We Remember the Loyalty of Gelert

I wonder how many people know of, or have truly understood the ancient Welsh take of Gelert

The story goes that in the thirteenth-century, Prince Llywelyn the Great had a palace at Beddgelert in Caernarvonshire.  The Prince was a great hunter and spent much of his time in the countryside. He had many hunting dogs, but one day when he summoned them, his favourite dog Gelert didn’t appear and Llywelyn went off hunting without him.

When Llywelyn returned from the hunt, he was greeted by Gelert who came bounding towards him his jaws and chest dripping with blood.

The Prince was appalled.  He rushed into the castle to discover his son's cradle turned over and the walls spattered with blood! He searched for the child but there was no sign of him.

Mad with grief that his prized hunting dog has killed his son, Llywelyn took his sword and plunged it into Gelert’s heart.

As the dog howled and writhed in a death agony, Llywelyn heard a child’s cry coming from underneath the upturned cradle. It was his son, unharmed!

Beside the child, and under the cradle, was an enormous wolf killed by the brave Gelert.

Losing Louisiana, 1932 and Today

The damming of the Mississippi River has led to massive land-loss in coastal Louisiana as delta soils are no longer replenished, leaving America's oil-rig rich Gulf Coast vulnerable to tremendous damage from hurricane storm surge.

Distant Nations Close to Home

A few pictures from the local H-Mart.

 When I was a kid, we had none of this variety and even now, at age 60, I do not know the names of most of the roots sold at the local store.

The upside is that we no longer live in a world of seasons, as food comes from all over the world, and very little of it has so much as a spot or a bruise.  Amazing!

Those who groan that we no longer have local vegetable farms fail to note why: we also no longer have slave labor or vast pools of unfree illegal immigrant labor jungled up in remote work camps and forced to drink polluted water while sharing an outhouse with 70 others. 

If a food crop cannot be mechanized at scale, then it should be grown closer to labor sources that can plant, weed, or pick it by hand. 

We can import people or goods, and goods are almost always a better choice for all.

The Road Goes on Forever

Coffee and Provocation

Doggerland Once Connected Britain and France
When and how did it disappear? What if it had survived? " Doggerland – named after Dogger Bank, the large sandbank which currently sits in a shallow area of the North Sea off the east coast of England (dogger being an old Dutch word for fishing boat). Doggerland had a rich landscape of hills, rivers and lakes and a coastline comprising lagoons, marshes and beaches. It had woodlands of oak, elm, birch, willow, alder, hazel and pine. It was home to horses, aurochs, deer, elks and wild pigs. Waterfowl, otters and beavers abounded in wetland areas and the seas, lakes and rivers teemed with fish. It was probably the richest hunting and fishing ground in Europe at the time..."

There Were Mammoths in Essex
A 6-foot mammoth tusk discovered during an unusually low tide off the coast of Mersea Island, Essex, could be up to 12,000 years old.

Americans Know Nothing
And that includes knowing nothing about the Constitution. More than one in three people could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment; only one in four could name all three branches of government; one in thee could not name any branch of government, and; a majority believe the Constitution affords illegal immigrants no rights.

Was 536 ‘the worst year to be alive’?
In 536 a mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night, for 18 months. The cause: a volcanic eruption in Iceland. Crops failed and huge numbers of people starved, killing off all the horses and other livestock to survive. It began the coldest decade in the past 2,300 years, and in 541 bubonic plague struck what is now Egypt and the "Plague of Justinian" then wiped out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire. Good times!

He's Out There Now
Pedro Alonso López is a Colombian serial killer jailed for killing 110 girls but who claims to have raped and killed more than 300 across Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. López was released in 1998 on a $50 bail, and he absconded and has not been seen since, though Interpol believes he is still out there committing murders.

Whale Earwax Tells History
The history of the oceans is locked in whale earwax; the massive plugs contain spikes and dips of stress hormones that perfectly match the history of modern whaling and indeed the state of the oceans.

Selling Fear of Ticks

I saw this product for sale at a local big box hardware store today.

I think it’s a very defective product.

