Before we get started this week, I have a new article out in this quarter’s ParABnormal Magazine, coincidentally called “The Animal Unconscious.”
As a small boost to their marketing efforts, I include a link to The Sample, a newsletter that uses AI to recommend other newsletters based on your reading preferences. It forwards this newsletter to its own readers based on how often you all click on its link (at least I think that’s how it works).
Original Blog Post from 2013
This playful experiment grew out of several different things.
1) I read King Solomon’s Ring over Christmas.
2) I’m starting to use episodes in my classes, which is a whole different audience. I think they’ll prefer infotainment to an interview. Maybe not. The data will tell.
3) I saw Wizard People, Dear Reader, which just slew me ("a piano made of frozen Windex"!).
You can hear Chloe the Wonder Dog’s origin story here, in Episode 17. Her position on evolution is quite similar to the Catholic Church's. I previously wrote about the Vineyard Christians (the source of the “coffee with dog” joke) here.
Updates from 2023
Chloe the Wonder Dog is now something like 13 years old. We have enrolled her in the Dog Aging Project, which recently sent us an experimental protocol to use with her. She has less energy than she once did, and sleeps more, but she is still quite trim and generally very alert — and unfortunately, easily bored. A strict laboratory-style experiment did not go well. We were supposed to do nine trials with the following set-up:
On each trial, I was supposed to let her see me baiting all the boxes with dog treats, as we visited them, in the same clockwise order. I was supposed to let her eat two of them every time, leaving a different box baited each time. There was a pseudorandom list included with the directions. She was supposed to remember which one she hadn’t eaten and go directly to that box each trial, ignoring the ones she had just emptied.
Chloe doesn’t think that way. She’ll scour the majority of the house (which is about 1200 square feet, much larger than this 6-foot foraging area) multiple times, because there’s a decent chance my wife has dropped a crumb of something at her desk or the kitchen table since the last time Chloe was in there 2 minutes ago. I’m always flicking scraps from the cutting board on the kitchen counter into her bowl too.
As an experimental design, not super-high on the ecological validity scale. Also, we were doing this outside on our carport, where Chloe could see our dog-trainer neighbor across the street with a client. That was way more interesting to her than working for treats.
Uh, guys, we should do that experiment again with steak.
Or liver. How about liver? I like liver.
—Chloe the Wonder Dog
Will Scooby Ever Stop Doing?
Since its premiere in 1969, so long ago that laugh tracks were standard operating procedure for cartoons, there has been at least one new production almost every year (often two or three!). That’s over a hundred units of media, many of them with a couple dozen episodes per season.
(This doesn’t even count all the mystery-club snowclones, like Speed Buggy and JabberJaw, or the more obscure Clue Club, or The Amazing [Charlie] Chan & the Chan Clan).
Most of them are incredibly formulaic, which could be good (ie, comfort food for the brain) or bad (ie, boring). Some of them depart from the formula, such as the 90s movie series that began with Zombie Island, where the gang are all ten years older (Scooby has held up remarkably well, given those are dog years), and the spooky stuff is all real. My recent favorite Mystery, Inc. is one of these, with an elaborate paranormal mythology for the town of Crystal Cove involving the Annunaki, lots of relationship humor, guest appearances by versions of Harlan Ellison and HP Hatecraft, and Lewis Black as Mister E, the voice that leaves the clues. I did not like Mindy Kahling’s rather mean-spirited Velma, though it had some good jokes. I did like 2015’s Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! which reminded me of Gravity Falls in terms of the animation and the sheer number of jokes.
Why is my hair the color of chicken wings?
— Asian Daphne Blake, in Velma
The answer, according to the show? Epigenetics.
Be Cool also has the edge in absurdity, like ep 3, “Game of Chicken,” where the gang searches for the hidden treasure of a lost tribe of underground chicken-worshipers.
Hang on, I just got this video from my crazy old pal Chuck.
The subject is, “HELP ME!”
— Fred Jones, voiced in all good versions by Frank Welker
(the one true king)
Why the “meddling kids” trope has sunk like a fish hook into our collective unconscious is a mystery to me. Sheer repetition?
VSI Episode 56