The ol’ blog has a new look today. Gone are the mat – textured header and the grid background in the right column. And a few other things went with it, most of which made the site look clunky. I like the new colors, and there are lots of new toys and easier formatting behind the scenes, for the geeksome blogger.

This is all due to an upgrade by Blogger, and consolidation with their megalocorporate parent, Google. Unnerving in an Orwellian sense? Sure, but it’s still free so it’s all good. I’ve been tempted several times, some recently, to switch to WordPress. These changes forestall that irksome possibility.

Are you watching me write? Good. Discreet applause please, for using geeksome and irksome in the same post.

… that’s better. I turned off the TV. It’ll turn itself back on at 10:00, so I can watch Numbers. I think it’s a rerun tonight though.

Looks like the neighbors across the alley are stringing lights tonight. Which is nice. I’ve had mine up for several days now, just a simple string around the balcony and down the stairs. Maybe the neighbor has aspirations of winning the association’s decoration contest next week. He doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell, and neither do I. Some of the condos have really dressed it up this year. There’s a unit a couple of streets over with bushes that look like a magical train. The wheels turn and stuff. The kind of thing that can make a six year old go completely fruitcake with Christmas glee.

If it seems like I’m kind of vamping here, faking it because I wanted to blog about something and had no ideas at all, that’s about accurate. Last night, as I was kicking back in the tub reading the New Yorker, I was struck stupid with a brilliant idea for a story. But it washed away, as ideas tend to do. So it goes. And tonight I’m mostly looking forward to bedtime. I usually like to stay up, but I’ve got the old Sealy all decked out in wintry flannel sheets, and that’s really going to feel good. I love these little transitions in life, the kind that don’t require medical or funereal ministrations. Just the flannel sheets in winter, the fan blowing on the bed in summer. I am a man easily satisfied by change.

Change is like cologne, a little drop will do it.

and probably don’t even realize it.

Yahoo TV listings have recently been updated to the latest fancy level of complete uselessness. No fault of mine. So for TV listings, I’m going over to zap2it.com. Don’t say I didn’t hook you up.

click toon for better view

2.5 million people have been driven from their homes in Darfur, Sudan. Each day, they face threats that should not be hard for us to imagine – including rape, disease, and starvation; though, if you are like me, you prefer not to imagine them.

These are people. They need our help to put an end to the genocide and they need it NOW. That they are people, in the sense that my friends and family are people, is another concept my brain wants to ignore. They don’t look like us, or dress like us, or let us take the right-of-way at an intersection. They don’t live in cities like us, or talk about the stock market or literature. Isn’t it easier to turn away from their deaths, by the thousands, than it would be if they were Americans?

Well, I believe God loves them each and every one just the same as He loves me. And my weak-minded willingness to tolerate their suffering is pitiful and irrelevant. So please join me in taking the first step in stopping the violence.

Use this link to sign the Save Darfur Coalition’s petition urging President Bush and the UN Secretary-General to take immediate steps to stop the killing. Maybe we can make a difference in the lives of millions of people in the region who desperately need our help.

The Save Darfur Coalition is urging the international community to prevent further killings, displacement, and rape by deploying the UN peacekeeping force that has already been authorized, strengthen the understaffed African Union force that is already in Darfur, establish a no-fly zone, increase humanitarian aid, and ensure access for delivery of food, medication and other essential supplies.

I’m listening to Charlie Brown Christmas music on the laptop, and watching the minutes whirl by like snowflakes (yes, I’ve seen some at some point in the distant past) while my thoughts settle into drifts. A pure white winter wasteland, devoid of sentience, let alone cognition. I mean the tree is lit, but nobody’s home. But man, this music is cool. The album came out in ’65 – with the TV show – the year I was four.

Back in those days we didn’t listen with our laptops and I-Pods. It took a strong man to to hand crank whatever needed cranking, be it the model-T, the ice cream maker, or the gramophone.

We’d lost our innocence with the fall of Camelot too years and a month earlier, but a sweet jazz piano riff to the tune of O Tannenbaum could still turn heads. We couldn’t have envisioned the soulsucking cynicism of the Patriot Act.

I never thought it was such a bad little tree. … maybe it just needs a little love.

Oh, I’m rambling … here, watch for yourself.

Daniel Anderson, Elegy for the Dying Dog.

Trust me, it will clear that fine gray Monday dust that’s settled on your soul. Prepare a hankie, though.

Are cops afraid of dogs? I’m afraid so. They’re afriad of all of us, especially gangs, but dogs just completely piss them off. There’s the fear of teeth I guess, and the fact that sooner or later, some men who carry guns around just have to shoot something. I’ve been watching the phenomenon for years. And until a recent computer crash, I’d amassed a respectable collection of news stories about cops shooting people’s dogs for stress relief, fun, target practice, and just because at the moment of making a decision a police officer is trained to resort to violence.

I remember when I was a kid in the Boy Scouts, and a veteran local cop gave a speech to our troop. He said that in about 20 years of being a police officer, he had never drawn his gun in the line of duty, because they were trained not to draw unless they intended to fire, not to fire except to kill. He’d never seen the need to kill anyone. And back then, the police didn’t tackle people unless forced to do so. They made you put your hands behind your back, handcuffed you, frisked you, and led you away to jail.

Now I watch TV – the documentary Cops shows – and I see that they draw their guns routinely, put people on the ground, tackle them, sit on them, etc. You’ve seen it too. The have batons and teargas and such, but they increasingly pull their Glocks, and more often we see a guy on the ground with a cop’s knee on his neck.

Recently, I saw a Cops show where they’d set up a drug buying sting. People walked up to an undercover cop, bought drugs, and were arrested as they left. Except they weren’t arrested. As each buyer walked away, he was tackled – blindsided – by a cop who flew at him from the shadows off-camera. Then more cops piled on. I’m saying each one was literally tackled, like in football, slammed to the pavement, by screaming officers. They were breaking the law, they got busted, but dammit they’re still citizens and entitled to fair treatment and due process of law. Instead, their civil rights were grossly violated. And no, this wasn’t an episode from Moscow or Beijing. It was someplace like St. Louis or Kansas City. And the cops went there with cameras – they knew it was being filmed.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a law-abiding, law-respecting, citizen. I respect the police and the courts, and I’m certainly not suggesting that the cops should put themselves at unnecessary risk. But something is getting out of control somewhere. There’s been a shift in the way The Authorities view The People, the people’s property, and – most offensive – people’s little pets.

TELL CITY, Ind. – Mayor Gayle Strassel says the city’s street department was wrong to dump dogs shot by city police officers onto the bank of the Ohio River behind a near-downtown flood wall, but she defends the shooting of the animals.

Complaints surfaced last weekend after Tell City residents questioned the presence of yhe deteriorating carcasses of three dogs along the riverbank.

Perry County does not have an animal control officer, and the dogs had been shot by police, Chief David Faulkenberg said, after they exhibited aggressive tendencies toward officers. A county ordinance requires dogs to be on a leash. [Link]

One of the three dogs shot and dumped by these people, who are armed and trained to defend themselves against humans by non-lethal means, was a boxer named Harley. You can read about Harley here. And expect lots of posts on this topic, because cops are afraid of dogs, they’re triggerhappy, and I’m rebuilding my collection of these stories. This chickenshit behavior has to stop.