LauraW sends along the good word:
Please send your pet photos in by Sunday night so we can roll the calendar out next week. The submissions have been amazing. There are clearly a lot of very loved pets out there.
[email protected]Rosie’s CafePress store section has officially launched with her own Pet Overlords mug. Big thanks to Ahab for the mug design and Evelyn DeHais for the illustration. More products to follow.
Here is a recent update for the Balloon Juice community from Evelyn Bridges, founder of CAAR:
Connie McNab and Evelyn Bridges, of Charlie’s Angels Animal Rescue in Brevard, NC, have just returned from a 3-day stay in Las Vegas for the No More Homeless Pets Conference sponsored by Best Friends Animal Sanctuary of Kanab, Utah. Over 1,150 animal rescue people from all 50 states and 6 countries were in attendance. It was an awesome experience for all that care for our neglected, abandoned, unloved, mistreated and injured pets. The common goal is to have all adoptable pets find homes by the year 2015. This is being accomplished now by new spay and neuter programs, continued work with kill shelters, passionate, caring and hardworking volunteers saving the animals one-by-one, and coalitions between government agencies, shelters, rescue workers, spay and neuter clinics, vets and many others.
We want to thank the Balloon Juice community for continuing to support Charlie’s Angels’ rescue work by buying from the CafePress Store. As of this date, we have saved 346 dogs and cats with your help. We are very excited about the Pets of Balloon Juice 2011 Calendar now in production, another wonderful source of donations for us. With our sincere gratitude — we are the voice of our 4-legged friends who cannot speak for themselves.
For the critters.
sven
This seems like the kind of issue all BJers can get behind!
European-style school lunches.
As a college student in Germany I was always struck by how much better the cafeteria food was than at my home university. There were only 3 choices but each was high quality. The price without subsidy was about $4 per meal.
stuckinred
Go Illini, Go Hokies. Go Dawgs
Go BJ Pets!
dj spellchecka
of possible interest…
npr:
Scientists Reveal How Fast Dogs Must Shake To Dry Their Fur
…researchers found that both bears and dogs shake at a similar speed — around 4 Hz and 4-5 Hz, respectively. In this case, hertz refers to the frequency of skin oscillations per second….
….it turns out that the smaller the animal, the faster it has to shake to dry. Thus, a cat can get by with shaking around 6 Hz. But its nemesis, the mouse, requires 27 Hz to dry off.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/10/22/130758623/scientists-reveal-how-fast-dogs-must-shake-to-dry-their-fur?sc=nl&cc=nh-20101023
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
I think we’d have to use the Richter scale to see how fast Tunch shakes.
jeffreyw
Sometimes words just fail you.
Nethead Jay
@jeffreyw: Awesome shot. How the hell did you get that one?
Seems like the Homer and Bea story will be one for the ages ;)
David Hunt
The mug looks nice. I think it’s time for Rosie to get her own Lexicon entry.
stuckinred
@dj spellchecka: This is what those dopes over at the North Avenue Technical School are up to! HA!
JGabriel
OT, but:
Sigh. You’d think I’d know better by now.
The rings. R-r-r-r-ing! Again.
I pick. It’s a Ed Koch! Well, a recording anyway. He wants me vote. For reform! For Saul Farber!
Because Saul has signed the NY Uprising pledge! (But I look it up, and so has Saul’s opponent, Liz Krueger. Hmmm.) Because Ed Koch FOUNDED NY Uprising! And we need REFORM!
And what party-line is Farber running on anyway? Koch never says.
“This message has been brought to you by the Republican blah blah blah…”
Oh.
You’d think I’d know better by now.
.
debit
@jeffreyw: Poor Bea. I love Homer’s fighting spirit.
@ thread: Yea, for Rosie! I gotta order a mug.
debit
@Nethead Jay:
Homer: “Someday, she will love me. Oh yes, she will.”
jeffreyw
@Nethead Jay: That scene is replayed several times every day. I’m never far from my cameras. The hardest part is picking one shot out of many.
