Author: bobg

Pepper the dog, 2012 — 2025

In March of 2020, when we were all newly under lockdown and terrifying stories were everywhere about the exponential growth of a deadly new virus, everyone had one important job: stay out of the hospital. Medical workers were about to confront a tsunami, and it was up to all of us not to make it any worse than it was already going to be.

Pepper the dog chose that time to send me to the E.R. We were out on a routine late-night walk in the neighborhood when she spotted The Black And White Dog, who for some reason she had decided was her mortal enemy. She lunged, jerking on the leash and therefore my arm. I was not unaccustomed to such behavior and was ready with some fancy footwork to avoid being pulled off balance — but I was not sufficiently attentive, and my footwork failed to keep me upright. I landed on my spine and (as I later learned) fractured a vertebra. Pain prevented me getting back up. At my request, Black And White Dog’s owner went to fetch my sons to help me, and as I lay there waiting, Pepper — still attached to my arm — added insult to injury by stepping on my face.

Pepper died suddenly earlier this month. I would have let her pull on the leash and step on my face a thousand more times for that not to be so.

Literally breaking my back wasn’t the only challenge Pepper posed. Her occasional flatulence could clear a room. Her skin problems meant steering around lumps and bumps of all sizes when petting her. When we traveled with her to someplace unfamiliar, we could walk her for an hour or more before she finally found a spot where she felt comfortable doing her business. Her mild incontinence (for some merciful reason confined to evenings only) meant we didn’t dare let more than 90 minutes or so elapse between walks, and we prayed she didn’t drink water at bedtime, because if she did, one of us was staying up for another 90 minutes to give her an additional walk. Her opinions about other dogs — that some were instant best friends and others (like The Black And White Dog) apparently needed murdering — were unpredictable and required close monitoring. Her habit of eating the most disgusting things off the ground was repulsive and turned every walk into a contest of vigilance and will between us and her. She usually won.

But most of all her extreme separation anxiety meant we could never leave her alone. For over twelve years we couldn’t do anything as a family that wasn’t someplace we could also bring Pepper, unless we were prepared to put her in the kennel — the most expensive one around, able to meet her special needs.

I would gladly endure her farts, her warts, her random aggression, her repellent foraging, her extreme clinginess, her needy bathroom habits, and her sky-high boarding expenses in exchange for the additional year or two we expected to have with her but didn’t. She may have been a challenge, but she was a bundle of love, and great company. “You like ‘because,’ and you love ‘despite.’”

Years ago, when our sons were 10 and 8, they started clamoring for a dog. They remembered that we previously owned a dog, Alex; but if they had any memories of her, it was only from when she was already old and infirm. We missed Alex, but we also knew what a boat anchor a dog can be, so we resisted, especially since the boys were finally at an age where we started being able to have really interesting family adventures together. But they would not be denied and they wore us down. We connected with a puppy named Melanie Drizzle from the Milo Foundation, a local animal-rescue shelter.

We didn’t have her for very long before we realized that the name didn’t fit. In searching for a new name, our eyes landed on this item, still lingering in our kitchen from the recent holiday season:

“Peppermint Bark” it was.

A few months after we got Pepper, once she was housetrained and a little more grown, we decided it was time to try leaving her home alone while we all went out to dinner. We weren’t out long, but in that time poor Pepper had a complete meltdown. She was frantic and took a long time to settle down after we returned. Among the physical evidence of her agitation was this:

She had apparently eaten the lock button out of the doorknob.

We learned that puppies separated from their litters too early are prone to this kind of anxiety, and to other behavioral problems, and even to urinary incontinence. And “Melanie Drizzle” had not only been separated too early, but had already bounced traumatically from one animal shelter to another when she found her forever home with us at less than three months old.

We all loved the dickens out of her, but presumably because of her trauma it took her a good long while to seem comfortable with us, and longer than that to seem happy. But there’s no doubt that happy is how she spent the rest of her life.

Dad’s nerd

My dad was thirty when I was born, so a few years ago I had the opportunity to send him this for his birthday. Happy Father’s Day in heaven, Dad!

A birthday greeting

(Stick with it, it’s worth it.)

