The Other Pageant / Puppymill Connection

On this week's themes of pageants -- For Your Consideration:



Keep watching ... keep watching ... no, seriously, it gets much worse than you think it can.

According to The Examiner:

But what happened after the pageant? Did Makynli, in fact, get to keep the puppy, or was it given away?

"Yes, she kept Petey [the puppy] and they were crazy about him," Makynli's pageant coach, Christy Cosby, tells Pet News Examiner. "Unfortunately he was ran over just a few weeks ago and the family was devastated."

What is wrong with you people?!

It Has Never Been About the Dogs

The Grey Lady writes about the M-word in dog pageants.

Karma points for the scare quotes around the word "pets."

US Today gives Frei his podium for the party line that dogs who live in crates with professional handlers are "just like your pet at home." Just like JonBenet Ramsay was just a regular little girl playing dress-up.

Srsly, could this dog want to be where he is any less? (Video -- I did not embed because of obnoxious continuous stream ads.) Hey Frei, slap his head back towards you and the newstwinkie again, show us how much you love him. Yeah, he runs wild on a ranch in Texas. Or lives in Missouri, with another "owner." Or in Illinois. Or at Frei's apartment in NYC. Depends on which member of his "ownership team" or handler or PR shill is holding forth on how he's just like your pet at home.

Three more recently working breeds get a stake through their hearts this year. The AP acts as the ACK's press agent on this one.

I will not be watching, unless Perfesser Chaos decides that it is time to get a flat-screen teevee; he knows he can count on my foot going through the tube of the old one when the GSDs and border collies take the stage. Or the obese Labs. Or the lumbering goldens. Or any other visually apparent atrocity against dogdom.

Time to Jazzie Up Your Life?

Jasmine says it's all very nice here and all, but she would like to go home now.

Maybe your home?



She's looking for an owner who will provide her with structure and leadership. She's a natural follower, enjoys learning obedience, is clever, and gets along well with most other dogs.

I think she'd be a dab hand at agility, rally, frisbee, freestyle, or regular obedience with the right handler.

She might also do well as a farm dog.

What she wouldn't do well at is behaving herself if left in a yard where people walk by a lot, or reach over the fence. Or confined behind an invisible fence. She feels too vulnerable in such situations, and makes bad decisions about defending herself and the space.

Jasmine looks to her people for leadership when she's unsure -- so her person has to be there, and has to show or tell her what is to be done.

She's the bottom dog here. With most of the dogs, that means that she fawns on them and they accept it graciously. Rosie, however, thinks that Jasmine is Unnecessary. She stalks around the house muttering cruel things under her breath about how Jasmine has fat thighs and stupid fur* and a collar from the Goodwill. It's got Jazzie bummed out, though thankfully, no eating disorder or cutting or anything like that. This is why I won't let Rosie have a Facebook account.

So it's high time for Jasmine to move on to a home where her owner or owners can appreciate her for the bright, fun young thing she is, and bring out her potential.

Jasmine is still a little afraid of human children, so I'm going to stipulate a home without any young kids or feckless teens.

Video of Jasmine playing with Cole.

More on adopting Jasmine, and quite a few of her relatives, here.

_____________________

* This is jealousy. Jasmine has much nicer fur than Rosie does.

What a Tyro Does ...

... when faced with a complex, important task that she won't admit is far beyond her capabilities, requires a knowledge set she has not begun to master, and is not susceptible to her pin-headed ideology.

Phil Klass 1920-2010

A beloved fixture of the Pittsburgh writing (and reading) community has left us.

I met Phil Klass not long after we moved here, holding court as always at one of the local science fiction events. It wasn't until a bit later that I learned that he had published mostly under the name William Tenn.

I could sit in that circle and listen to Phil's stories forever. His health gave him some difficulty in speaking, and the anecdotes and jokes came slowly and in spurts, plenty of time to savor. I stayed as long as he would keep going, generally until Fruma came to collect him.

Beneath the razor wit and appreciation of the absurd that overlay his stories, there was a passion that eventually revealed itself. The Russian-British-American* Jewish socialist citizen-soldier who had been little more than a boy when he marched the German townspeople through the gates of the concentration camp and forced them to look at what they had pretended was not there -- the young man who saw -- was fueled by a boundless drive for justice.

Every funny anecdote about John Campbell's eccentricities, or how it used to be possible to pay the rent (New York City rent!) selling short stories to the pulps because per-word rates in 1946 were same as they were in 2006 (not in real dollars -- ten cents a word vs. ten cents a word -- in other words, more than a tenfold decrease in real pay), was really a story about justice or injustice, great or small.

