As I look back across my seventeen years on this planet, I can see that I am a soul in search of a hero. My first recollection of needing a hero was in my third year. Grandma came every Wednesday night to take me to her regular Bingo game where I dazzled and delighted the other grandmas with my witty nursery rhymes and clever songs. On the ride to the big game, Grandma coached me to answer, “President of the United States,” whenever one of the old ladies asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. In 1998, being the President has lost its appeal. I don’t want to be fifty-two, fighting both a Viagra addiction and a dysfunctional Congress that wants to impeach me. Being the most powerful man in the world just isn’t what it used to be.

I went through the normal selection process of the standard heroes, but as the years passed, I failed to make that special bond that leads to a lifelong commitment. TenderHeart is caring and sharing, but—like Hamlet—Carebears have trouble taking decisive action. Batman (chiropterarum homo sapiens) relates better with chiropterae than he does with homines sapientes. Michael Corleone lacks sensitivity. Han Solo is brave in Starwars; yet, in the final analysis, he is just a deadbeat who stiffed Jabba the Hutt. Last year, John Elway won the Super Bowl, but his own coach doesn’t trust him enough to allow Elway to call a single play.

In high school, it became painfully obvious to me that I was different: a man with no hero is always an outsider. The only car in the student parking lot without a bumper sticker was mine. All the other cars were decorated with signs proudly announcing the owner’s commitment to a sports figure, a rock star, or a political candidate; even the school bus had a “Go Broncos” sticker. I longed for that special moment in life when I could connect with a hero by performing that sacred ceremony of attaching my commitment with glue to the bumper of my car.

Last Saturday morning, I was answering my e-mail—with both the stereo and television playing to provide the proper amount of ambient noise to drive my parents out of the room—when the power went out. Deprived of electricity, I decided to entertain myself with pre-historic technology and began reading a book on Eastern religions. The first chapter convinced me to look inward for my hero; he should be someone like me, only better and more complete. He needed to be a thinking competitor who took joy in making a plan and executing it. He would be a modern hunter who stalked his prey with a combination of the latest technology and his own natural talent. A string of tragedies that would send a Greek hero whining blindly into exile would not dent the spirit of my American hero. He would always try again. Even if success never touched his hand, my hero would take satisfaction in knowing that the supreme act is the hunt, not the kill. Then the power came back on.

In a sudden, blinding surge of excited electrons that danced across the cathode ray tube, my own great American hero was finally revealed to me. He was strapped to an Acme rocket sled that was suspended in the air over the Grand Canyon. He even waved goodbye to me just before gravity sent him crashing to the bottom. In less than an hour, I was gluing my new “Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius” sticker to the bumper of my car. Life is good!

–Christopher Landauer, Super Genius

Today marks the one year anniversary of my enlightenment to the true state of the shelter system in this country, its sordid history, and the hope for a better future. What a profound impact the words and research of Nathan Winograd have had on my outlook towards the animal rights and animal welfare movements, my views toward breeding and owning animals, and the duty we have to do right by them in all respects.

Before I read Redemption, I had a rather negative attitude toward the breeder ethic of taking their puppies back at any time for any reason. While I agree with everything I said then, I put such a clause in the contracts I signed with the buyers of my puppies. Why? After reading how incompetent and defeatist the shelter system really is, there is no way I’d ever want an animal I love to end up in one.

I had the mistaken idea that shelters were positive upbeat places where used dogs could find new homes. I had no idea that killing was such an ingrained element of the culture, defeatism the rule not the exception, and community outreach an unfulfilled burden instead of the core mission.

I had no idea that the ASPCA had abandoned their core principles and I didn’t appreciate how antithetical the roles of animal advocacy and animal control really are.

I got everything I wanted out of the book, and more.

Give yourself a gift this Chrismas and pick up a copy of Redemption. You won’t be the same again.

You see, when I read his name combined with his work in San Francisco, I immediately thought that he must be related to Terry Winograd, one of the best Computer Science professors I had at Stanford. After all, how many Winograds can there be in the bay area, let alone on the Stanford campus; they must be related especially since they have more than a passing resemblance to each other. If Nathan is anything like what I assume is his father, then he must be an engaging speaker with a soft style that belies a razor sharp intellect.

