HOLIDAYS, CUSTOMS AND UDDER STUFF

Naugahyde
While its use peaked in the rest of America in the early 1970s, the tanned skin of the wild nauga remains popular in North Dakota.

Bison vs. Buffalo
Buffalo, home to terrible pro-sports teams, is an industrial wasteland in New York State. A Bison is the mascot of a North Dakota university sports team in the social wasteland of Fargo. Both are delicious in burger form.

“Minnesota Nice”
A more common term for the passive aggressive behavior of the residents to the east, who really deserve credit for doing so well, considering.

Supper
One pea more than "super" is supper! The last official meal of the day, supper is what east coast elitists call "dinner."

Sundogs
Also known as a "phantom sun” or a "parhelion.” A prairie phenomenon that occurs during sunsets when a bright blaze of light at 22°, the same distance above the horizon as the sun, gives the appearance of a second sun. If you see one, you owe George Lucas royalties.

Sodbuster
Farmers in the late 1800s who moved into the Great Plains to work the pristine expanse of prairie. Their nickname came from the way they busted up the sod to plant crops. Sodbusters shared a name with "union busters," another popular late- 1800s vocation.

The Food Security Act of 1985 gave sodbusters a bad name, using the term as the name of a provision that penalized the plowing up of certain grasslands. These lands were named "highly erodible lands" by the US Dept. of Agriculture, leading to government papers with titles like "More HEL is in compliance."

Each summer, Fort Ransom in Ransom County hosts Sodbuster Days. Some North Dakotans still think of themselves as sodbusters, though the stone-sharpening art of flintknapping has fallen off in popularity recently in favor of plain old napping.

Berm
A level, sometimes raised, barrier of grass area between the sidewalk and the road. Yes, you also have to mow that.

Euphorbia esula
Better known as "leafy spurge," or by its scientific name "That Damn Weed that Just Won't Die," euphorbia esulaan is an invasive plant characterized by white milky sap. An invasive immigrant species, leafy spurge moves into an area and takes all of the jobs that would otherwise go to native weeds.

Nodding Donkey
Commonly seen in western North Dakota, a "nodding donkey" is the above ground pumpjack portion of a reciprocating piston pump oil well. This term is derived from the pump's seesawing, in-and-out motion, leading to its other nicknames "grasshopper pump,” "thirsty bird” and “Yo’ Mamma’”

In the eastern portion of the state, a "nodding donkey" is an incumbent Democrat.

Hotdish
A hotdish is a baked casserole consisting of some kind of meat, some kind of starch, and some vegetable mixed with a canned soup and baked to a golden brown at some kind of temperature. For example, tater tots, hamburger, frozen peas and a can of cream of mushroom soup is a perfect hotdish. The hotdish forms the wide, heavy foundation of the North Dakota food pyramid. Eaten often enough it forms the wide foundation of the heaviest North Dakotans. The hotdish also serves as a peace offering between family members who hate each other.

Alberta Clipper
Sudden, unpredictable burst of harsh weather that comes down from Canada to tear through North Dakotan cities. Not to be confused with "Alberta trippers," a weekend burst of Canadians come down to tear through North Dakotan big box stores. Alberta Clippers are often confused with "Alberta strippers" as both can cause great monetary damage.

Syttende Mai
Also known as Norwegian Constitution Day. May 17 celebrates the day Norway's founding fathers plagiarized the greatest document in the world for their own freedom and liberty and then all shared a hotdish just like a bunch of socialists. In re- cent years, Syttende Mai has become especially popular with the Scandinavian Tea Party, also known as the Glögg Pärty.

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SQUARE DANCE!
Like polio and Flag Day, square dancing was largely eradicated in America by the late 20th century. Yet, a healthy number of square dancing groups still operate in the state, where it is the official dance.

American square dancing is derived from the folk dances of numerous immigrant cultures, including those of the British, Caledonians, and Skuares, a forgotten culture known for its inability to make anything but a right turn.

From the beginning, the dance was controversial.

In 1923, the popularization of the square dance move "Allemande Left," led to harsh punishment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Many religious leaders have forbidden square dancing for its similarity to sex. Sexually transmitted dances are common.

As with many things North Dakotan, the name, "square- dance," wastes nothing. It at once describes the motion through which the dance is performed while at the same time describing the social position of those performing it.

Square dancing is generally made up of movements using an eight count, with each dance consisting of a set of moves for the dancers to follow. Typical square dance choreography is comprised of four parts called A1, A2, B1, and B2. A count is one half of a musical measure, or a quarter note in 2/4 time, also a three-eighth note in 6/8 time. It is also a dude from old Europe who may or may not drink your blood.

The “caller” calls the dance by describing directions to the dancers through coded square dance terms. Typical terms include: allemande; butterfly whirl; do-si-do; promenade: sashay; and ladies chain (not to be confused with Ladies Chain™, a line of pornographic videos).

