Graham Nash & David Crosby :: Lee Shore

Stinky Squid

A “Stinky Squid” (Pseudocolus fusiformis) stinkhorn mushroom near where I was stacking firewood this morning.

Thylacine?

I think someone over-paid. I suspect this is a South American Bush Dog with glass eyes pulled from a taxidermy bits box (they don’t make commercial Bush Dog eyes).

Most Women Are Better Than Most Men

Stacking Yesterday’s Oak and Pine Sections

The bar is two meters tall.

The Fish and I :: Babak Habibifar

A blind man living in isolation with his only companion -- a small goldfish in a bowl.  Written, shot, and acted by Iranian Babak Habibifar. A perfect movie in 6 minutes.

The Chambers Brothers :: Time Has Come Today

What They Don’t Talk About in Sunday School

“Sunday School” by Eira Quinn

They told me about Noah

But not the bodies.

Not the screaming 

beneath rising water,

or the mothers 

who begged God for mercy 

as he watched from the clouds 

and said nothing.

I heard about Job,

but they skipped the bet.

The part where God let the Devil

ruin a man’s life

just to prove a point.

Killed his children.

Stripped his skin.

And called it 

“Righteous testing”.

They told about Abraham’s faith,

but not Isaac’s trauma.

Not what it does to a boy

to see his father raise a knife

with heavens approval.

Not the silence that follows 

when you survive a god 

who wanted you dead.

No one mentioned the concubines,

the raped,

the forgotten wives,

the daughters sold

for the price of land

or peace

or power.

They didn’t talk about 

stoning disobedient sons,

or killing gay lovers,

or what to do

if a woman is not a virgin

on her wedding night.

They said Jesus died for us,

but not that God

could’ve chosen forgiveness 

without blood.

That maybe the crucifixion

wasn’t salvation,

But spectacle.

They said 

“Trust the word”

but they handed me 

a censored book

and a list of acceptable questions.

And when I asked about the rest,

they said

“Have faith”

But faith without truth

is just fear

in nicer clothing.

And now that I’ve read

what they skipped -

now that I’ve seen

what they hid —

I can’t go back

to coloring pages

And quiet amens.

The god they taught me

was edited.

Redacted.

Rebranded.

But the truth?

The truth was always there.

In the margins.

In the footnotes.

In the blood.

Concern-trolling at the Small Engine Shop

I take down and section enough trees that I have an opinion on chainsaw blades, and that opinion is that you definitely do NOT get what you pay for when you purchase chains in a local shop or specialty store.

My last experience was in the shop that sold me my chainsaw.  

That shop sells $18” chains for about $28 — the same price they sell them for at Lowes.  

When I mentioned I was buying chains for $4.75 apiece, the salesman said he had “concerns” about these cheaper Chinese-made trains.  They “stretch” he said. 

I looked at him weird.

“All chains loosen,” I replied.  “It’s why the saw comes with a wrench, and why there’s a bar chain adjuster.”

Apparently his normal clientele did not use their chainsaws enough to know how to actually put on and tighten a chain.  

It’s actually a common problem, but it’s not one at this house.

“Concern trolling” is a core competency in the world of sales. 

The most common manifestation is the phrase “you get what you pay for.”  

That might be true in some cases, but more often than not, it’s bullshit — the catch-phrase of the up-selling salesman.

What’s this have to do with dogs?  Quite a bit.

Dog breeders are big on the idea that the more you pay for a dog, the better it’s likely to be.  

That’s mostly bullshit

It’s also bullshit that the more expensive the dog food, the better it’s likely to be.  

Provably not true.

Then, there’s veterinary care, where a large part of the job of most “vet techs” is to upsell and tack on every nonsense service, test, and procedure they can think up.

Concern trolling is the most lucrative part of nearly every veterinary practice.

It's concern trolling that gets customers to:

* Vaccinate their adult dogs for diseases they will not get because that first-year round of distemper and parvo vaccines are actually good for life;

* Put their dogs on heartworm medication all year long, even when it's snowing outside;

* Buy their flea and tick medications from their vet rather than order online for half the price;

* Run tests for parasites (worms) and diseases (Lyme) rather than simply treat for less.

* Come in every year for a "teeth cleaning" (complete with anesthesia) and a "well dog checkup."

The concern trolling vet tech will say they are “concerned" your dog is not "up to date" with yearly vaccines.  

He or she is "concerned" about your dog's weight -- and has special food to sell you. 

"It's standard practice," they will tell you, to have your dog's teeth "professionally cleaned" every year and for it to come in for a well dog “checkup" because “that's what you do for yourself,” right?

Can you feel the concern?

If you are a dog owner, the proper response to being concern-trolled is to push back with your own concerns. 

