Start of a new lease of life for this stupid little website? I guess it’s time to be thinking up a good name and/or acronym.

Generally if I need a witty title for something I plagiarize from my friends (hello “Geometric Rate” domain name!) or use a really lame joke ([insert witty title], anybody?). However, this time I wanted a unique and personal title. My first thought was “Dog In The Playground!”. Named for a childhood experience that I remember very vividly.

Imagine yourself as a young child. It’s lunch break at school and you’re tearing around, shrieking wildly and over-committed to your playground games in that earnest and oh-so-important way that all children have about them. Suddenly, you look up and there’s a dog. He’s off his lead and roaming the school grounds. There are shrieks of excitement from the children. The dog is overexcited, yapping and running in circles, darting around legs. The children are overexcited, squealing and sprinting. Teachers can’t calm this situation down because there is a DOG in the PLAYGROUND (“here boy! I bet he comes to me”, “I bet I can catch him”, “That’s my best-friend’s neighbour’s dog”, “A dog bit my dad’s friend and he DIED. Run for it!”). Absolute pandemonium, and a great name for a website, right?

After googling around a little bit* to check that the title would be unique to me I discovered that there is actually a children’s poem called, funnily enough Dog in the Playground, about precisely this thing.

Dog in the playground
What a to-do!
Thirty-five children,
Caretaker too,
Chasing the dog,
Chasing each other

It may not seem it at first glance but this poem is to me a profoundly and deeply upsetting thing. It mirrors, precisely, the feeling of absolute lawlessness and excitement that everybody felt when there was a dog in my playground.

Worse than that, it hits close enough that I’m worried I invented my dog. What if poem-dog was the same one as in my memory? What if I read the poem as a child and in remembering the story twenty three or so years later this fictional creature was plucked out of the page and dropped into my life? For that matter, how much of anything from my childhood can I remember reliably, and how much represents some sort of unintentional cryptoplagarism on my part? I think my playground dog is mine, but that poem hit awfully, eerily close.

I mean, do you even know how easy it is to implant false memories in a child?

“Tommy, do you remember when you cut your hand and had to go to hospital?”

Repeat that a dozen times and Tommy will not only start agreeing that he had been to the hospital, but he will invent all sort of supporting detail (“Yes, the doctor was nice but the room was cold”), and believe it with all of his heart.

So, anyway, I called the blog “Dog in the Playground!” not just because it reminds me of feelings of lawless freedom and fun, but because I can’t help but think about the fragility and unreliability of memory, and the transience being human

Mainly, though, I just really like dogs!

^{* should I capitalize Google when I’m using it as a verb? I have no idea}