In some ways, square dance callers are the original free-form rap artists. In almost every other way they are not.

Some classic examples of calls that would make up a dance:

Allemande left, with the corner maid; meet your own and promenade.
Cat in the barn, rat in her mouth Grab your honey and head her south.
Ambulances and big black hearses; swing those doctors; swing those nurses.
Bow to you partner and the corner miss; to the opposite lady, just blow a kiss.
If you like this book so might your brother; then open that wallet and buy a-nother.

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NoDaktivity: Spot the Difference on Highway 2

Can you spot the four differences between these two pictures of traffic on Highway 2 during a blizzard?

ANSWERS

1) The truck carrying a load of potatoes in Picture 1 is carrying beets in Picture 2.
2) The Pontiac driver in Picture 1 has a blood alcohol level of .04. In Picture 2 it is .19.
3) It is night in Picture 2.
4) In Picture 2 there is a deer directly in front of your car. It is not there in Picture 1.

Born and raised on a dairy farm in the Midwest, Abe Sauer splits time between North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. One of his daughters was born in North Dakota, the other is North Dakotan in spirit. He's a columnist for The Awl and has written for Esquire, The Atlantic and The St. Paul Almanac, among others. He tweets the Midwest on Twitter.

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Converting a railroad corridor to a linear park results in an essential transformation of a past artifact. Though linear parks and other new landscape forms take their structure from the past, they have risen to the level of new typologies. They mark the beginning of a new landscape agenda. The example of an abandoned railway line made into a linear park or greenway will serve as the poster child of such ecological transformations.

This kind of transformation is not what it may first appear. Some members of the public consider the linear park a “greening” and the return to nature of an industrial mechanized corridor, where coal- or oil-driven engines polluted a strip of land for hundreds of miles. But the reality is more complicated. It is true that the making of the rail line into a greenway often involves planting trees along its edges and removing railroad ballast. But in most cases, the removed ballast is unfortunately replaced by asphalt, making the corridor surface impermeable, and thus ecologically a loss. Whatever vegetation is in place or is added to this trail generally has little in common with the original vegetation; it is not a return to the plant life that was there before the railway. What will grow on this line now will be vegetation which flourishes along edges. There will be many invasive plants which prosper in these situations, and the animal life will also be edge species. The greenway will also contain vegetation changed by having survived decades of application of herbicides (to keep railroad lines clear of vegetation) and by having endured diesel oil and coal emissions. As a corridor for mass transit, it could also be considered to have been a greener artifact than the resulting pedestrian and bike greenway, though its function as a space which permits people to walk and bike does enhance the quality of human life.

Linear parks are dynamic rather than static; they are not peaceful retreats but ways. A huge network of outworn and defunct transportation systems and public-utility corridors—canal lines, railroad lines, waterfronts, abandoned ports, utility rights-of-way—is being converted into open public space. That they have become a typology shows their success; they have exceeded and moved on from the artifact that generated them—the railroad corridor—and have spread to anything that can take a linear format.

The large-scale abandonment of railway lines across the United States gave rise to the creation of these linear parks, or greenways. The possibilities of this new form have not yet been fully explored. More appropriate to our times and culture than the traditional central urban parks of the Olmsted era, the linear park differs from them in many ways. Nonetheless, this new park, like those of the nineteenth century, continues to embody our civic ideals; today’s greenway has sparked the first truly widespread citizens’ movement concerning public space since the great park era of the 1830s to 1860s, eliciting the same broad-based grass-roots idealism and support as the nineteenth-century urban parks did. This movement has spawned citizens’ organizations that support various individual conversions of old infrastructures to new parks, as well as national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Rails-To-Trails; it has also become a strong base for another NGO, the Trust for Public Land, which has been brought in to negotiate land acquisitions from the most challenging of clients, the railroad companies.

The main characteristic of this new public space, the linear park, is above all the creation of a dynamic set of connections rather than a destination. It responds to a new stage in our thinking about transportation and to the peripatetic spirit that has long characterized American life. The linear park opens pathways to diverse neighborhoods and new recreational spaces and experiences of nature; it invites exploration of alternate modes of transport and of cultural resources. It weaves connections between city and suburb, suburb and country, and nature and culture, and among people of different origins, ages, or sexes. It is an answer to the increasing cultural isolation and physical separation in which we find ourselves.

Linear parks are the twenty-first-century park par excellence. Their implications are dramatic: for a relatively small amount of money, these narrow green corridors can reconnect parts of a city, weaving themselves through it, spreading themselves democratically to reach all areas. They can be attached to streams, rivers, or shores to provide soft edges and restore floodplains. And they function as pathways for people to travel on foot or bicycle, not as ancillaries to an avenue of cars. Though the idea of the linear park is less than twenty-five years old, it has the potential to remobilize our life in cities, encouraging pedestrian movement.