The counting system we normally use is called “base ten.”  It uses ten distinct digits (zero through nine), and the columns of a multi-digit number are powers of ten.  The rightmost column is “ones” (1 is 10 to the power of 0), the next column is “tens” (10 to the power of 1), the next column is “hundreds” (10 to the power of 2), and so on.

Example: the number 412 is understood as “four hundreds plus one ten plus two ones.”

Base ten is convenient for humans, who have ten fingers to count on.  But it’s inconvenient for computers, which count using “bits,” each of which is a microscopic on-off switch.  This makes it more convenient for computers to count in “base two,” which uses two distinct digits (zero and one, corresponding to a bit that’s off or on).  The columns of a multi-digit base-two number are powers of two.  The rightmost column is still “ones” (because 2 to the power of 0 is 1) but the next column is “twos,” then “fours,” then “eights,” then “sixteens,” and so on.

Example: the base-two number 110011100 is understood as “one 256 plus one 128 plus one 16 plus one 8 plus one 4” (which is the same as the base-10 number 412, by the way).

As you can see, base two requires many more columns than base ten to express the same number.  Computers don’t care about that – but the people who work with computers do.  Base two counting is very inconvenient for them.  But converting back and forth between base 10 and base 2 is onerous, because even computer nerds don’t like doing unnecessary arithmetic.

One common solution is to deal not in base two or in base ten but in base eight.  Base eight uses eight distinct digits (zero through seven) and the columns of a base-eight number are “ones,” “eights,” “sixty-fours,” and so on.

You might think that adding yet another counting system is a needless complication, but the cool thing about base eight is that each group of three base-two digits always corresponds to the same base-eight digit:

Base twoBase eight
0000
0011
0102
0113
1004
1015
1106
1117

This makes converting between base two and base eight easy.  Just take three base-two digits at a time (from right to left) and replace them with their base-eight counterpart:

110011100 -> 110 011 100 -> 634 (which is the base-eight version of 412).

Base eight is often called “octal,” and base ten is often called “decimal.”  Now you have enough information to understand this old programmer’s joke:

Q: Why is Halloween like Christmas?
A: Because OCT 31 = DEC 25!

But we’re not done.  Base eight is handy, but not as handy as it can be, because as you probably know, computer memory is divided into bytes, and each byte is eight bits long.  You can’t evenly divide eight bits into groups of three.  And there’s some ambiguity when you string together multiple bytes in a row.  Suppose you’re dealing with these two bytes:

11010001  10011100

Should you group these sixteen bits into threes like this:

11 010 001  10 011 100 -> 321234 (base eight)

(where each byte is grouped into threes separately) or like this:

1 101 000 110 011 100 -> 150634 (base eight)

(where all sixteen bits are strung together and then separated into groups of three)?

To avoid these problems, it’s more common for computer folks to use not base two, not base ten, and not base eight, but base sixteen!  Base sixteen has sixteen distinct digits: zero through nine as in base ten, then A for a single-digit “ten,” B for a single-digit “eleven,” C for a single-digit “twelve,” D for “thirteen,” E for “fourteen,” and F for “fifteen.”  The columns of a base-sixteen number are “ones,” “sixteens,” “two-hundred-fifty-sixes,” and so on.

In base sixteen, 412 is written as 19C.  (One 256 plus 9 sixteens plus twelve.)

Like base eight, base sixteen – which is also called “hexadecimal” (or “hex” for short) – is easily converted to and from base two, because every group of four base-two digits corresponds to a base sixteen digit.

Base twoBase sixteen
00000
00011
00102
00113
01004
01015
01106
01117
10008
10019
1010A
1011B
1100C
1101D
1110E
1111F

And grouping base-two digits four at a time instead of three at a time makes it very natural to represent any eight-bit byte as a two-digit hexadecimal number.

11010001  10011100 -> D1 9C

Now for the punchline of this nerdy shaggy-dog story.  This year you are turning 80 and I am turning 50.  And DEC 80 = HEX 50!

This is the kind of thing that makes nerds like me turn cartwheels of joy.  And before you roll your eyes or shake your head, let me just remind you of who raised this particular nerd.

Happy birthday, Dad.  I love this numeric coincidence, but not as much as I love you.

