My tooth now hurts like hell after the dentist cleaned around it. He gave me antibiotics because my tooth (or the gums) has an infection.

Say, do you suppose I could temporarily be like a komodo dragon, where I could bite someone and just wait a few days for the bacteria in my mouth to cause the person to die of infection?

Maybe. Human bites are pretty nasty to start with.

tommy, I've had that problem off and on for years now. I solved it by buying a waterpik. I've brushed and flossed and still managed to get bits of food out with a waterpik rinse. Gums are crazy.

What makes that Jeffster performance even better is the backdrop.

Say, do you suppose I could temporarily be like a komodo dragon, where I could bite someone and just wait a few days for the bacteria in my mouth to cause the person to die of infection?

Will you be taking suggestions for the munchees?

Will you be taking suggestions for the munchees?

You know Dick Cheney still has a Secret Service detail, right?

A blog post by a guy whose dog went blind: [link]

It's really amazing. In far less time than you'd ever guess, she adapted-- far, far better than I ever realized would be possible. I made the usual mistake of anthropomorphizing the animal I live with. Her brain just works differently than ours do: I'm told when they go blind, dogs just think something along the lines of "It's nighttime always now. Huh. How about that." and they get on with it. Plus, they're much less avid readers than us, and, of course, their primary sense is smell, so they're in a much better position to give up sight than, say, me.

Virginia learned how to navigate the yard and the house. She checks for open doors with her snout, she uses her ears far more than before it seems-- you can 'remote control' her through unfamiliar territory by clapping or yelling, and she'll make a straight vector to the recognized sound source. Plus, she got rid of her phobia of men who fit some mold from her past, because, apparently, the nose gives everyone a fair shake.

I knew she's really adapted when I saw her chasing squirrels. And doing a surprisingly good job of it. I made a little diagram here showing a bit of how I think she does it: the nose gives a general radar-like image of squirrel locations; the ears, each pivoting independently, are triangulating rapid movement and locations with some advanced unconscious dog-math; she has a good map of the yard in her brain, and I think she gets more information from her paws about the surface she's on, which must help pinpoint where she is in her mind's map.

A friend's dog has recently gone blind, and she does all of that. According to my friend's research, dogs have very good spatial memory, so their house is all laid out for her still in her mind.

My previous dog went blind towards the end of her life, and my current dog is now deaf (progressively with age, not congenitally).

I don't think the blind dog ever even noticed or cared; with the deaf one, it's hard to get his attention or wake him up, and we take care not to startle him, but once we have his attention he's fine. I worry much more about the deafness, if he ever got out of the yard unattended, or if some disaster happened inside the house.

This is how bad of a day today is... I am in the living room and can see my trash can. I just went and yelled at a middle school aged kid to take the GIANT bag of trash that he dumped into our trash can out.

He looked at me plaintively and said, "But ours is full."

My reply was "I'm sorry."

I don't know why other than I hate when people fuck with our trash -- including those who dig around in the recycling.

I should have also yelled "GET OFF MY LAWN" and shook my cane.