The big excitement for the day was getting a doggie door for the critters so I no longer have to choose between being a personal butler for four animals or wasting energy. They are slowly taking to it, although there was a brief bit of comedy when all three dogs were sitting around it sort of timidly looking at it and Steve walked into the kitchen, walked between the three of them, and then walked right out the door.
I have a feeling that Steve looks at the dogs the way you and I look at your average Red State poster.
Elizabelle
that’s funny
Srv
I have to admit us Trump supporters have not brought much reason to redstate.
It’s not establishment, it’s establishnet. Here and there.
I can show you the door, but I can’t walk through it for you.
ThresherK (GPad)
So not surprised at Steve.
Did you do that “show them what it’s for” demo? We’ve never had a pet door. How do they figure it out?
pat
So Thurston has found his forever home??
How’s it going with the glasses?
SiubhanDuinne
Every now and then, John, you’re a poet.
Eric S.
I’m sure Ozzie the Cat would like a pet for to the deck but chicago winters make that as unfeasible as his desire to have ask the windows open all year long.
benw
@ThresherK (GPad): gently shove them through a few times. By the time you’re done applying band-aids and antibiotic cream to your hands and arms they’ve figured it out.
kindness
I have one from the garage to the outside but in the winter we close the door from the kitchen to the garage. Gets too cold to keep open. Yes one of my dogs wakes me up to pee. Not much insulation from those dog doors though John. Gonna lose some heat.
Arm The Homeless
The SO has been dropping not so subtle hints about getting our fur-friend a playmate. She sent this to me yesterday.
I think this applies to all dogs, but the one about crazy eyes hit home.
J R in WV
I’m agreeing with Elizabell, that is funny.
We’ve thought about getting a doggy door, as our dogs want in and out approximately 591,211 times a day, or so.
But we live way in the country, and our dogs would bring in terrible things, things that smell like zombie apocalypse. Dead bambi bits, we call them, or possum parts. It’s bad enough when they stand on the other side of the glass slider and whine with their mouth full!
Hang in there with the glasses. I have a week or two of adjusting even when it’s just the prescription changing, I’ve had tri-focals for years now, and the lines actually help me aim better to see what I’m looking for.
And the mustard is in the fridge door, behind the salad dressing!
Kay (not the front-pager)
I have 2 cats. One is a 20 lb Maine Coon and the other is a much smaller cat that looks exactly like Steve. The big cat is, lets say, a lover not a thinker. Sometimes we put up pet gates to keep my son’s chihuahua out of the living room. The gates swing open with a firm push, but the big cat just can’t seem to figure it out. So when he wants to go through he yowls pitifully until the little cat runs to help him. Little guy has tried to teach him, but now he just comes when called and opens the gate.
Kay (not the front-pager)
OK, This is the second time I’ve left a comment and it was quarantined. Have I been banned?
danielx
Dogs, minion? Been my experience that cats look at humans in general that way.
Jordan Rules
Best decision evah John!
A treat on the other side of the door was all the training needed. And we didn’t have issues with it during Michigan winters. Occasionally a surprise was brought in but the pros outweighed the cons by a few tons.
Arm The Homeless
@kindness:
They sell insulated inserts. They sorta work, but my old roomy would put up another layer of tin foil covered cardboard over the entrance after the animals came back in
Bill E Pilgrim
Carly Fiorina’s latest lie was debunked by FOX News. And it was an attack on Obama, based on false claims. And FOX defended him. Because her lie was just so blatant.
That’s hilarious.
Politifact and those other fact checking sites must feel like installing a pet door for Fiorina’s statements. Let them just let themselves in and tallly up “pants on fire” status automatically, why bother writing any copy to go with it. It’s Carly Fiorina. Of course she’s lying.
Patricia Kayden
@Bill E Pilgrim: Even Faux Noise can’t stand “demon sheep” Fiorina. Her run for VP is doomed. Yay!!
Villago Delenda Est
@Bill E Pilgrim: Fiorina apparently has no problem with spouting easily debunked lies.
This indicates, to me, a serious cognitive issue.
