Probably Correct

Maybe a good idea for advertisers?

Link: The Neon Sun: New Study Appears to Solve Mystery.

The Sun likely contains nearly three times more neon than previously thought, according to a new study.

A new Olympic event?

A German company is looking to cash in on an expected boom in the sex trade during next year's soccer World Cup with a 60-room brothel a walk away from Berlin's Olympic Stadium, German media reported on Friday.

Link: News.

This is no flash rip-off joint where clients are taken for a ride.

And that's a damned shame.

On living with old dogs

     I've come to a very strange point in life. I'm an older human (57 this September) and I have a couple of dogs who are also my age or better (in dog years).

     Background:  We've always had a dog or two here (and once a cat, when daughter Jennie lived here briefly) since the late 1980's.  Conan (a Retriever mix, who passed from a vet's error before we moved into this house), then Maggie (an Irish Setter) and Winnie (a Beagle-Labrador mix), onto Lucy (a German Shepard-Yellow Lab mix), and onto BoyDog (a major mutt mix). 

     Dogs come into our lives as friends and companions and then eventually cross the Rainbow Bridge and are supplanted but never replaced by another.

     The reason we bought the house we live in was because it had a fenced-in yard and Maggie could have a place to run and play. A few months after we moved in, we adopted Winnie from a friend.  It took a few weeks but Winnie and Maggie became fast and forever friends.

     Winnie was a little Houdini who could escape from anywhere and I spent hours walking and driving around the neighborhood trying to find her when she got out of the yard. I always knew when Winnie escaped because Maggie would bark and bark and bark, telling on her.  Most often, Winnie ran just to find one of those great animal scents that dogs love to roll around in.  My car always smelled, well, bad.  But Winnie always came home with me.

     When Maggie died (and it was the worst day of my life, worse than the day I learned that my Father had died, in fact), a week later I brought home from the Humane Society a German Shephard-Yellow Labrador mix, whom we re-named Lucy.  She is now nearly nine years old and has, as so many of her breed do, "blowed up real good".  But she always got along with Winnie.  And Lucy has always been incredibly loyal to both me and my son, a very loving dog.

     Lucy is a giant dog, we call her "the dog you can see from Outer Space".  She weighs about 125 pounds these days and although we have done everything we can to get her to lose weight, nothing has worked.  Maybe she's like Cartman...big-boned!

     Then Winnie got sick. I had gone on a working vacation to Jamaica and when I came home I noticed a black spot on her upper gumline.  It grew alarmingly large over the next few days and our vet told us that it was cancer, and that, even if we did the surgery, it would grow back and there was no hope. 

     The day that I took Winnie to the vet to put her down she raced across the yard and almost caught a bird on the wing. Afterward, I sat in my truck in the vet's parking lot and cried like a baby.

     I scattered her ashes at all the places in the fenceline that she used to escape in our yard the evening of the year's last snowfall, dancing out there, a little drunk, with Lucy dancing and yelping behind me. It was quite a celebration of Winnie's life.

     Because we were used to having two dogs, I went back to the Humane Society and wound up with a dog who they said was 5 years old (but our vet said was probably 7 or 8).  His given name was Blackie but we re-named him to BoyDog and he joined the family. 

     He and Lucy have never really gotten along...in the first month he was with us, he crashed with Lucy about a bowl of dogfood and it cost me $300 to have the cut in his scalp mended.  There have been mix-ups since then, but none so expensive.

     And that brings us to the Summer of 2005. 

     Lucy has physical troubles now getting up and down the stairs from my office to the living area of the house, but she makes the climb every time I do and she will NOT be away from me when I sleep, nap, or sit on the couch.  BoyDog has no such climbing problems but he's always at my feet, somewhere.  Both of them insist on rub sessions to be made available at their convenience.  I do my best to comply with their demands.

     An aging fellow like me now has the care of two aging dogs, both at or over 10 years, at his plate.

     I'm not sure if I'm emotionally capable of losing and then replacing the pups.

     But I don't know if I could do without the companionship and love that a dog brings.

     I just don't know that I'm physically capable of it all, again.

Seems like a milion years ago...

I recorded the audio of The Wizard of Oz (before video taping) and hung it together on a couple of ten-inch reels.  My plan was to edit it down...

...to the "Sixty Second Whiz".  You know what I mean.

I was going to use it as part of a radio show. It was funny then, I guess.

