Roscoe

I have been doing this blog for three weeks now, and I may be reaching the point where the preliminary disclaimers and legal statements are out of the way, and I can get down to actually "blogging" -- whatever THAT turns out to be. Perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way, but I see it as laying a foundation -- not necessarily much fun, but important for everything that will follow.

During those three weeks, the world continued to turn, there were some interesting political developments, local instrumental music groups began their "school-year" season, and Roscoe the cat slipped off somewhere to die. (WARNING: If you would prefer not to read details of a cat's final illness, stop here.)

I have many animal friends, and I am becoming too familiar with animal deaths. Roscoe showed up last fall, full grown, and was friendly and lovable, though he had an unfortunate tendency to "spray" inside. I thought perhaps having him "fixed" would help, but it turned out he had already been fixed in his life before he arrived here. Still, he was a very good cat.

The most notable thing about Roscoe's death was that it took so long. Roscoe had been diagnosed with terminal, inoperable, untreatable, "wildly malignant" cancer at the end of May/beginning of June, with a projected life expectancy of less than one month. The cancer was under his tongue, so it would interfere with his eating, and he drooled a lot and smelled bad -- I took him to the vet for what I assumed was an infected tooth, and that's when the cancer was discovered. The vet prescribed pain medication to be given every other day, and Roscoe took it without complaining much, and never seemed to acknowledge any pain. He would sometimes bleed, and sometimes quite a lot. Occasionally, he would look like a child who had stuck his face into a bowl of ketchup.

His appetite declined over time, or perhaps the pain and difficulty of eating with the cancer under his tongue made it not worth the effort. I am not getting any compensation for stating that he developed a special fondness for Friskies "Mixed Grill" flavor, though towards the end he would mostly sniff at it and walk away. He enjoyed ripping into unopened bags of both dry cat food and dry dog food, and he would eat some of what he tore into. He liked to eat fish and drink milk, though sometimes the milk would get pretty bloody.

I suppose I should mention that he lost a lot of fur and looked awful, and we advised the neighbors of his situation, lest they become alarmed at the site of this smelly, bloody, fur-losing cat. I am happy to point out that even in this condition, children loved him, though their parents might cringe when they cuddled him. I should also mention that his life perhaps could have been prolonged with tube feedings, if that had seemed like a good idea.

Perhaps later in this blog I will discuss animal euthanasia. For now, I will just say that Roscoe continued to live life on his own terms and to the fullest for months after he was expected to be dead. Most nights, he would sleep inside, but for the last few days he preferred staying outside. By the evening of September 17, he was thin and weak, and I spent a long time petting him after he had some milk, and then he got up and took off in an unusual direction. I have not seen him again.

Policies

I have been doing some reading recently regarding blogs, bloggers, and "Codes of Conduct." There seems to be some concern in some circles that blogs may incite or encourage violence and a general lack of civility. At the same time, there is not necessarily any effective way to regulate this, AND you don't want to stifle freedom and creativity.

As I learn more about blogs and blogging, I have been surprised to realize there are quite a few legal as well as ethical and moral issues related to blogs. I am doing my best to deal with the legal issues in what seems to be "standard, accepted" fashion, with a legal notice posted separately from my blog "policies". I will strive to maintain a legal blog.

Though many of the legal issues related to blogs are still being sorted out, copyright infringement is a major problem. Since YOU own any comments that you place on MY blog (unless you have posted another person's already-copyrighted material), you have the legal right to ask me to delete anything that you have posted. Therefore, I have to have some way to identify you, so I will know it is YOU if you ask me to remove something, SO I will have to have some sort of contact information. Since I am new to all of this, I cannot predict exactly how the system will actually work.

As far as general rules and conduct goes, I will probably strive to keep this blog "G"-rated. I personally am not much of a fan of profanity -- I can see where it may have its place, but it tends to get over-used and therefore loses impact.

