The Curmudgeonly Professor

Mandatory Reading Lesson for All Dog Owners Who Use the Jordan River Trail (Or any other public trail or area)

Today, dog owners, we are going to have an elementary reading lesson. Look at and read carefully the following sign:

Now read along with me, starting at the top "All Dog Owners . . ." and then read carefully down to the bottom of the sign. Is there any portion of this message you do not understand? Can I explain any thing to you that you have failed to grasp? Do you know what a leash is? Did you know your dog shouldn't do its duty on the trail? Of course you don't know that; that's exactly why you bring your dog out here so you don't have to clean up after it at home. Did it occur to you that dogs running loose and running up to other people some times frighten them?

Did your mothers not make you clean your room? Do you clean up after your dog at home? I am puzzled about your level of understanding and your gross lack of consideration for other people, especially dozens and dozens of little kids who aren't as careful as we adults about where they step. Unfortunately, playing the hall monitor game never gets one anywhere, since some fraction of people are rude idiots who could care less about anyone else. But at least I can rant about them on my blog even though none of them, unfortunately, will ever read it. I am sure that after I croak a certain large number of people who never should have been given a dog license will continue to exercise what they must assume is a constitutional God-given right to let their dogs run loose to annoy other people and other dogs, and to take care of their bathroom chores for everyone to step in. Heaven help us.

The Worst Person on the Jordan River Trail on June 26 2008

This morning a jogging woman was accompanied by two very large unleashed dogs. Apparently she is either (a) illiterate and can't read the signs, or (b) feels that she has a special mandate to be exempt from the rules and thereby make herself a nuisance to every one else on the trail. The Worst Person Today on the Jordan River Trail!

The Worst Persons on the Jordan River Trail

With due credit to Keith Olberman's "Worst Persons in the World" routine on MSNBC, here are the worst persons who use the Jordan River Trail:

3. People who litter the beautiful trail with pop cans, water bottles, and other trash.
2. Dog owners who think it would be wonderful to let their dogs run loose and don't leash them, often terrifying other people. Signs clearly indicate that ALL dogs must be leashed.
1. And, no surprise, the worst persons on the Jordan River Trail, if not among the worst in the world, are those dog owners who ignore the signs about cleaning up their own dog waste and simply let their dogs deposit their day's duty on the trail for hundreds of others to try and avoid, including countless small children. Why do dog owners think that owning a dog and taking it out in public involves absolutely no responsibility for cleaning up after it? Definitely, these people are among the most thoughtless, rude, inconsiderate, thick headed people in the world.

Update on My Gardening Activities

After I took refuge in the house to avoid being stricken by lightning and endured a house-shaking thunder clap, I waited for the sun to come out and resume my planting. I set out 72 petunia plants, two dozen marigolds, a cucumber, a zucchini, and an indefinite number of tomato plants. We have just a small space both in back and in front of our condo lined by a concrete curb to do our own planting. The tomato plant thing is a bit iffy because all winter my wife has said at least once a week, "We are NOT going to set out more than two or three tomato plants next summer." This negative attitude springs from three summers ago when I bought a flat of tomato plants for a bargain and set them all out. Of course, I suspected that the only thing that would grow would be leaves, and that is what happened--a green tomato vine jungle, but no tomatoes. I think there were at least 12 or 15 plants.

Last year we planted a zucchini and a cucumber plant but our gardeners, who do not speak English, hoed them out as weeds despite the fact they each had a protective garden white cap on top of them. We'll try again this year, with instructions to the gardeners to not touch our own little area and mind their own business.

My wife keeps reminding me that I have a degree in agriculture and that I should know stuff about gardening. I keep telling her that agriculture at the University of Wyoming meant range (sagebrush) management, sugar beet and grain production, alfalfa hay, and weeds. I didn't pay much attention to any of that because I knew by then that farming would be way too much hard work and my experience in milking cows at home and working at the University dairy in Laramie taught me that the only good kind of milk comes in a (then glass, now plastic) carton and I never want to get close to another cow under any circumstances. Hey, this isn't New Jersey truck gardening out here, what we do is count the number of range plants per square something or other before the cows chew them all up and then count them again afterward. Not something that caught my attention since I did not intend to spend my life out where the deer and the antelope play, not by a long shot.