The theory is that pyrethrum-soaked cotton balls will be carried by mice into their burrows to use as bedding, thereby killing off the ticks that feed on the mice and spread Lyme. Problem:

1. Pyrethrin is not long-lasting, especially if exposed to sunlight;
2. White-footed deer mice are not normal house mice;
3. Mice breed in such huge numbers you would have to drop thousands of insecticide-soaked cotton balls all over a farm to have much of an impact;
4. The mice will still carry Lyme — they are the actual repository of the disease.

Want a better solution that this nonsense?

1. Encourage fox, hawks, and possums to take up residence with places for them to perch and shelter (hedges, old tree snags, brush piles);
2. Put several “mechanical cat” multi-mice traps around barns and lofts;
3. Cut grass low and make your mow paths wide;
4. Spray your pants with pyrethrum before going through tall grass and brush, and check yourself over after being in the field.

Medals and Dog Tags

Good Doggie

Hunting Vermin Wherever Found

Another picture from Briton Riviere, this one entitled “The mouse ran up the clock." From 1884.

Public Health Rat Gangs to Combat the Plague

After the first Plague-infected rat was discovered in Brisbane, Australia in 1900, Australia’s Queensland Health Department implemented the Rat Gang, a ten-person team to eradicate rats. In just one year the gang laid over 400,000 poison baits, and their dogs killed thousands of rats.

Whatever happened to the Plague?  The unbelievable answer is that rats helped end it over most of the world. That story is told here.  

Tactical Doggos

Tactical helmets for military and police dogs are now a thing.

The visor protects the eyes, the GoPro camera records what the dog sees.

Poachers as Prisoners

This painting by Briton Rivière (1840-1920) is called "Fidelity," but it was originally entitled 'The Prisoners" as it shows a poacher and his dog locked up awaiting trial.

Fresh from the Asylum

There is a wee bit of madness in this picture.

Jack Russell on the Can-Can Line

Before the Deluge

I'm With the Band

Front and Center With the Boys

A Lifetime of Class

Audrey Hepburn had terriers, of one type or another, her whole life.

The Next King of England

The next king of England will be a Jack Russell man. A lifetime with the dogs.

Hemingway: "The Big, Fat Slob" in Bimini

Hemingway in Bimini with Blue Fin tuna.

There's a lot they don't teach you in English class, and more's the pity.

You see, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway's story of the epic battle of age against nature, is not entirely a work of fiction, and there's some excellent fishing history there too.

The Caribbean was once full of enormous Blue Fin Tuna and Blue Marlin that could not be reliably caught by line, as the proliferation of sharks in these same waters meant that the hours it took to bring in a really big fish would invariably attract sharks that would "apple core" the tiring giants, leaving massive chunks taken out of their sides and tails.

Hemingway with "apple-cored" 1,000 pound Blue Marlin. 

What to do?

The answer, it turned out, was to make an entirely new and more powerful reel, load it with heavy line, and tie the whole rig into a deck chair and seat belt arrangement so that the big tuna and bill fish could be horsed to the boat while they still had the quickness and energy to evade the sharks.

Hemingway and children in Bimini., 1935.

The idea was first proposed by Ernest Hemingway. 

In 1935 the 36-year old loaded a newly developed reel built by Finley Norwood onto his 38-foot fishing boat, Pilar, custom-built in New York the year before, and went to the Bahamas to do battle with the giant tuna and bill fish off of Bimini.

In April of of 1935 Hemingway reeled in two tuna that weighed 514 and 610 pounds. These were the first big, un-mutilated Blue Fin Tuna ever taken off of Bimini.

Hemingway's accomplishment and technique were quickly the talk of the small island.  If anyone brought in a fish using his fish-horsing technique, it was said to have been "Hemingwayed."

Hemingway in Bimini.

Still in Bimini in May, Hemingway was washing down the Pilar in early evening after a fishing tournament when a voice came to him out of the darkness: "Say, aren't you the guy who claims he catches all the fish?"

"I catch my share," Hemingway said as he turned to see a large man in white shorts who had also been competing in the tournament. "I figured him for a mouthy drunk," Hemingway later told his brother, Leicester.

The goading continued as the drunk called Hemingway "a big, fat slob."

After a while, Hemingway had enough of the insults, leaped up on the dock, and clipped the heckler with several lefts, but the man still didn't go down. "Then I backed off and really got the weight of a pivot swing into the old Sunday punch," said Hemingway. "He landed, and his ass and head hit the planking at the same time."

