Not Your Daddy's NRA

This is the National Recovery Administration, a New Deal agency established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 in order to eliminate "cut-throat competition" by bringing industry, labor, and government together to create codes of "fair practices" and set prices. The NRA allowed industries to get together and write "codes of fair competition" in order to reduce "destructive competition" and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours, as well as minimum prices at which products could be sold.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Can You Find It?

Eastern Screech Owl

What Do You Have to Lose?

"Professor" Damrel's Wolf Cart

"Prof. J.A. Damrel & Five Timber Wolves pulled wagon for
"CREAM of RYE", Minneapolis Cereal Co, Minnesota, 1912"

This is a promotion wagon and card for "Cream of Rye" cereal from 1912.

The Minneapolis Cereal Company (now called General Mills) employed "Professor" J.A. Damrel and his team of canids, sometimes listed as "five timber wolves," to go "coast to coast" advertising their product.

The story has a few holes, however, as Mace Loftus notes over at The Wolf Crossing.

For one thing, there is no evidence this team of five wolves ever got out of the orbit of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, much less traveled from Seattle, Washington, as trumpeted in the few remaining advertising circulars of the era.

The real story appears that Professor Damrel and his wife started on the road on May 15, 1912 from their general store in Ashland, Wisconsin, and by July 30th they had reached Racine, a distance of about 374 miles in 76 days at an average speed of about 5 miles a day.

On October 17th, The Decatur Review reported that J.R. Damrel and wife drove a team of wolves into Decatur, Illinois, and that the team "is composed of three Siberian wolves, one husky, one large Alaskan dog and one timber wolf". Though Mr. Damrel said he expected to reach New York City by the middle of December, and that his dog team averaged 40 miles a day, the actual distance between Racine, Wisconsin, and Decatur, Illinois is just 277 miles, a distance traversed in 79 days at a speed of about 3.5 miles a day.

So what's the real story?

It appears Mr. Damrel dug out a litter of wolf pups near Cayuga, Wisconsin, raised them up for a year or two, trained them to pull a wagon with perhaps the addition of one or two wolf-like Alaskan sled dogs. He then sold the folks at the Minneapolis Cereal Company on a promotion for their new rye cereal, danced up a fancy story to help grease the promotion circuit (and perhaps get a free room on the way), and made a 700-mile trip of it over five months, never once tripping over his own tail in an era of weak reporting and poor long-distance communication.

Louisiana's Missing Tsunami Stones

The flooding now going on in Louisiana, following something like 20" of rain over two days, is a reminder that humans have short memories and that we tend to create perverse incentives to encourage bad behavior.

Extinction of memory.  I have called it the first thing to go extinct. 

Perhaps no one has written about it as well as John Steinbeck in East of Eden, when he talks about California's long-repeating drought cycles:

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

What is true of drought is also true of flood and fire, and at least one culture -- the Japanese -- have embraced a permanent way to teach and warn the next generation -- Tsunmai stones.

From The April 4, 2011 New York Times:

Residents of Aneyoshi, Japan, heeded the warnings of their ancestors. They obeyed directions and wisdom found on a local stone monument: “Do not build any homes below this point,” it reads. “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis.” When the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan, this village sat safely above the high water mark.

Hundreds of such “tsunami stones” dot the coastal hillsides of Japan. Planted decades or even centuries ago, they commemorate past disasters and warn residents of future ones.

In Aneyoshi, village leader Tamishige Kimura praises his forefathers for putting a stone marker in place and obviating the need to rebuild. “They knew the horrors of tsunamis, so they erected that stone to warn us,” he told the New York Times in 2011. Kimura describes its warning as “a rule from our ancestors, which no one in Aneyoshi dares break.”

This particular stone in Aneyoshi dates back to the 1930s. After the village was devastated by the 1896 tsunami it was rebuilt in the same place. But when another tsunami struck in 1933 the village was moved uphill. A tsunami stone was put in place after that disaster and is credited with saving the town in 1960 and again in 2011.

Instead of erecting our own common-sense versions of Tsunami stones in Louisiana and California, we have created taxpayers-subsidized insurance pools to encourage bad behavior.



