Douglas
My Douglas was diagnosed with bone cancer yesterday. (I say my because I’ve had him since before Amy and I were together and because he is mine in the sense that some dogs choose you and will have it no other way.) I adopted him when I was going through one of the more difficult times in my life, and there are moments I wish I had back, a chance to do things differently, to do things better, to somehow make amends. The cancer is in the front right leg and, if it hasn’t spread, we will have to have it amputated. He blew out the tendons in both back legs a few years ago, and we were only able to have the one repaired. I don’t know how well he will be able to handle the stress of the loss of the front leg with the existing debilitation of the back. Right now, I’m at a loss.
microchipping immigrants
I think we should catch ‘em, we should document ‘em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support micro-chipping them. I can micro-chip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I micro-chip an illegal?
spam name
Nelda Bacon.
quote out of context
Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions.
Everything
Your daily dosage of weird goodness. And for those who aren’t weirded enough, there’s more. (via)
powerpoint makes us stupid
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Edward Tufte would be pleased.
from the spam
Penis size should be dark and quiet at night.
Best Hockney Gif Ever
Well, it is.
water billboard
It was set up in Paris.
The Dogs of Moscow
There is one special sub-group of strays that stands apart from the rest: Moscow’s metro dogs. “The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.
Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.
“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their biological clocks.”
Steven Monteau’s Battlefield Pinhole Camera
The battlefield is a revolutionary pinhole camera that simultaneously uses 3 rolls of 35mm film to capture an image split across all three rolls.
If you’re not remotely ADD and have a thousand hours, you can build your own.
dear clusterflock
We all know what’s happening in Arizona, right?
oops
A Denton woman is trying to figure out what to do after a demolition crew wrongly tore down most of her house, instead of one across the street.
protecting Nessie
A letter released by the National Archives of Scotland from Inverness County Police Chief Constable William Fraser in August 1938 shows police believed the only step they could usefully take to protect “Nessie” from hunters was to tell people that the monster’s preservation was “desirable.”
Fraser went on to say that a certain Peter Kent and Miss Marion Stirling of London were determined to catch the monster and that Kent had told local police he was having a special harpoon gun made to hunt the monster down.
“That there is some strange creature in Loch Ness seems now beyond doubt, but that the police have any power to protect it is very doubtful,” Fraser wrote in his letter to the Under Secretary of State, Scottish Office.
fabricating history
Stephen Ambrose, acclaimed author of Band of Brothers and Eisenhower’s purported biographer, may have fabricated hundreds of hours of interviews with the President.
The discovery came to light almost by accident. The museum had been planning an exhibition exploring the relationship between Ambrose and Eisenhower. Rives found that the records showed that Ambrose and Eisenhower had met only three times, and never alone. He found that on seven occasions when Ambrose had claimed in the footnotes to his book Supreme Commander to have met Eisenhower, his subject was either elsewhere in the country or holding meetings with other people at the time. In one example, Ambrose claimed to have had an interview with Eisenhower in Pennsylvania, when Eisenhower was in Kansas. “The whole story kind of unraveled from there. It was quite a surprise. We were not looking for it, so it sort of happened almost by accident,” Rives said.
who do you think you are?
A new study suggests humans interbred with Neanderthals (or another archaic species) at least twice and that interaction is present as subtle variations in our genome.
The researchers arrived at that conclusion by studying genetic data from 1,983 individuals from 99 populations in Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Sarah Joyce, a doctoral student working with Long, analyzed 614 microsatellite positions, which are sections of the genome that can be used like fingerprints. She then created an evolutionary tree to explain the observed genetic variation in microsatellites. The best way to explain that variation was if there were two periods of interbreeding between humans and an archaic species, such as Homo neanderthalensis or H. heidelbergensis.
“This is not what we expected to find,” says Long.
(via marginal revolution)
world’s smallest horse
Einstein weighed just 6 pounds at birth.
A parenting question
I’m not a parent so I’m told I’m not allowed to judge.
Clusterflock? How old is too old for wiping your child’s ass?
pocket transistor radios
I just love this image.
Buda Wiener Dog Races
via Austin Kleon
you know what’s good?
Cold grapes.
Eat it and eat it fast or the gulls will snatch it!
The sun has warmth in it and the old folks are out and about filling their faces with food. It feels like the hunting season has arrived.
After the earthquake in Yushu County
from the spam
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Dugout Dick
Richard “Dugout Dick” Zimmerman, one of a handful of Idahoans who made homes for themselves in caves along the Salmon river, died last week.
His metamorphosis to Dugout Dick began when he crossed a wooden bridge over the Salmon River in 1947 and built a makeshift home on the side of a hill. He spent the rest of his life there, fashioning one cavelike dwelling after another, furnishing them with castoff doors, car windows, old tires and other leavings.
“I have everything here,” he said. “I got lots of rocks and rubber tires. I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables, my dog and my cats and my guitars. I make wine to cook with. There’s nothing I really need.”
Some of his caves were 60 feet deep.