I read his online material about feral cat populations at Stanford and was rather impressed that despite being accosted on several occasions by the mutant black squirrels on campus, I never once recall even the slightest annoyance by a cat, despite there (supposedly) being a sizable feral population on campus. If they’re still there, they are unobtrusive and seemingly innocuous. I don’t recall ever seeing a mouse or a rat, and can’t say I ever smelled urine or stepped in cat feces. If you’d argue that cats would be detrimental to bird populations, the plethora of owls, hummers, and abundant species in between would suggest otherwise and the Stanford Cat Network makes a pretty convincing argument that saving cats is not endangering birds.

According to Winograd, a feral cat population that numbered between 500 and 1,500 in 1990 is today a community of 50 spayed and neutered cats. At a sustained level of 4-10% of what it was at its peak, without the unneeded killing of a single cat, the Stanford Cat Network would have to be called a resounding success.

Given the reviews and a decent bet that he can write as well as his father, I bought Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America.

I wanted to write at least one post before I read it, giving my honest guess about what the message might be and to document my comparative ignorance of the shelter situation in the U.S.

To me, most of the rhetoric coming out of the various animal crusader movements is off-putting and obnoxious, filled with slogans that don’t make sense and are frankly offensive. The “buy a puppy and kill a shelter dog” rhetoric pretty much just disgusts me, and removed any desire for me to learn more.

But I have a feeling that all of that is about to change, and nothing is better for the growth of the intellect than to be proven wrong or enlightened to a topic you’re in the dark about. Everyone seems to agree that Winograd is not your average bleeding heart gimme-gimme type, and on all accounts he seems to be a potential for a “true genius” that is being harped on by the “confederacy of dunces” according to my favorite of theories.

Several warning flags alerted me that I might not enjoy this book as much as others have. First, the liberal use of the word “compassion” all over the cover. Often, this is a political code word used by lefties to justify pork projects that don’t work and create a culture of dependency and by righties to abandon fiscal conservatism and libertarian ideals with their own vote-buying pet projects. Both parties use the word to whitewash what really amounts to either a nanny state or fascist interference into the economy or individuals’ social lives. Given that Winograd is an ex-lawyer from the Bay Area, there is a 95% chance he’s a lefty… maybe he’s a socialist anti-capitalist too.

“Compassion” is an attack word: people never use it to describe themselves, yet they often site its lack in others as justification for otherwise unpopular or nonsensical redistribution programs. When a socialist with a bleeding-heart’s compassion outgrows their own means to provide relief, they almost universally demand that other people who “have” aren’t doing enough for the “have nots.” They combine this with the anti-democratic notion that their power to influence wealth should be proportional to how much they “care,” not how much they have.

In essence, this is the same mentality as the protest movement. Protesting isn’t democratic, it’s the exact opposite. It’s using tactics to magnify your voice louder than it really is and to drown out the voices of the larger opposition. It’s tyranny of the minority. Obstructing commerce, trespassing, destruction of private property, inciting a riot, and vandalism are terrorist techniques, not democracy. They might be justified, but that doesn’t make them democratic. This is the game plan of wackos like PeTA.

So why is all this relevant to Redemption? Well, this is the milieu from which I would suspect on first glance that Wi
nograd is coming from. Guilt by association, so to speak.

But there are other things that make me feel that this book and Winograd’s argument might be different. First, the Stanford Cat Network is run “in agreement with, but not funded by” Stanford University. Interesting, a cause that doesn’t have its hands in the deepest pockets it can find.

Second, Terry Winograd is such a captivating professor because he combines two distant disciplines, computer science and modalities of human interaction, to great effect. His book and class is on Human Computer Interaction and all the issues regarding how we translate our organic wants and needs into digital processes and likewise how we interpret output from lifeless and predetermined systems with our social lens was a highlight of my undergrad experience. He managed to take the most interesting aspects of computers and human behavior and show how they relate.

Winograds are probably people who don’t think along trite two dimensional models. From what others are saying, Winograd is advocating a new path, a different direction, and just maybe he has found a way to combine the best of two different fields just like his father.

Third, I like people who come out with seemingly outlandish theories that defy all “conventional wisdom.” These people are the ones that push us forward and who find elegant solutions to complex problems that have evaded solution by generations of “experts.” These people are typically visionaries and their detractors are the confederacy of dunces who would rather wallow in the dark than face the light. Results based assessments versus theory base assessments are always superior (what actually works versus what sounds good).

Fourth, the first sentence of his book, “the Myth of Pet Overpopulation” rings very true with what I have observed to be true. I don’t believe there is a pet overpopulation problem and have yet to be shown any convincing evidence that there is one. The notion that there are homeless pets in no way demonstrates an overpopulation problem, just as the existence of homeless people doesn’t in any way support the notion of human overpopulation. It took me years of planning and months of intensive searching to find my two current Border Collies and I had to seek out of my home state before I found either of them. I have yet to see packs of wild feral dogs anywhere other than the third world countries I’ve visited, and the dog friendly places like dog parks and superstores are busy, but hardly overcrowded with too many dogs.