Few things are more perverse that flood insurance in Louisiana, where flood is so common that FEMA (your tax dollars at work!) underwrites and backstops flood insurance sold and marketed by private companies like State Farm.

These private companies not only sell taxpayer-underwritten federal flood insurance for water, they also sell private corporate-backed insurance for wind damage, using the same private sales force, inspectors, and auditors out in the field.

And the result? When a massive storm comes along, like Hurricane Katrina, wind-damaged buildings that are 20 or 30 miles inland from the storm surge are said by company-paid inspectors and auditors to be "flood damaged".

That simple false claim, which is never "ground truthed," shifts massive costs from the corporate bottom line to government (taxpayer) ledgers.

This is a multi-billion dollar pickpocket abetted by a poorly managed FEMA bureaucracy and thousands of lawyer-lobbyists who grease the wheels in Baton Rouge and in Washington, D.C. This is privatizing profits and communizing costs in order to make a few thousand lawyers and lobbyists fabulously rich.

The Tsunami stones? They are free, and they save lives and money. But they also require a culture that puts at least some small value on collective cohesion for the common good, rather than the free-style, go-wild, cowboy corporate capitalism that American embrace over self-restraint and common sense.  

What They Don't Tell You About War Mortality

If this WEEK, we had all of the COMBINED additional mortality from the Congo War of 1886-1908 (8 million dead), and Word War I (5 million dead) and the Russian Civil War (9 million dead) and Stalin (20 million dead), and World War II (66 million dead) and Mao (40 million dead), we would still have more people on earth than we did two years ago.  #necrometrics  #environmentalfactstheyhidefromyou 

My Dogs Have Forever Homes

My wife, kids, and parents too.

Do Something Fun With Your Dog

Do something fun with your dog this weekend. Get outside. Get off the sidewalk.

What They Don't Tell You About Bears

If every American black bear killed one American a day, everyday for two years, we could solve our foreign dependence on imported oil. #environmentalfactstheyhidefromyou

Fish on Friday

A Dog's Life: Love in the Traces

St. Albans Dog Day Cut from The Underdog Documentary on Vimeo.

From the web site for the movie Underdog about Doug Butler's goal of winning the Open North American Sled Dog Race in Fairbanks, Alaska. This three-day battle pits fifteen of the world’s best mushers on a 22-mile trail. Doug has qualified many times, but never been able to "kick spandex-wearin’ European ass" because, as a farmer, he is tied to the land and his herds. This year is likely his last big shot:

Doug Butler is a quirky old Vermont farmer in a race against time. With his health declining and his dairy farm in trouble, Doug is hell-bent on achieving his two lifelong dreams: passing on the family farm to his son and winning the dog mushing world championships. He's the underdog, but the kind you want to root for. Training fifty canine athletes after a 12-hour workday demands a rare combination of dedication and madness. For decades this has been Doug’s unique escape from the harsh realities of farming, fine-tuning his team through subzero temperatures on a trail surrounding his farm in giddy anticipation of the next race. At the age of 62, Doug is often asked if he’s slowing down. His response is simple and direct, "that’s for old people."

But the deep lines on his weathered face tell the truth: a life of hard labor has taken its toll. In the last five years the Butler’s have doubled their herd size from 300 to 600, but not by choice. As mega-farms with thousands of cattle begin to dominate the landscape, milk prices continue to drop, forcing Doug and his son to increase herd numbers without increasing their staff. Still the farm loses money every month — it's threads of control steadily unwinding.

It’s clear that maintaining a fifty dog team and running a family farm have both become unsustainable — pushing Doug’s body and business to the brink of failure. Yet the man refuses to quit. This year, Doug is determined to not only continue, but to both win the dogsledding world championships and pass off a viable family farm to his son. He’s the underdog, but he doesn’t seem to mind. To him, it’s simple.

"We’re gonna be dead longer than we’re alive," Doug reminds us, "so let’s have fun…let’s get her done."

This story reminds me, a bit, about Donald McCaig's trip to the World Championship sheep dog trial in Llandielo, Wales, recounted in his excellent book, Mr. and Mrs. Dog.  Buy it; read it!