The "mouthy drunk" was now unconscious on the dock, and a crowd of some 60 people looked on.

The crew from Storm King, the boat that had been carrying the drunk, carried him back onboard. The man did not regain conscious for a very long time, and at 4 a.m. Storm King left port to rush him to Miami for medical treatment.

That night Hemingway worried that he might have seriously wounded his antagonist.

His feeling of dread did not abate when he found out the man was Joseph F. Knapp the son of the owner and publisher of such magazines as Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, the American magazine, and Farm & Fireside.

The good news for Hemingway was that the Joseph P. Knapp, the father of the unconscious, never messed with the editorial side of his magazines, and Collier's later hired Hemingway as a war correspondent.  As for Joseph F. Knapp, he recovered and said he was wrong and blamed it on the booze.

The fight between the wealthy magazine scion and the writer became famous in part because Calypso singer Nattie Saunders was in the crowd on the dock that day. Saunders later wrote a song about it called "Big Fat Slob".

Mr. Knapp called Mr. Hemingway
A Big Fat Slob
Mr. Ernest Hemingway balled his fist
And gave him a knob
Big fat slob in Bimini

This is the night we have fun
Oh the big fat slob in Bimini
This the night we got fun

Mr. Knapp look at him and try to mock
And from the blow
Mr. Knapp couldn't talk
At first Mr. Knapp thought
He had his bills in stalk
And when Mr. Ernest Hemingway walk
The dock rocked

Mr. Knapp couldn't laugh
Mr. Ernest Hemingway grin
Put him to sleep
With a knob on his chin

Now, tell the truth, shouldn't we all have been taught this in school?

Coffee and Provocation

French Chickens Kill French Fox
Not sure if I am proud of the chickens or ashamed for the fox. It took 3,000 chickens, the living descendant of the T-Rex, to kill a small fox.

Dutch Salmon Has Gone to the Source
Dutch Salmon, a conservationist, author, dog man, and lover of the outdoors, and most things in it, has died at age 73. A powerful voice for the protection of the Gila River, he had been suffering from Parkinson's for a number of years.

The American System of Manufacturing
From Wikipedia: "The American system of manufacturing was a set of manufacturing methods that evolved in the 19th century. The two notable features were the extensive use of interchangeable parts and mechanization for production, which resulted in more efficient use of labor compared to hand methods."

When the Road Charges the Car
A stretch of road outside Stockholm transfers energy from two tracks of rail in the road, recharging the batteries of electric cars and trucks that have a movable arm attached to the bottom of a vehicle.

The Official Scent of the Trump Administration 
Its called Malicious Shit Show Infused With Chaos

Poor Man's Fillet Mignon
People think how eggs, chicken, and beef are raised determines taste.  Nope.  It's almost always how it is prepared.  True too for coffee.  See this link for how to turn a low-cost crap cut into a terrific one.

Malevolent Beetles Are the Problem
Devils Hole Pupfish are rare and hard to breed because of vicious water diving beetles that prey upon them.

Monosodium Glutamate Is Fine
MSG got a bad rap due to flawed science and racism.

It Has To Be a Fake
When presented with the first Platypus, European scientists assumed an egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed, venomous mammal had to be an elaborate hoax.

World War I Trench Construction
Detailed cross section models of WWI trench construction show how they dealt with drainage, cooking fires, storage, and the threat of trench collapse.

Coffee and Provocation

White Male Racists are a Problem
Every single American murdered by extremists in 2018 was murdered by a white supremacist or far right extremist.

Guns Are a Problem
More children were shot dead in 2017 than on-duty police officers and active duty military combined.

Trump Is a Problem
Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.

Jack the Ripper DNA Identifies the Ripper
He was someone suspected at the time.

Global Warming on Mount Everest
Melting glaciers are exposing dead bodies.

Re-Wolfing Isle Royale
After the wolf population of Isle Royale collapsed due to inbreeding, four wolves were trapped in Ontario and transported to the island by helicopter.

Rural Crime on the Rise?
The overall violent crime rate in Iowa rose by only 3% between 2006 and 2016, but grew by 50% in communities with fewer than 10,000 residents.

