Christmas Dogs

At right are you can see a collection of four not-particularly-happy dogs. From left to right, there’s Lea, Mo’i, Jet, and Daisy Mae. The first two are ours; the second two belong to our good friend Sharon Shepard.

Lea, Mo’i, and Daisy Mae are all agility dogs of varied accomplishment — with Daisy Mae being the studly jumper/weaver/runner amongst them. Jet is still just a puppy (as was obvious trying to get him to stand still for this photo session!), but one fine day he too will run an agility course.

Looking at these pictures, don’t you just wonder what kind of loony would do this to his dog? Their expressions tell you exactly what they think of this evolution!

As usual, click on the small photo to get a larger version.

Iraqi Elections

That the inimitable Mark Steyn would kick some butt after the spectacularly successful Iraqi election was, of course, inevitable. And he doesn’t disappoint:

From “Iraq vote leaves Dems looking like the losers"

...pick almost any recent statement by a big-time Dem cowboy and tell me how exactly it would differ from the pep talks Zarqawi gives his dwindling band of head-hackers — Dean arguing that America can’t win in Iraq, Barbara Boxer demanding the troops begin withdrawing on Dec. 15, John Kerry accusing American soldiers of terrorizing Iraqi women and children, Jack Murtha declaring that the U.S. Army is utterly broken. Pepper 'em with a handful of “Praise be to Allahs” and any one of those statements could have been uttered by Zarqawi.

And he concludes with this:

The Anglo-American political tradition is the most successful in the world in part because of the concept of “loyal opposition.” Yes, the party out of office opposes the party in office and hopes to supplant it, but not at the expense of the broader political culture. A party that winds up cheerleading for a deranged loser death cult is the very definition of pointless self-defeating sour oppositionism. So, as Zarqawi flails, Dean and Murtha and Kerry flail ever more pathetically, too. Just wait till the WMD turn up.

Ouch!

That man does have a way with words.

Just wait, indeed.

And go read every last word!

Dear God

There was a man who worked for the Post Office whose job it was to process all the mail that had illegible addresses .One day, a letter came addressed in a shaky handwriting to God. He thought he should open it to see what it was about. The letter read:

Dear God,

I am an 83 year old widow, living on a very small pension. Yesterday someone stole my purse. It had $100 in it, which was all the money I had until my next pension check. Next Sunday is Christmas, and I had invited two of my friends over for dinner. Without that money, I have nothing to buy food with. I have no family to turn to, and you are my only hope. Can you please help me?

Sincerely,

Edna

The postal worker was touched. He showed the letter to all the other workers. Each one dug into his or her wallet and came up with a few dollars. By the time he made the rounds, he had collected $96, which they put into an envelope and sent to the woman. The rest of the day, all the workers felt a warm glow thinking of Edna and the dinner she would be able to share with her friends.

Christmas came and went. A few days later, another letter came from the old lady to God. All the workers gathered around while the letter was opened, it read:

Dear God,

How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me? Because of your gift of love, I was able to fix a glorious dinner for my friends. We had a very nice day and I told my friends of your wonderful gift. By the way, there was $4 missing. I think it must have been those thieving bastards at the Post Office.

Sincerely,

Edna

Surrender Monkeys

Bingo! (click on thumbnail to see it in all its glory)

Ouch…

Tip of the hat to “All Things Conservative"…

Sharp Testimony

Tip of the hat to Anil for this good one:

If you ever testify in court, you might wish you could have been as sharp as this policeman. He was being cross-examined by a defense attorney during a felony trial. The lawyer was trying to undermine the policeman’s credibility.

Q: “Officer — did you see my client fleeing the scene?"

A: “No sir. But I subsequently observed a person matching the description of the offender, running several blocks away."

Q: “Officer — who provided this description?"

A: “The officer who responded to the scene."

Q: “A fellow officer provided the description of this so-called offender. Do you trust your fellow officers?"

