I Bet on the Wrong Dog

Stacy's Mom Lynne is a die-hard dog person.  She has been running dogs in agility competitions for years and has got all the ribbons and trophies to prove it.  She's intense.  I'm not saying she gets carried away or has difficultly separating dog world relality from human world reality or anything, but before I was allowed to propose to Stacy she did make me get a qualifying score in the weave pole event.  It wasn't a pretty sight, but hey.  You do what you have to do.

Her first agility dog was Ace, a Jack Russel terrier.  There have been many other additions to the brood, but Ace was the prototype of canine insanity to come.  Ace and I even bonded somewhat.  A rather tense and high-strung animal, I'm one of the few people he would let pat him, and on a good day, rub his tummy.  Ace is an old codger now - 15+, half bald and all trembly.  His time is short.  If all dogs go to heaven, Ace is significantly late for his appointment.

Knowing that fateful day, when if finally arrived, would be a hard one for the MiL, I figured I would make a rare attempt to be kind and considerate (and preemptively earn some mother-in-law brownie points) by painting her a portrait of her beloved show dog.  I purloined an old photo of puppy Ace and put together the soon-to-be memorial portrait, shooting to give it to her for a birthday present.  I was happy with the way it came out.

She seemed to like it too.

But as brilliant as I thought my plan to be, it had a significant flaw that manifest itself only days before I'd finished the painting.  I came up to Stacy on the phone one day and she was looking concerned and making comforting sounds to whoever it was on the other end.

"What wrong?" I asked.

"It's Kyle," she said, speaking of her brother.  "He just had to put Mom's dog to sleep.  Mom's quite upset."

"Ace is dead?" I asked.

"No, not Ace.  Charlie."

I bet on the wrong #@%$  dog.

Probably Not As Smart As I Thought I Was

N's kindergarten teacher let N bring home a dice learning game from school today.  I don't think N quite got whatever the rules for the game were, but he had tons of fun this evening tossing the dice and very seriously and deliberately manipulating the little wooden, numbered flags on the toy after each throw.  Occasionally he would shriek with satifaction and squeal "I won!" though I never saw any rhyme or reason to what he did and never understood his trigger to celebrate.  After a while watching I decided I would inject myself in the name of pedagogy and create a learning moment.

"OK, N, L, we're going to run some experiments.  If we throw one die over and over and count how many times each number comes up, which number do you think will come up most often?"  "Four!"  "Free!"  "Five!"  "Six!"  They had difficulty with commitment.  I made them all sign up to a number then had them initiate the experiment.  N tossed the die over and over, gleefully calling out the count while I tallied the results.  Then L had her turn at the wheel and scores of additional samples were added to the sample space.  After nearly a hundred tosses we closed the experiment and performed our analysis.  Hmmmm...  Not quite what I expected. Seems 6 was a particularly popular number.

Not overly concerned, I upped the ante.  "Now we're going to roll two dice.  What do you think will appear the most often?"  This time we documented our guesses and made everyone take a stand:

• N chose 10
• L chose 12
• Mommy chose 10
• Daddy chose 7

L (I was very pleased to note) very quickly pointed out that no one should chose 1.  Unfortunately her spot-on logic for why she should avoid 1 was not extended to other related concepts that would have spared her some upcoming humiliation.

And the die were cast!

The results were a lot more comfortable from my point of view, though something mysterious seemed to be happening in the upper registers.  (I think N's teacher might be having shady craps games in the teachers' lounge after school.)  At the end of it all L was bitter; Mommy and N were suspicious, and Daddy was smug.

As with all important analytical work, documenting your data sets is critical, so I therefore submit our extensive catalog of original research documentation.