Year in rearview

In the latter part of this year I ramped down my posting on Facebook (as I had previously done on Twitter) in favor of BlueSky. Time to get serious about resisting the oligarchs. [Previously.]

  • [On Jan 1st, friend asks, “Where’s my #$%^& flying car?!”]

    https://youtu.be/lhALK64e4bk

  • First Dad’s-birthday-without-Dad. He would have been 88 today – his target age (though I always told him he should aim for 100). He very nearly made it.

    We all miss you Dad.

Continue reading “Year in rearview”

The Roads Scholar

I relinquished the Wine-Dark Shark to my son for use at college and beyond. After all, I was working from home, and for our now-modest transportation needs, my wife and I were easily able to share her Volkswagen. What did I need with a car of my own?

Plenty, it turns out. Just maybe replace “need” with “want.” Presenting the Roads Scholar, a 2025 Honda Accord EX-L hybrid in Canyon River Blue Metallic.

Trump’s weakness is his strength

[cross-posted at Medium]

Early in the 1997 film The Fifth Element, the Earth is menaced by a flaming ball of space-evil. The space navy fires its biggest missiles at it, but those only make the flaming evil ball bigger and stronger.

This is an allegory for Donald Trump’s political career. The man is plainly incompetent, illiterate, dishonest, disloyal, pervy, cowardly, and cruel, not to mention increasingly deranged. But no amount of loading these irrefutable accusations into our missile tubes and firing them at him or his supporters has diminished the Trump menace. If anything it has made it worse. Why?

Paradoxically, the answer is: meritocracy.

What could be more just than a society where success is based on merit? Maybe nothing, and that’s a tragedy.

We’ve tried the system where what you deserve depends on who your parents are. (By “we,” I mean humans.) That’s not very fair.

We’ve tried the one where what you deserve depends on the whims of a strongman. That’s not very fair either.

Neither are the ones where success comes from how many enemies you can defeat in battle, or how many serfs or slaves you can subjugate, or how closely you can hew to what this era’s priests say are the divine rules of the universe.

In America we are rightly proud of overthrowing those earlier systems and organizing ourselves as a meritocracy.

But here’s the thing: all of those systems pick winners and losers. (We’ve also tried doing away with winners and losers, but that never seems to work out.) Meritocracy is no different in that way. But it is different in one important respect: if you’re a loser in a dictatorship or a monarchy, you know whom to blame, but if you’re a loser in a meritocracy, there’s no one to blame but yourself.

Now, that’s not really true. “No one to blame but yourself” is just marketing. It’s meritocracy’s brand. The fact is, if you’re a meritocracy loser, there are a lot of things you could blame. Merit can be measured along multiple different dimensions, and in our society some count and some don’t. You could be the best, hardest-working grade-school teacher in the country, but that is never going to make you rich, or even save you from having to buy your own classroom supplies. On the other hand, you could be only a mediocre CEO and have no personal problems worse than where to park your yacht.

Who decides which kinds of merit count, and for how much? Unfortunately the answer is hazy. It’s a diffuse agglomeration of historical attitudes, public policies, and profit motives. It’s hard to point your finger at any one villain, so “no one to blame but yourself” wins out.

With the disintegration of the middle class, we have a lot of losers in America, and that adds up to a lot of people sitting with this toxic idea… and being driven insane by it.

Imagine you’re one of those folks. (Or maybe you don’t have to imagine.) You know what success looks like, especially now that the Internet makes it so easy to compare your life to those of others far away. There is no path to that kind of success for yourself.

Now along comes Donald Trump. He’s flabbier than you. His marriage is in worse shape than yours. He can barely form a coherent sentence. You sometimes leave an ungenerous tip? He skips out on the whole bill. Your work colleagues don’t respect you? His hate and undermine him. You have impure thoughts? He brags about grabbing women by the pussy. Your business is failing? He bankrupted six.

Whatever it is that disappoints you about yourself, whatever you think is holding you back, he’s worse — and somehow he makes that shit work. The more others point out his flaws, the more it endears him to you. At first you are ashamed of this and keep it to yourself, but thanks again to the Internet you get connected to others of like mind, and you are all emboldened.