A vet pushing annual or every three-year parvo and distemper boosters should be asked if he or she has been keeping up with any of the literature of the last 30 years. Surely he or she has read Ron Schultz, the leading expert on vaccines? Surely they know that parvo and distempter vaccines are  good for life?

You have concerns!

Annual teeth cleaning? No, actually you do not get anesthetized every year to have your teeth cleaned, and you also do not have a full  blood workup to boot. That does not happen. And no, it's not going to happen to your dog either. Anesthesia is dangerous, dental cleaning and scaling for humans has not been show to be effective, and dogs are dead at age 15, not age 80 like people. Surely the veterinarian knows all this? And what dental school did he or she go to again?

You have concerns!

And why would you test an asymptomatic dog for Lyme? If a dog is asymptomatic, the dog is fine. Leave it alone.  Surely they know this is the correct protocol?

No? You have concerns!

And why would you run a fecal worm test that, with the vet bill for it, is far more expensive than simply dosing the dog for worms with an over-the-counter wormer?  Surely the vet knows this too, right?  Right??

You have concerns!

A heartworm test on a dog younger than 6 months? Surely the vet knows that dogs cannot get heart worm if they are that young? 

You have concerns!

And surely they KNOW that heartworm cannot be transmitted if the temperature at night has ever fallen below 56 degrees any time in the last 30 days? No?  Then maybe the vet needs to read up on heartworm before prescribing anything?  Concern troll right back!

Of course, if you are too timid to push back, are a people-pleaser that avoids all confrontation, or are the kind of person that folds to any and all claims of authority (see the Milgram Experiment), you are free to carry on by flushing your money down the drain.

As always, do what you want.  It’s a free country, even if the upselling is all very expensive.

Practicing “Place”

Practicing “place” on rocks and downed trees.

Franken-Fido

Frankenstein is a story of unintended consequences.

Dr. Frankenstein was not a bad man. He was simply trying to push death beyond the horizon by returning life to the recently deceased. 

He did not set out to make a monster. 

For the record, Author Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein story has roots in reality.  

Its core premise was rooted in a scandal of her time — body snatching done by, and for, doctors who were studying human anatomy in order to teach medicine and make medical advances to save lives.

Anatomy beyond the skin is learned through dissection, and it was through dissection that Herophilus, Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, and even Benjamin Franklin learned about bones, heart, lungs, kidneys, muscles, and the human circulatory system. 

Up to the start of the 20th Century, most medicine was built on the dissected bodies of dead men and women.  By studying the dead, the health problems of the living could be understood and perhaps even reduced.

The first bodies used for anatomy were those of criminals who came fresh from the gallows, and their use by medical science for this purpose was legal. 

But as the pursuit of medicine and science exploded, and capital punishment became rarer, the demand for bodies outpaced the supply.  

In order to bridge the gap, doctors and universities began to pay grave robbers to find a supply of fresh bodies by any means necessary.

This was the era before embalming, and bodies turned bad quickly, especially in warm weather.

A man might die on a Friday evening, be buried Saturday afternoon, and the body dug up and disappeared by Sunday morning.

The problem was severe enough that in New York City in 1788, there was a small riot by the poor against doctors who were employing grave robbers (called "resurrectionists") to provide corpses.

This was the background against which 20-year old Mary Shelly wrote her novel, Frankenstein, a cautionary tale about scientists playing God and acting in isolation on the ragged edge of permitted thought and action.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein sought to banish death to a distant shore by discovering the spark of life that, when extinguished, resulted in grief for living friends and relatives. 

Surely, that spark could be reignited?

After all, electricity made dead limbs jerk and still hearts pump again. This was a mechanical problem -- a simple question of wiring and chemistry -- was it not?

And so Victor Frankenstein set out to make a new Adam and, by doing, rid the world of sorrow.  

He set out to do good, not evil.

But that's not how it worked out, was it?

Instead, Victor Frankenstein created a monster. 

Instead of banishing death, he created a thing that brought fear, death, and destruction with it.

Here was a tale of unintended consequences; of good intentions gone to very bad results.

Frankenstein was first printed in 1823.

At the time, grave robbing was so common that massive stones and even ironwork cages were being put over graves to thwart the activity. 

Relatives and hired men watched over graves for a week or more after burial to thwart those looking for fresh corpses.

And yet, the demand for fresh corpses for anatomy students continued unabated.

Capitalism being what it is, incentives were paid for grave robbers to move fast and find a "fresh one."

Apparently the incentives were enough to spark murder.

In 1828, some five years after the first publication of Frankenstein, William Burke and William Hare along with their wives, began murdering in order to provide fresh corpses for their patron, Dr. Robert Knox of Edinburgh, Scotland. 

Many of the murders were travelers lodging at Hare's house. 

