I’m happy to report that my beloved dog Gem is not on her last legs.

The past couple of days, I’ve noticed her limping around the house. My wife and kids have noticed too. No one has been happy to see it. I called the vet all day yesterday  and despite an answering machine that said their hours on Friday were 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., no one ever answered, leaving me with a trembling dog and the worst imagined fears. The dog has been a part of the family since February 2000 and, in these parts, is famous for being my favorite member of the family. I like my whole family, but the opinion is that I like her even more.

This morning the vet’s office finally called my  cellphone and I sprang out of bed to answer, quickly dressed, and hurried the dog over. She was noticeably happy when I got her harness and leash, and delighted when I encouraged her to spring into the back of our van with my two younger kids: Generally, this means we’re going to an hours-long hike. You can imagine her canine response when I opened the back of the van a couple of miles distant and she found herself outside the building where many dogs go to die. She tried to run cowering in all four directions at once.

The vet looked her over and then decided to keep her for a while and run x-rays, and at 2:30 he reported that the x-rays showed nothing, but she had a small gouge on one paw. He gave her some shots and a painkiller and said that if the limping didn’t go away in 10 days, then it wasn’t the little gouge, it was early arthritis. All things considered, that didn’t seem so bad for a 12-year-old dog, especially when I had already envisioned all sorts of canine medical horrors. I drove back home, relieved, and I guess visibly so, because my wife gave me a hug and then decided to personally bathe the dog, which is not her forte.

Meanwhile, I ruminated on what the vet had said when I dropped off the dog as she stood there shaking and trembling and as I told him that she had been so eager to cavort around town the past two days but that I couldn’t bear the sight of her limping. His comment applied to her and seemed to presage my own future as well:  “The legs are weak,” he said, “but the head still wants to run.”

I just stumbled across the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, which offers a salute of sorts to my old stomping grounds. My Jersey Shore name comes up as:  The Sausage Party. How did they know?

 In 1967, Mr. David Bowie (nee Jones) got his first fan letter from an American, in this case a 14-year-old girl in New Mexico whose father received a copy of Bowie’s first album from the radio station that employed him.

Mr. Bowie’s response to the girl is very sweet, and reminds us that behind the iconoclastic rock god we’ve come to know for four decades lurks the 20-year-old striver who was excited to discover a new fan on a distant continent.

Here’s the letter, which was recently discovered.

Go here.

Werner Herzog gets interviewed on KCRW’s “The Treatment.” (Thanks to Ross Kendall for letting me know about this.)  Here’s the link (and yes, there’s a downloadable podcast.) I haven’t seen “The Bad Lieutenant:  Port of Call New Orleans” yet, but I assume that like all Herzog’s other films it’s strangely compelling and somewhat badly made.

I hope the nation’s employers are finished with layoffs. But for those who, sadly, aren’t, here’s some good advice for HR managers, especially if they’re doing business in Gotham City.

Thanks to Brendan Carter for letting me know about this.

I guess I should add this to itinerary for friends and family who come to visit:  On Tuesday nights we now have porn-star karaoke.

So remember when you’re making reservations to book that extra night.

It’s almost midnight and I just came back inside from my back yard. It’s getting cold out there. I know it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, and now it’s chilly outside. We could actually get snow, if the temperature drops just another 25 degrees. It is December, after all.

Recently we had a Henry’s Farmers Market open nearby and today I decided to check it out. Here’s what I found:  Lots of fresh produce at low prices, and a store layout only slightly less confusing than the exit strategy for Afghanistan. The western end of the store runs left to right and seems to be divided between “organic” home remedies and, well, gussied-up candy and snacks; the left middle of the store features traditional supermarket shelving running back to front; the very middle of the store is populated with free-standing carts of produce and barrels of nuts, grains, and more candy;and the eastern wall is tracked by an expansive seafood section, a tiny deli around which eight or ten people jockeyed for position in front of a two-person counter area, more racks and cabinets, and what looked like another pullcart, this one hauling roasted chickens. Less than a farmers market, the store looks like a gypsy caravan broke down and stayed. Henry’s is a less bohemian Trader Joe’s, with airs:  decorated in that country chic style that certain social strivers overpay for.

Everyone working there was very courteous. I hadn’t really thought about the relative friendliness of the local Albertson’s , my usual supermarket — I’m not trying to strike up lasting friendships, I’m just trying to get my groceries and get out — but now that the people three miles away are treating me better and charging me less, it’s hard not to notice. On Sundays, I tend to cook seafood (to the delight of my son and the chagrin of his sister, which just delights him more), and I either buy wild-caught salmon or I don’t buy salmon. I don’t want color added to it, and I prefer the taste and the nutritional quality of wild-caught. I don’t know what farm-raised (and color-injected) salmon goes for, but around here, wild-caught salmon is usually $14-$16 a pound. (At that price, it must be a truly wild time catching it.)  Henry’s had it at $10.99 a poud. I bought it.