There are many other positive effects of greenways. They can foster a community of businesses along their edges, so that neighbors can once again walk, bike, or skate to the store for a loaf of bread or a bottle of aspirin. They can also provide critical migration corridors for animals through urban areas. They are active landscapes, which can introduce open, green space to various parts of the city; intensify topographic features, rivers, ridges; offer a soft surface capable of absorbing rainwater; and let people escape the car-dominated hardscape.

The transformative power of linear parks comes from the connections they are capable of producing. Up to now, linear parks have developed without arms, as straight 10- to 15-foot-wide strips along the path of an abandoned railway, canal, or utility corridor. But linear parks can also become links (either as permanent paths or as temporary one-day street closures) to museums, to bakeries, to marathons, to concerts, to state parks, to political rallies. This modest caterpillar with the capability of becoming a centipede is a landscape that can actively change a community: greening, invigorating, and connecting.

One of the chief values of the linear park is that it addresses the problem of socioeconomic separation to which the suburb contributes. Greenways, which accommodate movement on foot or bike, might be possible restitchers of the urban fabric, joining urban centers and suburbs to one another recreationally and culturally, providing the continuity of a common space. The linear park enhances the character of all the neighborhoods it connects. It might provide an outdoor activity for people in a medical or child-care facility, or offer space for educational and aesthetic activities for children, teenagers, or the elderly. In other words, an interplay can be achieved between continuity and locality, in response to the specific needs and characteristics of each neighborhood it transverses. In this way, the linear park can offer many different experiences.

This new park system, with human motion at its heart, promises to be economically productive. The linear park energizes areas around it, just as the railroad and highway before it did. Though it invites dense development along its edges, we have the opportunity to think about how we wish to implement and direct that growth. The linear park can increase land values and attract premium residential areas around its perimeters, just as nineteenth-century parks did. At the same time, however, the continuity and length of these corridors also lend themselves to a variety of commercial and institutional uses. Moreover, there is a political potential in these parks, as new avenues to community empowerment.

The originality of the linear park is to be expressed, not buried in ideals and agendas of the past. I think it is not too idealistic to propose that clean energy sources be used to build greenways; that linear parks should be drained, planted, built, and maintained to restore a healthy environment; that they thus become reliable refuges in which plants, animals, and people can thrive. We can, in these modest strips of land, create a blueprint for the life we wish for ourselves.

One valuable aspect of linear parks is that they stem from local initiatives. It requires a group of motivated citizens who band together, pay for a regular newsletter, and pressure their local government to acquire abandoned corridors of railroads and canals. This is often a slow process. In the case of the Farmington Canal in New Haven, Connecticut, it took more than 15 years, and progressed bit by bit. These projects shepherded by citizens’ groups, moving gradually but persistently, are a lesson about American society’s potential for action.

This new landscape at city scale has already entered the urban fray, putting citizens’ associations, politicians, railroad companies, NGOs, and state DOTs in one jousting arena. The conflicts and their resolution are not to be taken for granted. Though the citizens’ movement has been successful in many instances in obtaining the land from the railroads, there have been many compromises: the land in most cases is simply being banked for new public transportation systems. Also, the majority of these projects receive external funding (one million dollars a mile), which has meant that only their use has been transformed; no aesthetic language has been developed for them as a new modern typology. The work of transformation usually consists in making a narrow band—typically 15 to 20 feet—of asphalt pavement with some markings or signs at road crossings, thus creating paths for bikes and pedestrians. For a landscape’s new typology to succeed, landscape artists need to enter a battlefield of competing interests and experiment with alliances to shift economic interests toward it. 2 These struggles and partnerships are not only with client groups, but also with others who have the various types of professional expertise needed to create a new typology. The economics for linear parks have kept them from developing a landscape aesthetic which reveals the new sustainable relations between humans and nature. They still speak the old language of suburban “nature” trails, echoing an old relationship with nature.

Diana Balmori is the principal of Balmori Associates and author, most recently, of Groundwork (coauthored with Joel Sanders). On December 8th, she'll be part of a discussion, "Urban by Nature: Healing the Landscape/Architecture Divide in NYC," at the Museum of the City of New York.

Images courtesy of Balmori Associates. Author photo by Margaret Morton.

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Have you ever noticed that you always know when your dog wants to go “out”? Or when he is hungry? Or when he is angry with you or others?

You know because your dog is already talking to you!

Dogs are natural actors, instinctively adept at using their bodies and facial expressions to communicate with you nonverbally. They are also expert mimes, capable of performing a vast repertoire of deceptively simple routines to subtly get their points across. Some of these “bits” are universal (e.g., nosing the dog dish to indicate hunger, drinking out of the toilet to indicate thirst), but most are specific to the dog. For example, my own dog, Flynn (a seven-year-old Irish setter), raises his paw and points at the television screen when he wants me to change the channel.

