eternal life and dogs...

i recently came across a new way to share videos, and yes, it did just snow, so yes, i'm posting...we've been through that...

it's called godtube...

here's one of the most popular videos (i like to pick videos that have been most commented on or most popular to get a sense of what humans are up to...). WARNING, this could be a very distressing video to watch, it was for me...if you don't feel like watching it (it's kinda long), here's a brief synopsis. basically, this kid named zach never shared his belief and "personal relationship with jesus" with his friend josh, and well, josh dies in a really bad car crash, and josh writes zach a letter from hell, literally, not figuratively, mind you...the letter basically describes the horror of hell, and all. to a simple dog like me, it made me wonder about this godtube...




now, as this was the first video i looked at. i quickly searched "sheltie," and i came up with no results. and as i was quite concerned with my own eternal fate, i decided to search for "dog heaven" cause clearly, i want to go there, not hell...how does a dog get his/her name written in the book of life?

I found this....


while this video doesn't explain if dogs go to heaven or hell, it certainly seems to partially claim that dog is god spelled backward, and that we are pretty coolio creatures....

so, then i figured i'd do some more searching to find out if i can relax about my eternal fate, i mean come on, this is serious, right?

Pope John Paul II:
'Animals Possess A Soul' all from "do dogs go to heaven?"

Pope John Paul II declared in a public audience in 1990 that "also the animals possess a soul and men must love and feel solidarity with our smaller brethren". He said, too, that they are the "fruit of the creative action of the Holy Spirit and merit respect," and are as near to God as men are."

The Pope went on to say that, "animals have the breath of life and were given it by God. In this respect, man created by the hand of God is identical with all living creatures. ... The existence therefore of all living creatures depends on the living spirit/breath of God that not only creates but also sustains and renews the face of the earth."

well, that's a huge sigh of relief...of course, he doesn't really answer the question of if i'll go to heaven...


so, i searched further...and found: "do pets go to heaven" (i'll leave out my editorial on the propietary and icky-ness of the word 'pet' for now). even after reading most of it (ok, so i skimmed), i'm left with the final thought of"

Obviously, what God has prepared for us is wonderful beyond comprehension. Therefore, love your pets as much as you can while they are here. Those of us who go to heaven will later understand that everything worked out perfectly regarding our pets.

and the long and short of that article is that FEW people will go to heaven, and who knows about us dogs, and hell, if we dogs aren't there, you humans will somehow magically understand it....very unsatisfying from a dog's point-of-view.

i'm off to try to find some intelligent dog blogs, as this whole godtube has gotten me quite depressed. maybe there's a dogtube...

ANIMAL IDENTITY: just who is an animal?

it’s been snowing again, and my humans finally left the house. i’ve been in the house more than before. according to petra, my lady human, the neighbors had complained that i had been barking too much when i was out in the backyard. this was news to me as mckinley, the neighbor dog (he’s a sled dog, nice, but pees on my rocks too much) had mentioned nothing about me barking too much. i only bark at squirrels or when small humans come by the fence on wheels, especially ‘skateboards.’ i also bark when the neighbors have a bunch of male humans with their loud machines that come in the summer and make the neighborhood smell like grass. they use one machine (leaf blowers) that blows the smells all over the place, and well, they don’t always seem to realize what they are stirring up, but it’s a lot of information to communicate and explain to everyone around.

so, instead of barking outside, i’ve been trying to follow some dog news stories.

michael vick was sentenced to 23 months in prison this week for dog fighting. he used to be an atlanta falcon, which was initially confusing to me because he’s a human, not a bird, but then i remembered that humans like to pretend to be other creatures when they play certain games. what can i say, humans are weird; we dogs are content being dogs.

i started thinking about why humans would enjoy watching dogs fight. i read about dog fighting in wikipedia. they called it a ‘bloodsport,’ which they defined as ‘a term used by social reformers to describe sport or entertainment which is believed to be cruel and which involves needless animal suffering.’

