Madonna or Madeline?

After calling this kitty Maddie, Madness, and Mad (right after her flea treatment), yesterday morning I was calling her and "Madeline" just kind of slipped out. So...

Thinking about changing my 1 year old cat's name to Madeline. (Bit of a refresher/background--I adopted her as an 11 week old kitten in January and she CAME with the name Madonna. The name always felt a tad awkward, but I didn't have any better ideas at the time.) Can still call her Maddie or whatever else springs from my lips at a given moment. LITERALLY no other human in the household cares, or even calls her by name. So, no help here, and I am REALLY undecided. Input please.

Addendum: For some reason I resisted calling her "Maddie" for a long time, and it still doesn't quite trip off the tongue. If Daughter had been a second son instead, I liked the name Matthew, but not Matt. Also, I did enjoy the Madeline books...

Operant Conditioning Lecture

Wow--this took an unbelievable number of attempts before I finally got it to work. Can you say "technical difficulties"?

Link to Rat Basketball Tutorial
Link to "How to Toilet Train Your Cat

Classical Conditioning Lecture (Take 1)

Although I am not currently teaching psychology in an official (paid) context, I did devote a sizable chunk of my adult life to both learning and teaching this subject. I am loathe to let all of that learning go to waste, and also would hate to see my skills and knowledge base in this area erode.

So, I decided to create some video presentations. Maybe they will end up being helpful as "supplementary resources" for psychology students and instructors. This first attempt did not turn out as "clean" and "polished" as I really would have liked, but just finishing the presentation and converting it into video format proved much more daunting than I ever imagined. Mainly because my laptop kept crashing without warning while the PowerPoint was being converted into a video. I'm sure this will become easier, and the process with go more smoothly with practice.

May it please the court...

So, I'm on a nursery rhyme/kiddie lit kick lately. I blame this phenomenon on the impending 18th birthday of my younger child.

One thing I notice about nursery rhymes is that many of them tend to be of counting-down genre similar to "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"...Five little monkeys jumping on the bed, three little angels all dressed in white...  But shorter, for the shorter attention span of little children. And minus the alcohol. Still, looking at these songs today, I think that maybe teachers of preschool and kindergarten were desperate to find ways to kill time.

Anyway, about those angels "trying to get to heaven on the end of a kite". Why were angels forced to resort to such crude methods in an ultimately vain attempt to get into heaven? Had they been cast out of heaven? And if so, why?

There are serious theological questions here.

I have learned this week that in the version of "5 Little Monkeys" that many people learned, the physician Mama consulted never actually uttered the words "That's what you get for jumping on the bed!"

If you've never heard that version and think I'm making this up, all you have to do is enter that quote into Google.  Such a version exists. According to one source, the doctor says "No more monkeys jumping on the bed!" after the first four monkeys have incurred traumatic head injuries, and only says "That's what you get for jumping on the bed!" after the final monkey has fallen.

Dramatic music sting.

However, when I went to kindergarten, it was "that's what you get" for the first four monkey casualties, and concluded with "no more monkeys jumping on the bed" only after the last one. Pretty much stating the obvious.

By the way, as it happens, when I was two years old, I sustained a head injury from jumping on the bed, falling off, and hitting my head on the wall. I needed stitches.  I guess what I am saying here is that I have personal reasons for thinking that the doctor who said "that's what you get..." was a jackass who should have lost his license.

But I come before you today to discuss the case of the Three Little Kittens. I find their mother's parenting strategies troubling. To wit:

Three little kittens,
Put on their mittens,
And soon ate up the pie;
“Oh, mother dear,
We greatly fear
Our mittens we have soiled.”
“What! Soiled your mittens,
You naughty kittens!”

May it please the court...surely Mama Cat, aka "mother dear", as the responsible adult in the household, should have seen the flaw in her plan to require her children to wear mittens while eating pie. Especially if that pie was, say, blueberry. She is in no position to call them naughty, as she has clearly set them up to fail.

According to the nursery rhyme, the mother seems prone to mood swings and is unfamiliar with the concept of unconditional love. Couple that with her seemingly arbitrary rules regarding pie-eating etiquette, and it's hard to foresee a future for these kittens that does NOT involve intensive therapy.

Spot's Curse

Okay, I'll be honest. I uploaded pictures over a week ago for a post I planned to entitle "The Least of These". The tone was, in retrospect, shamefully self-congratulatory--focusing on the effort I was putting into providing as much comfort as possible to this rat dude in his last days. This rat, who, let's be honest, never liked me. Or any human. He did quite like his brother, Stripe, who passed away over two months ago. 