Arm The Homeless
@Patricia Kayden:
The GOP wasn’t going to vote for her or Carson. They just enjoy hearing their hate filtered through tokens. If Carly were Carl, she wouldn’t receive any more airtime than Gilmore.
PhoenixRising
My current dogs (120lb Dane, 13lb poodle mix) both came to us ‘housebroken’* but unfamiliar with dog doors.
The little guy was shown how to use it by the previous cat, who was 8 lbs and liked to lie in the sunbeam trapped between the 2 flaps. However, he had a number of incidents on free roam when we first left him loose in the living room…because he couldn’t get out past the cat.
The Dane was afeered of the dog door. It smelled like cat. Because she was actually housetrained, she simply waited to be let out for her initial 6 weeks with us. I had to lay a trail of bacon for her to follow. Then we had to replace the dog door with the XXL size to accommodate her hips.
*No dog under 25 lbs has even been housebroken, AFAICT. Everyone lies.
Peale
@Bill E Pilgrim: so, the generals who were forced out include retirement aged men, one who retired under bush, one who was diddling his biographer and was rumored to want to run against Obama, and one who gave an interview indicating that he felt he was superior to civilian leadership. Bring back the warrior class.
TaMara (BHF)
@Kay (not the front-pager): Well I got you out of purgatory, but I can’t seem to do the same for myself. UGH
TaMara (BHF)
Maybe 3rd time is the charm.
My friends installed a door with a built in doggie door (expensive, but better insulated). This past summer they went out of town and received a frantic call from the petsitter. Seems a FAMILY of raccoons used the pet door to raid the family room. The sitter walked in and the raccoons were sitting on the floor, eating a bag of peanuts. They had also crapped in the corner.
Fun times. I have no idea where the pets hid out during the raid.
Omnes Omnibus
@Peale: It’s projection. GEN Shinseki was forced out by the Bush administration for accurately forecasting the number of troops it would take to hold Iraq after the initial invasion. He did not forecast flowers or that that war would pay for itself. He is a branch traitor, but still….
mclaren
LOL!
That’s classic. And oh, so true of cats.
Mnemosyne
If you see a woman at Disneyland this weekend with two teens and one wheelchair and the kids keep switching who’s sitting in the wheelchair, have pity on me and don’t assume we’re asshole fakers. My niece and nephew were both born with clubfeet so they can’t do an entire walking-heavy day at Disneyland without a bit of respite. It’s basically being used as a stroller for big kids.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@TaMara (BHF): Raccoons are presumptuous like that. What kind of dog door can Bixby use? A short – topped dutch door with dog transit bottom would be my guess.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Peale: Petraeus wasn’t forced out as a general at all. He retired to become head of the CIA, with full praise from Obama. This was all before his biographer sex scandal.
The other guy retired while George W Bush was in office. If he was forced out because “Obama wouldn’t listen to him” then you have to ask yourself A) why was a general trying to get a junior senator to listen to him, and B) how could that senator “force” him to retire?
The simpler explanation of course is that Carly Fiornia is lying, because that’s what she does.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Master Occam was a bright boy.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Omnes Omnibus: When I posted that I tried and failed to come up with some play on that and her name, but gave up.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: This is PRECISELY the case. Shinseki was tossed out for speaking truth to Congress in defiance of his wretched civilian warmonger masters. When Shinseki was named head of the VA, Rethugs worked tirelessly to find some reason to get him out. They found one, no matter how flimsy.
There are no honorable Rethuglicans. None.
dmsilev
@Bill E Pilgrim: People keep forgetting that Obama owns a time machine (he faked his own birth certificate, remember?). Clearly, the general insulated Obama and Obama retaliated by going back in time 5 years and forced the general to retire. I mean, that’s the simplest explanation, right?
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Three electoral disasters in a row.
@Bill E Pilgrim: ‘Tweren’t worth the effort.
benw
@efgoldman: not just the political party, but a significant enough percentage of the US population that votes for them. At any rate, the meteor will return them to some world, but probably not this one.
Villago Delenda Est
@efgoldman: It’s one thing to tell a lie you think you might be able to get away with.
It’s another thing to tell a lie that is child’s play to expose. iCarly tells a lot of those.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: I will always respect Shinseki for that. The FA to AR change can even be forgiven. He did what he should have done.