the part that stood out to me here was ‘needless ANIMAL suffering.’ now, i would like to note (i sound like a lawyer, huh?) that humans rarely think of themselves as animals. one of many examples is boulder’s city code

6-1-17 Animals on Mall Prohibited.
(a) No person shall bring an animal onto the mall or possess an animal on the mall, regardless of whether the animal is on a leash or is confined. But a person with an animal may cross the mall in a northbound or southbound direction at 11th street, Broadway, 13th street, 14th street, or 15th street.

according to the code, it would seem that no humans are allowed on the mall ever, and i know that andy brought petra to the mall (not on a leash) to go to a party recently. now, i don’t know if you all know that humans are classified as belonging to the ANIMAL kingdom, but the last time i checked the darwinian classification of humans it was like this:

Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: H. sapiens
Subspecies: H. s. sapiens
Trinomial name
Homo sapiens sapiens Linnaeus, 1758

you following?

now the picture that wikipedia uses for the human entry is a detail from NASA's pioneer plaques: the pioneer plates are pictures that NASA created to send into outer space so that ‘extra-terrestrials’ would know who lives on earth.

the anthropocentrism is appalling. . . apparently, the only creatures on earth worth depicting are human animals.
and let's look at these humans a little closer: human animals are officially depicted as non-furry creatures. i’ve seen my humans naked, and they have some pretty distinct furry regions. apparently, NASA was uncomfortable depicting humans with their natural furry areas. besides which, humans come in different levels of furriness:

here’s just one furry man i found on the internet:

and if you want to get really picky…look at the NASA picture. i’m wondering what breed of humans are they depicting? i know humans don’t like to categorize themselves into breeds like they do with cats and dogs and hamsters, to name a few popular ones. instead they use terms like nationality, race, and ethnicity, which, frankly, is way too complicated to try to explain what i understand about any of those at this point….

so, here are my new realizations:

humans don’t consider themselves to be animals or to be furry. they generally think that it’s bad for humans to watch other animals suffer needlessly, and if a human is involved in having or watching animals suffer needlessly, a judge will send the human to prison (this is not crate training), even if the human used to be a falcon.

the picture that NASA chose is kind of like when petra and i go to petsmart, and we walk down the crunchy balls food aisle. we shelties are depicted on a lot of the bags. i guess that must mean that i, a sheltie, am a top dog, more important than others, which is funny cause crunchy balls taste the same to me as mckinley, and he’s no sheltie.

and dog barking is annoying noise, but leaf blower noise is acceptable.

pressures, stresses, and motivations....a realization

pressure, stress, motivation issues…these are things that i hear my humans talk about, and it got me to thinking about my own pressures, stresses, and motivation issues. let’s start with the fact that i haven’t blogged in months, seven months to be specific.

gosh, it’s snowing again today. i think it was snowing the last time i blogged, maybe there’s a connection there….i bet you can find a website somewhere that proves that snowing causes dogs to do things…but that’s another post…

pressure. pressure to succeed. pressure to perform. pressure to be someone you’re not. i found a cool song by queen (weird, no women, hmmm) called under pressure that seems to capture much of what my understanding is of the human experience of living under pressure. i like the part of the song where it says,

Can't we give ourselves one more chance
Why can't we give love that one more chance
Why can't we give love give love give love give love
give love give love give love give love give love
'Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And loves dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
Under pressure
Pressure

well aside from the depressing part about being our last dance, i like the focus on love. i also like the repetition in the song. it’s simple. love is something that humans don’t always do so well. we dogs are good at love. we have to be really hurt, a lot, many times over for us to give up on love, and even after bad stuff, we still manage to provide a lot of love.

stress seems to come from the pressure that humans experience. i watch my humans do different things to “relieve” their stresses. my boy human, anthony, whose hair is finally achieving a nice dog like coat appearance on his head, likes to play video games. he has several different machines for this, and he can spend hours in front of the tv playing these games. they often have pitches that bother my ears, and i would rather he just watch tv because he has to hold this black thing in his hands, and he doesn’t listen very well to my commands to THROW ME THE BALL when he’s playing these games. i do expect the moment i see my humans parked on the couch that they should THROW ME THE BALL.

