitation to come play. So a couple of weeks ago Tralfaz barked a couple of times, then charged like a maniac across the wooded section and scared the crap out of everybody next door.

And he didn't even get to play with the little dude, who was swept into the house by his alarmed owners.

Tralfaz is the friendliest dog I've ever seen, but people who don't know him are understandably a little dismayed by the sight of a 130-pound dog crashing through the forest like an angry bear.

I apologized profusely, of course, and hauled my miscreant home, covered in shame. He received punishment; I stewed for hours on the disobedience of a dog we've worked so hard to train.

The incident has not yet been repeated. Partly because Tralfaz stays on the leash when there's any hint that Barky McBarkypants might be taking his constitutional. But Tralfaz sits in the yard and watches, hoping, just as he used to for the kid next door who got less enthusiastic about him when he got bigger than she is.

He'll never understand that people's reaction to him depends a lot on whether he's on a leash.

Oh, my poor Tralfaz! He is one that loves not wisely but too well.

Cook 'em, Dano.

Ho frost.

It's getting hairy out there.

Took the dog out yesterday morning and was quite impressed by the hairy-looking frost all over everything. Here's a closeup.

Aha! I said. Hoarfrost! And the dog looked at me funny. Because he probably knew that I didn't know what hoarfrost is. I just thought it looked like what I would expect hoarfrost to look like. As I've said many times, I am one of nature's great indoorsmen, and there are very few meteorological phenomena beyond the most obvious that I can identify. Or flora. Or fauna. Which one is "fauna" again?

Hoarfrost is the kind of word you expect to see in fantasy novels with battleaxe-wielding dwarves on the cover. Those dwarves are so hairy, even their frost is hairy! 

But is it hoarfrost? The Wikipedia page on frost lists six varieties of frost with many different names and subtypes (who knew?), and I can't quite tell. It's a function of the ambient temperature, humidity, wind speed, and maybe day of the week, not appearance. Although advection frost looks kind of like what I'm seeing. But it wasn't windy. Maybe it is hoarfrost.

Of course, in the Explicit Lyrics section this would be Ho Frost, which is an entirely different thing.

And in the Kids' Holiday section it's Ho-Ho-Ho Frost.

Nah, I'm going back to the Norse dwarves. Hoarfrost Ironson is the hero of my next novel, The Quest of the Saga of the Sword: Hoarfrost's Curse. It's Book I of Trilogy 1 of the FrostWorld series. No idea what will be going on, but there will be ogres. Got to have ogres.

Saint Nicholas.

Today is the feast day of Saint Nicholas, the 4th-century bishop of Myra, in present-day Turkey. You may know him better as the Clark Kent to Santa Claus's Superman.

It's nice when his feast day falls on a Sunday.

One of my favorite Christmas books is The True Saint Nicholas: Why He Matters to Christmas, by William J. Bennett. It's a wonderful book about Nicholas the man, Nicholas the myth, and Nicholas the super-myth that has become our modern Santa Claus.

I'm not a huge fan of Bennett's work---I was annoyed when he used Parson Weems's fatuous lie about young George Washington chopping down the cherry tree to illustrate "honesty" in The Book of Virtues. Using a fabrication to support the virtue of not fabricating things struck me as ignorant, and from a man as accomplished as he, unworthy.

That said, he did a sterling job with this short book. At first glance the goofiness connected to Santa Claus---you know, flying reindeer, weird elves, North Pole, Burgermeister Meisterburger---would seem to be an insult to a dedicated follower of Christ, who risked his life for the faith many times in a perilous age. Bennett answers it this way in the introduction: "This saintly man who lived so long ago has come to influence one of our holiest seasons and most beloved holidays. The influence that has come across so many centuries is a kind of miracle. It is evidence of God's love."

Bennett then goes on to talk about the tremendous popularity connected to Nicholas after his death, and the astounding legends attached to him, some of which are as goofy in their way as slipping down a chimney with a sack full of toys. One legend has him single-handedly destroying a temple of Artemis, turning it literally upside down and exorcising the demons that dwelt within it.* No wonder he was called Nicholas the Miracle Worker. He was so popular that, as Bennett writes, "By the end of the fifteenth century, more than 2,500 churches, chapels, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and works of art had been dedicated to Nicholas in Western Europe. England alone boasted nearly 400 Nicholas churches."

Even some of the most famous stories about the real Nicholas are generally unsubstantiated, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. At Nicaea he supposedly slapped a heretic**---although he may not have even been there. Nicholas has never been removed from the rolls of the saints, because there was a real holy man behind the legends, but he has definitely been downgraded***. But he is still the patron saint of 78 cities, as well as Russia, Germany, and Greece. It might be easier to list the professions that he is not the patron of than those he is****.

Bennett connects the dots between the real Nicholas, the legendary Nicholas, the various elves and spirits associated with Christmas in Western culture through history, the emergence of Santa Claus, and how Santa became what he is today, all in a very neat 116 pages.

Ultimately it all sings together in a story of love, hope, devotion, mission, and mercy, and what better Christmas message would you want?

May Saint Nicholas intercede on behalf of us all on this, his feast day. And happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

* Don't ask about the chopped-up students in the pickle barrel. Well, Nicholas put them together and brought them back to life, so it was okay in the end. 

** He felt bad about losing his temper, but Arius had it coming. 

*** See also Saint Christopher.

**** His patronage, by the way, includes toy makers. :) 

Hello, Dolly!

Speaking as we were the other day about the Island of Misfit Toys, I have a few things to add. One is that, like a lot of kids, I probably identified more than was healthy with the misfits seen throughout Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. That remained true right up through high school.

