Summer Solstice

For those of you that don't know what to buy your very favourite - indeed, your only* - blog-coyote-about-town as a thoughtful and much appreciated summer solstice gift, may I suggest a Doggie IQ Test? Only £4.99! With the small stipend for 'super fast delivery', you might still make it by tonight, if you hurry! And after all of this damnable rain, I'm pretty sure it'll bring me a very welcome little ego boost.

If you figure I'm already smart (ass) enough, and don't need further excuses to tap my full potential in that area, I'm also completely open to the Stylophone or the intriguingly fluorescent Space Putty, suggested as alternatives further down the catalogue page. But be forewarned that paste-on smile for pugs is a non-starter.

Meantime, I suggest that everybody reading this start flushing your minds right now of any and all mental images of certain Irregulars dancing naked around their gas barbecues tonight. Down that road lies rump of skunk, and madness. 'Kaythxgbye!

*This town, anyway. Wandering Coyote has the Southern BC franchise sewed up.

Image: Captain Cripple and his K9 Companion Skipper the Wonder Dog

Slavishly Devoted to Buffy

I asked Fourth Dwarf if he liked Buffy.

"Do I like Buffy?" he responded in his usual sexy voice. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I was only slavishly devoted to the show since the third episode originally aired. You know how I'm obsessed with Battlestar Galactica? Buffy was worse."

"Well, hum, Buffy is going to be at Westfest," I squeaked out.

I paid for my deceit. Dwarfie loved this other Buffy too, but so that he could see above the crowds he insisted on sitting on my shoulders during the whole evening.

And overpriced houses to boot...

Spoken word performance
A full night of Aboriginal artists
CBC celebrities

Only five years old and it's already become more self-indulgent than an ESI meeting.

See you there.

RNDP 10: Recycling and Rules

Moving away from Histocompatibility for now, the next Google hit to explore in the world of new dating paradigms shows up in a comment to a livejournal posting. 30-year-old featherynscale asked her readers:

If you are friends with someone, and they break it off with a person they are dating/sleeping with/married to/whatever, is it okay for you to pursue their ex?

She broke her question into sub-questions and created several polls that 32 of her readers responded to. She also invited her readers to leave comments expanding on their answers and to describe circumstances that would make it okay or not okay.

Her first commenter, saffronhare, replied:

This is one of those areas where it always depends on some other shading of relationships. If both people of the deceased relationship (dating or married) still travel in the same social circles, then one would perhaps want to maintain some amicability in any new dating paradigm. You know, and *talking* to the people involved. But I bet you already knew that. :)

4D Analysis: Saffronhare is using the phrase "new dating paradigm" to refer to a new dating situation that a person might be in, in this case, with a person who used to be involved with a friend, not to a whole new model for dating. You might assume that, because Saffronhare and Featherynscale are not endorsing this model as a new paradigm, I also wouldn't endorse it. But let's not sail away from this port before seeing all the sights.

2 out of a non-random sample of 32 people say it's not okay to date a friend's ex even if the friend is dead. I hope these two are in happy relationships that last until they die and if after their death their widows or widowers get involved with a friend, there really is no afterlife so they won't ever know about it.

A majority (20/32) say it can be okay in certain circumstances, but this also means they think it is not okay in other circumstances. I assume that they are all referring to it being morally not okay. Not to it being practically not okay.

Because let's face it, while dating a friend's ex may have pitfalls like possible fistfights, slashed tires, and late night hangup phone calls, it also has benefits like already knowing the person you're dating and knowing what you can do to compare favourably to the last paramour. And you can date a stranger and get the pitfalls anyway.

If you've got a screening list like Kirshenbaum, Coyote and Milan do, you might be tempted to add not a friend's ex to it, or if you're not a hardliner, not the ex of a friend who says it's not okay.

What I ask if you have a screening list is, do you actually want to date? Or are you trying to come up with reasons to justify not dating? Sure we don't want you getting involved with an ax-murderer or somebody you'll come to despise, but at the pre-dating stage, where you are trying to find somebody to go out with, a list of criteria that removes people from consideration may just keep you from getting involved with somebody wonderful.

A Dating Paradigm for the ADD

Revolutionary new dating paradigms are all very well, but I can't help noticing that the Short Guy is taking a darned long time to reach the punchline. And he says I tell shaggy dog stories! In these ADD times, the only worthwhile solutions come in ten second soundbites. And the Elgin Street Irregulars are all over Attention Deficit Disorder, because... Ooh! Look! Shiny object!

Now, where was I? Uh, yeah... instant dating paradigms. We're not talking about high-speed dating - that's something else entirely. As an example of what I mean, Michael Pollan in the New York Times recently managed to reduce the complexities of good nutrition to three stunningly simple sentences: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That would probably even work for me. If cats count as vegetables.

So what we seek here is a way to measure dating suitability in a nanosecond. The less time you waste in deciding if the person before you is suitable, the more quickly you may proceed toward the decided charms of lolling and fubbing. Normally, the Irregulars would be all over formulating something like this, but, hey, it's sweltering out and we're feeling dopey. Conveniently, somebody's already done the work for us. Mira Kirshenbaum, a relationship therapist who seems to have a nice sideline in self-help books has just released a feel-good opus entitled When Good People Have Affairs, which according to this week's Maclean's is a book "for the decent person who made a mistake and got themselves into a complicated, messy, and dangerous situation."

Sort of off our chosen topic, because an affair presupposes a relationship already, which means that you've already figured out the... Ooh! Look! Shiny object!... However, a short paragraph toward the end of the review describes how Kirshenbaum attempts to do for dating, what Pollan did for food. Here's what she says to look for:

• Not stupid.
• Not crazy.
• Not wierd.
• Not mean.
• Not ugly.
• Not smelly.

Roughly twice the word count of Pollan's dictum, yes. But dating's roughly twice as complicated as food.