Anyone familiar with my terrier mutt, Ripley, knows him as an uncommonly needy dog, one apparently so smitten with the very idea of attention that he'll debase himself to any level just to get so much as a scratch behind the ear.

He is also a murderer of mammals great and small. His scalps include a skunk, a possum, a squirrel, at least two rabbits, and, over the snowy holiday in northwest Arkansas, three rodents in two days. This plump field mouse Ripley flushed out of a snowed-over patch of flowers, only after pawing through ice and chomping through branches to follow his nose.

Death comes cold and swift in a mouser dog's jaws. And it's worth remembering, when this cute little dog tries to lick you on the mouth, that his lips would just as soon be curled around stiffening rat hide.

Excellent all-purpose advice from a robot shop in Chicago.

Funny, the things you find in the woods.

Yep, this is full-blown. Not for much longer. It is absolutely the sweetest time of year in central Arkansas until these leaves dun over and fill the gutters. Then: nastiness 'til March.

If you want to make the case that the Halloween costumes we choose are somehow reflections of our psyches -- that we distort and project a self-image first affected by our perceptions of how others see us -- then at some level I'm a nattily dressed yet naked-from-the-waist-down gorilla in smart-looking glasses, and my friend Shannon is a toothpaste model channeling '80s high school live-for-the-moment exuberance as imagined by John Hughes and engineered by Savers. Her gentleman friend, Collins, was a Ferris at least as convincing as her Sloane.

My discussion last night of The House, the Little Rock restaurant that is, in fact, not your house and therefore a pain in the ass to discuss as a meeting point, prompted the inestimable Jonathan Katz to e-mail me a note and accompanying photos from the Caribbean. Apparently this homonymous business naming is a global problem.

He writes:

Re the confusingly named restaurant in Little Rock, there is a funny if oppositely intentioned analogue on Hispaniola.

JMK

And for no other reason than that the Internet is fueled by nipples and adorable animals ... here's a photo of the latter.

The House: If I had rafters in my house, they, too, would be full of bikesLittle Rock's finest hipster-leaning after-work coffee/beer/burger dispensary, The House, is closed much of this week for some sort of renovation. They're adding wines and beers and entrees, all of which I'm sure will be delightful. The only thing I've had there that didn't meet muster was a portobello that should have been retired and turned into Soylent Green about three days earlier. But c'est la vie: The House is, for a lot of us social workers, a fine office away from home. The service has always been exceptional, the occasional live music delightful, the scene indispensable. I'm the sort who finds it difficult to work alone in a quiet room largely because I worry that somewhere a brainy dame is sitting in a coffee shop waiting for me to walk in, and because there's no other way to write a ballet review than with a draft pint at hand, and the House is positively lousy with pints and dames. Plus it's about four minutes away by bike. This, friends, is why people live in town.

Not that my two cents is worth a nickel, but while the House is closed, I could offer one suggestion for an upgrade: Change the name. For the love of Pete, change the name. I've actually had the following conversation on the phone while sitting there:

"Hello. Yeah, I'm at the House. With a capital "h." Right, not at home -- at the restaurant confusingly named after my place of residence."

Some photos may not be the most amazing the world has ever seen. But you shoot 'em, and they sit around, and then you notice them again and think, Well, that sure was a fine day, wasn't it?Fight dirty: Taken in Fayetteville, Ark., on July 5, 2009

The new camera here. It's a sexy beast. Pictures again are being taken. All's well.

Until I get around to processing the new shots, however, I'm just going to post this picture of my paternal grandmother, Lucille, that I snapped Gino's East in Chicago back in May. Something about my 79-year-old teetotaling Nana getting comfy at a neon-lit, graffiti-soaked bar (WE'RE GOOD TO GO!) tickles me.