Subtraction

When Mister President passed away in December, it made for a very rough end to the year. But one thing that got me through it all was remembering how much I still have to be grateful for. For instance, Laura has been pregnant since late spring — with twins. Twins! Pure craziness.

For various reasons, I haven’t talked about it publicly yet, but the time to do so is now. With twins, doctors tend to want them to come out before they reach the full nine-month mark, so in just a little while we’re going into the hospital where her doctors will induce labor. If everything goes well, sometime in the next day or two we’ll add an ‘identical’ pair of baby boys to our family.

Here’s a picture of one of them — “Baby A” — from just a few days ago. “Baby B” was camera shy that day, and they couldn’t get a good shot of him — but they’re twins, so you can imagine what he looks like, right?

That’s all for now. Wish us luck.

To those uninitiated in the vagaries of medical care for pets, suffice it to say that veterinarians’ bills can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. So for years I’ve paid for a pet medical insurance policy for my dog, Mister President. It sounds a little silly, I know, but it’s been worth the money.

After my dog, Mister President, passed away last month, and after I picked myself up off the floor, I somehow found the wherewithal to submit insurance claims for all of the bills we incurred in diagnosing and treating his cancer, and for the euthanasia and cremation processes too.

When Flickr released a major update to its iPhone app last week, it seemed to jolt the long-neglected photo sharing network back to life. Suddenly, my activity stream was lighting up with scores of new contacts (I guess they got rid of the term “followers”?), a level of commotion that I hadn’t seen from Flickr in a long, long time.

But, over the past few days of using the app, I’ve noticed that this new activity is worryingly shallow. The vast majority of what I see is people adding me as a contact, but there seems to be little engagement beyond that. For example, Sunday night I posted this photo of my daughter at her ballet recital. As of this morning, it had received just a few dozens views, one favorite and no comments. For comparison, I posted the same image, with the requisite filtering and cropping, to Instagram this morning. Within a few hours, it already had twice as many favorites and several comments.

Just about anything that takes me back to Mister President has been bringing me to tears. This is true whether it’s something as pronounced as recounting for friends and family how he came to pass so quickly, or something as mundane as reaching for a scarf on the coatrack and, through muscle memory, picking up the old boy’s leash and collar by mistake. When I looked down and saw it in my hands, all my composure crumbled right off me, and the tears started pouring.

For men, crying is a complicated thing. I don’t claim to be John Wayne, but I do have a nontrivial amount of my identity invested in being emotionally anchored and resistant to dramatic mood shifts. I think of myself as “manly” or at least aspire to “manliness,” and gaps in that veneer are uncomfortable, something to be avoided, hidden, and left unspoken. The corollary to that is I also harbor a dread of weakness, or even the appearance of weakness; few things seem as unmanly or as weak as crying.

Nevertheless, I cannot deny that I have been crying. On the subway, at the grocery store, walking down the street, talking to strangers, on the phone, at dinner, and many more places besides. It’s awkward for me, and awkward for the people before whom I’ve been sobbing like a helpless child. No matter how enlightened most people claim to be, the reality of a grown man in tears ignites immediate discomfort.

It was my birthday yesterday, and I had to lay down Mister President, my dog of ten years, to rest forever. All things considered, my family and I were fortunate in that we were able to say goodbye to him in the home we shared with him, where he could be comfortable and unafraid; his veterinarian came to us in the afternoon, counseled us, administered the sedative and then the euthanasia drug, consoled us, and took away his body to be cremated.

Afterwards I took a walk to Ft. Greene Park, about a mile away. Mister President and I used to walk there several mornings each week, during off-leash hours. I sat down near the trees where I used to chase him for fun; it was one of his favorite games. The weather was uncharacteristically mild for late autumn; clear and with bright golden hues from a warm, low-slung sun.

Still, I had already begun to feel a chill in his absence, like a draft coming in through an open window at the other end of a room. Beyond the window feels like emptiness, a void. I miss my dog.

Throughout Mister President’s shockingly fast decline, I’ve been struggling to express exactly why he meant so much to me, why I loved him so dearly. In some ways this is something that can go unsaid, because when you tell people you’re losing your dog, they instinctually seem to understand what’s at stake. Dogs are dogs, and they are designed to be loved.

But I think it’s important, at least for me, to articulate it more fully, and I’m only now starting to be able to do that.

This is what I’ve come up with: Mister President came to me at the height of my selfishness, during a time of my life when, fundamentally, I was interested only in myself, despite all the relationships I’d had up until that point. And when he came to me, he taught me how to care for someone else, to devote myself to someone else, to really love someone else — unreservedly and unconditionally .

When I look back, I had never learned to do that before, at least not as an adult. I have always loved my parents and my sister in that way, but I’d never been able to muster what it takes to truly love someone new — until I brought home that furry, awkward mutt.

In this way, he saved me. Without him, I don’t know if I would have been ready to fall in love with Laura when I met her, and more importantly, I don’t know if I would have known how to sustain that love. And without Mister President, I don’t know if I would have been equipped to care for and truly love our wonderful daughter.

In and of themselves, those are two enormous gifts that he gave me. This is what dogs do, I guess. You think you’re doing all the giving. But they give you more than you know in return.

I really loved that dog.

When you’re young ten years seems like a long time, but as you get older you come to realize it can go by in a flash. A decade ago today, I walked out of the Humane Society in Newark, New Jersey with a black, labrador-mix mutt on a leash. I took him home to my ridiculously tiny studio apartment in Manhattan’s East Village, and named him Mister President.