Critter Carts of Every Kind

If you can put a harness on it, you can at least pose for a picture with it "pulling" a cart. With the exception of the alligator, however, I think all of these would work, though how much cart control you would have with a hippo or a team of elk would be interesting to know.  Thanks to Melissa T. for the elk, lion team, and hippo pics!

For those interested in dog carts, see my earlier post on Dog Carts and the Extinction of Memory.

Dog Carts and the Extinction of Memory

Dog cart selling meat scraps for pets.


The first thing that goes extinct is memory.

Who alive, among us today, remembers when dog carts prowled our streets?

And yet in most of Europe, and in the largest cities of the U.S., they once did, pulling small wagons filled with milk, bread, and perhaps ready-to-drink lemonade or tea.

Dogs were used in war too, to pull ammunition and machines guns to the front lines (dogs are harder to shoot than horses), and to pull reels of communication line and barbed wire.

Would a dog-drawn small business work today?

I think so.

Imagine a dog-drawn ice cream, lemonade, or hot dog cart. The novelty of the thing would be a competitive advantage, attracting kids and adults equally. Here's a small-business idea just waiting to happen!



Dog cart, Brussels. Probably milk.



Dog cart with milk canisters. Large terrier is probably a guard dog.



Bakers dog cart, brace of dogs.



Dog cart mobile tea delivery, Brussels, with three dog team.




Baker's dog cart with handles to help the dog up hills,and to slow the cart going down.



Dog cart with ammunition, 1917, Italy. Brace pair.

Dog cart with milk canisters, Holland. Handle to help push and slow cart as needed.

Dog cart with milk canisters.

Dog cart with machine guns, World War I, Belgium.

Dog cart jitney, Canada.

Dog cart, Belgium, with three dogs. Probably a produce cart.

Dog cart with milk canisters, Lucerne, Switzerland.

Silent film star Mary Pickford Dog with dog cart in the movie Pollyanna.

Milk cart pulled by brace par of shepherds, Lauterbrunner, Switzerland.

Dog cart with milk canisters, Rosendaal, Netherlands.

.

Sportsmen: It's Always Been on Us

From Hatchmag.com comes this wonderful piece from Tod Tanner.  Not new, but new to me, and it's solid gold, which never wears out.

We seem, at least from where I sit, as if we don’t care all that much -- as if it’s only natural that the trout streams we fish will eventually run warm and brown, that our woodlots will give way before the rising tide of suburban development, that our wilderness areas, once pristine and untouched, will fall before the onslaught of roads and pipelines and well-heads, that our oh-so-vital wetlands will be drained and filled, that our farms will leach pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers into the gaping maw of oceanic dead zones, that we’ll pull apart our mountains for their coal and cast their broken bones down into the hollows of Appalachia as if our landscapes are mere detritus to be sorted through and discarded.

“Progress,” we call it. Progress, where we trade our outdoor heritage and our sporting traditions for the illusory benefits of comfort and convenience. Faust, were he here today, would surely look around and laugh, for his namesake bargain is the rule rather than the exception. It’s a devil’s pact, pure and simple - selling our souls, trading our kids’ future, worshipping at the altar of endless growth, turning our backs on Leopold and Pinchot and Roosevelt, and on the hard-earned wisdom of our fathers and grandfathers, ignoring the myriad lessons of American history while we embrace the soul-sucking siren song of modernity - all, I might add, so we can fill the shrieking emptiness inside with “more” and “bigger” and “faster” and “better.”

Let’s face it. We’re junkies, snorting conspicuous consumption and mainlining Madison Avenue, and it has to stop. It has to, if we’re going to hold on to the things that really matter.

When you think about it, none of this is complicated. If we want to save our tarpon, we need to get off our asses and fight. The same applies for our trout, and our salmon, and our bonefish, and our smallmouth bass. Nobody else gives a shit whether we’ll still have steelhead in 50 years. Nobody else cares if our snowpack melts away and our rivers run low and hot; nobody else gives a damn if ocean acidification renders our favorite saltwater fisheries bare of everything except an endless armada of jellyfish. It’s on us. Here’s a news flash: it’s always been on us.

