🤖 Mitch's newsletter
Minnie is doing much better
We finally got Minnie eating again over the weekend. At first, 90% of her diet was sandwich turkey. It’s pretty good sandwich turkey — Julie and I eat it ourselves. But it’s a lousy diet for a dog. Still, the priority was to to get her to eat anything.
Since Minnie’s health problems started a few weeks ago, I’ve talked to other dog owners who described feeding all kinds of junk food to their sick dogs, just to get them to eat. Our vet said she has a senior dog with a heart condition whom she sometimes feeds take-out burritos. A neighborhood couple with a collie in chemo fed the dog microwave pizza. These are responsible dog owners who care about their dogs’ health and nutrition. But when a dog is sick, the priority is to get them to eat.
Dogs have a powerful food aversion instinct. If they eat a food while they are sick to their stomach, they will associate that food with being sick and shun that food, even if it was formerly a favorite. This can go on for a month, and there is no guarantee they will ever get over it. This is our problem with Minne now. She won’t eat the kibble she ate all her life. She won’t eat the prescription food we gave her — she loved that for a day or two and now it’s a hard nope for her. She won’t eat any of a variety of treats she used to love.
Yesterday, I tried her on Blue Buffalo canned dog food and that was a breakthrough. She loves it! I am optimistic and hopeful this will continue.. If not, well, that was the first brand I tried so I’m optimistic that if she turns her nose up at the Blue Buffalo, we can quickly find another brand more to her liking. People caring for sick dogs say they keep a few different varieties of food around the house and switch around as the dog develops food allergy.
As Minnie eats more, her energy and positive attitude returns. She still seems tired a lot of the time, even by the standards of a a dog, an animal that sleeps up to 20 hours a day. Hopefully her energy and positive attitude will continue to increase. On the other hand, she is a sick old dog, so I’m working on accepting things as they are.
The priority now is to get her weight back up to normal. She’s noticeably lost a lot of weight in the past few weeks. She’s alarmingly skinny.
The Blue Buffalo food is great for a healthy dog (according to my reading — I am by no means an expert on this!). But it’s bad for a dog with kidney failure. In a few weeks, I’d like to transition her to a prescription brand. On the other hand, many dogs with kidney failure never take to the prescription food. If that happens, that will shorten Minnie’s life. On the other hand, food she loves will improve her quality of life. With pets as with people, lifespan vs. quality of life are often in uneasy balance.
I’ve reduced Minnie’s walking from the previous 3+ miles per day to a little bit more than 1 mile per day. And I try to let her set the pace more when we walk.
The Ringer’s Rewatchables podcast discusses “48 HRS,” starring Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. “This is my favorite movie ever. It’s indefensibly racist and got more racist every year.” Me too — I love this movie and yeah it is, as the young people say nowadays, problematic.
A look at the history behind the musical “1776.” It’s surprisingly accurate. youtu.be/ZAHEUe7UV…
How Markdown took over the world.
By Anil Dash:
Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team.”
"What I Saw When I Peeked Over the Edge of Consciousness"
NYTimes writer Jessica Grose visits an unusual conference.
Near-death experiencers are the best dancers. I could identify which attendees at the annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies have been to the brink, because they moved their bodies with un-self-conscious abandon, ripping up the floor of a tent on the grounds of a suburban Chicago Hilton.
Also:
In the weeks since I returned* from the conference, my mind has kept drifting back to a woman I spoke to, Hailey Georgia Harris…. [She was] striking and poised. She had a shaved head and a bright pink backpack. She told me she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 and had been getting treatment ever since, though the disease has progressed from Stage 1 to Stage 4. She is 44 years old and has two sons.
As she began to process her mortality, Harris started listening to people recounting their near-death experiences. “I didn’t have the right words for it at the time, but I would find myself listening to them in the car, and then it became like a nighttime ritual, where I would put them on and I would go to sleep, and I didn’t really share that with anybody, but it just brought me profound peace,” she said.
She felt that after her diagnosis, she hit what she called an edge, “where you can’t go back, but people expect you to go back to your normal life within your circle, your tribe, but you also have one foot into the other side.”
The government is very upset that people are criticizing it for shooting innocent mothers to death in the street. DHS stalked and intimidated a man who protested against state-sponsored killing, issuing him a “WARNING NOTICE” as flimsy as the nonjudicial “warrants” it uses now to bust into people’s homes…. It’s both deadly serious and deeply unserious. What are they afraid of? Well, we already know. Accountability in any form.”
— ICE are heavily armed killers. They’re also huge losers
I brilliantly deleted all the subscribers to my newsletter without having a current backup. Fortunately, I had a backup from late May, so I restored from that.
If you unsubscribed since late May, please accept my apologies and I’m afraid you’re gong to have to unsubscribe again.
If you subscribed since May, well, you’re not seeing this so I’ll just try to beam telepathic apologies in your direction.
Every few weeks I get a Bluesky notification that someone has blocked me. There is no reason for anyone to block me on Bluesky; I seldom reply or @-mention anybody and when I do I don’t criticize or even disagree.
I think I’m on a shared blocklist — but, again, why?
The only thing I can think of is maybe somebody’s distributing blocklists of leftists. But my political influence is slight.
This is puzzling.
A friend points out that I have “journalist” and #DEI in my Bluesky profile, which could explain why I’m getting blocked. I also have he/him in there. I had completely forgotten — it’s been a while since I edited or looked at my profile. Mystery solved. and no I’m not going to edit my profile to remove the offending phrases. Sensitive snowflakes who might be triggered by those words and phrases will be punished by being deprived of my dad jokes and stupid memes.