Many dog owners are content to communicate with their pets solely on this preverbal level. But imagine how handy it would be if, in addition to being able to alert you when somebody was at the door, your dog could also tell you who it was (dogs, remember, have a keen sense of smell). Or how enriching your relationship with your dog would be if the two of you could just “shoot the breeze” sometimes. Let me show you how.

Exercises: Try this simple nonverbal exchange: place both hands firmly on either side of your dog’s head. Apply firm pressure and pull your dog’s face close to yours (between 1" and 2" is optimum). Now, smile broadly and—again, using both hands—vigorously stroke your dog in an upward motion from the base of his neck to just behind his ears. Your dog will understand this as meaning, “I like you. I value you as my dog.” If your dog then licks your face, that means, “I like you, too!” (Do not be discouraged if your dog does not immediately lick your face. The setting may be too intimate for him, or, more likely, he is just not a licker.)

THE CANINE TONGUE

Dogs are the most vocal of all domesticated animals. Whereas the cat goes meow, the cow goes moo, the sheep goes baa, and the pig goes oink-oink, the dog is not limited by these crude utterances. The average American dog can bark, howl, yap, snap, growl, whimper, woof, yelp, bay, howl, whine, gnarl, mutter, and, of course, bow-wow. In fact, many scientists believe that if dogs had more highly developed brains and sophisticated vocal cords, they could converse much like humans do.

But make no mistake: dogs do “speak,” and not just as a parlor trick. My own close examination of the canine tongue reveals that dogs have a “vocabulary” in excess of 2,000 words. Fortunately, nearly all of these words roughly translate into the English word “food” (dogs have more than 120 words for dry food alone), and so you will only need to learn a working vocabulary of about 400 words in order to talk to your dog.

Pronunciation can be tricky, however. The canine alphabet differs significantly from ours, featuring a fraction of our consonants (b, f, h, p, r, w, and sometimes y) and the rounder vowel sounds, which are more “sung” than “spoken.” Words are therefore primarily distinguished by minor variations in pronunciation (dogs can differentiate twelve types of r sounds and five degrees of hardness in the letter b). From this deceptively sparse phoneme palette, dogs are thus able to create a comparatively rich language.

A basic Canine/English dictionary can be found at the back of this book, but you should be aware of few matters of form and style before attempting to use it.

Eschew Excess Barking. Dogs tend to follow Strunk and White’s dictum about omitting needless words and avoiding weak modifiers. Rather than saying something smells “very tasty,” a dog will simply bark “tasty” (woh-af), placing added emphasis on the initial vowel sound and saying the entire word louder.

Regarding Plurals and Possessives. There is no true plural in the canine tongue. Rather, your dog, seeing another dog, may say, Rarf ! (“Hey, there’s another dog!”), whereas, upon seeing a pack of dogs, your dog will likely exclaim: Rarf rarf rarf rarf rarf rarf! Possessives, on the other hand, are usually indicated with a low growl.

Some Things Just Won’t Translate. Not all human concepts are meaningful to dogs; for instance, there is no dog word for “stay.” Likewise, there are several dog phrases which cannot be translated adequately into English (a few of these do have analogues in German and Chinese, however). Among the more enigmatic dogisms you are likely to encounter:

Bow wow—This frequently uttered canine cant provides an intriguing look at your dog’s overall philosophy. Directly translated into English, bow wow means, simply, “I am.” But to your dog, it means something ineffably more.
Rowp! Rowp!—Usually delivered enthusiastically with your dog’s head thrown back, means something along the order of “Would you listen to that? Is that loud or what?”
Rur rar roo roo roo rawr rawr awr raw rarp rarp rarp!—Means nothing; your dog has gone crazy.

Exercises: Let’s start with a simple “hello.” While dogs prefer to say hello nonverbally, they are capable of a standard declarative greeting when actual contact is not possible. The dog word for “hello” is woof (pronounced wuf, wüf, and sometimes wrüf, depending on breed and regional dialect). Facing your dog, say woof in as energetically and friendly a way as possible (tone of voice is very important; the similar-sounding weuf means “Back off! This is my food!”). For maximum impact, place added emphasis on the w and f sounds (The f is actually more of a ph. Dogs have more space between their lips and teeth than humans do, which causes increased “lip flapping” when they speak and makes them particularly well-suited for consonantal diphthongs.) If you have said “hello” correctly, your dog will woof back, a bit louder and slightly higher in pitch. If your dog just stares at you, you have probably mispronounced the word. Try again. If repeated attempts to say hello fail, it may be because your dog feels you are making fun or trying to talk down to him. Try to sound more sincere. If you have a smaller dog, you also might want to try substituting the phrase yip yip yip.


NOW THAT YOU AND YOUR DOG ARE ON SPEAKING TERMS: WHAT DO YOU TALK ABOUT?