JasonF
I finally got off the stick and sent in pictures of my bunnies. Dogs and cats are great, but don’t you all want to see some bunnies on the calendar? You know you do …
JGabriel
Blech, too many skipped words in #9. Just goes to show you importance of proofing before hitting submit and walking away to cook lunch.
Oh, well. I assume you guys get the gist. Apologies for the bad typing & fractured syntax/grammar above.
It should read:
.
Nethead Jay
@jeffreyw: Heh, I can imagine that. Have to say, I love your Flickr stream. You’ve got a very good eye.
Also, Bea’s “Paw of Punishment” out-in-the-air stance is quite characteristic.
JGabriel
@JasonF:
Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits — Magnetic Fields.
.
gbear
link
I can remember life before cassettes when I made my mixed tapes on 7″ reel-to-reel, but I’m surprised the cassette walkman held on this long.
valdivia
Totally OT but wanted to say I just spent the morning phonebanking at the DNC with a great group of volunteers. There is great energy out there and voters are open to being told about the candidates, and reminded that the election matters. They are not leaving anything to chance, they’re working tons of shifts and making a lot of calls. Please if you have the time go down to an OFA office in your area and do this. It really *really* makes a difference.
stuckinred
@gbear: Ya skipped 8 tracks!
Amir_Khalid
@gbear: I mislaid my Sony CD Walkman (formerly called the Discman) last year. I’d been using it with my CD-based language kits (Oxford University Press’ Take Off In ,,, series, which I highly recommend) to teach myself German and French. You can’t get those in Malaysia anymore, and boy do I miss that gadget.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: No, vinyl skips; eight tracks have their own issues.
jwb
@valdivia: I was at a phonebank last week and completely agree. Morale was high, and the voters I talked with seemed very motivated.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: I dumped 50 years of records a couple of weeks back. It was hard but it needed to be done.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: I couldn’t do that. I don’t use my vinyl these days, but I could never get rid of it.
gbear
@stuckinred: Oh how could I have forgotten 8-tracks. My dad installed an 8-track player in the car and I can still remember that the first three tapes we had were Led Zeppelin 1, Buffalo Springfield Retrospective, and Atlantic’s Super Hits Vol 2. Those three were enough.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: I didn’t think I could either, it was about 800 albums. I had a buddy I trust come over and go through them, he had a pile that had decent value, a pile of ok value and 650 that were trashed. His advice was to sell the ones with value and donate the rest to the women’s shelter thrift store and take the deduction. It was hard for a day or so and now it “doesn’t mean shit to a tree” as Grace said.
(the seeds and stems in the double albums were worth more than some of the records themselves!)
geg6
Yay Rosie! My Lily mug got me through the bubonic plague or whatever that shit I had this week was. And now I find I’m craving a Rosie mug to go with it. Can’t wait for the calendar, too.
Pitt is kicking some Rutgers ass, so all is right with the world today.
stuckinred
@gbear: Many of the 8 tracks had songs in different order from the records.
stuckinred
@geg6: And the Cuse is whupin the eers! Oh yea, Iowa State is beatin the Horns in Austin!
gbear
@stuckinred:
I still have all my old vinyl too but I’m thinking that I should get rid of half of it. Same with my books. I’m getting to old to have so much stuff, but it’s hard to part with any of it.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Speaking from experience, here’s how you do it:
You move your two orange crates filled with record albums outside, carefully sheltered in the corner under the carport, while you are re-doing your floors. Keep thinking you need to bring them back in and go through the process described by stuckinred, but never actually do it.
Do this for a couple of years.
Then decide you are going to bring them back in the house, and discover that they are damp and dirty and mildewy and generally disgusting.
Still can’t let them go? Sit down for a couple of hours and carefully write down the names of artists and albums so you won’t lose that part of your past.
Then, sadly, drag them over to the curb so they can be picked up with the trash the next morning. Instead, the recycling guy takes them and you hope that they found a nice life elsewhere.
gbear
@stuckinred: Sometimes they had to switch the order so that they could get the songs into four equal groups instead of just having to split it into two for album sides. The Led Zeppelin album had a couple of long songs that would fade out midway, then there’d be a ‘Klunk’ when the track shifted, then the song would fade back in. That just became part of the listening experience for 8-tracks.