PurpleGirl
My friends in Peekskill installed a dog door in the sliding door in the basement. It led to a stone patio which had steps down to the yard. The dogs went out and came back in through it, seemingly with no problems. I never saw how the grayhounds learned to use the door. Rowdy, the cat, used the door to leave the house but he came back in using a space between the window/wall and the gas vent from the clothes dryer. Rowdy would come in, stand on the window sill for a moment and then jump down to the floor or the washing machine and then to the floor and toddle out of the room.
CaseyL
@TaMara (BHF): I don’t have a kitty door, but nearly all the rooms in my house have balconies, and sliding glass doors to said balconies.
I used to leave the sliding glass door off the extra bedroom upstairs open so the kitties could come and go as they pleased.
One night about, oh, four years ago, I was wakened by a trilling sound. The one you make rolling your tongue over the roof of your mouth. The sound was coming from the staircase…
…baby raccoons, four of ’em, with Mama, had come into the house and were headed downstairs where the kitty kibble bowls are. One of the kids was trilling at Mom.
Previous to that night, for a few weeks, I’d go downstairs in the morning and notice all the kibble was gone. Figured my kitties were eating more as the weather cooled down or something. Turns out, no, the raccoon family had been using my house as their own personal Applebees.
I had to shut the door from then on. Felt really bad about it, actually. The little family were so well-behaved: they had been coming in quietly, eating their fill, and leaving just as quietly. But the cats were freaking out, as they had every right to.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m convinced it’s not so much projection as preemptively setting up a tu quoque. They know what they’re guilty of, so they accuse the other guy of it so they can claim he’s being hypocritical if/when they are ever called to account.
Bill E Pilgrim
I did actually go and read what this site Politifact says about her claims, the result is also pretty funny.
Basically, they find that out of the five generals she cited, in three of the cases her claim is clearly and demonstrably false.
With the remaining two, there’s just no way to know if what she claims is true or not. No evidence that it was the case, but they can’t prove that it absolutely wasn’t the case, either.
So they rated her claim “Mostly false”.
Which implies that it’s “partly true”. Except that by their own admission, it could all be entirely false.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bill E Pilgrim: Politfact became a permanent joke when they made the absurd statement that just because Paul Ryan’s totally gutted Medicare proposal still had the name “Medicare”, that Democratic accusations that he was destroying Medicare were the lie of the year.
There is no forgiveness for anything that craven.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Not losses. Disasters.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: That works too.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh yeah I remember that. Never kept track of which of those sites was which though.
Listen if anyone is saying anything other than “Pretty much all Republicans have become blatant liars and right-wing extremists” then I figure they’re mostly Republicans writing the thing. It’s just too obvious to anyone giving an honest look.
Democrats right now are a fairly traditional mix, some stretching the truth, some honesty, etc. Republicans by contrast have gone off into a Never Never Land of outright lies and denial of reality. Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that has lost all credibility.
Redshift
@Villago Delenda Est:
It’s the mark of a bullshitter rather than a liar. A liar knows it’s a lie and puts effort into getting away with it. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether it’s true or not, only if it serves its purpose at the moment it is uttered. A GOP base that actively wants to be lied to if the truth contradicts their beliefs is the most fertile ground possible for BS artists.
I think this is a much more plausible explanation for the frontrunners than “they’re mad at the establishment and looking for an outsider.” (Especially considering the contortions that usually follow to justify calling Cruz an “outsider.”)
Redshift
@Villago Delenda Est: Especially because it wasn’t at all an isolated incident.
Adam L Silverman
@TaMara (BHF): Actually I got both of you out of purgatory. You were both just hanging out there.
Matt McIrvin
@efgoldman:
They tend to lose some ground in Congressional elections that happen in Presidential years.
But they win huge in the midterms and odd years. I just counted it up: since Clinton took office, the Democrats have had one successful midterm (when Dubya had been failing so hard nobody could stand him any more), and there was one wash where the Republicans were expected to lead (1998). The Republicans had four solid wins, and two of those were monster landslides.
Now part of that is because midterms tend to run against the party with the White House, which was in Democratic hands for two-thirds of this time period. And the first one under Bush probably went Republican mostly because of 9/11. But it’s also because the midterm electorate is demographically different.