I have no problem with disagreement and civilized debate. In fact, I encourage it. I believe the world would be better off with more honest and open debate -- but it needs to be an attempt at true communication, and not just blind name-calling. I also encourage people to stay "on topic" -- one of the things that gets in the way of communication is countering a statement with an argument that is completely off topic. (On the Internet, there are also the annoying off-topic references to things like dating web sites and weight-loss products, which I will attempt to keep off this blog.)

I am a big fan of honesty, but there is often no way to determine whether a person is being honest. I am also a fan of privacy and anonymity. The bottom line is that I always encourage everyone to keep their private matters private, but try not to lie. For example, if you don't want to say where you are from, fine, but don't say you are from Colorado if you are from Indiana. There is no way to regulate this, so all I can say is that I hope you do not lie, and that I do not plan on telling any lies. I also encourage you not to violate the privacy of anyone else, including me. If you try to post personal information about someone other than yourself, I will do my best to censor it. This includes just about ANY information about ME, in case you are someone who knows me or knows information about me.

My "Privacy Policy" should be obvious. I will never sell or otherwise distribute your e-mail address, nor will I send you any mass e-mails of any kind, but depending on how everything works out, I will probably contact you before I post anything from you, just to make sure the e-mail address is valid. I do not believe ANYONE should be allowed to sell or distribute your e-mail address without your specific consent. However, as stated in the "legal" section, in cases of alleged or suspected illegal content in any comments you post, I will reluctantly share contact information with any requesting authorities.

This is all uncharted territory for me, and will probably evolve.

Legal Stuff

I am not a lawyer, and I am new to blogging. Until recently, I would not have realized there needed to be a "Legal Stuff" entry on a blog, and it seems unfortunate. Still, we live in civilization with laws for the welfare of all (I am not going to debate this statement at this point).

Most of my legal info comes from the World Wide Web, especially an article called, "Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?" (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/07/copyright-explained-i-may-copy-it-right/) This article is extensive and sobering.

According to my understanding, anything anyone creates and posts on the Internet is automatically copyrighted. Anything I write is MINE, anything you write is YOURS. I am responsible for what I post, and you are responsible for what you post. Anyone reading this blog should be aware that they may find material on this blog that is offensive or inaccurate. There are legal gray areas, and I may incur some liability for comments posted on this blog. Therefore I reserve the right to delete comments or keep them from appearing in the first place, without written notice or explanation.

Since you are responsible for any comments you post, and have the right to ask me to remove them, I must have some way of verifying that it is indeed YOU who are asking me to remove them. Therefore, I must collect at least basic contact information before allowing any of your comments. Also, since I share liability in cases of alleged or suspected illegal content in any comments you write, I will reluctantly share this contact information with any requesting authorities.

I am new to this, and both my own knowledge and the laws are constantly evolving, so I would expect that this legal notice will evolve as well. Laws are complicated.

Punctuation

There is a rule of American grammar that states "In the United States, periods and commas go inside quotation marks regardless of logic."

For question marks and exclamation points, the rule is "Whenever we have to use a question mark or an exclamation point with a sentence that ends in a quotation, we follow the dictates of logic in determining where the question mark or exclamation point goes. If it is part of the quotation itself, we put it inside the quotation marks, and if it governs the sentence as a whole but not the material being quoted, we put it outside the quotation marks."

For decades, I have considered this rule to be stupid, and contrary to clear communication -- periods and commas should also follow logic. In light of my strong opinion, I often consciously disregard the "rule". This brings up a separate problem. Anyone AWARE of the rule, reading my earlier sentence, in which I deliberately placed the final period outside the quotation mark, may consider me to be simply careless or uneducated, rather than a stubborn free-thinker. So, in practice, I follow the rule when I worry more about being viewed as careless or uneducated, and I disregard the rule when I worry less (about being viewed as careless or uneducated).

I have only recently learned that this is apparently an exclusively-American rule, and does not apply in other English-speaking countries. So now I can just claim to be doing the "global" thing, and I will probably disregard the rule even more in the future.

By the way, the REASON for the rule seems to have to do with earlier printing presses, and the fragility of the tiny commas and periods. This is not much of a factor in the modern world, but for unknown reasons (probably tradition), the rule persists.

