The key quote from the recently deceased Adam West:
“You can’t play Batman in a serious, square-jawed, straight-ahead way without giving the audience the sense that there’s something behind that mask waiting to get out, that he’s a little crazed, he’s strange.”
Exactly!
In this conversation yesterday, a common question came up: can you breed a Chihuahua and a Great Dane? It seems like it ought to be doable in one direction, if you cross a tiny little Chihuahua male to a large Great Dane female, but the question is what will happen if you cross a Great Dane male to a Chihuahua female — does the female swell up with giant puppies inside her until she looks like a watermelon with four tiny legs sticking out to the side, and then she explodes? That’s the cartoon version, anyway. I threw out my general recollection that no, fetus size is maternally regulated, so that doesn’t happen at all, but I didn’t recall any specifics, and said I’d look them up.
I did. It turns out there’s nothing but anecdotal bogosity out there on the interwebs. A lot of people cite this blog post from Ponderings from Pluto.
“It took a lot of trial and error,” said Marty Samson, a canine researcher with the University of South Texas. “At first, we tried having a Great Dane impregnate a Chihuahua, but that didn’t work: the puppies’ heads were bigger than the Chihuahua mother. We tried to deliver the puppies through Caesarian section four weeks early, but they were not viable enough to survive on their own.”
Neither the Great Mexicans/Chi-dane-danes nor their Chihuahua mother survived, leading Samson to conclude the only way to breed the dogs was to have a male Chihuahua mate with a female Great Dane.
Samson’s team had to erect a ladder for the male to climb since, even with the female Great Dane laying on the ground, his climbing on top of her was similar to an adult man having to climb a small structure.
Hey, everyone! It’s a satire site. It’s fake news. It even says so on the blog. I decided to check it out anyway, just in case. First problem: There is no such thing as a University of South Texas. There is a South Texas College, a Texas Southern University, a University of Texas Southwest, etc. But nope, sorry, we can’t ask the IRB at a fictional university to explain what they were thinking to allow this experiment.
I went further and checked PubMed, and there actually was an MD Samson who published a couple of papers in veterinary journals in the 1980s. They were not breeding experiments.
Other people cite Reddit (ugh, please). Nope, this is garbage, too. I also checked Snopes, just in case, but no joy.
It seems that either the experiment has not been done (purebred dogs are expensive, and owners are usually solicitous about breeding them appropriately; it’s also quite likely that this kind of research might be frowned upon as pointless), or it has been done and failed. It’s entirely possible that the two breeds are not interfertile. Or it may have been done, and the results were mundane and uninteresting, and not at all noteworthy.
I’m going to guess at the latter likelihood. I hit the developmental biology textbooks, and while it didn’t have the specific Chihuahua/Great Dane cross, Ecological Developmental Biology did describe a similar experiment in horses. Shetland ponies are small horses, less than 4 feet tall at the shoulder. Shire horses are huge draft horses. What if you cross them? The reciprocal crosses have been done, and no female Shetland ponies were exploded in the process. This diagram summarizes the results of the crosses.
The answer is simple: fetal size is regulated by the mother, and the foals are always of a size appropriate to the maternal breed. That makes sense; growth would be limited by the availability of maternal nutrients. The size of the offspring in different crosses are also correlated with uterus and placenta size. There is also evidence from human children.
When the same woman has borne children with different men, the birth weights of the babies are usually similar. However, when the same man fathers children with different women, the birth weights are often very different.
The final answer: the definitive experiment either has not been done or has not been reported in a credible source, but on the basis of other experiments, I’d predict that a Chihuahua mother would give birth to Chihuahua-sized puppies, no matter how big the father dog.
When a conservative party has trouble meeting the demands of a progressive future, they never consider compromising with the liberals: they always reach back and compromise with the most backward idiots they can find. The Tories in the UK fail to form a majority in the recent election, so what do they do? Revise their policies to be more in line with the electorate? Don’t make me laugh. They decide to form a coalition with the crazies. The DUP. Ian Paisley’s rotting corpse. This party:
It reminds me of how the Republicans in the US are making hay with an unholy union of Libertarians and the Religious Right. It just leads to greater decay.
The Driftglass report on Brooks’ latest: We can’t investigate Trump because look at all the misery caused by investigating the Clintons!