The editing, though, was daunting, and by the time I got around to it, the movie was out, in stereo, on VHS.  The process began all over again.

Still, I managed to get the whole movie to reel, unedited.  It has sat on a shelf in my garage for many, many years, and I have no idea if the tape is even playable.

Now along comes this: Pulp Fiction in 30 seconds with bunnies.

I was on the wrong track all along! What I really needed was bunnies!

The Left is different from you and me

There's not much I can add to this...

Link: The Increasingly Ugly Left.

It's always shocking when the left unmasks itself — it's usually very brief but when it happens not only can't you turn away, it's actually important that you don't. While it would seem impossible, the left has found a new low, this time courtesy of both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Just in case you needed a reminder

Link: Senior Iran cleric: How I sent my son to the firing squad.

A senior Shiite cleric in Iran has shed light on his involvement in his own son’s execution in his newly-released memoirs.

Growing older sucks...

...until you consider the alternative.

Link: Study: Exercise Can't Halt Aging Effects.

Exercise can't hold off the effects of aging, but it can improve an elderly person's chances of hanging onto an independent lifestyle, researchers said, citing a new study that brought both good and bad news.

A treadmill test given to different age groups showed that as people aged, their aerobic capacity — the amount of oxygen consumed while exercising — declined at higher rates with each passing decade whether they exercised or not.

Good news for military vets

Some years ago, I took into my home a guy whom I had believed to be a friend.  He had fallen on hard times:  lost his business, his wife and family, had gone through VA-sponsored rehab and was, at the time, homeless. 

He was a mess, but I believed what he had told me about his Vietnam service as a SEAL and so I took him in to at least give him a home base.  I got him a job with a friend who owned a nearby convenience store, even drove him to and from work on days when the weather was inclement (otherwise he used a bicycle).

Then things started to fall apart.  He fell off the wagon, big-time.  My friend at the convenience store had some questions about the way this guy counted out the cash drawer and wrote up the final report each evening.  And our conversations about Vietnam began to get weirder and weirder...lots of things he said made less and less sense.

I called the CO at the BUDS training facility in Coronado CA, explained my situation, and he was back to me within an hour to tell me that no one with my "pal's" name had ever gone thru BUDS...the mandatory precursor for any SEAL training...ever.

So I prevailed on yet another buddy, who had some clout in these kinds of things, and I wound up getting faxed my "room-mate's" service record. 

It was all a fantasy, a lie.  I threw him out.  I can't stand liars.

Then I started researching all of the "wannabe" vets and award-winners and became thoroughly disgusted.  For years, it's been a felony to falsely represent oneself as the winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Now, a bill has been proposed to make it illegal to claim any military status or award falsely.

Things are looking up!

Link: Phony Purple Heart Taken Off Film Web Site.

Following complaints from a congressman, the producers of "Wedding Crashers" on Monday yanked from the movie's Web site a printable Purple Heart advertised as a gimmick to pick up women and get free drinks.

The bitch is back

Ah, yes... Ms. Fonda's long-delayed but highly-anticipated return to the political arena. 

Maybe someone should have reminded her that the last time she did this, it took her thirty-six years to regain enough traction so that she could do it all over again.

In fact, click on the thumbnail image at top left to see Jane and a few of her close personal friends from her World Tour 1969.  Hint:  those guys ain't South Vietnamese soldiers...

Can Jihad Jane be that far away?

Somehow I think I smell the acrid odor of George Soros on this...

Actress and activist Jane Fonda says she intends to take a cross-country bus tour to call for an end to U.S. military operations in Iraq.

Link: The bitch is back.

And you're worried about avian flu?

One Winter, about ten years ago, I discovered a trail of dog kibble and little, tiny mouse poops from the dogs' dishes in the kitchen, running behind the tv and stereo, and over to what I discovered to be a very small hole in the carpet at the other end of the living room.

I cleaned it all up just in time to see...A MOUSE scamper across the carpet, up the wall and straight down in the corner!  The damned thing, no bigger than my thumb, had gnawed his way up from the garage into the living room and had been making his holiday dinner out of the pup's Purina.

I filled the hole in the corner and laid out enough poison in the garage to kill Ben and all his little friends a hundred times over.  It worked.

But if I had only known what his larger cousins were up to...just click on the thumbnail to see what them danged birds are up against!

The mice are eating seabird chicks alive on Gough Island, one of the most important seabird colonies in the world, UK conservationists report.

Link: Albatross chicks attacked by mice.