Yes! MPR just started playing ‘Soul Finger’ by the Barkays. That was one of the songs on Super Hits. Great song.
stuckinred
@WaterGirl: You forgot the “select the albums you will burn to mp3’s with the incredibly easy “spin doctor” . Start that process and see if you make it past 5 records! Rinse and repeat. I got a couple of hundred bucks to go with my 9,000 songs in iTunes. I’m so goddamn old that I can’t even tell the difference between vinyl and digital. “Kind of Blue” sounds fine so that’s enough for me.
valdivia
@jwb:
yep. It actually made me feel so much better about it all. Am trying to get as many hours in as I can and hope people will take the time next weekend. The last few days are crucial.
stuckinred
@gbear: Remember “Full Moon Fever” on cassette?
T Petty
stuckinred
Ilini win 43-13!
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Mine are boxed and in a dry storage room. I have stuff I doubt I could find anywhere else. At some point, I will transfer everything to mp3s, but I still intend to hold onto the vinyl. There have been discussions in the past in Omnibus household regarding my sentimental attachment to things. My wife has tried to toss stuff like my old rugby jersey from college. She points out the stains on the sleeves and I have to explain that those stains are my blood and that they got there when I wiped said blood off my face. She was not particularly convinced by this but the shirt is still in a box in the storage room.
stuckinred
Hi, I’m father Flanningan from Boy’s Town! (I do have my original jungle fatigue’s from 41 years ago)!
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: I truly appreciate your expression of faith. Really, there is shit i want to get on my iPod that I only have on vinyl.
gbear
@stuckinred: I’ve heard that and it made me laugh. Matthew Sweet did a similar kind of thing on the Girlfriend CD. Midway through the CD one of the songs ends with some scratching and the sound of a needle heading into the lead-out groove, getting picked up, and then dropped on the ‘other side’ before the next song starts. It was a nice touch.
freelancer
If Memorial Stadium in Lincoln is the “Sea of Red“, does that make Stillwater, OK, the “Sea of Boehner?”
ETA: Oh fuck yeah, Punter scrambles for 10 to keep the play alive, Touchdown!
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: Aw man I’m just foolin around. I had every intention of burning but it’s just a royal pain in the ass to do very many albums. In addition, there are these blogs that post links to very obscure albums that you download as RAR files. I have no problem getting stuff that I already payed for (and nine out of ten times the artist is dead).
Actually one of those blogs inspired my BJ handle
Stuck in the past
http://stuckinthepast08.blogspot.com/
stuckinred
What’s this Boogie Woogie?
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m with you, to a limit. I’m down to about 100 vinyl, just the essentials. I currently have no way to play them, but…I just can’t let them go. I actually have instructions for my sisters/nieces to play Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The River” at my wake. Gotta keep at least those two.
And like you, I have certain things that I will never be able to give up. Whole shelves of my beloved books. My first communion dress. Some t-shirts of my mom’s and flannel shirts of my dad’s. Love letters from a then-longtime boyfriend when he lived in Paris for a year. A sweatshirt from the Super Bowl ’70s. A Pitt football long sleeved t-shirt that still has a stain from spilled Alabama slammers that happened one night at the Decade, with Danny Marino being one of the sloppy shooters.
I may need to have all those things cremated right along with me.
stuckinred
@geg6: Do the Viqueen pyre!
AhabTRuler
So, if one were theoretically creating a “Property of Tunch” athletic t-shirt style design, what would people think the most effective manner in which to convey the size of Tunch’s ‘Property’? 1 x 10^7 XL or XL x 10^7 ?
ETA: You’ll have to follow the links to see what the two designs look like, the way that FYWP teases you with superscript function is annoying and unhelpful.
R-Jud
@AhabTRuler: Wouldn’t it be X (raised by 10^7)L? Because you want it to be shorthand for XXXXXXXXX… (etc.)L, right?
AhabTRuler
@R-Jud: Yes it would, but it just looks weird and reads poorly as a t-shirt with the formula broken up like that, so our old friend artistic license kicks in and away we go!
