Pet Monologues

Recently I read an article about dogs. It defined purebreds, hybrids, and mutts. The “hybrid” was labeled a “designer dog.” Of course this was the one I was most interested in. I am a designer.

What the hell does “designer-fill-in-the-blank” mean? Dogs are labeled “designer dogs” because many of them are bred “by design” for specific reasons like minimizing allergies to shedding and dander, having good temperaments as family pets, and eliminating excessive drooling. Is “designer-this-or-that” an admirable label? I can’t deny it, “designer dogs are pretty popular.”

The design thing:
“By design.” You know, everybody knows, designers are “trained” to arrive at beautiful looking and/or beautiful working solutions. It’s part of the process. It’s what we do. In a perfect world designers always use the process for our work-for-hire solutions. Some use the process for personal solutions, like “living and breathing” design. 24 x 7. I can think of several as we write. Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter 9: The stories that nourish a newspaper.
By John Armstrong

[This is the ninth of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

When a cement truck lost its brakes on a hill and ploughed through someone’s backyard, you needed the parents and relatives of the dead and wounded, the name of the driver, the owner of the company, the neighbours (to fill out the background and describe the terror they faced daily with Big Trucks roaring though their neighbourhood) and someone from government licensing to comment on why he and his department hadn’t checked this truck’s brakes.

It was also important to get the Opposition critic for that department who would describe how the government had failed so tragically in this case, despite his repeated warnings that such a disaster was coming, and how his party would do things differently if they were in office….

The same was true of any local tragedy whether it was the man who hacked up his wife and mailed her postage due to her parents or an immigrant woman who spoke and read no English and bled to death in the emergency room because she couldn’t fill out the admittance papers. Read the rest of this entry »

This must be “fix the blog” week. PM is having site maintenance issues. Here is a 13 item laundry list to boost your blog from Samantha and Tigger over at Life from a cat’s perspective. But first, to preface this next post a little terminology should be clarified. For example, what is a “meme”? Urban Dictionary offers this definition along with some others:

Meme (a noun):
1 : an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)

2 : a pervasive thought or thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means; a parasitic code, a virus of the mind especially contagious to children and the impressionable

3 : the fundamental unit of information, analogous to the gene in emerging evolutionary theory of culture
- meme pool (n.) : all memes of a culture or individual
- memetic (adj.) : relating to memes
- memetics (n.) : the study of memes

4 : in ‘blogspeak,” an idea that is spread from blog to blog Read the rest of this entry »

For the highly structured bloggers, or those that long to be, here is a blog, Watermark—a poet’s notebook, that has been posting Cat items on Friday’s. It suggests a great way to create that “something fun to look forward” mindset. To introduce you to Watermark here is one of the earlier posts that went all the way back to August 2004! The title is “Badly Drawn Cats” and the premise is this: “it’s all very simple—drunken doodling leads to challenge to friends leads to asking random people in pub to draw pictures leads to knocking up web site leads to obsession!”

Here are several to admire:

Source: Watermark—a poet’s notebook.

I recently joined a Denver, Colorado-based online organization known as Blacktie-Colorado. Blacktie is an exceptional and essential venue for non-profits to expand fundraising opportunities, as well as promote and manage their premiere special events.

In my marketing/sales role for Blacktie. I decided to enlist my three-year-old black and white Boxer, Roxy Hart, to go with me to call on potential clients for membership in the organization. I bought her a beautiful formal satin black tie to wear for our marketing campaign and headed downtown to a building housing mostly environmental non-profits. I had heard everyone brings their dog to the office.

Roxy behaved beautifully, having no prep for her ambassador role. While she wouldn’t go into the elevator, she did manage to navigate through narrow doors and five flights of steps up to various offices. Keep in mind, Roxy hates hallways and narrow spaces.

Anyway, we introduced ourselves and left materials on Blacktie for follow up. The only way I’d improve on our presentation is to work a little more with Roxy to sit attentively during our presentation (good luck, I know) and to color coordinate her leash and collar with the formal wear. We’ll see how many memberships we sign up.

Blacktie is rapidly expanding to major cities across the nation. If not yet in yours, contact blacktie-colorado.com and help them make that happen.