In blogging, I expect I will largely disregard the rule, but I doubt that I will be consistent, since sometimes I will still worry about being viewed as careless or uneducated.

As I think about it, I realize there are MANY grammatical rules, especially regarding punctuation, that I believe sometimes impede rather than clarify communication ... and my goal will usually be clear communication. I will not throw out ALL the rules -- throwing out ALL rules of grammar and punctuation may be witty or clever or artistic, but it does not necessarily aid in clearer communication.

If you have waded through ALL these Disclaimers, THANK YOU.

Privacy

I like privacy. I love privacy. I am willing to admit that I have an extreme, possibly unnatural need for privacy.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines privacy as:
1 a: the quality or state of being apart from company or observation : seclusion
b: freedom from unauthorized intrusion
2 (archaic) : a place of seclusion
3 secrecy

I like the Wikipedia statement:
"Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively."
In fact, after glancing over it, I recommend the entire Wikipedia entry on Privacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy).

Privacy is a complicated topic. The Wikipedia entry emphasizes that the meaning of "privacy" varies in different contexts, and that different cultures and individuals have differing "boundaries and content" of what is considered private. This variability compounds the problem that it is difficult to justify or explain one's need for privacy. Foes of privacy can always ask, "Why do you NEED privacy?" and argue that, "If you aren't doing anything WRONG, then you don't need PRIVACY." Lawmakers and lawyers have an ongoing debate regarding "The right to privacy," and many laws are written and revised governing the boundaries of privacy.

As I have already admitted, I have an extreme need for privacy. There must be some reasons, but I do not know them, and I do not particularly care about not knowing them. The fact is that I need privacy, I want privacy, and I do not believe there is anything wrong with needing and wanting privacy.

To the extent that people have gathered together and become "civilized", some loss of privacy is inevitable. Loss of privacy is a trade-off that we make in order to live among other people. Personally, I suspect I could be happy as a stereotypical old-time "mountain man", living for years without encountering other humans (I did say STEREOTYPICAL; I am not sure whether there were many true cases of mountain men living for years in solitude). Nowadays, in most parts of the world this has become impossible. In the USA, there are taxes and other dealings with "the government" and "laws" that make at least some form of human contact legally mandated, if not inevitable.

Actually, though, my personal desire is NOT for the total privacy of a totally isolated life. I just desire MORE privacy than many or most others in our society in our time. It is this issue of each of us having differing needs for privacy that adds to the difficulty.

For example, I am very private about my comings and goings. When I have chosen apartments, one of my primary criteria has been being able to get to my particular apartment without having to pass any OTHER apartments where the residents could observe my comings and goings. I do not want people to know whether I am "home" or not, or in general to know where I AM.

There is a relationship between privacy and anonymity. Last night I went to a store. I was happy that most people in the world did not know where I was during that time. Other people at the store could perceive that I was at the store, but that did not particularly bother me, especially since I had little knowledge of them and they had little knowledge of me. I was, to a large extent, anonymous, though I did not take any particular steps to conceal my identity. If someone broadcast on the radio the fact that I was at that store at that time, I would have had a strong negative reaction, just as I would if that news appeared the next day in the local newspaper.

This brings up the point that it is easy to argue, "What difference does it make if the newspaper publishes the fact that you were at the store last night?" I cannot offer a logical, eloquent reply, other than "It makes me feel bad, really bad," which is a dramatic understatement.

A key point regarding privacy and living among others is the idea of each of us deciding for ourselves what information is revealed to others, and to whom. I believe that I should be the one who decides who knows that I went to the store last night, and any information about what I did there. You'll notice that I have not mentioned what store I went to, or what I did there -- that information is none of YOUR business -- but I did make the conscious decision to reveal to you that I went to the store.