Like humans, dogs prefer to talk about what they know. This varies widely from dog to dog, but my experience with Flynn is probably typical.

Flynn loves to talk about smells, all kinds of smells, even and especially smells humans consider impolite to discuss. You must try to give your dog some latitude in this regard. Remember, smells are your dog’s only colors.

Flynn is also keenly interested in the environment, though his commitment wavers. During our trips to the city, for example, he will complain long and bitterly about the air quality, and yet, he plainly enjoys all the garbage.

Among Flynn’s other favorite topics of conversation are: animals (all kinds), music (particularly opera), the weather, and the moon. Conversation stoppers for Flynn include: politics, religion, sports, clothing, the future, and money matters (about which he often displays an exasperating disinterest).

Your dog will likely share some of Flynn’s interests; undoubtedly he will have several of his own. The important thing for you is to explore a full range of talking points with your dog, to discover what he wants to talk about. Any topic is fair game, although I would strongly warn you against broaching the subject of death. When I tried to explain this concept to Flynn, he began whimpering uncontrollably, then took off through the house, scooting along on his rear end and making a horrible mess.

Exercises: Take your dog for a short, brisk walk around the block. When you arrive home, go into separate rooms and compose a list of all of the things you saw. (Since your dog cannot write, he will have to memorize his.) After about fifteen minutes (a time limit is important; your dog will otherwise spend hours pondering a single five-minute walk), get together and compare and contrast your lists.

You will be amazed at how differently you and your dog look at the world.


GETTING PAST THE SMALL TALK

How much do you really know about your dog? To find out, it is not enough to talk to your dog: you must also listen. Only then will your true dog emerge, as Flynn has for me.

For example, I never realized, until I took the time to listen, that Flynn has such a terrific sense of humor (albeit a bit immature). Before I mastered his language, one of Flynn’s favorite jokes was to spout a canine vulgarity of the lowest order whenever I commanded him to “speak.” He’s really quite a kidder.

In getting Flynn to open up, I also discovered he has the heart of a poet (as I suspect most dogs do). He loves to recite his song poems (which resemble blues dirges) on clear evenings when there is a full moon. Here’s one (translated):

        My master is good
                 and he gives me good food.
        When I am hungry,
                 he brings me food then.
        Except sometimes,
                 I remember one time in particular.
        But mostly,
                 he is a good provider.

Had I known this was what Flynn had been howling all along, I never would have yelled at him to shut up. Getting to know your dog can help you avoid similar misunderstandings.

Be warned, however: it is possible you and your dog will get to know each other, only to realize you are totally incompatible. This happens rarely, but when it does, it is better to accept this fact, and take appropriate measures, than to go on living a lie.

Exercises: If you and your dog have gotten this far, you are beyond structured exercises.


HOW TO TALK TO A BAD DOG

Being able to talk to your dog is wonderful, but should not be confused with true intimacy. Don’t find this out the hard way, as I had to.

A few months ago, I came home from work and discovered Flynn had chewed up all the mail. He could not, or would not, give any explanation for his behavior. Furthermore, he did not seem the least bit contrite. I sternly lectured him on the importance of respecting the property of others (throwing in a few ominous references to U.S. Postal Inspectors) and thought that would be the end of the matter.

But the next day, Flynn had done it again. He had also attempted to hide the results of his crime throughout the house.

It didn’t take too long to figure out what was going on. Behind the bedroom toilet (where Flynn is not even supposed to go), I found the pulpy remains of my broadband bill; it was for nearly fifteen hundred dollars!

A quick call to the company confirmed my worst suspicions: someone had ordered Beverly Hills Chihuahua more than three hundred times. (This is not quite the fantastic accomplishment it seems; the remote is quite intuitive.) Although a cable company supervisor said she would give me a one-time credit on the bill, I was absolutely furious. It wasn’t the money; it was that Flynn had deliberately lied to me, something I thought dogs were not even capable of.

I lost control and lashed out at Flynn viciously.

Harph! Harhh rrah gruh rau-hurr! I barked without thinking, and then went on to say a number of other things I immediately wished I could take back. But it was too late; Flynn had understood every word.

In retrospect, I guess I should have just taken a rolled-up newspaper and rapped Flynn across the snout. I thought we had gotten beyond that kind of thing, but I’ve since come to realize that words hurt far more when they are spoken in anger than when they appear on the printed page.


WHEN YOUR DOG IS NO LONGER TALKING TO YOU

Flynn didn’t speak to me for a long time after the Chihuahua incident.

I would try to initiate conversations, ask Flynn how his day was, but he would just mutter something unintelligible. When I would try to tell him how my day had gone, he would look straight into my eyes, and then rudely turn away to attend to an itch between his legs.

After about three weeks of this, I couldn’t take it anymore.