R-Jud
@AhabTRuler: In that case, the first one looks better, I think.
R-Jud + 4^10^
AhabTRuler
I guess the other question is should it be a higher factor. 10^7 is just 10mil L’s, right? I mean, that’s large, but is it Tunch large?
AhabTRuler
@R-Jud: Maybe this instead?
Hmmmm, the only other question is brackets, yes/no?
WaterGirl
@AhabTRuler: For what it’s worth, I like the second option best. Theoretically speaking, would an image of tunch also be on the shirt somewhere?
kindness
I wish you had Latte mugs in the store.
Death Panel Truck
Yeah, well, I’d send in a picture of my dog, but I’m sure he wouldn’t qualify. You see, I “rescued” him from one of the best breeders of cocker spaniels in the state of Washington, and paid $600 for the privilege. And all I hear is, “Jesus, I’d never pay $600 for a purebred dog. All my dogs are rescued dogs,” to which my usual response is “Fuck off.” I’d have paid $1,200 for my dog. But I’m the snob, ’cause I didn’t “rescue” him.
Litlebritdifrnt
I am late to this party but it reminds me of Rush going ape shit about UK “school dinner programs” cause you know governments should not be providing “dinner” to kids while being so totally uninformed to realise that “school dinner” means “school lunches” in the UK. No one is suggesting that in addition to lunch that schools should provide dinner, but that is exactly what Rush “I don’t know a fucking thing about the rest of the world” Limbaugh was suggesting when he was railing against “school dinner” programs. Fucking idiot. Ask anyone in the UK what they mean by the term “dinner lady” and they will tell you the nice lady with a paper cap who served you your school lunch. “Dinner” is an interchangable term, Traditionally there are several meals in the day, breakfast, elevenses, lunch, tea, high tea, and dinner and in some cases midnight munchies. Rush Limbaugh is so utterly clueless as to the world that he should really be ignored.
abscam
@Death Panel Truck: Let it roll off, I paid $500 for my clumber spaniel and she was worth every penny and then some.
Anne Laurie
@Death Panel Truck: There’s no shame in paying for a purebred, as long as you know enough to pay for exactly the dog you want, and you know what you’re getting into. The idiots that tick me off are the people who buy a pet on an impulse, or because it’s fashionable at the moment, or they want a dog that will coordinate with their newly redecorated living room — and then they’re appalled & outraged when it turns out a living being has its own needs.
We’ve bought, and rescued, seven Papillons over the last 25+ years. The cheapest of them, on a dollar-per-day usage basis, was also the only AKC-championship-pointed product of one of the top breeders in the country. She sold us 4-year-old Candy for the cost of her spay surgery, when it became obvious that Candy didn’t enjoy conformation enough to finish her championship and neither of the two puppies in her first litter were outstanding. Candy lived happily with us for the next 12 years, eventually succumbing to kidney failure. Outside of her annual physical and the usual vaccinations, the most we ever spent on her medical care was maybe $20 a year for estrogen supplements.
Our most expensive dog, on the other hand, was our first rescue — my husband flew cross-country to bring 18-month-old Flash (literally a ‘backyard breeder’ discard) back as carry-on so he wouldn’t have to travel as cargo. And we paid twice as much as a “donation” to the rescue group than we had for Candy. A mere five years later, Flash developed an extremely atypical version of Addison’s disease that killed him in less than a week, but not until we’d put $4,000 in emergency veterinary services on our credit cards.
We’ve got three rescue papillons living with us now, which is about our limit, but that doesn’t mean we’ll never buy another purebred. We’re lucky enough to have a network of papillon-lovers in our area, some of them professional breeders, who also support breed rescue with money as well as time & services, and I’ve looked at many puppies with longing. But as it happens, Zevon (from the breed rescue), Sydney (from a Petfinder listing), and Gloria (total accident) needed homes when we had a papillon-shaped slot in our household ecology — and (mostly) I wouldn’t trade any one of them for the cutest, most titled, highest-dollar puppy on the planet.
andrea
Decisions, decisons… a Rosie mug or a DIAF mug?