I’ve seen documentaries on Puppy Mills on TV, but the very existence of a low cost provider speaks to a burgeoning market, not an over population problem. Signs of overpopulation would be too many dogs over running every venue for dog activity, tons of stray an feral dogs wandering around and setting up wild colonies. News reports of farmers complaining about excessive predation on their flocks of chickens, sheep, and other small game. There would be more breeders than you could care to shake a stick at and they’d all be selling pups at dirt cheap prices. Mall pet stores wouldn’t be the low end of the market, they’d be comparatively high class compared to the masses of wild born puppies and get-rich-quick schemers, and the US would be exporting the excess puppies instead of importing them.

People wouldn’t be paying a premium for pet food, vet care, and dog toys. Nor would the standard of living of today’s pets be higher than ever before in history.

People who speak of human overpopulation are welcome to sterilize or even kill themselves to solve the problem. Few have the, erm, balls. But plenty of zealots have latched on to the eco-terrorist/green/vegan/environmental band wagon that says humans are a plague and pets are too, but since we can’t kill humans, killing pets will have to do.

That’s my greatest hope for this book, that Winograd uses facts and logic and data instead of zealotry and dogma, that he makes me want to support his movement instead of shun it, and that he acknowledges the facts as they are and gives credit where it’s due instead of the slactivist tactic of blaming someone else and then bitching for them to fix it.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

So what drew the click through to this site? My justification (being born a month early) for always being late:

I feel that this justifies me to be a few minutes late to just about every appointment so the cosmos stays in balance.

But some of them are fun and serve a purpose. So here are my answers to the two recent Meme games I’ve been invited to. First up, 4 THINGS Meme:

N.B. Being the nonconformist that I am, I choose to ignore the limitation or suggestion of only 4 answers to each prompt.

Some Jobs I have had in my life: Marketing Consultant for Electronic Arts, Founder of a highly successful treasure hunting forum, President of the Colorado Junior Classical League, Technical Consultant for a major Lawfirm, Real Estate Agent, Student Representative to the CO State Senate Subcommittee on Gifted and Talented Education, Financial Manager of La Casa Italiana at Stanford University, Alumni Co-Chair of the Youth Advisory Board of the Young American’s Bank, Congress Captain of the Speech and Debate Team at Cherry Creek High School, Border Collie Breeder

Some Places I have lived in my life: Denver, Colorado => Cherry Hills Village, Colorado => Stanford University, CA => Palo Alto, CA => Back to Colorado

Some Movies I’ve watched more than once: The Devil’s Advocate, Dune, The Usual Suspects, The Boondock Saints, Graveyard of the Fireflies, Crash, Traffic, Patton, LOTR, Gattaca, Closely Watched Trains, Krull, The Bunny Picnic


Some TV Shows I watch: House, Battlestar Galactica, Nip/Tuck, Deadwood, Rome, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Sopranos (early seasons), SeaQuest DSV, Fraggle Rock, 24, Monk, Family Guy, South Park, The Shield, LOST (only in marathons, constant cliff hangers are annoying)

Some Places I Have Been:

States:
Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island

Countries:
Canada, USA, Mexico, Spain, Morocco, Gibraltar, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Vatican City, Israel, Egypt

Some of My Favorite Foods: Ravioli, Steamed Chinese Dumplings, Macaroni and Cheese, Stuffed Cabbage, Pumpkin Pie, Spinach and Artichoke dip, Baked Brie, Lo Mein, Prime Rib

Some Places I’d rather be right now: On a ranch in Southern Spain, Outside a warm hut near the arctic circle where I could observe the Aurora Borealis, In the market in Ancient Rome with a pocket full of coin, One thousand years in the future.

Some Things I am looking forward to this year: Competing with my dogs and training my puppies, Getting a new Jeep, Watching Pacific Life go down in flames in the court case I am assisting with and all of the clients getting their money back and then some, The end to election coverage on the news which has been going on for way too long, the return of the final season of Battlestar Galactica, The Deadwood Movies, Keeping up with the puppies and their new families.

Next is the 7 THINGS Meme, for which I’ve been tagged by Fay at the Country Livin’ Blog.