A: “Yes, sir. With my life."

Q: “With your life? Let me ask you this then, officer. Do you have a room where you change your clothes in preparation for your daily duties?"

A: “Yes sir, we do."

Q: “And do you have a locker in the room?"

A: “Yes sir, I do."

Q: “And do you have a lock on your locker?"

A: “Yes sir."

Q: “Now why is it, officer, if you trust your fellow officers with your life, you find it necessary to lock your locker in a room you share with these same officers?"

A: “You see, sir — we share the building with the court complex, and sometimes lawyers have been known to walk through that room."

Gift Idea

Oh, my.

I can think of a few liberal politicians that are clearly in desperate need of this product. And also in dire need of the related facial tissue version.

Oh, my.

Tip of my hat to our friend Dr. B. (aka the “Merchant of Pain” — how fitting!).

Ivan and the Eland

This is a followup to yesterday’s post about our photo safari at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Josie (our driver) commented on our post, and asked for pictures of Ivan and the eland. Ask, Josie, and ye shall receive!

Ivan is the rather large male giraffe in the photos at right, and the eland (a Patterson’s Eland) is the roughly one ton antelope that Ivan is bullying. Yup, Ivan’s a big old bully. He just herded that poor eland around wherever he wanted it to go. I’m sure the eland isn’t used to such bullying, as he’s rather big and bad himself — but what are you going to do when you have Ivan after you? I know that if I had Ivan’s big, bony head swinging at me like a spiked wrecking ball, I’d probably get all humble, too. And then there’s those monster hooves, which Jeanne (our guide) told us can go whizzing around at very high speed, doing lots of damage to things like rib cages, skulls, and tank armor (I added that last category myself after seeing one of Ivan’s hooves up close and personal).

What is a little hard to absorb from these photos is the scale of the tussle going on. In motion, we saw two rather ponderous beasts dancing in slow motion; ponderous really only because of their size. In some of the other photos (in my original post), you can see Ivan’s head as he feeds from Debbie’s hands — it is enormous! Now look in the photos at right, and even though Ivan’s head is bigger than the eland’s head, that eland is still darned big. It’s the size of a fairly large cow — and look how Ivan towers over him. That poor eland couldn’t poke Ivan in the ribs no matter how hard he tried…

As usual, click on the small photos at right to get a larger version…

Wild Animals

Last Christmas (yes, almost 12 months ago!), our good friends John and Grayle gave us a gift of a “photo safari” at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Just this past Wednesday, we finally scheduled it. The photo safari is a very interesting and unusual sort of thing: you get onto the back of a small flat-bed truck, outfitted with rails, seats, and a canopy for shade. There’s a driver and a guide (Josie and Jeanne for our safari), both very knowledgeable not only about the biology (which we expected), but also about the history and lore of the individual animals (and that we didn’t expect). It lasted almost four hours, and at the end of it we were fairly tired — certainly not from physical exertion, but more just from the intensity of the experience. It was non-stop, wall-to-wall close encounters of the animal kind for the entire trip. And I took a lot of pictures — only about one in ten are posted here! In fact, there are so many pictures that I’m only going to mix a few in with the text; the rest will all be at the bottom. As usual, you can click on any photo for a larger version.

We arrived an hour or so before the photo safari started, so we decided to just wander around a bit. We hadn’t been to the Wild Animal Park for five years or so, and the map showed quite a few changes. Our plan was to go check out the new things, but a park employee mentioned to me that there was a baby lion in the nearby nursery, and it was just about time for it to be fed. That sounded way too good to risk missing, so we practically ran over to the nursery — and ended spending all our free time there. Koza, the baby lion, was only four weeks old — and so cute it oughtta be illegal! I didn’t want to risk a flash upsetting Koza, so I didn’t take any pictures of him. He weighed 11 pounds; to us, his most striking feature (especially as compared with house cats) were his truly enormous front paws. His behavior was practically identical to a housecat kitten of the same age, just on a very different scale. We envied the caretaker, who had the wonderful job of delivering some attention and loving to Koza. Debbie would give just about anything for a chance to do that, I think…

