What Orhan Pamuk knows about dogs

It's not available online, but there's a nice little piece in this week's New Yorker about a mud-colored animal that prompts the Turkish novelist to consider the question of what he knows about dogs (I am fond of the list format, I think more people should use it more often--oh, and I also that lists which include four or five different posssible responses to a situation should always end "5. Do nothing"!):

1. Recently, an engineer friend of mine had told me how he'd sold a Sivas Kangal to some Americans. The dog pictured in the brochure he showed me was a strong, handsome, upright Kangal, and the caption said, "Hello, I'm a Turkish Kangal. My average height is this many centimetres. I'm this number of years old. I'm this intelligent, and this is my breeding. A while back, a friend of ours went missing, but we folllowed his scent for six hundred kilometres until we found him. So that's how clever and loyal we are," etc.

2. Dogs in Turkish illustrated novels, and dogs who have been translated into Turkish, say "Hav." But dogs in foreign illustrated novels say "Woof."

And that was all I could remember about dogs.

Here are some pictures of Sivas Kangals, they are awfully handsome.

I am in a ridiculously good mood today, can't remember the last time I felt so light-hearted (well, it was probably the day of that half-marathon in November): not only did I have a particularly strenuous & enjoyable workout this morning (I can finally really and properly do the kind of pushups where you do the dumbbell row thing on each side between pushups, very exciting) and jogged two miles on the treadmill afterwards without it particularly hurting, I then had an appointment (the last one for a long time, I hope...) with the sports medicine doctor guy, and he has totally cleared me as good to go. I will still have to build back up slowly, and pull back if I do stuff that hurts or think I'm overdoing it (a temperamental risk, given my personality type), but this is excellent news...