of course, watching tv isn’t an automatic assurance that my humans will start THROWiNG ME THE BALL, as i have found in eliza, my girl human. she watches a show called friends. i’ve come to recognize this one by certain lines of dialogue. she doesn’t seem to ever tire of watching the same episode. i’ve watched the one where ross says rachel’s name at ross’ wedding more times than i can count. so despite the fact that she’ll watch hours of tv, she sometimes doesn’t THROW ME THE BALL. she holds the ball in her fingers and crinkles her face at me, she usually adds something about the ball being stinky and wet, which i just don’t get, the BALL smells great; it’s a great combination of so many wonderful smells.

my bigger humans, andy and petra, do different things to relieve their stress, most that i won’t mention here as i’ve been learning about tv ratings, and they definitely engage in some non g rating stuff, but much of those behaviors seems to be tied to love, and as i’ve already mentioned, i approve of love. andy and petra do sometimes play something on the computers called age of empires. they, especially, petra seems to delight in making buildings and destroying other buildings.

but getting back to me and my pressures, stresses, and motivation issues, i’ve been feeling a lot of pressure to be an interesting blogger, ever since i overheard andy tell petra that one of his co-workers was reading my blog. yikes. i know i’ve invited folks to read, and it was easy at the beginning, but then well, my silence speaks volumes, don’t you think? let’s just remember that i’m a dog, and well, i’m really good at herding sheep, chasing balls, smelling things, eating, loving, and barking. blogging is something i think i feel a little, as petra would put it, insecure about how i measure up to other bloggers.

in terms of stress, it’s totally tied to amount of pack contact for me. when i’m home alone, i do get lonely and stressed that maybe my humans aren’t ever coming home. i worry about my humans when they’re gone. i like them to be close by.

i don’t seem to have issues around pressure to perform when it comes to dog stuff. i will sit, lie down, bring my humans the ball, hold still, as long as they want me to. in fact the more they interact with me, the lower my stress.

apparently, this summer, the loneliness or the stress was getting to me because petra and andy said i was doing something ‘neurotic.’ i would go to one part of the fence in the backyard, bark, trot along a specific line, and go to another part of the fence and bark there, then i would repeat this. apparently, i was doing this quite repetitively, and petra and andy crinkled their faces at me, similar to how eliza does it, and well, that worried me. to be honest, i can’t even explain why i was doing this. i do know that soon after this, there were more toys in the back yard, very cool was a ball filled with peanut butter and dog cookies.

so finally, my thoughts on motivation. i know that as i worried about what people would think about my blog, i stopped blogging. so worry or pressure got in the way of my wanting to do something, which i think petra would say is pretty basic in psychological terms, she talks like that a lot, you get used to it. it’s not so bad when she’s scratching me behind my ears and talking that way.

so, all this has helped me to realize that snow motivates me to write. that’s simple and logical. now, i just need to figure out how to motivate my humans to give me more food in my bowl that smells like the things i smell in the kitchen and not just the little crunchy balls that i get.

wiki whatever; going batty in denver

anyone in denver isn’t going to ask why my blog has been quiet. but the snow is finally gone.

my humans were going batty. i learned from them how to go “batty.” (batty isn’t on wikipedia, but it means to act like you’ve been bit by diseased bats.)

it gave me some time to spend on line. i spent hours on wikipedia, which i love (as i blogged about before).

among other things, i parked myself in the wikipump for a while. wikicreatures writing for wikicreatures. i love social-democracies (very dog-like of me, obviously—it’s called a pack).

i also spent some time (less) at conservapedia. my human lady heard about it on something called “npr.” she said this was started by a special pack of humans called “conservative christians.” (our neighbor, a “gay man,” was named christian, but he moved to boston and i miss him.) the man on npr disagreed with wikipedia (this was where i started paying attention) because “not everyone agrees that what is written there are facts.” this was news to me!