The topic of privacy is immense and expanding. New technology -- such as the Internet, cell phones, and GPS systems -- have raised new concerns, as have increasing worries over global terrorism. There are some who state emphatically that the very notion of privacy has become obsolete and perhaps a bit quaint -- we should all simply face the fact that we neither have nor are entitled to any real privacy. While there may be some underlying truth to this view -- with sufficient resources, entities such as governments and large corporations have access to vast amounts of "private" information about each of us -- the fact remains that at the moment at least the vast majority of my neighbors do not know that I went to the store last night, and this is important to me.

At this moment, I have never sent a text message, nor "twittered", nor been on "Facebook" or "MySpace", but I understand that all of these might be viewed to cast further doubts on the notion of privacy -- although an important point is that in general the individual retains at least some control over what is shared.

An age-old problem, accentuated by these new technological developments, involves "second-hand" information -- the extent to which YOU share information about ME with others. This gets very complicated, and there are no clear lines or answers. Suppose a friend accompanied me to the store last night, and had no reservations about revealing THEIR trip to the store to all of society. They might also choose to reveal who accompanied them, and who they talked to at the store, and what they saw purchased at the store -- all of which violates MY desire for privacy.

We can return endlessly to the argument, "What does it MATTER who knows that you went to the store, or what you purchased," but I will always respond that it matters to ME, and that it is none of YOUR business. In this case, there is the follow-up argument, "But your friend CHOSE to share with ME the info that THEY went to the store, so it IS my business," and THIS is where it gets complicated, more so by new technologies.

I repeat, there are no clear lines or answers. One of the ways I have always handled the situation is by attempting to choose friends and associates who have similar views on privacy to my own, or at least respect my views and attempt to accommodate them. Since I myself do not know precisely how I will deal with the privacy aspects of any situation, I cannot expect anyone to necessarily match my response, and sometimes friends will end up sharing information that I would prefer they had not shared. That is part of having friends, and living among humans. On more than one occasion, however, I have eventually decided that my friendship with certain individuals too often involved compromising my desire for privacy, and as a result decided to limit my contact with those individuals. Some might view this as extreme. We each have our own priorities.

I run headlong into my own strong feelings about privacy when I attempt to keep any sort of journal or blog. Certain people are very important to me, and integral parts of my life, and it is difficult to delve very deeply into my life or feelings without encountering ideas involving these other people. This has sometimes completely prevented me from keeping a journal or blog, but now I have decided to try. I will inevitably make mistakes, revealing information about both myself and others that both myself and others may regret. For this I humbly apologize.

Self-plagiarism

The wikipedia entry on "plagiarism" defines "self-plagiarism" as "the reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one’s own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing the original work." Wikipedia goes on to discuss the issue, including the question of whether there can even BE such a thing, and, if so, under what circumstances is it unethical. (The wikipedia entry on plagiarism is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism)

This seems to me to be a very complicated topic. On one extreme, it seems obviously wrong if, for example, a person is getting paid to write articles for a magazine, and writes the same article for every issue (though they MIGHT be making some sort of philosophical point). On the other extreme, a person who becomes well-known for coming up with a particularly revolutionary new theory could easily end up writing about that same new theory in many different articles, and, if that person comes up with a good way to state a complex theory, it does not make sense to use different words in every article just for the sake of "originality". A person famous for the telling of a particular story may even be CRITICIZED for coming up with a new wording of the familiar anecdote.

Self-plagiarism is a particularly dubious concept when applied to the world of blogging. A person may write different blogs with different audiences, yet choose to share the same thoughts with both. Especially if a person struggles to come up with the correct words to express complex thoughts, it seems foolish NOT to use the very same words to express the same thoughts at another time or location. Another problem associated with blogging is the fact that, unlike a "hard-copy" book or magazine article, blog entries can be constantly revised, so the issue of where or when a particular passage was "first" used may become difficult to determine.

Most people seem to agree that under most circumstances you have a right to re-use your own words. The issue seems to be whether or not you ACKNOWLEDGE re-using your own words. With that in mind, I freely admit that many of the ideas stated in this blog will be identical, similar, or hopefully improved versions of ideas I state elsewhere.