1. I was born a month premature by Caesarian section. I feel that this justifies me to be a few minutes late to just about every appointment so the cosmos stays in balance. I am never early and rarely on time. Despite being tiny and blue at birth, my head maintained its lovely shape from being spared passage through the birth canal. My parents were told to put me in the window with the houseplants upon taking me home from the hospital to keep my bilirubin levels in check. I’ve been in the 95%+ percentile in height and weight ever since.

2. I was voted “Most Likely To Be Sober” by my Freshman dorm, and I’m proud to say that I deserved it. I have no moral or religious hang ups about drugs, I just think they are incredibly stupid and I hate not being in control of all of my faculties. I’m in no way a prohibitionist and will have a drink if the occasion suits it, and I’d even advocate for the mass legalization and regulation (read: sin tax) of numerous other common drugs besides cigarettes and alcohol. I see no reason why the US should be sustaining every country from Mexico on south with an illegal drug business that we could replicate cheaper, safer, and more economically right here at home.

I’ve never tried anything harder than Tequila, nor will I and I find smoking of any kind rather disgusting.

3. I have really good relative pitch, which means that I can whistle or sing most songs in tune but off key. Given a few minutes and a harmonica I could probably transcribe and play most common songs using my own notation, but it’s likely that it won’t be in the same key as the original.

Despite years and years of lessons I don’t read music well at all, but I can memorize the notes and the styling for a whole concert with little effort if only I can hear someone else play the notes first. The notes on the page only make sense if I can associate it with sounds. I can’t sight read worth anything and to this day can’t tell you how the mathematics work out, despite playing the Saxaphone since middle school, the recorder since elementary school, and winning the State Math Contest. I am mediocre at improvisational jazz on the saxophone but excellent at impromptu speech.

4. If I had to pick a designer dog, I’d probably go with a Bordernese, a cross between a Border Collie and a Bernese Mountain Dog. Although larger, dumber, and thicker boned than a Border Collie, I rather like the Bernese and I’ve admired the handful of Bordernese dogs I’ve met in public. There’s something altogether appealing about really big dogs and no other big breed really complements a Border Collie as much as a Bernese Mountain Dog.

Not only do their colorings match, but the Bernese temperament is a good counter to the Border Collie, and the Border Collie certainly improves the elements of the Bernese that I’d find lacking.

5. Normally, I speak in the tenor range and so fast and have to remind myself to slow down. While I sound clear in my own head, recordings usually come out garbled and some people have a hard time following. Other fast talkers have no problems keeping up.

When I debate I speak very loud and in a pitch an octave lower than my normal voice. This trait earned my circle of friends in my Freshman dorm the title of “the loud talkers” as we’d keep the RA up during our late night philosophy fests.

When I speak in public, I rarely have the same problem with pitch or speed and sound like a news caster. This is common among Coloradoans as we have little to no accent. I find that not having a strong accent makes me susceptible to local accents and I’ll often pick one up if I’m visiting somewhere for a few days.

6. I can juggle while riding a bicycle. I learned to juggle because I was always an over achiever and eager to please. This landed me in trouble when the middle school drama teacher asked me if I could juggle and I said yes even though I didn’t know the first thing about it. She cast me in the school play that was opening in 2 days as a jester, so I had to learn fast.

As a child I was always jealous of a kid who used to ride his bike down my street with no hands. I could never figure it out. Then in college, when I was on a bike more the first week than I had been in the decade prior, I finally figured out the secret to riding with no hands. Of course I had to combine the two, although no one was there to film my amazing feat.

7. I was a driver in the longest Presidential motorcade in history.

The pundits gave us a 0.0457 chance to beat the number one ranked USC, who hasn’t lost at home since the September 2001 (also STANFORD!!!!) and whose coach had only lost 12 total games at USC. Make that un-Lucky 13 now.

Stanford won 1 (one) game last year. Our quarterback this year is out with a brain virus.

And WE JUST TOOK DOWN THE #1 team in College football lead by a sophomore quarterback in his debut start!

“Trojans have little to gain against the Cardinal, except rest for some injured players.“

USC coaches and players refuse to acknowledge it.

The record of the opponent, the gargantuan point spread and upcoming games against other struggling teams draw nary a reaction from the second-ranked Trojans.

But today’s Pacific 10 Conference game against Stanford is the start of a three-game stretch that should allow USC to regain its form, nurse some key players back to health and audition others for what figures to be a difficult five-game finish.

The unbeaten Trojans are coming off a sloppy three-point victory over Washington and will be without two of their three leading rushers, two starting offensive linemen and possibly a starting cornerback today at the Coliseum.

