Let your inner voice have complete freedom. Allow others to know everything you’re thinking.

From a patient that I saw yesterday for a consultation:

I’m with a new dentist now. I left my previous dentist because one day when she was drilling my tooth and you could smell that tooth dust smell she told her assistant that that was the smell of money.

Elvis Presley in Suspicious Minds:

Why can’t you see
What you’re doing to me
When you don’t believe a word I say?

We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds
And we can’t build our dreams
On suspicious minds

Ameloblast and Roxy in our kitchen after a messy training session. Actually it was painful (for me) more than messy because I was trying to teach Roxy how to take treats gently:

Roxy is a 2 year old mixed dog that we rescued from the Toronto Humane Society a couple of weeks ago. The teenager who surrendered her to the shelter because he could not afford food for her said that she’s an Azores Cattle Dog. If she does have some of the Azores islands in her those genes are quite diluted. She hardly resembles a purebred ACD.

She has a docked tail and poorly cropped ears. A lip injury along with some scabs along one thigh were suggestive that she had been in a fight just prior to being surrendered.

She and Ameloblast are slowly becoming tolerant of each other and some day soon I’m sure they will become good friends.

Adopting a dog from the SPCA is not as easy as it used to be. If you have never adopted a dog from a shelter it’s definitely not as easy as you might think. The interview that potential adopters are put through can be quite stressful. An extensive questionnaire must be completed and then a meet and greet is set up between you and the dog. If everything goes well there, anyone else who is going to be in close contact with the dog at home must be brought to the shelter as well. This includes other dogs.

Shaz, a professional dog trainer, was our interviewer at the shelter. Thanks to him we were made aware of potential issues between Roxy and Ameloblast and once we brought her home we were able to watch and react to problems before they became issues.

As with any animal that you rescue, you don’t know what sort of life they really have had and you probably do not want to know. All that you do need to know is that a dog like Roxy just wants to have a home that they can call theirs, they want to be loved, to be fed, and to be entertained. Given all of this, they will become your forever friend and you will have saved one soul from a sad ending.

None of us ever asked to be born to this world. Once here, though, we just want to live a life that is happy, positive, and fulfilling. Dogs feel no differently. Anyone who has owned a four-legged pet knows this.

We saw the show in Toronto a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. The vocal talent in the show is spectacular. The rotating mountain top on the set was a unique sight for me. The acting, overall, was ok.

You will probably want to see the movie (again) after being part of the audience for the theatrical version. The film version works just as well musically but unfolds smoother dramatically.

Nevertheless, I can see why this is another hit for Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Update: Thanks to Rudy for his interest. See comment number 1 below.

I chuckle a little bit whenever conversation comes around to American values and the old discussion of violence versus sexuality in film arises.

I don’t profess to be an expert on this topic, but it does seem to me that American film values are shared by other countries where the rule of law is based upon religion. In these places, sexuality in movies is a greater taboo than violence. Canada, with its geographic proximity to the US, is heavily influenced by the US from all things artistic to legislative. When it comes to what is acceptable in film for specific audiences we are more conservative than Europeans and more liberal than the Americans.

Here’s a trailer for the American film, This Film is Not Yet Rated. It was given an NC-17 rating in the US (also known as an X rating) which was rejected by the filmmakers. Thus the film is not rated in the States. Here in Ontario (which is a province in Canada) it’s rated as adult accompaniment under 14 years of age (14A). The film is banned in Malaysia,  a non-secular state. Australia isn’t really Europe but if I tell you that the film is rated MA over there you might still get my point. MA is the same rating that the spectacularly popular US show, 24, has in Australia.

The note about Ontario being in Canada is another inside joke that Canadians chuckle about when it comes to Americans. But I digress.

Can someone please tell me why Europeans are so much more fearful of their children viewing violence than sex? Are they morally corrupt — what the hell is wrong with them?

Or do they have their priorities correct?

It was four years ago in Mexico that I was told to do that.

What should have been a simple matter of putting a ring on my bride’s finger almost turned into a fiasco. The heat and humidity of the warm weather on the Mayan coast had caused swelling of our entire bodies but particularly our fingers.

Her ring wouldn’t fit. I tried twisting it, even rocking it, onto her finger.

“Push, Baby, push,” she insisted.

So I did push, harder and harder. She pushed back. The Justice of the Peace looked on.

The ring finally slid on as we both sighed with relief.

Through the ups and downs of 4 short years of marriage she still wears that ring.