Instead, Mr. Brooks turns the entire Republican attempted-coup-by-impeachment scheme — from Whitewater through Blue Dress — into a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger cautionary tale about the consequences of investigating presidents generally:
If past is prologue, this investigation will drag on for a while. The Clinton people thought the Whitewater investigation might last six months, but the inquiries lasted over seven years. The Trump investigation will lead in directions nobody can now anticipate. When the Whitewater investigation started, Monica Lewinsky was an unknown college student and nobody had any clue that an investigation into an Arkansas land deal would turn into an investigation about sex.
This investigation will ruin careers far and wide. Investigators go after anybody they think can yield information on the president. Before the Whitewater investigators got to Clinton they took down Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Webb Hubbell, Susan and Jim McDougal, and many others.
But of course, The Past can only be prologue for those who remember it fully and clearly. So how perfectly ironic it is that doing this very thing — remembering The Past fully and clearly — is also the greatest single existential and financial threat to Conservatism generally, and to Mr. David Brooks’ ability to afford his new multi-million dollar Capitol Hill retreat specifically.
The media are trying desperately to exonerate Republicans and blame the Democrats for our current situation — and I agree in part with the latter, because the Democratic party has lost its soul in a mad scramble for corporate dollars — but we cannot allow this kind of selective amnesia. The Republican party is a treacherous swamp of greed and treachery, and the people who voted for Trump are…
I would say much worse things about David Brooks.
Tom Hardy’s dog died, as you’ll discover in his strangely punctuated stream-of-consciousness description of life with Woody Woodstock Yamaduki Hardy. It’s nice. He really loved that dog.
We did a “meet the bloggers” hangout tonight, so if you’ve wondered what Great American Satan and Iris Vander Pluym are like in conversation, now you can find out!
Katha Pollit tells it like it is. I’m also tired of all the news stories that tell us that we have to empathize with Trump voters, that it’s our fault that Trump won, that gosh, this dumbass who voted for a racist psychopath is just a down-home salt-of-the-earth fella. We know all that. But really, it’s time to stop the one-sided efforts to humanize people who dehumanize the rest of us.
But here’s my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschild’s subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-staters—that distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldn’t they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security? How realistic is the conviction, widespread among Trump supporters, that Hillary Clinton is a murderer, President Obama is a Kenyan communist and secret Muslim, and the plain-red cups that Starbucks uses at Christmastime are an insult to Christians? One of Hochschild’s subjects complains that “liberal commentators” refer to people like him as a “redneck.” I’ve listened to liberal commentators for decades and have never heard one use this word. But say it happened once or twice. “Feminazi” went straight from Rush Limbaugh’s mouth to general parlance. One of Hochschild’s most charming subjects, a gospel singer and preacher’s wife, uses it like a normal word. Equating women who want their rights with the genocidal murder of millions? How is that not a vile insult?
Somehow, the idea that the tolerant side is the side that tolerates Nazis annoys me.
I’m also tired of people who preach their goodness (because God) but don’t practice it. In particular, the Ryanesque theology that equates Jesus Christ with Ayn Rand. Capitalist Christianity has gone down an evil path.
These statements from Arrington and Marshall are rooted in the same religious idea: that the poor and sick — or at least a subset thereof — supposedly deserve their plight, and healthy and more financially secure Americans shouldn’t be forced to care for them.
This theology has incensed many progressive Christians of late, but it didn’t appear overnight. It’s the result of a decades-long campaign by conservative lawmakers, intellectuals, and theologians to craft a theology that rejects longstanding Christian understandings of society’s needy.
But they love Jesus! Therefore we’re supposed to sympathize with them. That’s the game skin-deep Christian exploiters have been playing for centuries.
Crispian Jago is dying of renal cancer, and he’s been writing an account of the progression of the disease. It’s a grim read, except that Jago is resolutely stolid throughout, determined to make the best of his remaining months. It’s just so British.
I’m an American. If I were in a similar situation, the story would be full of whining, wailing, caterwauling, hot tears, and angry denunciations of the universe. At some point I’d probably lash out, launching a cruise missile at some blameless smaller country that had said something that annoyed me. So it’s an interesting contrast.
He does have a bit of anger in him, but he reserves it for those who deserve it. Read the illustrated chapter, the Book of Extremely Tedious Oncological Platitudes, in which he takes on all the people who have been giving him advice on how to cope with cancer.
You guys are having an election? And you’re not electing a narcissistic psychopathic braggart?
You’ll have to tell us Americans how that feels in the comments.