I had in my cart two bottles of Chianti at $6.99 each. I don’t know why I’m buying Chianti lately instead of Shiraz, but I am. Supposedly, your body craves food that contains nutrients or minerals you lack at that moment; according to this theory, when you “have” to have that glass of orange juice, it’s because you’re low on vitamin C. I guess I’ve recently met my minimum daily requirement of Shiraz but am suddenly low on Chianti, because now it’s this perceptually low-grade Italian restaurant table wine I have to have. It’s like going from reading Rilke to slugging your way through Mickey Spillane. I had just rounded the corner of one of those bizarre freestanding units that Henry’s seems to have picked up at an out-of-business rustic swap meet when I came across this entire end cap display for Crane Lake wine. I had never heard of Crane Lake wine. But at $2.99 a bottle and with a name that wasn’t Charles Shaw, I figured I’d try it. The helpful guy carefully stacking all the numerous varietals suggested something he apologized for not being able to pronounce:

“I hear the San… San… Sanjo — I can’t even say it.”

“Sangiovese?” I asked.

“Yeah, sorry, that’s it,” he said. “I hear that’s good.”

So I bought two bottles of the San-San-Sanjo and a bottle of the cabernet and two of the chardonnay, each at $2.99, and put back the two bottles of chianti at $6.99, and also the two bottles of Robert Mondavi chardonnay that I’m even embarrassed to say here that I was going to buy because, let’s be honest, it tastes like Robert Mondavi fell into it and never got back out.

Now I’m eating my reduced-price “gourmet” popcorn and drinking my San-San-Sanjo while writing this, and you know what, it’s all actually pretty good. Here’s one review I found of the Crane Lake Sangiovese, and here’s another one.  Here’s my favorite line:  “As for the Sangiovese? Eh, not bad, nothing to get excited about. Certainly preferable to really cheap Chianti.” I feel vindicated. Even if, as this reviewer claimes, Crane Lake is just, wait for it, the alter ego of Charles Shaw.

Ten years ago I was working out at the Burbank YMCA when I got to talking to one of my wife’s friends, who was using the machine next to mine. When she asked how my wife was, I said she wasn’t feeling well, that lately she’d had persistent stomach upset.

“She should come see me,” the friend, Donna, said.

“Why?”

“I can make it go away.”

“Really? How?”

She said, “I’m an acupuncturist.”

Now, I knew Donna only slightly, and I knew her as the blonde bombshell mother of one of my son’s grade school classmates (and therefore someone who knew my wife). I didn’t know her as someone who stuck pins in people for medical reasons. But I was about to.

“Can you really make it go away?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then… can I come see you?”

I had had persistent acid reflux for about 15 years. Lately it had been worse. I had been to every doctor in my group and tried all sorts of remedies prescribed, including one that killed all the flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die, and one that put all sorts of new flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die.  I tried not eating many different types of food, and then eating only those types of food, and then eating no types of food at all for a week at a time. Nothing worked. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying out Donna, the attractive housewife formerly from New Jersey, who now wanted to stick pins in me. The pins couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than the acid reflux.

The next week I found myself in her office.  She asked me questions quite different than any of the doctors I had been to. For one thing, she asked me what it tasted like. No one had cared to ask that before. “It tastes like there’s a dead mouse stuck in my throat.” She thought that was pretty descriptive. Then she had me take off my shirt and my pants and my socks and lie down, and then she started to stick pins in me. And almost instantly the dead mouse was gone. I had spent countless hours circulating among doctors with theories, and five minutes of acupuncture cured me.

I make this point because the current Senate version of the health-care legislation now crawling its  way through Congress seeks to allow treatment plans to include “alternative therapies.” This story from the LA Times shares the medical establishment’s take on this, as summed up by  someone at Yale School of Medicine:  “These provisions are anti-science and anti-consumer.” A spokeswoman for the California Medical Association is quoted as saying, “They raise red flags because they could potentially open the door to practitioners with less training and expertise, which could endanger patient safety.”

But, y’know what? Acupuncture never endangered my life. Meanwhile, many years ago when I couldn’t keep any fluids down, a Western doctor  prescribed compazine — a muscle tightener — that came within 20 minutes of killing me. (I was very lucky that the right ER doctor, one who had once before seen someone’s head twisting all the way around behind his back,  happened to be on duty.) I haven’t known any acupuncturist to mistakenly take out someone’s gall bladder (as a surgeon did with my wife), or to recommend that my father-in-law have his voicebox removed (when later it turned out he just had a sore throat).

The people advocating for “alternative therapies” in this story are derided as “lobbyists.” And I guess they are. But so are the people agitating against these treatments getting covered by national health insurance. One way or another, they’re part of the American Medical Association.  There are many fine doctors in the nation, and if I’m struck by a car, please don’t take me to see an acupuncturist. I don’t deny the value of skilled surgeons or orthopedists or optometrists. What I don’t like is the ongoing agitation against other therapies with long traditions of effective healing.