Words

For those who live in the company of other living things, communication is very important. Even those who live in total isolation might wish to record their thoughts for future reference. Though it is possible to communicate and record thoughts with pictures, sounds, and other methods, this blog will rely mostly on written words.

Words are not clear. Every word has an infinite number of subtle variations in meaning, and some words have profound variations in meaning. When we string words together in phrases or sentences, this infinite number of variations gets multiplied exponentially. Since every person has their own continually-evolving internal definition of each word (dictionaries are great, but their definitions do not match each person's set of internal definitions), it is virtually impossible for any given sentence to mean precisely the same thing to two different people, since both would have to somehow pick precisely the same set of meanings from those infinite numbers of possible meanings. For that matter, it is probably impossible for even one person to pick precisely those same meanings two times in a row, so even when we read or hear what we ourselves have written or stated we cannot be sure precisely what we meant at that moment. Still, for now, words seem to be the best we can do -- our most precise means of communication (though many times a look or a gesture will suffice). Perhaps someday we will master more precise methods, such as direct transmission or recording of thoughts.

The real danger in the use of words is that because of our great familiarity with the process, and the lack of a better alternative, we tend to THINK of words as clear and precise. Indeed, they work well enough for most purposes most of the time, but we fail to remember that words are just approximations of thoughts. They can never be precise representations of thoughts.

Words work better under some circumstances. People who are familiar with each other, or share similar points of view, may have a greater tendency to use the same meanings of words than people who are strangers or have opposing points of view. (Oral communication, as opposed to written, allows the use of inflection and other means of communication, such as gestures, facial expression, and tone of voice, to increase the likelihood that words will clearly transmit the underlying thoughts.) Feedback between two people offers each a chance to clarify and ask for clarifications.

All of this assumes that people are using words in an attempt to clearly represent thoughts. If someone chooses to use words to deliberately mask or muddy their thoughts, or chooses to deliberately misinterpret someone else's words, then the process of communication quickly becomes hopeless. This often happens in politics and arguments -- one side blindly repeats and argues with the other side's WORDS without ever understanding or attempting to understand the underlying meaning, or perhaps deliberately misunderstanding, all the while insisting that they are correctly stating their opponent's beliefs.

When you agree or disagree with my words, what you are actually agreeing or disagreeing with is YOUR interpretation of my words, rather than my underlying thoughts. You can never know my actual thoughts, and I can never know your actual thoughts, no matter how hard we struggle to communicate. All we can do is give it our best effort, while remaining aware that we can never fully succeed.

This is not to say that words have no meaning, or that words are so vague that they can be construed to mean ANYTHING, or that it is impossible to tell a truth or a falsehood. A lie is still a lie -- though even the definition of a lie is subject to interpretation. (Just for the record, I consider a lie to be any DELIBERATE falsehood -- a person who makes an untrue statement is not telling a lie if they themselves believe it is true.) Words are probably the best we can do, and we can do a lot with words ... but they ARE subject to misinterpretation.

I am aware of the irony of using written words to discuss the insurmountable difficulties associated with the use of written words, and I am aware of the irony of having a written blog when I believe that words are not clear. Perhaps it is a mistake.

Disclaimers

There are three or four preliminary points I need to try and make to anyone reading a blog that I write. Unfortunately, since one of my most basic beliefs is that verbal communication is inherently unclear, I tend to use a LOT of words in an effort to make it less likely that I will be misunderstood. Sometimes I will state and overstate things that might seem obvious, because I do not want to assume they are obvious in case they are not, and also because I believe that even though they may seem obvious, they are often ignored or overlooked. If this style seems "wordy", tedious, preachy, or is otherwise unappealing to YOU, I am sorry. At least for these foundation points, that is how I probably will write. Please be assured that this is due to my awareness of my own struggle to be clear, rather than anticipation of some inadequacy on your part. Still, I am also painfully aware of instances in which a person spent fifteen minutes trying to make a point, only to have someone seize upon one phrase and decide they had fully understood the speaker's intent from that one phrase, despite protestations to the contrary from the speaker, and I find this to be among the most incredibly frustrating phenomenons in human interaction. If it takes someone fifteen minutes to make a point, perhaps their point is a bit more complicated than a single phrase -- or perhaps not. You can never know without listening for those entire fifteen minutes, and life is short, and perhaps it is not worth your time.

