This is a picture of Sam from this entry back when Sam’s parents had an engagement crawfish boil in 2003. Sam liked the crawdads so much he’d eat them when they were still pinchy, which is both hilarious and nasty.

This week Sam was diagnosed with a grossly enlarged heart, cause unknown, and pretty unusual for a dog as young as Sam (he was about six?). Mrs Heathen and I spent last night and Thursday night hanging out with Sam and Joy and baby Gwen, partly as a favor to Joy, and partly because we loved him, too. His breathing was terribly labored, but he seemed to like having people near him.

About an hour ago, Joy and Carl called us to tell us he’d passed on at about seven this morning.

Bye, Sam. Lots of people miss you.

Our generation, Heathen, will have much to answer for and much to explain as we grow older. The 80s were an odd time; the west was in thrall to vicious right-wing philosophies promulgated by Reagan and Thatcher, and the world of the arts reacted accordingly. It is possible, we presume, to explain 80s-era covert military adventurism like Iran-Contra and the like as an outgrowth of the culture of fear that thrived in the Cold War. After all, we watched films about how to handle post-nuclear-exchange fallout in gradeschool, and bravely tried to pretend such an exchange wouldn’t destroy the world as we knew it, and that it also wasn’t in some way inevitable. But this, too, is understandable in the socioeconomic and geopolitical wake of the second World War, and the subsequent cooling of the US-Soviet relationship that probably peaked at Yalta.

Still, much remains of the 80s that children today cannot hope to understand or even sympathize with. They will look back on these things with horror and revulsion, and be utterly incapable of reacting in any way that does not include wholesale dismissal and damnation, and there is no excuse or justification we can offer.

We speak, of course, of this guy’s hair, and all sort of related crimes preserved forever by the Intarwubs. Children of today, we’re sorry. Especially for this, too. And also this.

But not for this or this. Not at all.

Update: Final link fixed.

Vern has joined the choir invisible.

Those close to Heathen are of course aware that we spent part of the week in Dayton, Ohio. Of Ohio, we say only this: It is not a coincidence that the Wright Brothers are from Ohio. Only a place like Ohio could push men to find new, faster methods of transportation, presumably in their search to put Dayton, et. al., behind them.

Hat tip to M.A.D. for pointing this out.

In Wolfsburg, Germany, Volkswagen has a fully automated garage made up of 20-storey cylinders wherein new, undelivered cars are stored. A robotic car-picker fetches the vehicles when the owners arrive. (Via BoingBoing.)

The United Church of Christ, a fairly normal Christian church, created a spot emphasizing their inclusive nature. The pseudochristian Right spends so much time talking about who’s going to hell, they must’ve figured it was about time someone associated with a Christian church said something in public that actually had something to do with Christ’s teachings. It’s a brilliant and lovely spot, and you should watch it.

However, you can pretty much only see it online, since NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, et. al., have all refused to air it. Tthey’ll cheerlead for the Administration and the war, but the idea that God loves everyone is too “controversial” for TV. We’re not sure how that worked, but we’re pretty certain the degree to which the ad would’ve made the right wingers apoplectic played a role.

So, late last week, half of the Heathen World HQ Master Bedroom Closet fell to the ground with a resounding and mildly disturbing thud. The culprit? Frankly, while the hardware was quite loaded, the real problem is that the builder chose unapologetically shitty closet hardware in the first place. So fuck him.

Anyway, Mrs Heathen and I thought about it, and did a bit of research, and then braved the wilds of the Galleria Area yesterday to fetch a $400 pile of Elfa closet hardware. This stuff is wholly unshitty, and not THAT expensive for what you get (four bills got us 8 linear feet of stuff, including two levels of hanging rail in one segment and a column of shelves at one end). The whole system hangs from a rail you can, if you like, screw into the framing timbers at the top of the closet wall (that’s what we did; Elfa insists you can hang the whole thing with drywall anchors, but we’re pretty sure that’s bullshit). Ten minutes with a level, a pencil, and a drill and you’ve done all the actual work you need to do. Everything else is closet lego.

So, the upshot is that Chief Heathen’s end of the closet is roughly 900% more attractive than it was before, especially after the more or less unavoidable purge associated with moving everything out of and then back into the closet. Seriously: we’ve gone back upstairs to admire it several times since the installation. The downside to this is that Mrs Heathen’s half of the closet — the part drastically less used prior to her arrival — is still rockin’ the craptastic white wire stuff, as is the end wall of our end. However, she has an Elfa catalog, and we’re pretty sure she’ll have a plan by the time we get back from Dayton later this week.

Oh yes. Dayton. We still don’t know why a Silicon Valley company would put their demo and education center in a city so hard to get to simply, but they didn’t ask us when they built it. We understand putting it in the midwest, which makes it reachable from both coasts, but what the hell is wrong with Chicago? We suspect they’re getting kickbacks from airlines for all the connecting flights they’ve generated. Weasels.

After passing on these startling findings to Our Man In Chile, a conversation about wildlife ensued. O.M.I.C. was at the same time observing a very small hummingbird outside his window, which led us to the following conversation.

O.M.I.C.: i am in no position to dispute their findings
Heathen: Because the mountainous regions of Chile are utterly and tragically devoid of enormous reptilian predators?
O.M.I.C.: among other reasons, yes

Then, slightly later:

O.M.I.C.: there is an impossibly small hummingbird outside
O.M.I.C.: it’s like a large bee
Heathen: I got some (poor) pictures of a normal sized on in Mendocino on our honeymoon.
Heathen: It kept folding space and suddenly being somewhere else.
Heathen: And was therefore hard to photograph.
Heathen: Frankly, the whole idea of alligators is pretty bizarre.
O.M.I.C.: it is much easier to explain hummingbird behavior if you assume not that they are very light, but are instead infinitely dense
O.M.I.C.: re: alligators, i think it is very important, at the end of the day, to be thankful that you were not eaten by something. without alligators we lose this small satisfaction.

So there’s that.

We’re sure you do. If you agree, drop us a line; some friends of Heathen have been fostering a litter of kittens, and have five left. They need good homes. We here at Heathen World HQ heartily endorse the adoption of cats (and dogs) if at all possible.

Kinda gettin’ the idea that Heathen are busy, aren’t you?