A Special #BeastOfTheDay

Plus a snowman army defends Greeland

Good Evening:

OpenAI’s Sora imagines the Greenlandic army mustering to fight off American annexation. Memo to the incoming Trump administration: I wouldn’t mess with them!

I would instead take advantage of the last 48 hours of the Sol Invictus on Steroids Sale and get myself or a loved-one a subscription to #DogShirtDaily knowing that I was getting half of the regular price and that half of the remaining proceeds would go to a basket of four charities—one of which I could help identify:

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Important scheduling announcement: tomorrow’s #DogShirtTV will not—I repeat, NOT—take place at 8:00 am Eastern time. It will take place instead at noon Eastern time out of courtesy to our West Coast-located guest, who understandably is not keen to be on television at 5:00 am.

This is a great opportunity for West Coast and other non-East Coast members of the Greek Chorus to join us. Our guest will be law professor Jody Freeman, who will be discussing her work on “structural deregulation”—which refers to deregulation by means of denuding federal agencies of staff and resources with which to do their jobs.

Access to the studio is available below the paywall.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is my dog, Gurgi, who died this morning at the age of 15. I know, I know: dogs are not eligible to be #BeastOfTheDay without an act of valor. But Gurgi, in fact, has committed an act of valor: refusing to die for a very long time—and being quite cheerful about it the whole time. He is a model for us all.

Gurgi was a rather large canine to reach such an age, and he really wasn’t supposed to live this long. Or anything like it. When we first got him from the rescue when he was a tiny puppy, we learned almost immediately that he had cataracts over both eyes, and a whopping case of canine hip dysplasia.

“They’re not good hips,” the vet told me very seriously, as though I should swap them out for another dog’s hips.

The special ophthalmologist vet wanted to take the cataracts out, and the special orthopedic vet wanted us to do a deranged hip operation on a puppy who just wanted to zoom around and cuddle.

But Gurgi seemed fine and didn’t seem all that interested in having multiple surgeries. So we left it alone. And he was cheerful. And he never reproached us for not fixing his hips or getting rid of his cataracts.

When he was eleven, he developed a brain tumor. It seemed to be causing him pain, so we had it taken out—along with one of his eyes, against which it was pressing. So now he had one eye—with a cataract. But he was cheerful, and he certainly didn’t seem to miss the other eye. He would bump into things sometimes, but then he would shake it off and go around.

Then he went deaf. That was a little bit of a problem because his favorite thing in the world was to go on walks through the alleys in our neighborhood without a leash, and he couldn’t do that any more because he couldn’t hear when I called him and would walk out into the streets. Still, he was perfectly cheerful and seemed to be having a great time.

Indeed, even after he hurt his hip earlier this year and—at an emergency room vet—we were told he had a big tumor that would rupture soon (“weeks, not months,” the vet assured us), he just didn’t accept that it was time to die—or time to stop enjoying himself. A few days later, he decided his back hip didn’t hurt much any more and he jumped up to go on his morning walk.

It was months, almost a year—certainly not weeks—until, the other day, he just couldn’t get up any more. He died quite peaceably this morning, on his own schedule (not that of any vet) and when he was good and ready.

I don’t know for how long Gurgi cheated death. I do know that from the time we brought him home, vet after vet has told us what was wrong with him, and he seemed fine and happy. And being happy and cheerful when you’re supposed to be sick and dying or needing serial surgeries is an act of valor. For which Gurgi is the #BeastOfTheDay.

Maybe it’s all easier if you’re a dog and you don’t understand that all of these people are telling you that it’s time to be dead. But I hope I have half so good an attitude toward mortality, which—if I can translate it from dog into English—amounts to, “Okay, yeah, I’m supposed to be dead. But let’s go for a walk and have dinner now.”