Two Amputations a Week
The cost of working in a US meat plant. On the upside, the pay is awful. Slaughterhouse workers made $11 per hour in 1985, equal to $25 in 2018 when adjusted for inflation. But 33 years later, the average slaughterhouse worker makes less than $14 an hour. Meanwhile, the CEO of Smithfield made $291 million in 2017.

Big Agriculture is Killing Farming
In the 1980s, farmers pocketed 37 cents out of every $1. Today, farmers take home less than 15 cents on every $1. This new economic reality forces farmers to survive on volume, creating a system where only the largest farms can make a living.

Ancient Birds Born to Run?
When are they gonna name a bird after Bruce Springsteen?

Tastes Like Common Sense
Samuel Adams has dedicated a new beer to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Are We Ready for the First Step?

Comedian Patton Oswalt writes:

Maybe "Russian collusion" is this generation's "2nd gunman" or "controlled demolition" -- we need there to be a master lattice behind all of this chaos, even if the lattice is diabolical. "Diabolical" still implies "logic" even if the logic is malignant.

But the SCARIER thing is facing the fact that America elected an openly racist, failed grifter, sexual predator to the highest office in the land -- all by ourselves. There was no one guiding us, no plot to destroy us. We did it. To ourselves.

But that also means we can FIX this, all by ourselves. We've been waaaay closer to the brink than this before -- Jackson, Buchanan, Nixon. We've pulled back from way more hopeless pits. But the pulling back always came AFTER facing what we were. We'll see.

All Leashed Pets Are Welcome at Petco

When Animal Control Fails

Will a child be next? 

It's not easy being an animal control officer. You see people and animals at their very worse, and the job too often puts you in direct conflict with people who are emotionally volatile.

That said, the job does require officers, at times, to step up and safeguard the public from dangerous animals.

Sadly, not every Animal Control officer is competent do the job.

Consider the situation in Aiken, South Carolina, where a group of free running molosser dogs (pit bull-boxer crosses) recently attacked and killed two miniature ponies, a goat, and perhaps a cat (it was never seen again).

The dog's tracks were all over the crime scene, the dogs were photographed with blood smeared across their bodies, and the bite marks on the goat and horse made clear this was a large-dog attack.

So what did Aiken Animal Control do? They said "maybe it was coyotes". Who knew? They did not have the equipment or budget to test.

So now what?

The latest is that the animals are to be "adopted out of state."

What's that mean?

It means out of sight is out of mind. 

In these kinds of situations, vicious dogs are routinely moved out of state, their histories scrubbed, and then the dogs are re-homed with unsuspecting and naive wanna-be dog owners who too often learn the hard way that a large, poorly socialized, dog can be a dangerous liability on four legs.

Will that happen in this case? It looks like it.

The dogs have been separated and, unless they attack other dogs or their human handlers in the next few weeks, they are are scheduled to be sent to "no kill' shelters in another state.

Aiken County Administrator Clay Killian says the dogs will NOT go to the adoption floor at the Aiken County Animal Shelter.

Right. Why not? Oh, because they are DANGEROUS DOGS? Got it!

Aiken County Administrator Clay Killian says the dogs will not be adopted into the same home together, and that a "history" of the dogs "possible" involvement in an animal attack will be included in their adoption information.

Wanna bet that never happens, or that that the "history" includes no photographs, and is so glossed over and sanitized as to be a lie?

And if the dogs attack again, where will be Aiken County officials be?

Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown, you can be sure.

None of this is to say that these kind of cases are easy. However, it goes, the ultimate price is too often paid by the dogs who, through no fault of their own, were born big with prey drive and who got little training or socialization.  Add in a human family that did not properly fence or kennel them, and it's a predictable tragedy.

To be clear, all of this was preventable.  Neighboring farms had seen these dogs loose and harassing livestock before, and they had reported the dogs to Animal Control.

And what did Animal Control do? Little or nothing.

What is Aiken County Administrator Clay Killian going to do about THAT?  It's a serious question as, at some point, liability is going to visit his door for failing to act. It's not like the situation has not made the newspaper!

And what about the Court? Will it step in and ban these dog owners from ever having dogs again?

We'll see; additional charges are set for March 25th.