After the pleasant interlude with Koza, we walked a short way to the administration building. The caravan was scheduled to leave from there at 10:30. As we walked in, Jeanne (our guide) walked out to meet us, and told us the news we were hoping to hear: that we were the only people on the photo safari today! I had carefully planned the particular date (with some help from the Wild Animal Park staff) to (a) maximize the probability of good weather, and (b) minimize the probability of too many other people joining us. Each of the trucks can hold up to about 15 people, and they have six trucks — so you could (if you were unlucky) have as many as 90 people along with you. That would be a much different — and much inferior — experience as compared with ours. It was just the four of us: Josie, Jeanne, Debbie, and myself. What also helped was that Jeanne and Josie figured out pretty quickly that they didn’t need to be careful or circumspect around old farmers like Debbie and I — we just all had a nice time together. It was very cozy and friendly, not really much different that an outing with particularly well-informed family or friends…

Now I completely forgot to take a picture of Josie and Jeanne, and that’s a shame, because you’d probably like to see them after you hear the rest of this. Josie (our driver) has an email address that proclaims her to be a fox, and we’ll agree with that (even though she’s missing that bushy red tail <smile>). And Jeanne (our guide) has an email address that brags about her hiccups (which we didn’t experience, but heard stories about). What an interesting job they have, doing these photo safaris! I can imagine that it is sometimes rewarding, and sometimes frustrating (depending on who your customers are) — but no matter what, you get out to see and know these exotic animals every day. We heard some stories about people who actually went out and then wanted to come back early; 'tis hard for us to imagine, as despite being almost four hours long, it was over all too soon from our perspective.

The variety of animal and bird life we saw was a bit overwhelming. There must have been three or four dozen mammal species we saw, and a couple dozen bird species. The truck was a great way to see them — we could (and did!) get very close even to animals that would have been quite dangerous had we been on foot. Yet we never felt threatened in the slightest, even with gazillion-pound rhinos bumping up against the truck. And being in the open air meant perfect visibility — no windows to interfere with seeing or photos. We also learned some things that surprised us, such as the fact that a giraffe’s front hooves are quite heavy and dangerous — and that they swing their heads about as weapons (which is why their heads have bony protuberances all over them). We were only allowed to feed two kinds of animals (giraffes and rhinos), and we could only touch one (the rhinos). Debbie had a lot of fun feeding both of them (as you can see in some of these photos). Personally I was more interested in getting that kind of close to some of the members of the goat and sheep family, or the antelopes — there were a lot of them I found to be quite beautiful and interesting..

The first thing we saw as we left on our safari was an island full of chimpanzees (Bonobos). In the photo at right (an extreme telephoto), if you squint and use your imagination, you can see that the adult female is tending a small baby. This mother didn’t let this baby off the leash (she used her arm and hand as a leash and collar). There was another, older youngster who scampered and played up a storm — lots of fun to watch.

Our safari took us through several paddocks (three, I think), each with animals from a different part of the world. Jeanne told us what all of them were as we drove around, and interesting little tidbits of information about each — and of course we forgot almost all of it, almost immediately. But we sure enjoyed the style — not at all the monotonous monolog one so often finds on guided tours, but rather a very interactive talk, with answers to our questions in as much depth as we could handle. What I most enjoyed was the stories — such as the history Jeanne told us of a Chinese deer called the “Pere David” deer, after the friar who discovered them. It seems that they existed only on the emperor’s grounds, until Pere David and some other Europeans asked for some animals. The emperor had plenty of them, and so was happy to make the Europeans happy with a few deer — and it’s a good thing he did, because after various disasters in China, most of the living Pere David deer were in Europe!

Well, that’s about enough yakking. Now it’s all about the photos…