Source: Christine Meyer

As a new, and fresh, pet/animal site, PM is getting a lot of peeks. Most are from dog and cat lovers so we welcome visits when new animals are involved. An interesting site amazon-tree-boa links to us from time to time. We did the reverse to see where it would lead us. In a around about way, it happens, we have a snake eating a rat story.

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“The Hog Island Boa finally picked a name and it’s Miss Spaz. Why you ask? She’s funny. Holding her, if she’s moving around and her nose comes into contact with my arm or hand, she’ll flip out and jerk back like she’s only just realized she’s being held. But mostly for the reason that’s under the cut.

Warning! Feeding pics. Don’t look if you don’t want to see the little psycho eating a rat. Don’t worry, the rat is pre-killed though, in a humane way, feeding live is bad.

She doesn’t seem to notice that the rat is already dead.

And I swear that when this started, she was completely in that hide. Then she darts out, snaps, coils and for some reason—every time—her tail comes shooting out to wrap the hide and look like it’s having a seizure. She is Miss Spaz.”

Source: thunder-nari Hey thunder-nari, please create more animal experiences for us!

It’s better than a soap opera.

Since late March, my neighbors and I have been privy to the continuing saga of the trials and tribulations of a family consisting of papa and mama osprey and their very hungry, very noisy young. There are three of those.

Don’t think it’s easy to keep that growing trio of fledglings fed. It’s not as if the parents get to drive to a fast-food restaurant to pick up burgers and some chicken for supper. On the contrary, a lot of hard work goes into providing enough fish for three growing youngsters, plus the mother who gets to baby-sit while the babies are still defenseless.

It’s been estimated that one juvenile consumes close to 200 pounds during a typical season; multiply that times three and it is apparent the life of an osprey adult is not easy.

Last year an osprey pair nested on a snag farther down the river and although we were able to see some of the action, we were only able to observe them through binoculars. My neighbors, Paul and Phyllis, decided a closer nest would be a good addition to our neighborhood and last year they had an artificial nesting box put on a convenient snag closer to their house on the banks of the South Umpqua River. Read the rest of this entry »

Warning: Violence. Adult language.

Man, I saw this guy get chomped by a fucking hippo dude. Man, this guy was getting eaten alive man. No, I wasn’t there dog, I saw it on t.v. It was on the Discovery Channel bro. This guy was in this canoe thing right and he’s rowing along, minding his own business, when all of a sudden, a huge fucking hippopotamus comes exploding out of the water!

The dude gets sucked into the jaws of this fucking hippo man and the hippo is like munch, munch, munch on the dude, dude! It was crazy man. No, I didn’t see it happen like that exactly man. It was like a whatchamacallit, a, ahhhh, like when those actor people act like what happened in real life man. What is that shit called??? Oh yeah, a reenactment. Right..renac, a rena, a shit, you know, anyways, fucking hippo was chowing down on this dude and then it spits the guy out of its jaws man. Read the rest of this entry »

by Sadie Stephens, age 13

so i’ve like this one guy for a while, right? ok, well, today i wrote a note, saying that i like him, and i gave it to him in class. unfortunately, he said that he’d read it after class, and i don’t get to see him for the rest of the day. boys. jeezy creezy. and there’s this boy named will in my class that likes me (i don’t care, really), and we were playing a game where someone yells your name, and they toss a ball at you. if you don’t catch it, you’re out, and if you call someone’s name that’s already been called, you’re out. so my teacher asks us if we’re ready, and then she throws it at will, and he doesn’t catch it, so he’s out. well, he gets kinda upset, and then goes off to sulk. then he comes back in the game just as i get the ball, so i say his name, and throw it at him as hard as i can. he obviously doesn’t catch it, and i hit him just as my teacher’s talking about how he was out, and she’s agreeing that he can come back in the game. then i hit him and she says, “well, now you’re out”. it was so easy. i got him at least twice. and he was threatening me about it too. he even took one of the tennis balls off of the bottom of the chairs, and he threatened to hit me in the face with it. fortunately the bell rang for the end of the day. Read the rest of this entry »

Click above and enjoy a short video-clip. It certainly will enlighten your day.

Source: by James Jacobson