Read the whole thing!

Trump Supporters Endorse Invisible Fence

Donald Trump is a "Roomba" smearing dog poo all over the Republican living room. It will never come out, and you will never forget it.

Here we see a real "focus group" of Trump supporters presented with incredible policy proposals. The Invisible Fence bit starts at 4:30, but the whole thing is pretty amazing.  Be sure to watch the spot ads these focus group folks do at the end! Remember these when Trump rolls out  his real ads this Friday; these are the people he is appealing to.

As for the pro-Trump, anti-Hillary, and pro-Bernie trolls that are sure to show up.:  Please go away.

If you support hate, racism, fear-mongering, and sexism, or are confused about what Trump is offering the American people, your life is already a failure and no one wants your hear your babble.

Move along.

Coffee and Provocation

The Continuing Crisis 
New Zealand Car Thieves Steal Weasel Anal Gland Oil Instead of Meth Fixings


It's Me or the Cookie
The American Association for the Advancement of Science reports that dogs would rather get a belly rub than a treat.

A Greenland Shark  400 Years Old?
According to the scientists who radio-carbon dated her, she was born during the reign of James I, was a youngster when René Descartes set out his rules of thought, saw out her adolescent years as George II ascended the throne, reached adulthood around the time that the American revolution kicked off, and lived through two world wars.

Serious Sorcery Delusion 
A witchcraft shop in Huddersfield, England refuses to serve Harry Potter fans because it sells 'spiritual tools' not toys for young Muggles.

How Will the World Change with Electric Cars?
Health will improve a lot, and ambient noise in the city will fall a lot.

In Vitro Article in Scientific American From 50 Years Ago
“If rabbit and pig eggs can be fertilized after maturation in culture, presumably human eggs grown in culture could also be fertilized, although obviously it would not be permissible to implant them in a human recipient. So far we have either failed or have at best achieved a very limited success in fertilizing human eggs in vitro. We intend to continue these experiments; the ability to observe cleaving human eggs could be of great medical and scientific value. For example, sterility caused by faulty passage of embryos along the fallopian tube could probably be alleviated by removing oocytes from the ovary, growing and fertilizing them in vitro and then transferring them back into the mother. —R. G. Edwards”

Grinding Up Mummies for Paint 
You want umber? Grab that mummy leg. It seems the production of “mummy brown” paint only ceased in the 20th century because no more mummies were to be found.

Marijuana Plants Vie for Blue Ribbons
Marijuana growers at the Oregon State Fair will submit their plants to be judged by Ed Rosenthal, the self-styled “Guru of Ganja,” to be awarded the classic blue, purple, and yellow ribbons.

An extremely bitter roast, picked by child labor overseas,

Nightmare Dog

Geonni B. sends this picture of some nightmare of a cross. She said she thought of me and all the women she showed it to, said how cute it was. Yeah, that's how I read that paragraph. Was there another way?

I figure this might be a Pug-Frenchie cross with a bad case of alopecia.

X-Men: The Recent Rise of Pale-Skinned Mutants

A US study out of the Penn State University has found that Europeans' light skin almost certainly stems from a gene mutation from a single person who lived only 10,000 years ago.

Keith Cheng from Penn State College of Medicine discovered that a single amino acid difference in the gene SLC24A5 is the key contributor to the skin color difference between Europeans and West Africans. The mutation, called A111T, is found in virtually everyone of European ancestry, and is also found in populations in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, but not in high numbers in Africa. Since all individuals from the Middle East, North Africa, East Africa and South India who carry the A111T mutation also share traces of the same ancestral genetic code, researchers believe they all are descended from the same single mutant.

Bred for (Poor) Function

For many dog owners, a dog that will barely move, or which tires easily, is a convenience.

For many breeders, an early canine death is a core part of their business plan.

Think about it for a minute. What is the function of a Pug?

Is it not to be a dog that demands very little exercise?

Is it not a product to be sold as often as possible?

Perhaps English Bulldogs and Pugs are NOT simply being bred to look cute.  Perhaps they actually fit the market demand, however perverse that demand actually is.