Anyway, for those who are short on time, perhaps you are at the wrong blog. Briefly, here are the key starting points I am about to try to make (but I will not be held responsible if you decide not to bother to read the expanded versions to follow):

1) Words are not clear, and can never be clear
2) I do not worry about plagiarizing myself, so anything written by me in this blog may have already appeared elsewhere, or may appear elsewhere in the future
3) I DO worry about my own privacy and the privacy of those with whom I associate, and I shall endeavor to protect both
4) I believe the grammar rules about always placing periods and commas inside of quotation marks are stupid and obsolete, and I shall feel free to disregard them.

I would also like to point out that I favor clarity and honesty over grammatical and other "correctness". When speaking, if I believe there is a chance the word "knight" will be confused with the word "night", I often pronounce the "k". This may sound ridiculous, but people understand that I am not talking about "nights". (In a future blog entry, I hope to include a similar story involving someone speaking about the large intestine.) In typing, or e-mailing, or blogging, if I want to stress a particular word or phrase, as I would in speaking, I tend to use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS rather than underlining or bold face or italics. This is due primarily to the fact that I have been involved in writing computer programs since the late 1970s (when I tended to use all caps, all the time) and as things have developed over time, using all capital letters has remained the easiest method for technology to handle, offering the highest likelihood of accurate reproduction across different systems and media (though this is becoming less of a problem, and my views may already be obsolete -- just like worrying about periods outside of quotation marks).

Finally, I do not claim that any of the thoughts and ideas recorded here are original, eloquent, profound, or relevant. They are "original" in that they ARE my thoughts, but others may have had the same thoughts before, and may have stated them more eloquently. "Profound" and "relevant" are in the eye of the beholder and the situation. I hope that this blog is a worthwhile experience, but life offers no guarantees.

Hello world!

I did not plan to begin this blog today. I planned to begin this blog SOON, but not today. Then I got up this morning and noticed the date, and thought, "9/9/9! Seems like a good date for new beginnings."

Later, I logged onto the Internet, and found that people around the world have been anticipating this date -- though not necessarily positively, depending on culture and tradition. It knocks some of the wind out of my sails to realize that millions of other people noticed the date long before I did, but I suppose it is still as good a day as any to begin a blog.

I freely admit that I do not know much about blogging, and I am sure I will make mistakes, and perhaps this entire blog is a mistake.

I am writing this blog because my dog died. Actually, there were three things that happened together last winter: My dog was dying, I was made aware of a blog page dealing with the subject of whether or not dogs go to heaven, AND I found myself with some time to kill on a high-speed Internet connection. After my dog "up and died," I found myself driven to just WRITE. Random stuff, philosophical stuff. Not necessarily worth writing, or worth reading, and not necessarily related to the subject of dead dogs -- but including a response for the page about whether dogs go to heaven, which I will attempt to post there any day now.

One of the things that has kept me from blogging in the past -- or from most writing, for that matter -- is that I believe strongly that words are never clear, and always leave room for misinterpretation. Therefore, before I go any further, for my own peace of mind I will post disclaimers and prefaces about anything I write here or elsewhere. This brings up the fact that I am actually beginning TWO blogs today -- one here, and one at another site on another "host" since I do not know enough to know which host I will prefer. (Full disclosure: I have already tried some "practice blogs" to try and figure out technical aspects of the process, like the fact that the newest posts appear at the TOP of the page rather than the bottom.) For now, I plan to place many of the same posts on both sites, though the sites seem to have different organizational schemes that will keep them from ever being identical. Over time, I suspect the two sites will diverge, but it's hard to know what to expect.

It's ALWAYS hard to know what to expect. Truth is complicated.