I got down on my knees and literally begged Flynn to talk to me again. I have re-created the resulting conversation below. It represented an important breakthrough for Flynn and me, and I think you’ll find it instructive.

Me: C’mon, boy, speak to me! Speak!

Flynn: Arph?

Me: Arph? Because we need to talk about this. I’m going nuts with this.

Flynn: Wuf wif.

Me: I said I was sorry! You don’t know how sorry I am. Rü! But there’s something else going on here, isn’t there? You can tell me, boy. This is your best friend talking. Please. Roof.

(long pause)

Flynn (softly): Har hraugh rhuf whuf hrr.

Me: What do you mean? I pay attention to you all the time!

Flynn: Har hraugh rhuf whuf hrr.

Me: Yeah, rhuf. We talk all the time, don’t we? Or at least we used to.

Flynn: Rhuf… rhuf… hurr.

Me: Oh my God. I am such an idiot.

What I had only then realized was that when Flynn said to me, “You never pay attention to me anymore,” he was employing a euphemism! What he had meant was, “You never pet me anymore.” And I had completely missed it.

I had gotten so wrapped up in the idea of being able to talk to Flynn, and so comfortable discussing matters with him as an equal, I had completely forgotten that, when you get right down to it, Flynn was just a dog—a dog with the same physical and emotional needs as any dog. Words count for very little to a dog; actions speak much louder.

This is the most important lesson I can impart to you: it is not enough to talk to your dog; you must also communicate. I shudder to think that if Flynn had not opened up to me, I might have gone on hurting him indefinitely. Remember: your dog might not be as assertive.

Flynn and I talk less than we did at the beginning, but that’s all right. We know that when we want to, or need to, we can. And it still comes in quite handy sometimes.

But other times, like on hot, firefly nights, when the stars seem so close you can catch them in your mouth, and the old porch swing creaks rhythmically back and forth with the crickets adding chirpy syncopation, and the slow, thick air smells a deep, dark purple, well, words are meaningless. Flynn has taught me that.

You can purchase the audiobook for your dog by sending $19.95 cash or money order plus $3.50 for postage and handling to: Talking Dog, P.O. 8745, Champaign, IL 61820. Flynn cautions that some of the growling on this tape may be too intense for younger dogs or more sensitive, miniature dogs.

* Like He's Your Best Friend

Larry Doyle, a former writer for "The Simpsons," works in showbiz and writes funny things for The New Yorker. He is the author of I Love You, Beth Cooper, which won the 2008 Thurber Prize for American Humor and was made into a major motion picture, and Go Mutants!. He lives outside Baltimore with his wife, Becky, and their three children.

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My friends in Goleta Meadows,

I think about you always and honor the sacrifices you make for our community.

How is our little group? Are people from the area still showing up for the weekly suppers? Keep your gates open to neighbors, and hide nothing from the honestly curious. We are living without the three poisons by choice, to show the world a new path, in fact a new map of the world. Don’t be weary. Don’t rob yourselves of music and conversation and laughter!

It saddens me that Salvatore and Jane have left us. Why did they leave? I can’t answer that. Maybe it’s because they were the last in your community who knew B. Think of all the questions the newcomers must have, the expectations that those few who lived and worked with B somehow take his place.

You write, “And now we try to live up to what B wanted for us, and not one of us ever saw B face to face.” Maybe that makes it easier. I knew B as well as anyone could, and I often stare at the blank page wondering what to write to our scattered communities.

But I will tell you a story that you can tell the others.

After B was set free from the Los Angeles county jail, those who remained loyal to him gathered at the home of Vera and Tommy in Echo Park, that crumbling old cottage that looked ready to topple down the hillside. We shared a meal around their great wooden table. The blinds were closed because already the unmarked cars were clumsily parked outside and the spies were watching from the street. The table was lit by two great candles and we were about to begin when the garden door flew open and B ran in, laughing, because he was forced to go through the alley and over a fence and then jump down to the garbage cans below and the knees of his pants were ripped and dirty.

We embraced him and he looked at us and said, “This gloom is intolerable. If you can smile and enjoy each other’s company, sit down with me. If not, go outside and scowl at the policemen.”

Then he led us in a song and we filled our glasses and he said, “Honor this food, honor each other, honor this world that is our home.”

Someone, I can’t remember who now, started crying and said, “But what will we do?”

B smiled in the candlelight and helped himself to the food and passed the dish to me, sitting at his left.

“What will we do?” He took a bite and answered, “We are already doing it.”

Ken Layne is the proprietor of Wonkette; Dignity is available for the Kindle.