It's something not often noticed about satirists, even the gentlest -- the wit and drive to skewer or needle or drop itching powder into the underwear of the comfortable and the powerful and the smug -- is always all about justice.

How could anyone pass up an opportunity to listen?

I had one story for him.

About a kid about eleven years old who had already cleaned out the children's room of public library and was randomly burning through adult fiction when a particularly salacious science fiction cover grabbed my attention.



Now, this was back in the mid-70's, when the Moral Majority had not yet turned public librarians into paranoid gatekeepers of our plastic little minds. As long as I was up-to-date on my overdue fines, I could check out whatever I could carry off. So I brought home a paperback full of sex and nekkid people living as rats in the walls of monster houses and women having litters. I was savvy enough to keep it out from under my parents' noses. I checked it out over and over. I knew it was trash, yet somehow it was also great.

I was eleven. I had no idea it was satire. I just knew I wanted more.

Still do, Phil. Still do.

-------------------------------------------------

* Phil Klass was the Allied forces. He was Hitler's worst nightmare personified. I never saw that before now.

FUNERAL UPDATE: Phil's funeral, scheduled for Wednesday morning, has been postponed due to the snow storm. A memorial service is planned for spring.

Six More Weeks? The Deuce, You Say!

The Weather Service would not commit yesterday. You might get a foot of snow. Or maybe about four inches. Who can say?


You bastards.

So, turns out, it might have been a good idea to bestir ourselves after Perfesser Chaos' last fire call last night and plow out the driveway when we had only 11 inches.

Because Tractor-San is a game little thing, but we cannot even raise the blade high enough that it does not act as an anchor.

A man might come tomorrow to extract us. I'm not sure what it's going to cost us. We've actually jumped the queue on account of PK being a firefighter. Even though his substation is only about a quarter mile away, he can't get there fast enough on snowshoes to make the truck when the pager goes off. Depending on where I sink the yardstick, we've got between 18-22 inches, and are going nowhere.

Meanwhile, we still have power, there's oil in the tanks, wood in the shed, plenty of toilet paper, half a case of home brew, a whole case of Mexican Coca-Cola, two bottles of rum, 80 pounds of beef scrap for dogs, and a couple new Netflix on hand.

Four pairs of snowshoes, two pairs of skis, a case of toe warmers, and a gallon of gatorade.

Two feet of fresh powder sounds wonderful. What it really is is a shitload of work.

Sophia actually did some of the trail-breaking, but she is not particularly skilled at route-choosing, and tends to porpoise in aimless circles. Mostly it was up to Perfesser Chaos. The English shepherds were happy to hang back and let The Help perform this function.


Even where the trail was broken, the smaller ES had to porpoise to get through.


I only fell once. It's actually pretty hard to fall when the snow is over your knees, but the concealed tripwire brambles in the pasture finally had their say. Getting back up is not a straightforward exercise when one's skis are five-foot snow anchors. I got plenty of helpful advice on how to manage this task from the non-ski-wearing Peanut Gallery.

I think Cole might be carrying half his weight in snow dingles here. He also got to relive the testicle experience in gigantic ice form. It wasn't as good as he remembered.


Interesting that Barry White, who braved the same drifts, collected nothing. I think he repelled the dingles with force of will. He's never going to suffer that indignity again.

There were few game trails apparent, and only in protected lee areas. I'm hoping our trail-breaking will be a boon to the wildlife -- except for the tiny tunnelers and the hibernators, a snow dump like this one makes hard times for wild creatures. Our route coincidentally connects the deer bedding area in the pines on our north boundary with our neighbor's unharvested cornfield to the west. I figure that by February, that corn is forfeit to the local Bambis. I filled two feeders with safflower seeds and black oil sunflower, and hung out some more suet.

I opened the window for the turkeys to come out. Yeah, I was just messin' with 'em. They knew it, and did not take the bait.

Interesting that wild turkeys manage to survive even though their feet sometimes touch snow.

One hour of porpoising through snow higher than their backs has given us a houseful of very quiet dogs tonight.

Snapshot Sunday: Bones on Blue

None of the photos I got can do it justice.

The crown of this ancient sycamore against the deep blue sky pulled a gasp from me today.

Mingo Creek County Park, in Washington County, PA. Maybe the best park in Western PA.