And yet they are a near-six-touchdown favorite over Stanford.”

Yeah, that’s right, little to gain, but EVERYTHING to lose.

If this were another opponent and another venue, there might be trepidation. USC is hurting physically and not playing up to its customary high standards (see last week’s victory at Washington).

But with Stanford visiting the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum today, oddsmakers see no reason for the No. 2 Trojans to worry.

USC by 40, they say.

Of course, the Trojans would be a prohibitive favorite against Stanford under any circumstances. But fact is, the Cardinal (1-3, 0-3 Pacific-10) is more beaten down than USC (4-0, 2-0).

Redshirt sophomore Tavita Pritchard – not fifth-year senior T.C. Ostrander – will start at quarterback. Ostrander had a seizure Sunday and will be re-evaluated next week. Pritchard has not started since high school.

If Pritchard goes down or is ineffective, next in line would be redshirt freshman Alex Loukas, who has never played a college game.

All told, Stanford will be without six players who were expected to make significant contributions, including left tackle Allen Smith (knee) and running back Toby Gerhart (knee).

Still, Cardinal players put on a happy face as they walked off the practice field Thursday. Yes, their team is one of the biggest underdogs for a Pac-10 game in the history of the conference. But that hasn’t crushed their spirits.

Tavita Pritchard showed the kind of skill and brains that Stanford quarterbacks are famous for. Maybe Stanford will never be able to recruit the best defensive line, and perhaps we’ll never outweigh any other team in the country save those east coast Ivy teams…. but when it comes to the positions that require the brains and the brawn, Stanford has been producing some of the best. Tavita Pritchard should be proud and I wouldn’t be surprised if John Elway isn’t picking up the phone right now to give that young man a call.

As I look back across my seventeen years on this planet, I can see that I am a soul in search of a hero. My first recollection of needing a hero was in my third year. Grandma came every Wednesday night to take me to her regular Bingo game where I dazzled and delighted the other grandmas with my witty nursery rhymes and clever songs. On the ride to the big game, Grandma coached me to answer, “President of the United States,” whenever one of the old ladies asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. In 1998, being the President has lost its appeal. I don’t want to be fifty-two, fighting both a Viagra addiction and a dysfunctional Congress that wants to impeach me. Being the most powerful man in the world just isn’t what it used to be.

I went through the normal selection process of the standard heroes, but as the years passed, I failed to make that special bond that leads to a lifelong commitment. TenderHeart is caring and sharing, but—like Hamlet—Carebears have trouble taking decisive action. Batman (chiropterarum homo sapiens) relates better with chiropterae than he does with homines sapientes. Michael Corleone lacks sensitivity. Han Solo is brave in Starwars; yet, in the final analysis, he is just a deadbeat who stiffed Jabba the Hutt. Last year, John Elway won the Super Bowl, but his own coach doesn’t trust him enough to allow Elway to call a single play.

In high school, it became painfully obvious to me that I was different: a man with no hero is always an outsider. The only car in the student parking lot without a bumper sticker was mine. All the other cars were decorated with signs proudly announcing the owner’s commitment to a sports figure, a rock star, or a political candidate; even the school bus had a “Go Broncos” sticker. I longed for that special moment in life when I could connect with a hero by performing that sacred ceremony of attaching my commitment with glue to the bumper of my car.

Last Saturday morning, I was answering my e-mail—with both the stereo and television playing to provide the proper amount of ambient noise to drive my parents out of the room—when the power went out. Deprived of electricity, I decided to entertain myself with pre-historic technology and began reading a book on Eastern religions. The first chapter convinced me to look inward for my hero; he should be someone like me, only better and more complete. He needed to be a thinking competitor who took joy in making a plan and executing it. He would be a modern hunter who stalked his prey with a combination of the latest technology and his own natural talent. A string of tragedies that would send a Greek hero whining blindly into exile would not dent the spirit of my American hero. He would always try again. Even if success never touched his hand, my hero would take satisfaction in knowing that the supreme act is the hunt, not the kill. Then the power came back on.

In a sudden, blinding surge of excited electrons that danced across the cathode ray tube, my own great American hero was finally revealed to me. He was strapped to an Acme rocket sled that was suspended in the air over the Grand Canyon. He even waved goodbye to me just before gravity sent him crashing to the bottom. In less than an hour, I was gluing my new “Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius” sticker to the bumper of my car. Life is good!

–Chris Landauer, Super Genius