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Linda encouraged her to take chances, to talk to guys instead of just watching from a distance, as they liked to do in the school cafeteria over lunch or tea. While Maria’s stock response was that she was too busy or too “stressed” from work, the truth—which she admitted only to herself, at least at first, and only late at night, as if it were a secret even to her—was that she was very much attracted to certain guys and—again, in secret—was not above paging through the student face book to figure out exactly who they were. Coincidentally or not, almost every one of them was a brass player; these were guys who tended to swagger through the cafeteria looking hungover but unrepentant, like they had just rolled out of bed after sleeping in their clothes, which may have been true, given rumors of whiskey-fueled jam sessions in smoky jazz clubs, but which Maria also liked to consider because it seemed to make the strict adherence to her own training somehow more tolerable. And while she would have had no problem walking up to one of them and singing an aria, the thought of having a conversation—of being “normal” for just a few minutes—petrified her, so for a long time she did nothing at all, and resigned herself to playing out these meetings in her fantasies.

One night at school, as she walked by a rehearsal room, she noticed the muffled strains of a trumpet and, peering through the window, spotted one of the brass players just as he was emptying his spit valve onto the wooden floor. This particular guy had already caught her attention, and was at or near the top of her list: an unabashedly beer-bellied trumpet player, he was at least seven inches shorter than she was and had a full, bushy beard that in a certain light looked almost red. His name was Richie Barrett, and—as much as she would have preferred not to spend the time thinking about him—she liked his sleepy and somewhat disdainful eyes; that he was black added to the sense of curiosity and transgression as she thought about what it would be like to meet him, and possibly more. On the verge of walking away, she found the courage to push open the unlocked door and walk through as though—or so she told herself—she were taking the stage.

He didn’t even look up. “Sorry—I still have seventeen minutes.”

“I just wanted to tell you,” Maria declared with an expression halfway between a grimace and a smirk, “that other people, who might not like the idea of wading through your drool, use these floors.”

“What? A little spit never hurt anyone,” he said and dipped his finger in the puddle, then raised the finger into the air with a grin, as if to offer it to her. “Want some?”

In response, Maria cleared her own throat and disgorged a fairly sizable ball of phlegm, which landed at her feet. “You first.”

Laughing, Richie left the room and returned a few seconds later with a stack of paper towels, half of which he handed to Maria, and together they kneeled to mop up. “I don’t know if we’ve officially met.” He held out his free hand for her to shake. “Richie Barrett.”

She felt dazed from the apparent success of her entrance and resisted the temptation to take a bow and leave. “Maria Sheehan,” she replied, and liked the weight of his hand in hers. “Second-year soprano.”

“I know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, let’s see, that you’re a hot-shit soprano who almost got kicked out for punching Judy Caswell.”

“So not true,” Maria objected, employing one of Linda’s expressions. “I tapped her on the shoulder when she tried to step in front of me during a scene rehearsal. She tripped and hurt her toe, and the whole thing got blown way out of proportion. And I didn’t almost get kicked out for it, either. Anna saw the whole thing.” Everyone in the school referred to “Anna,” so there was no need to explain the reference.

Richie nodded. “Well, between you and me, I think Judy Caswell’s kind of a bitch.”

“Between you and me,” Maria said, lowering her voice to what she liked to think was its most sultry tone, something she had also practiced in front of the bathroom mirror, “the top of her range isn’t bad, but her middle sounds like a dying cow.”

“Can I quote you on that?” Richie responded as he stepped around Maria and blocked the door so that—when she did not move out of the way—only inches remained between them.

Maria felt seasick with physical longing. “Unless you want to die,” she said, “you better move.”

“Maybe I want to die.”

Moving closer, she tilted her head down. “Maybe you want to kiss me?”

“I think a cup of coffee would be more appropriate,” he said and pulled back just slightly. “I hate to play the stereotype.”

Maria stepped back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, we only met five seconds ago and you’re already hot and heavy? You don’t think that has anything to do with the fact that I’m black?”

“I never thought of it exactly like that,” Maria admitted, as she tried to decide if he was insulted or not, or if she was insulted or not. “I see your point, but I can tell you that of all the black guys at this school, you’re the first one I’ve ever wanted to kiss.”

Richie ’s smile contained a mix of wry skepticism and intelligence.

“So what do you have against black guys?”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said and laughed a bit uneasily.

“If you say so,” he said and inched closer to her, so that she now was in a position to kiss him again.

“You’re sending very mixed signals,” she whispered.

He looked at his watch and then reached behind her, locked the door, and then pulled a cord to close the blind on the small door window facing the hallway. “We only have fourteen minutes.”

They kissed for a few seconds as Maria, gripped by something magnetic and propulsive, leaned into him. She loved how sturdy he felt on his feet and the sight of her own blue hand against the russet folds of his neck added to the excitement, as did his beard—softer than she expected—when it brushed against her face. She knew what she wanted and decided there was no point pretending; he was obviously thinking the same thing. After a furious removal of shirts and unbuttoning of pants, Maria was on the floor, and for once remembered her experience with Joey Finn with appreciation as—with Richie ’s hairy gut spread out over her—she wrapped her hand around his dick to help guide him into her, where after a few seconds she found it very much to her liking. As he began slowly to move, she dug her hands into his back and in an urgent whisper reminded him that time was at a premium; he responded in kind, pushing to allegro for a few minutes before a molto vivace finale that left her pleasantly numb and transparent, after which she reluctantly watched her body reappear from somewhere else.