This is basically me and my friends; just add beer and a boom box playing prog rock.

A lot of people have wondered about Dolly, or as some have tagged her, Dolly for Sue. Everyone wants to know what made her a misfit. Train with square wheels, boat that sinks---those are dealbreakers. Spotted elephant---what's the big deal? Since the 1960s we've seen the rise of ugly stuffed animals and even stuffed pathogens. But maybe a spotted elephant was too "out there" for the early 1960s. As for Charlie in the Box, Santa could've slapped a name change petition form on Charlie like the Wizard hitting the Scarecrow with a diploma, patted him on the cheek, and said, "All right, you're Jack now, capisce? You're beautiful, kid, now hit the road."

"Mind? BLOWN."

But let's assume that all these problems for every toy were equally misfitational, and somehow Santa Claus was still able to find homes for these toys just as they were, which even Santa Claus couldn't have done for me and my high school friends. The question remains: What was wrong with Dolly?

The word is that Dolly had psychological problems, "psychological, caused from being abandoned by her mistress and suffering depression from feeling unloved." So in that regard she would have fit right in with my crowd, at least as we saw ourselves. Not sure if she could handled the beer.

The Rudolph special is as heavy-handed as DeAndre Smelter, but it's always resonated with all little kids. Maybe all kids feel like misfits sometimes---they want to be good but they don't know how; they have so much little-kid lunacy in them and they can't control it. I never knew a kid who said, "Fireball is my favorite; he knew a freak when he saw one." And yet that's how so many behave when they get older.

Fireball is an ass, but at least he doesn't sit around feeling sorry for himself all the time. So maybe everybody has issues. At least at the North Pole.

Damn.

Was in a big fat funk all morning yesterday. Should have been able to shake it. There was work to do, and when I'm in good spirits I can get a lot of work done. But all I wanted to do was sleep on the sofa or perhaps under it. Could not put my finger on what was bothering me.

Talked to my wife, who is a perfect angel. Came to realize it was the horrific shootings in San Bernardino that had gotten me so depressed---the shootings and the disgusting reactions by the political class while it was still going on; the shootings and the revolting display on the poorly named "social" media.

President Togetherness was using the attack to attack fellow Americans while the manhunt was continuing, while the murder victims were still warm. Way to keep the citizenry calm in a crisis, jackass. If Iran nukes us he'll be blaming the Republicans while the mushroom cloud is still forming over New York.

It's just more Republican obstruction.
(Thanks to the Great Lileks for the image.)  

The president and those like him only value Americans who fight other Americans, have you noticed that? Enemies of America are ignored like slightly annoying neighbors, but it's YOU, American, who are the problem. This is true every day, all the time.

I have resigned myself to starting a new group called Al-Amerinon. We cannot reform America; our love is not enough. It is spending itself into oblivion; it is wholly run by a corrupt class of creeps who, despite enriching themselves by shoving their snouts deep in the public trough and selling connections---people being the only thing that they know---think they are superior in some way to the rest of us. It cannot win wars, cannot protect borders, cannot dispense justice fairly, cannot follow its own laws, cannot in short do anything a nation is supposed to do for its citizens.

We must separate with love, or we are doomed. Actually, we're probably doomed anyway, but at least it won't hurt so much.

We're done. Trump can't save us. Probably no one can. And don't look at me. I'll be under the couch.

Highlights of my youth.

A visit to the doctor's waiting room is a visit to my past.

Not that the magazines in this doctor's office are so old that they actually date to my childhood. This is High Five, a spinoff for younger kids, but just seeing that Highlights logo makes me happy.

Back in my day, Highlights covers were not so cartoony:

Color-coded, though.

I always enjoyed the magazine. It was more fun than Boys' Life. Nothing against the Scouts, but I never got out of the city, or out of the station wagon, so stories about nature survival didn't resonate with me. Besides, during my Highlights days I was probably too young for Boys' Life.

Highlights was the closest thing to a general-interest magazine I ever read, excepting Reader's Digest. Highlights was meant for any kid who could read English. That encompasses a lot of kids. Can you think of an adult magazine that targets all grown-ups that way?

Highlights has a lot of great features that people remember into adulthood, perhaps none so much as the continuing conflict between Goofus and Gallant. But one that I enjoyed was the hidden-objects puzzle. It would be a line drawing (which you could color in) (except if it was in the doctor's waiting room) that had a list of objects that were hidden in it.

I remember one that I'm pretty sure was a drawing of Bob Cratchit carrying Tiny Tim on his shoulders through the streets of London. There was the usual list of a dozen or so things you had to find, and I found them all.

Except the spoon.

This issue was in my dentist's office. He did not cycle the mags much. Next time I was there I went back to that same issue and checked again.

No spoon.

I feel like I spent dozens of visits looking for that dadblasted spoon, but it might have been three. I used every strategy my childlike brain could conceive of to scan every inch of the illustration. No dice. Or rather, no spoon.

Now, as a publishing professional (no, really!) I have worked for a number of magazines, and I know how, with the best will in the world, mistakes can get through. The word "spoon" might have been left from a template for the list. But I didn't know that back then. I thought adults who made magazines were perfect. I thought I was being stupid.

Boy, was I wrong. Not about me being stupid; I leave that for others to determine. About people who make magazines being perfect. Wow. As a colleague once told me: with all the prima donnas and all the politics, publishing "is like show business without the money."

I would still like to see that puzzle one more time. Highlights had never let me down otherwise. Maybe, just maybe... there was a spoon somewhere....