All in all, Hare and Burke killed at least 16 people before they were finally caught and put on trial. 

Dr. Knox received no charges at all even though, at some point, he clearly knew that the men he was paying were in fact murdering the poor and sick for quick cash.

William Hare avoided the gallows by implicating Burke and Burke's wife, Helen McDougal.

Burke was found guilty of murder on Christmas Day 1828 and, in a twist of irony, the court ruled that: "Your body should be publicly dissected and anatomized. And I trust, that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes."

Burke's body was, in fact, dissected at the local medical school.  His skin was turned into a book cover.  His bones are still on display at the Edinburgh Medical School.

What’s all this have to do with dogs?

A bit.

You see, the eugenic ideas of Francis Galton, upon which the Kennel Clubs are built, were hammered up with good intentions.

Galton’s cousin, Charles Darwin, had postulated that the invisible hands of Mother Nature and Father Time had come together to forge the fires of Natural Selection.

But natural selection was so slow!

Surely, things could be speeded up by the hands of man, as stock man Robert Bakewell had already done with cattle and sheep?

And so “unnatural selection” at the hand of man was created.  The idea here was simple:  select a few dozen of the best of a form or type, and then breed best to best, ad infinitum, until perfection was achieved.  What could go wrong?  Nothing!

But while cattle, sheep, and chicken breeders had a steak-and-eggs axis against which to judge their efforts, dog breeders did not.

The result was increased selection for exaggeration, leading to serious deformity and dysfunction. 

In addition, small closed gene pools meant that invisible recessive genes (an idea not yet fully understood) were often doubled up on, resulting in a rise in disease.

Here was Franken-fido come to life; German Shepherds unable to stand unaided, Bulldogs that could not breed or whelp on their own, and Dogue du Bourdeaux that routinely expired at age five or six.

No one started the Kennel Club intending any of this to happen, anymore than Dr. Victor Frankenstein intended to unleash a monster on the world.

But there it was; unintended consequences. 

Now the question was “What are we going to do about it?”

And the answer, so far, has been to fumble the ball for a hundred years.

Blue Heron on Yesterday’s Bike Ride

Recapitulating Scotland’s Mistake

 The older I get, the more I see patterns, and so often those patterns are repeated mistakes.

It’s often racism, war-mongering, and capitalism run amok, but sometimes it’s slower, less dramatic, and every bit as brutal.

This video is about how an ancient mountain range was divided by the Atlantic Ocean, and then the Scottish side was denuded of its forests, losing its soil, exposing its rock which was used to create stone walls to pen sheep, which kept the forest from growing back until the sheep economy began to collapse.

This  video is also about how immigrants from Scotland and other parts of the UK and “Old England” came to New England to do the same thing.

Watch the whole thing.  Long, but worth it.

For those wondering how this relates to terrier work, see >>   https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-glory-of-british-dogs.html?

52 Years Ago Today

Found a Third Box Turtle in the Yard

This one was floating in a tiny 50-gallon deer watering “pond” next to where I set out corn for deer.  This Box Turtle was fine (they can float), but he’s not a water turtle, and I fished him out and put in a escape ramp to avoid future water problems

Today’s Box Turtle is picture #1.  The other pictures are of the other two Box Turtles found earlier.  They can live 50 years, and lay only 4-5 eggs a year.

Now We Re-Elect the Crooks

Woodward and Bernstein watching Nixon’s resignation announcement, 52 years ago this evening. Where were you? I was in a camp ground, bicycling between Bangor, Maine and Boston, Massachusetts.

A Very Handsome Grandson

Eastern Cicada Killer Wasp

Eastern Cicada Killer Wasps are giant wasps that paralyze cicadas and then pick them up and fly them to burrows.  The cicadas are still alive when the wasp lays there eggs in them.

The Cicada Killer wasps are pretty harmless, but their presence attracts another wasp.  

This other wasp is a wingless reddish wasp, sometimes called a “Velvet Ant,” but more accurately called a “Cow Killer” wasp. The sting of Velvet Ants is extremely painful.

Drone, Drone on the Range

  Back in 2012, I wondered:

“How hard would it be to put a small gun on a drone and fly it into forest or field... or through a window for assassination purposes? Not hard, I can assure you. Sure it would probably be a one-shot deal (blow back and all), but you can bet that little problem will be fixed soon enough. 

“Imagine a world with everyone flying cheap drones with guns on them. The possibilities for extortion, murder, and mayhem are legion, and so too will be the desire and rationalizations of the police, and others, who are likely to use them to invade privacy and snoop in all kinds of ways now unimaginable.”

The 2012 post >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2012/09/photo-source-wired-add-caption-back-in.html? .

Go Ahead and Look Up (But it won’t matter)