Greetings from Houston Heights

(Don’t read this over lunch.)

You know, it’s considered unacceptable for me or any other dog owner to let our dumps take dumps on the sidewalk, in others’ yards, or anywhere off our own property without cleaning up (to the point that most places have laws about it). And that is as it should be. And yet there are cat owners who think it’s fine to let their cats wander around using everybody else’s yards as litterboxes.

For example, this little area outside my back door where there are some bushes, and no ground cover, which of course makes it an appealing place for cats to shit. And cat poo is of course an exciting delicacy to dogs, so last night, I went out back with Teddy and in seconds he had his snout buried in the ground there.

So I told him to leave it, and he did… pulling away from it licking his lips.

Predictably – this morning – the squirts, as I call it. It must have been a motherlode of cat shit, given how quickly he went straight to it. So I just finished cleaning up and washing my hands for about ten minutes. Thanks, neighbor!

If I were not moving soon, I’d make an effort to figure out where the cat lives (there are a couple of neighborhood cats, with collars, that roam into the yard and are actually pretty assertive – one in particular will jump  up on the garage roof and taunt Teddy), and start leaving piles of dog shit on the owner’s front steps.

Apart from exposing their pets to disease and mortal danger, these people are just bad neighbors. Letting your pet use your neighbor’s yards as a bathroom is not acceptable behavior.

(And I have heard people say, “Oh, but if I don’t let her out, she whines, and she really wants to go out, and she gets annoying!” I don’t care. That’s your problem, not mine. Spend some time playing with the cat to keep her busy. Get a little kitty leash and take the cat out for a supervised visit to your own yard. You don’t have time for that? Tough. That’s your problem to solve.)

I love cats, but these particular cats are pests, thanks to their owners’ irresponsibility. If you don’t want a cat in your house, don’t have a cat. How hard is this to figure out?

{ 14 comments }

As I mentioned in a post the other day, around Gay Pride time we always hear the Butcher Than Thou (or more correctly, Not as Butch as They Think) gay people complaining that pride parades are big freak shows that convince everybody that gay people are basically a bunch of guys who want to be Cher. Or paddle someone in the street. Or something. And part of this complaint is always that the most flamboyant people at the events are the ones in the news. Which always leaves me wondering, “What news are they talking about?”

So just for fun I decided to take a look at the coverage of yesterday’s pride parade and festival (and, I imagine, sweat-at-thon / encounter with heatstroke) here in Houston.

There’s not much, but there’s a link to a photo gallery on the home page of the Houston Chronicle, which features lewd, racy items like this:

And this:

Hide the children! Or they’ll want hula hoops and beads.

There was an editorial, too; here’s some of the bigoted, homophobic coverage clearly intended to make people think that all the homos are weird freaks:

With the theme “united we stand,” the parade sponsored by Pride Houston created a tradition in which gay and straight people together celebrate the year-round contributions of LGBT individuals and organizations to a diverse and vibrant Houston.

Since its beginnings, area elected officials have taken part in the festivities and 2009, with the theme “Out 4 Justice,” is no exception. Mayor Bill White, U.S. Rep. Al Green and mayoral candidates Peter Brown and Annise Parker will be among those riding in the parade, which starts at 8:45 p.m. tonight on lower Westheimer.

It’s a sign of progress that some of those elected officials now come from the gay community itself. As OutSmart publisher Greg Jeu notes, “pride means that out LGBT people can be serious contenders for elected offices in the fourth largest city in the United States and the first thing most people talk about is their stellar qualifications, not the fact that he or she is gay.”

The Chronicle applauds the accomplishments of our LGBT citizens and wishes all a satisfying celebration.

Read between the lines; clearly, the message is that we are all sex obsessed freaks!

There are freaks among us, of course; generally, they are clean cut and wear Dockers and pressed shirts and are extremely careful with their pronouns, except when complaining about all those other gay people.

{ 4 comments }

{ 0 comments }

So, hey, did you hear? Michael Jackson died. And broke the Internet doing it.

The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.

"Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson," a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic."

As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.

Twitter crashed as users saw multiple "fail whales" — the illustrations the site uses as error messages — user FoieGrasie posting, "Irony: The protesters in Iran using Twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of ‘Michael Jackson RIP.’ Well done." The site’s status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.

Whenever any big news story breaks, we get the predictable round of news items and blog entries about how this just proves that new media are fabulous, powerful ways to get important information out to us in ways that those tedious old media can’t. Important information like “OMG, Michael Jackson died!”

Thanks goodness that as I was leaving work, people heard about this and could tell me about it. I was then able to leave the office, go home, feed Teddy, watch him run around the yard, and looked through my mail. Imagine if I hadn’t known he was dead for a few hours: I would have foolishly gone home, fed Teddy, watched him run about the yard, and looked through my mail.

My point is that Twitter et al are not potentially useful tools; Twitter is an ingenious multi-platform short message system. It’s that these cases that get held up as examples of their power are more like cases of their power to increase the flow of trivial information cluttering up our lives.

How many news stories do you need to hear about instantly, without the benefit of detail or fact checking? Some, certainly. If a natural disaster were taking place in Houston, Twitter could be a useful way to keep track of friends and find out what’s going on in specific places.

But… Michael Jackson’s death? Thank you, I was fine with seeing it on my news site of choice (the Washington Post site) later. This is interesting and newsworthy but otherwise has no impact on my life.

This is why I stopped using Twitter; there are only so many 140-character brain farts that are interesting to me. If I set myself up on it again, and connected to a small group of friends and/or professional contacts, it might be useful… but probably not useful enough to be worth the time I’d spend on it.

But hearing everyone I know and 500 people I don’t inform me that yes, Michael Jackson is still dead? Thanks, I have enough other things to think about.

Oh, and there’s that other aspect of getting your news from a bunch of strangers who don’t bother to write things as long as paragraphs:

As with any breaking piece of news on the Web, the reports of Jackson’s death sparked something of a feeding frenzy — and with that came rumors that dragged in other celebrities completely unconnected to the "King of Pop’s" death.

One Wikipedia prankster wrote that Jackson had been "savagely murdered" by his brother Tito, who had strangled him "with a microphone cord."

Soon rumors spread online that movie star Jeff Goldblum had fallen from the Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand while filming his latest movie. On several search engines, "Jeff Goldblum" soon became the only non-Jackson-related term to crop up in the top 10.

The rumors forced Goldblum’s publicist to issue a statement to media outlets, saying: "Reports that Jeff Goldblum has passed away are completely untrue. He is fine and in Los Angeles."

At the same time, Harrison Ford was also rumored to have fallen from a yacht off the south of France.

Because all that tedious fact checking and using reliable sources that those boring old media do – so twentieth century.

Tools for spreading information are as useful as the information they carry. Tools that reward immediacy over accuracy and usefulness, that make no distinction between useful and trivial information, that reward popularity over thoughtfulness or even coherence, are tools that make us, as a society, more stupid.

That’s not to say that there aren’t edge cases where they perform useful functions; there are plenty. It’s the mindless worship of them, just because they’re fast and new, that gets on my nerves.

As I said last night at dinner, during a discussion of various idiotic pop culture news items, “This all makes me want to draw the blinds and reread all my Virginia Woolf books.”

(In a disturbing turn of events, I finally found who these “Jon and Kate” people that everyone keeps talking about were last night. I wish I hadn’t. I assumed that there was something interesting about them – they had some talent that brought them to fame? No. They accomplished something that thousands of stray dogs across America can manage. I was happier not knowing.)

{ 4 comments }