i listened while my lady human and the others toggled between browsers, comparing articles (conservapedia vs. wikipedia).

she found, for example, that “feminism” on conservapedia was 1 sentence; on wikipedia it was many pages.

she decided to become an official editor for conservapedia, and copy-pasted the article from wikipedia into conservapedia. a moment later, her screen flashed with this large red box, like fire (very scary), and she said a man had sent her a message – a sophomore from a university of wisconsin – that she wasn’t supposed to do that. i’ve never heard of that happening on wikipedia. it was scary. wisconsin is scary.

so, later, with trembling paws, i conservapedia’d “goofy.” (which i wrote about before)

nothing!

on the home page, conservapedia says:

Welcome to Conservapedia
A conservative encyclopedia you can trust.

Conservapedia has over 4,800 educational, clean, and concise entries, including more than 350 lectures and term lists. There have been over 3,600,000 page views and over 38,300 page edits. this site is growing rapidly.

Conservapedia jumps to number one!

Traffic ranking among conservative websites as of march 8th (by alexa):

1. Conservapedia
2. Rush Limbaugh
3. Sean Hannity
4. Bill O'Reilly

clearly, this up-and-coming website needs a dog’s voice.

so i created an account (read me! “vidi peysek” on conservapedia) and i took a paw to it…

i know better than to copy-paste from my beloved wikipedia. instead, i composed; my human male would call this “digested content” (i shudder).

"goofy" (adj.) means to act silly.

goofy (n.) is a dog that was a star character from disney. he tends to not act like the most intelligent of dogs (funny to watch if you're a human, but embarrassing if you're a dog). frankly, he's an anthropomorphic character -- with human characteristics, designed to comment on human behavior -- which is kind of disrespectful to dogs.

not bad, eh? look at me! i’m a “conservative christian!”

so far, no big, red, burning box from any “sophomores in wisconsin.”

i’ll keep you posted.

disconcerting human pack behavior - hanging hussein

my humans and i get most of our news and worldly information via the internet [perhaps you do too, as you are reading a dog blog; thus, i’m assuming you are a bit of an internet aficionado]…recently, i learned that one set of humans hanged one particular human, saddam hussein. apparently, this hussein human had acted very poorly, indeed quite ‘inhumanely’ by human standards, and certainly ‘incaninely’ by dog standards. what is puzzling and unsettling to me is that this disorderly and vicious human was killed by the leaders of the human pack trying to settle the problem. i certainly think that this hussein human needed some redirection of his behavior, i just don’t understand the killing part…

you see, i have never lived among other dogs, [i live in a pack of humans, two cats, and a couple of rodents [the rodents live in small see-through boxes, so i’m not on a friendly basis with them.]] and as i have never lived among other dogs, i’m not 100 per cent sure how dogs would handle such a problem, but according to several internet sources, it seems that killing a fellow dog when there is a conflict is indeed a rare event. this does not seem to be the case among humans. in fact, it is the alpha male’s job to intervene in a fight between two other members’ dispute. the intervention is one in which the leader places himself between the two other fighting dogs, and gets the two to settle down and back off. the alpha male does not attack either party.

i guess i’m just so curious as to why the humans didn’t simply demote hussein to an omega position within the larger pack of humans [this seems to be referred to as ‘mankind’]. it’s not as though humans haven’t come to understand a concept like this; it seems very similar to RESTORATiVE JUSTICE. step one seemed clear enough, strip hussein of his alpha status [they seemed to have gotten that right], and step two is give Hussein a job as an omega member of the pack that helps the pack. reforestation of the amazon is just one simple idea or how about digging a well for some mother somewhere or how about something as simple as a cleaning toilets?

i wonder what you, my dear readers, wish hussein could have done for the pack of ‘mankind?’ were his organs at least donated for transplants? call me a simple dog, especially, if you engage in ad caninen argument/attack [like ad hominem argument], but i just know that something more intelligent could have been done with this man’s life.