Excerpted from The Metropolis Case: A Novel. (Amazon; Indiebound.) Copyright @ 2010 by Matthew Gallaway. Reprinted by Permission of Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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West Germany v. Detroit: The Volkswagen Campaign
It was a "Nazi car" repackaged by a Jewish-owned advertising agency and sold as an underdog option to the bloated cars out of Detroit. It became a symbol of consumer counterculture. It was ugly, it was cramped and it was named after a bug.

"But we learned that Hitler's 'people's car' had a lot going for it," George Lois wrote after returning from Volkswagen's factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, with copywriter Julian Koenig. "Julian saw it as a dumb, honest, little car-but a marketing enigma. New York was our biggest market for our new account, and that's what made it so tough."

If David Ogilvy exploited the class aspirations of consumers to get them to spend money, and Leo Burnett's campaigns spoke in a lingua franca so that products reflected American sensibilities, then Bill Bernbach's greatest-some hail it as the greatest-contribution to advertising's creative revolution was counterintuitive marketing. Bernbach took the perceived disadvantages of a product and turned them into their most desirable aspect. With the Beetle, Bernbach position the little car as a revolt against American excess. The vulgar Detroit cars were oversized, larded with unnecessary accents that increased their prices (fins, chrome, etc.) and every few years you would have to buy another to stay current.

Koenig's copy acknowledged the Beetle was homely, squat, and had been derisively referred to as a lemon, but argued that the compact car's lack of flare was because German car inspectors-3,389, to be exact-spent more time perfecting an efficient product than adding frippery to a car that could only depreciate over time.

Thanks almost entirely to the campaign, sales went up to 500,000 a year.

Bernbach's (and his disciples') ability to challenge consumers' beliefs about a product while simultaneously enticing them to buy it distinguishes him as one of the most influential forces of modern advertising.

"Now I'm not talking about tricking people," Bernbach said. "If you get attention by a trick, how can people like you for it? For instance, you are not right if, in your ad, you stand a man on his head just to get attention. But you are right to have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets."

Lois summed up the legendary campaign this way: "We sold the Nazi car in a Jewish town by junking all the rules of car advertising. It could have only happened at Bill Bernbach's agency."

Penthouse called it "a dazzling pop-culture history of the 1960s"! What more could you want? Also: it features contributions by Awlers Matthew Gallaway, Alex Balk and more!

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The eighth grade days flowed in their hungry path and I grew more conscious of myself; I sat in classes, bored, dreaming. One long dry afternoon I took out my composition book and told myself that I would write a story; it was sheer idleness that led me to it. What would the story be about? It resolved itself into a plot about a villain who wanted a widow's home and I called it The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre. It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, and stemmed from pure feeling. I finished it in three days and then wondered what to do with it.

The local Negro newspaper! That's it... I sailed into the office and shoved my ragged composition book under the nose of the man who called himself the editor.

"What is that?" he asked.

"A story," I said.

"A news story?"

"No, fiction."

All right. I'll read it," he said.

He pushed my composition book back on his desk and looked at my curiously, sucking at his pipe.

"But I want you to read it now," I said.

He blinked. I had no idea how newspapers were run. I thought that one took a story to an editor and he sat down then and there and read it and said yes or no.

"I'll read this and let you know about it tomorrow," he said.

I was disappointed; I had taken the time to write it and he seemed distant and uninterested.

"Give me the story," I said, reaching for it.

He turned from me, took up the book and read ten pages or more.

"Won't you come in tomorrow?" he asked. "I'll have it finished then."

I honestly relented.

"All right," I said. "I'll stop in tomorrow."

I left with the conviction that he would not read it. Now, where else could I take it after he had turned it down? The next afternoon, en route to my job, I stepped into the newspaper office.

"Where's my story?" I asked.

"It's in galleys," he said.

"What's that?" I asked; I did not know what galleys were.

"It's set up in type," he said. "We're publishing it."

"How much money will I get?" I asked, excited.

"We can't pay for manuscript," he said.

"But you sell your papers for money," I said with logic.

"Yes, but we're young in business," he explained.

"But you're asking me to give you my story, but you don't give your papers away," I said.

He laughed.

"Look, you're just starting. This story will put your name before our readers. Now, that's something," he said.

"But if the story is good enough to sell to your readers, then you ought to give me some of the money you get from it," I insisted.

He laughed again and I sensed that I was amusing him.

"I'm going to offer you something more valuable than money," he said. "I'll give you a chance to learn to write."

I was pleased, but I still thought he was taking advantage of me.

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