So I must confess I did stick a few tomato plants in amongst the petunias. This horticultural accomplishment was in furtherance of a scientific experiment to see if petunias would enhance tomato growth and vice versa. My wife suspects that is what I did, and I will have to check in the morning to see if she whacked them out. She has no confidence whatsoever in my gardening ability, or for that matter, any other home improvement or outside improvement skills, and I know she feels she could not waste her time all winter threatening me not to plant more than two or three tomato plants and then realize she just wasted all that energy. But the plants were left over. What was I to do? Throw them out? I'll keep you up to date later in the summer in case anything survives and grows.

The Daily Crossword Puzzle: Solve it at any Cost

You can always tell the crossword puzzlers in a group. Whenever a word comes up in conversation or in a word game that is standard fare in almost every daily crossword puzzle, nods of recognition appear and knowing glances among puzzlers are shared. Words like "ale", "inn", "ate", and other three-to-five letter simple words are thrown in the daily puzzle mix to ease the pain of coming up with almost-impossible answers like "who was the winner of the 1916 Olympic discus bronze medal?".

My favorite puzzle is The New York Times Crossword. Mondays are almost insultingly easy, Tuesdays a bit more bothersome, Wednesdays are cranking up in annoying difficulties, and by Saturday you have the crossword puzzle from hell. Fridays are certainly no picnic, but yesterday's puzzle (Feb. 22, 2008) was an ingenious and clever masterpiece, with answers like sinequanon for the clue "requirement", and on the loose as the answer for "free." Of course, crossword solving is often viewed as a compulsory pastime for retired people who can, admittedly, be obnoxious in their obsession to find a rare and precious answer. But, according to Carma Wadley, writing in Salt Lake City's Deseret Morning News (Feb. 22, 2008, pp. C1-C2), crossword puzzles "are a part of daily life for an estimated 50 million people." How that number was arrived at remains a mystery, but suffice it to say that many people are addicted to the challenge of the daily puzzle.

A few issues must be resolved if you take up the pastime. First, should you Google? Googling may seem like a legitimate solution to finding answers to clues so arcane, so evil, and so maddening that were inserted by a sadistic crossword puzzle creator who knew that only two people on earth who have the capacity to memorize entire telephone books would ever know the answer. Second, ball-point or pencil? Ball-point pens are my choice because the letters are easier to see when written in large capital letters, although some of my finished Saturday puzzles are virtually indecipherable. Third, what is considered "cheating", or is any reference fair game in competing with some puzzle creator's wicked clues? I basically use two dictionaries, Andrew Swanfeldt's Crossword Puzzle Dictionary which becomes quickly tattered and battered, and Newman and Stark's The Million Word Crossword Dictionary. Then I use Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever for digging out names of directors for, say, a 1929 silent film no one has heard of for nearly a century. My fourth resource is some kind of sports atlas to find the 1946 American League pitcher admitted to the Hall of Fame. If you really want to cheat, Google the name Rex Parker a day or so after the puzzle appears, and he will have solved the puzzle for you. My standard rule is never, never look up the answers in the next days puzzle until I have completed it, by hook or by crook.

Of course, the honorable way to solve an impossible clue is to work the letters from the other direction and deduce the answer by sheer effort, but some times the puzzle creator has numbed us by placing ridiculous clues in both directions, in which case, I consider it getting even, not cheating. Perhaps the main thing I have learned about crosswording is to never, never get attached and married to what seems like a pet obvious solution that you are not prepared to get rid of and try some other possible answers. The other useful guideline is to consider every possible meaning of a word with multiple meanings so you are not locked in to the first meaning that comes to mind.

Carma Wadley provides us with more valuable tips and gives us some interesting tidbits about crossword puzzles and their creators. For instance, I never knew that Will Shortz, the editor and creator of the NYT daily puzzle, started selling crossword puzzles at the age of 14, ultimately got a law degree, but devoted his career to editing and creating crossword puzzles, thus allowing us alternately to cheer or cuss when we try to solve his daily puzzle. Here is the link so you can read the entire Deseret News article. Happy puzzle solving. After all, doing puzzles is supposed to keep us mentally sharp, if not chronically irritated.