Initially, these two boys had lived in my daughter's room, and I didn't really have much access to them in their formative months. Once we brought the cage down into the living room--my guess is that they were about a year old at the time--I made persistent efforts to present myself to them as friend rather than foe. Or at least as "mostly harmless". Food bringer. I made significantly more progress on that front with Stripe, but Spot never stopped flinching when he saw me approach. Mind you, as soon as he spotted a morsel in my hand, he would eagerly grab it and scarf it down.

Spot is the one on the left.

Over the course of the past month, Spot has still flinched at my approach, but was happily accepting my increasingly creative offers of sustenance. In addition to putting his food on the cage floor so he wouldn't have to reach into the food dish, I started offering grape halves, bits of canned peach, dabs of yogurt---basically anything that would help get some additional liquid into him.

He was pathetic to look at, an the human residents of this household looked at him as little as possible. But he did still seem to be enjoying life to some extent, thanks in part to my efforts. A week or so ago, I noted that fresh cooked broccoli was apparently the most awesome stuff on earth. Anyway, I took a certain amount of pleasure in these little daily acts of kindness (mitzvas?) I was performing for what was objectively the least lovable creature I had ever intentionally lived with.

The end is near for Spot. We've been saying/thinking that for weeks now, but yesterday he started refusing food and drink. I suspect he is unconscious most of the time. Anyway, we keep checking on him. Yep, still breathing. Later on...still breathing. Seriously, boy, do you have something to prove? 

Please indulge me as I turn to a bit of dark humor here. This is not fun, so sometimes you've just got to try to find a way to laugh at a predicament, you know?

A while ago, I jokingly speculated

Spot the rat genuinely seems to be slowing down now. He's over 2 1/2 years old, so he's definitely led a long life for his species. I was starting to wonder if he'd made the rookie mistake of asking the gods for eternal life without clarifying that he wanted that to come with a side order of eternal youth and heath.

I've revised my fanciful hypothesis since then. I now propose that Spot actually angered one of the Greek gods. My money is on Hera. Hear me out. You know how Zeus had a reputation for not being able to "keep it in his pants" (robe?) And also, when looking for some action among the mortals, I seem to recall that he didn't strictly just go for the females. 

So, here's how I think it went down. Spot (Spotocles?) was caught by Hera in flagrante delicto with Zeus. Spotocles' punishment was to be turned into a lowly rat, and, just for spite, Hera threw in the part about living (practically) forever, but without the eternal youth and health that would make such a fate more bearable.

Zeus' punishment, in my estimation, was remaining married to Hera. Forever.

Fred Rogers: Jedi

(Image via Huffington Post)

I get a lot of songs stuck in my head. This is one of the better ones...

Sometimes people are good 

And they do just what they should. 

But the very same people who are good sometimes

Are the very same people who are bad sometimes.

 It's funny, but it's true. It's the same, isn't it for me...  

Isn't it the same for you? 

 Wherever Fred Rogers is right now (hopefully someplace cool), I hope he doesn't take offense...but that man was a frickin' JEDI!

New shoes, yo!

I thought of adding "motherf**kers" or "b*tches" in the post title, but that might be just a bit TOO out of character for me. Still, I freaking HATE shopping for anything, so this is kind of out of character in the first place. 

Next outing, I need to find some clothes. Give me strength...

Fizzix not so hard?

The following is a Facebook comment that got to long to be just a Facebook comment (says me)...

I didn't actually take physics. I went to an all girls' Catholic high school, and went as far as chemistry. Physics had this intimidating "aura" about it--you had to go to the "brother school" next door, where you were taught by an actual Brother somebody-or-other, and he addressed all students as Mr. and Miss. Now, I don't want to make a big deal of being "intimidated" out of taking this class--I had a full enough schedule of honors and AP classes without it. The reason I bring it up is this--years later, I found myself scoring proficiency tests in a variety of subjects, including science. At some point I was a scoring team leader on a test that included physics items--this was for, I don't know, maybe 6th grade. But I'd never heard of "Newtons" before as a unit of measurement. (Just the commercials, telling me that Fig Newtons are not cookies, but fruit and cake. But I digress.)

Anyway, talking with co-workers, I learned that it is popular now to teach physics in elementary school, because it lends itself to so many great "hands-on" experiments. Isn't this kind of amazing--based on the educational philosophy of the decade or so you were going to school, a subject can have a completely different, um, mojo? Image?

And to really publicly confirm my status as a middle-aged person, I remember checking out high schools (going to a parochial school, there were three to choose from, as opposed to one option for public school--another thing that is very different today). My dad consistently asked of the people giving the tours, "Do you offer computer classes?" I recall one of the answers being something to the effect of, "Yes, but only for the really advanced students who have already taken all of the other math courses." One would assume that included the scary demon known as calculus. But really, doesn't that exchange, both the question and the answer, sound totally bizarre today, when children grow up with computers as part of the landscape?