Posts from — February 2008

Clinton(s) suck, Obama is our best hope at the moment.

Hillary, you are a hawk in a dress, and your move to New York to become a Senator and wage this campaign was sad, sorry and obvious, and you only feed the right wing machine. You have nothing to offer, yet take in millions (in big chunks) to spread your hollow messages about experience and how much you care about and have done for Texas and Ohio (at the moment). You suck, I hate you, and I have donated money to a political campaign for the first time in my life (obviously not for your sorry, smug ass) because I sincerely hope that Obama’s momentum continues to roll right over your pathetic campaign machine, you cunt.

The right and I saw you coming since 2003, and I think it’s very sad that I still have to listen to you and help Obama’s campaign defeat you. You suck. Go away.

Still here? Read this article.

An editorial in today’s Daily Camera mentions a recent judge’s recent order to “disable” the domain name of wikileaks.org, a site that purportedly offers up Standard Operating Procedures for American troops in Iraq, Gitmo, and other evidence of corporate wrongdoing. Potentially interesting reading, and protected under the First Amendment for chrissakes.

Luckily the judge is an idiot, and does not understand the domain naming system too well. Here’s the IP address: http://88.80.13.160. As the editorial says, visit the site today. Do it to honor the First Amendment.

Sheldon Brown is dead; he passed away today following a massive heart attack. The cycling world—particularly the bicycle mechanic world—has suffered a huge loss.

Sheldon Brown’s cycling/technical pages are loaded with excellent information, and I refer to it (and other people to it) often.

Bummer.

Sitting here reading Bark Magazine (which I realize outs me as an insane dog lover more than any of my previous admissions), I came across a quote:

“A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference. A mutt knows that you have chosen him for himself, and not because he is of the type you set out to get.”

Well put. Yesterday, Brenda & I (and Hooper) watched the Eukanuba dog show and couldn’t help but feel a bit of a slight, knowing that as great a dog as Hooper is, we could never show him in such an event because he’s not a purebred. But I would argue that while there is almost certainly a breed for every purpose, thousands of years of evolution led to a single mating of what is most likely a Border Collie and a Black Labrador Retriever and produced a perfect specimen for Brenda & I.

Hooper is almost exactly fifty pounds, the weight limit our condo association has arbitrarily imposed on dogs in the complex; his coat is low maintenance; he is friendly, almost to a fault; he is handsome; he loves to go hiking; he loves fetch; he loves soccer; he loves learning new tricks; he is smart, and yet he is also stupid, at all the right times.

The AKC doesn’t recognize Hooper because we can’t show papers that trace his lineage along some lines of doggie purity, but I would argue that Hooper represents something even greater. Hooper is our dog. He was sitting there in the kennel, the day I picked up Emma’s ashes, and he held the promise of being everything I ever wanted in a dog, complete with all the high expectations and idealization that comes with twenty plus years of longing for the chance to raise a puppy.

And when Hooper trots up to me in the ballfield, looking into my eyes with a ball in his mouth, timing his drop and velocity such that the ball rolls right to my feet stopping an inch from my toes, and he looks to me to make that blessed ball fly through the air once again, I know, I know, that this animal is the perfect amalgam of DNA; the end result of thousands of years of evolution, strict breeding, and errant screws in untold alleys that led to this precise genetic glop that is Hooper. He is perfect. The AKC says otherwise, but they are wrong.

I encourage you to read the full article that the above quote came from; it’s very entertaining, especially if you love dogs and hate purebreed dogma.

Today is Hooper’s birthday, making Hooper one year old! In truth, we brought him home at six months of age, and he was picked up as a stray in Utah sometime before that, so unfortunately we really don’t know the exact circumstances or conditions of his conception, birth and early development. The vet guessed he was six months old, based on his teeth, when we took him in or his first checkup in early August. So we counted back from there and picked Groundhog Day as his “birthday”. In truth we’ll never know, and we don’t care. Just as we’ll never really know his genetic makeup. He’s Hooper the Dog, he’s ours, he’s one today, and we love him. So we took him out for a hike.

Up past Jamestown there’s a trail that meanders through the tall trees and it seemed as good as any for a winter hike. Hooper seems to love the hiking, the snow, the altitude, the adventure, as much as all of us. Once out of the car, he starts whimpering if we don’t get on with the business of plodding through the snow in a timely fashion. He’s generally uninterested in drinking water because that would involve stopping. Instead, he snags chunks of snow and ice on the fly, and keeps on marching.

Today’s hike led to a vague trail hidden by snow, and Brenda eventually became more interested in scaling a boulder for the view at the top than continuing to the summit. Hooper & I ventured onward, but he kept looking back at Brenda and I lost all sight of anything recognizable as a trail, so we headed back to join her. We snapped a few pics, headed back to town and picked up new treats and toys for the birthday boy. He’s cached out on his bed now, amidst the debris of yet another destroyed stuffed toy. Life is good.