He was less than a year old then, and already fairly large. He had, at the end of each of his long, lanky legs, an almost comically oversized paw, suggesting that though he was no longer really a puppy, neither was he quite a grown dog yet. The folks at the shelter told me that he was seven months old, but I never really knew whether to believe that or not. Like a lot of dog pounds, they were doing their best with too many dogs and too few staff, and had little to offer in the way of prior history or other vital information, so I’ve never known his actual birthday.

That first week, he was frightened and cagey, and I was too, truth be told. I was single and I valued my then relatively carefree lifestyle, so the idea of raising a dog — being responsible for another living being — was more like a suit of clothes I was trying on with idle curiosity than a mantle I was accepting with a full awareness of all its implications.

In the back of my mind, I almost expected to chicken out and take him back to the shelter within a week or so. But I hung in there and so did Mister President, and at some point there was no going back. He had become Man’s Best Friend.

Last weekend I went to see “Skyfall,” the twenty-third entry in the now fifty year old James Bond franchise.

As an action film, it’s more than adequate, thanks largely to its overqualified crew: it was directed by Oscar winner Sam Mendes, whose name few people expected to see attached to popcorn franchises like this, given his past highbrow features like “American Beauty” and “Revolution Road.” I’m not a big fan of those movies, but they’re easily better entertainments than the majority of what has been issued under the 007 moniker through the decades.

Just as meaningfully, “Skyfall” was shot by one of today’s most accomplished cinematographers, Roger Deakins. The first half of the film features a fight sequence in a Shanghai skyscraper that, thanks to Deakins’ almost audacious stylization, surely qualifies as the most visually stunning Bond scene since Honey Ryder emerged from the sea in “Dr. No.” On its own, it’s almost worth the price of admission.

Evernote 5 for iOS is new and available in the App Store today. It sports a revised, beautifully executed user interface with a clever, smoothly animated ‘stacked cards’ metaphor. So far, I find it very impressive, especially for an application that has always been, in my view, more useful than elegant.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been a happy Evernote user for some time (since finally giving up the ghost on Yojimbo). It’s true that the product has always struggled with a certain level of awkwardness, but that hasn’t diminished its utility. Evernote is pretty much the only game in town if you want a well-maintained, truly cross-platform note-taking and random bits-collecting app backed by a robust, reliable cloud service. There’s nothing out there that compares.

Why is that, I’ve often wondered? It seems to me that being able to jot notes down quickly and stash away assorted and sundry snippets, pictures and documents, and have them all transparently and instantly synchronized over the Internet would be one of the most universally sought after software solutions out there — and would therefore inspire lots of competition.

Of course, when I write it out like that, it does strike me that it’s a tall order to build such a product. Evernote is not just an app, after all. It’s a full-scale service, too, and replicating even just a few of its client apps would be a major undertaking, to say nothing of building a comparable cloud service. Still, I know I spend a tremendous part of every day in Evernote (I used it to draft this blog post, in fact) and consider it indispensable. I know lots of Evernote users who also feel the same way, and don’t hesitate to tell everyone they know about it. You would think someone else out there would want a piece of that business too.

Tomorrow is Election Day, so get out there and vote. Barring any major polling malfunctions, by the end of the day we’ll finally have an answer to the question of who will reside in The White House for the next four years. Almost as interestingly, tomorrow could also mark a definitive change in the way we look at Presidential campaigns, potentially for decades. In particular: if Nate Silver’s ongoing, deeply statistical analysis of the race at Fivethirtyeight turns out to be an accurate predictor of the final outcome, it may alter political punditry for a long, long time.

If you’re not familiar with Silver’s work, it’s probably a reasonable if gross characterization to say that he is a kind of ‘meta-pollster.’ Each day, he surveys the most recent state and national polls, aggregating their results using a sophisticated — but proprietary — statistical model that accounts for such factors as polling methodology, past accuracy and tendency to favor one party or another. The result is what some believe to be an exceedingly accurate picture of who is ‘winning’ at any given stage of the campaign — and, of course, a prediction of who will actually win at the close of Election Day.

Silver began doing this work in the lead-up to November 2008, and produced eye-popping results. His model correctly predicted the winner of forty-nine of the fifty states in the presidential election, and all thirty-five of the senate races held that year.

Whether that was pure luck or not is the question that will be answered when the results of tomorrow’s election are in. If his predictions are largely accurate, it will go a long way towards validating Silver’s approach. It’s my feeling too that if that happens there’s no going back; in at least the next few election cycles, you can expect to see much more attention paid to this sort of statistical evaluation of a campaign’s progress.

This turn of events in the career of Lance Armstrong is stupefying and tragic. But this lead image at the top of one news article about his seven Tour de France titles being taken away from him is unnecessary, if you ask me.

I see this kind of thing a lot. As browser-delivered news integrates more and more multimedia, it’s been surprising how little editors, photographers and visual journalists pay attention to this particular detail. More often than not, the preview frame of the playable media is a headshot — just a person’s head and shoulders with a play arrow superimposed on top — and almost always unceremoniously planted right smack-dab in the middle of the person’s face. If you ask me it’s not just unflattering but it’s also frequently inappropriate, even if the subject is undergoing a colossal public shaming of the sort that Armstrong is experiencing.

No one at these news organizations sets out to deface these subjects of course, and certainly no harm is intended. It’s just carelessness in the production process. But it can’t be that hard to find an image where the subject is off-center, thereby avoiding this aesthetically unpleasant and completely unnecessary effect. Generally speaking, that would be more visually interesting than a dead-center shot anyhow, even without the superimposition of the play arrow on top.