sometimes humans are really very disappointing to me.

sorry for such a downer blog...perhaps your comments can be the uplifting ones....

vidi

we shoveled more snow today

we shoveled more snow today.

the cats and i “romped in the snow” as my human calls it. chloe continues to bury herself wherever convenient, peeking at me with the tops of her ears and all eyes. i jump on her when she does it, but she usually does it again.

tika did a nice trick: she (the lightest of us 3) managed to walk on the top of the snow without falling through. it’s hard to chase her when she can run on top, but a lot of fun. once i get her moving quickly (trying to escape) she usually falls through, planting herself neatly on her face, with a couple of hind legs and a tail sticking up (easy pickins).

my human went to safeway.

he took pictures (camera and phone) and put them on the web. (see his 2 snow albums... use the slideshow in upper right; space bar to pause it & arrows to go to next picture.) (click here)

my other human was really aghast that there was so little food left. he didn’t take a picture of the dog food section, so i think it’s okay. i don’t understand the cat little part.

anyway, it’s still snowing. this is kind of fun. apparently, when it snows, it’s saturday. it brings out the “pack instinct” in the humans, and they want to hang out with me more than going anywhere.

oh! fun stuff tonight! we walked over to ace hardware store and blockbuster movies (both were really full of people) and both times, the people who worked there stopped what they were doing and yelled at my human as we walked in (together)… “sir—please bring your dog inside. it’s fine. it’s cold out there.” my human kept mumbling “dog town – friendliest dog city in america.” (makes you wonder if there are cities where they let the dogs in but humans have to stand in the cold…)

grins, goofy, psychology, and circularity

my lady human has been coming home rather tired these last few days. i notice it in the way she doesn't throw the ball with as much verve. she also seems to not be very receptive to my telepathy these days...so, i've been watching her a little closer. her eyes are a bit glassy, and what little fur she has (mostly on the top of her head) is a bit lack-luster...

she seems to spend much of her time away from home listening to other humans in work that is called counseling psychology...

this got me curious, partly because she speaks very evasively about what she's actually doing; something to do with confidentiality, but she does talk about how important insight is to humans, and so i poked around the internet to see what insights i might gain about myself...

i found this www.willowglyn.com/shelti.htm

warning: it has EXTREMELY annoying music, but you can turn that off.

of course, the thing is written from an EXTREMELY human-centric position, but i'm very accustomed to this way of thinking, you have to put up with it when living with humans...but what was very interesting was:

"Many Shelties grin...that’s right! Like a big smile on a person, Shelties sometimes bare their teeth in a huge grin."

and as i'm reading the article, i'm thinking, 'uh-huh, well, maybe, uh, hmmmm, oh, yeah, right, grinning, my humans grin, like a big smile, like me, right....there were other things there that i'll comment on another time as they aren't quite on target as to how we shelties really are, but to the smiling, yes, this, this is correct, my humans do smile just like me,' and i suddenly remembered that when i smile/grin, my human guy often says,

'hey, goofy!"

which is always a bit confusing, and i really mental telepathy to him, 'my name is VIDI; VIDI, VIDI, VI-DEEEEEEE' so i quickly googled 'GOOFY' to gain some insight like my lady human thinks is the magic answer to everything (such simple creatures...) and

i find these pictures, as well as my beloved wikipedia as a google result: Goofy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and i can hardly believe this one.....

the first line in wikipdeia reads, 'Goofy is a fictional character from the Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse universe. He is an anthropomorphic dog and is one of Mickey Mouse's best friends.'

ANTHROPOMORPHISM, FASCINATING...

as i read through it, i am struck by how no where in the entry is any warning about how dangerous this ANTHROPOMORPHISM might be or at the very least that this state, this, dare i say it, personality disorder, might be at the very heart of humans inability to receive my mental telepathy.....

seriously, folks, this is INSIGHT!!!

gotta go...i smell squirrel!

VIDI