If someone tells you a useful working dog breed has gone extinct, be on alert.
Tools generally don’t go extinct.
The observation that tools almost never go extinct is not my own, but that of Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine and Whole Earth Review.
Robert Krulwich of NPR did not believe the claim, but damn if he could find an exception.
“If you listen to our Morning Edition debate, I tried carbon paper (still being made), steam powered car engine parts (still being made), Paleolithic hammers (still being made), 6 pages of agricultural tools from an 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue (every one of them still being made), and to my utter astonishment, I couldn't find a provable example of an technology that has disappeared completely.”
So Krulwich being Krulwich went out to the NPR universe and after thousands of people spent scores of thousands of hours pondering and suggesting they could only come up with three:
* Radium suppositories made by quacks in the 19th century and which caused quick cancer;* A Roman "corvus," a military boarding device used in naval warfare in the First Punic War against Carthage, and;* The ferrite "core" of a Seeburg Jukebox of the 1950s.
To be fair to Kelly, his original claim was that no *species* of technology has ever gone extinct, in which case all three of the above items have, in fact, been replaced by better off-the-shelf items that do the exact thing promised in the original, only quicker, cheaper, and without killing you.
All of this by way of saying that when someone tells you a legendary and excellent breed of dog is now “extinct,” your ears should probably rotate forward.
Extinct?
A legendary and excellent breed of dog is now extinct?
No it’s not.
Or perhaps it never existed.
Take the infamous “Blue Paul” fighting dog.
Did you know this dog is named after John Paul Jones, bassist for Led Zeppelin?
It seems when John Paul Jones was writing “Black Dog,” in the winter of 1970, the bass track on the first recording was muffled or, in the words of John Bonham, it was “as diluted as Wetherspoons’ gin”.
A Black Dog with a diluted color is called “blue,” and the original (poor quality) recording of Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog was labeled the “Blue Paul” recording on the box.
The song, written in 3/16th time was problematic from the start, with Bonham playing a straight 4/4 rhythm over the track. Robert Plant wrote on the original reel-to-reel that “this dog don’t hunt”.
It’s believed the original tape of Black Dog was recorded over in 1974 during the making of “Physical Graffiti”.
Due to massive doses of drugs consumed by the band, and large amounts of whiskey consumed by band manager Peter Grant, it seems the original 1970 “Blue Paul” recording was listed as 1790, the now-missing tape box became a real dog in the telling by roadies, and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin was somehow confused with John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born American naval officer who never owned a dog
Oh dear! What to do?
Why declare the imaginary dog with a fantasy history “extinct,” of course!
Job done.
But now undone.
You see, as I write this, a “Blue Paul” dog has been found and it is lying at my feet.
She’s a *genuine* Blue Paul and comes complete with papers verifying her pedigree and signed by John Paul Jones himself!
Want a puppy?
Operators are standing by.
“Special deal for American friends.”
I am also selling my author-signed first edition of the Bible. A
Very rare!
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