He is your champion, because a world in which even he can succeed is surely one in which you can, too.

Your inner me

[cross-posted at Medium]

Inside you
There’s an inner me
Who talks to you
Independently

He says things
I’ve never said
But might if I
Were in your head

How faithful
This facsimile
To the outer me
That others see?

How much like me,
This me in you?
How much does he
Combine we two?

He started off
As my design
So is he yours
Or is he mine?

Would I endorse
His words to you?
Approve of what
He helps you do?

Or would I say
“No, that’s not me”
If ever I could
Your me see?

You may ask
The same things too
’Cause in my head’s
An inner you

I’d like to
Introduce those two:
Your inner me,
My inner you

Would others
Seeing them discuss
Believe that
They were watching us?

Would inner we ask
In our steads
Of inner inners
In their heads?

Someday I’ll
No longer be
But you may go on
Separately

The me in you
May outlive me
Is this
Immortality?

’23 skidoo

The era of social media is on the wane, and here’s the proof: I wrote far fewer Facebook (and other) posts and comments than in years past, and instead of spending the last few days of 2023 recapping them like I usually do, I felt no urgency to, and did other stuff instead.

Gone daddy

In the mid 1990’s I had recently moved from Pittsburgh to California, and my dad, a lifelong New Yorker, was nearing his sixtieth birthday. More distance separated us now than ever before. He frequently exhorted me to visit, morbidly emphasizing that he didn’t know how many more times we’d get to see each other.

Many, as it turned out; about twice a year for the next quarter century, sometimes here and sometimes there (and occasionally elsewhere) — long enough to welcome two grandchildren, and frequently enough to be very present and beloved in their childhoods. He watched with pleasure and pride as they grew into accomplished young men.

Those same young men were with me in New York today, along with my sister — our dad’s complete genetic legacy — as he drew his final breaths after a long decline.

His body may have died today, but much of him lives on in me. Every time I take pleasure in a job well done, that’s my dad. Every time I keep my word, that’s him too. When I muster my self-confidence, when I deliver a firm handshake, when I plan ahead or stand up for myself and others, that’s him. The joy I derive from my loving family — that is one hundred percent my dad.

He equipped me with the tools I needed for building a good life, and for enjoying it. Thank you Dad, and goodbye.

Third term’s the charm!

With both boys now away at college the time finally came to purge two decades’ worth of clutter that accumulated while childraising left us no bandwidth to spare.

We’ve been making all sorts of discoveries among our long-forgotten belongings, including this: an outline that I wrote in early 2006 for a story about presidential politics.

  • August 2006, Crawford, Texas: George W. Bush summons campaign advisors to his ranch. There is speculation that he is making succession plans and may appoint his brother Jeb VP. (But Jeb’s circle is not in attendance.)
  • Right after Labor Day, word leaks: Bush may campaign again.
  • White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is evasive. “The Constitution does prohibit getting elected to more than two terms — but it doesn’t prohibit campaigning for a third term.”
  • Democrats’ heads exploding. Negativity starts to erase gains going into the November congressional elections. The GOP retains a congressional majority.
  • Republicans say the two-term limit is “our rule” in response to FDR, and is now “outmoded,” adding that the GOP deserves a three-term presidency because the Democrats had one.
  • The GOP launches an effort to amend the Constitution.
  • Bill Clinton promptly announces he’ll run for a third term.
  • The GOP amends its amendment effort: only three consecutive terms are OK.
  • The press attacks Clinton.
  • Democrats attack the press.
  • Hillary is pissed. This was supposed to be her turn.
  • Numerous GOP challengers emerge, but self-destruct. (E.g., Giuliani over the Kerik affair.) Bush is the party’s best candidate going into the primaries.
  • In the Democratic primaries it’s Bill vs. Hillary. They cancel each other out.
  • Bush wins the election (amid questions over the vote).
  • The Supreme Court rules the Constitution’s term limit rule is moot in this case, because enforcing it would undermine the will of the majority.

It’s a measure of how far the Trump presidency moved the Overton Window on constitutional abuses that this now reads as quaint satire. At the time I wrote it this would have been an all-too-plausible pulse-quickening nightmare.