Adam L Silverman
@Peale: @Omnes Omnibus: @Bill E Pilgrim: GEN McChrystal was in trouble anyway. The Hastings/Rolling Stone article was just the icing on the cake in the late Spring and early Summer of 2010. In late JAN 2010 Andrew Exum wrote a short post on his blog at CNAS that threw GEN McChrystal under the bus for failing to make any progress on political reconciliation in Afghanistan. A few weeks later Fred Kagan wrote an op-ed (WAPO if I’m remembering correctly) that did the same thing. By the end of February Exum had written and released a short CNAS report on this problem and shortly after that Anthony Cordesman from CSIS wrote an op-ed that also made similar points.
What was significant here is that all three of these honorable men were external, consulting subject matter experts for GEN McChrystal’s strategic review when he took over as ISAF Commander. Since the deliberations of that review process are classified, though stuff was leaked (hmmm, wonder who did that?), we have no way of knowing if these three august and honorable gentlemen all hammered political reconciliation as part of that strategy over and over and over and over for the four to six weeks that the review was underway and the new strategy was being formulated or if they never said word one about it. What we do know is they were publicly connected to it, what GEN McChrystal was trying to do wasn’t seeming to work all that well at that time, and they had both individual professional reputations and institutional reputations to protect. So someone had to be sacrificed. It was pretty clear that someone was meant to be GEN McChrystal. Had he not spoken out of place at that talk in England and not made a bad impression by showing up in ACUs rather than Class A’s for his chewing out by the President for publicly contradicting official US policy and had the Hastings’ piece not come out, it still would’ve only been a matter of time. The knives were out for him to protect other’s interests. This is what happened to GEN McKiernan several years before during the Bush 43 Administration. Regardless, one way or another GEN McChrystal was on borrowed time as 2010 progressed. Consulting money and access needed to be protected and preserved!
TaMara (BHF)
@Adam L Silverman: Our hero!
seaboogie
@efgoldman:
Remember back in the old days (swing your onion to the other side of your belt) when quicksand was a thing? What ever happened to quicksand?
redshirt
@seaboogie: You can swim out of it now.
seaboogie
@CaseyL: Years ago I had this strange case of fruit flies in my apt. Finally traced it back to a forgotten peach in a tote-bag that I had been carrying and then left, hooked over a chair. Inspected the decaying fruit – responded all “euuugghhhh” and parked the whole mess – bag and all – on my deck.
Fell asleep on the sofa with my trusty Golden Retreiver (the eponymous Seaboogie) later that night, only to wake in the wee hours as he howled and barked quite near my ear in mad indignation…to discover a raccoon pilfering my bag with the decaying peach. Dog was going kind of apeshit, and the raccoon just hopped up on the rail of the deck and was all “Whatevs, dude….” totally unflappable. Raccoon finally wandered off and I let my pooch out to spend the rest of his adrenaline sniffing around the premises.
Mike in NC
We’re hanging out on a riverboat docked on the Main-Danube Canal, awaiting a bus and foot tour of Nuremberg, Bavaria. Weather is what one should expect for the middle of December in central Germany. Chilly and wet.
Peale
Brazil considers shutting off the internet.
Or at least the part people enjoy using. And the part that saves them money on phone bills.
redshirt
@Peale: Brazil settles on only shutting down Balloon Juice.
Mike J
@Mike in NC: I liked Nuremberg, but I was there for work. If you really want to see the server room for an insurance company, I can probably talk to somebody for you.
At least you’re there for the Christmas market.
Marc
I had a pet door installed for my previous kitty. She got the hang of it quickly, but if a human was around, she’d fetch said human and have the human open the people door to let her out. The guy who installed new tile in my master shower and guest bathtub enclosures was given this treatment – and he complied with being her personal door opener while I was at work. I’ve since closed off the pet door with the arrival of Miri (and then the kittens). Don’t want them getting the idea that the outdoors is a place to be – have a busy street right next to my place, and don’t want a flat cat, nor feed the occasional coyote who wanders through the neighborhood.
Villago Delenda Est
@redshirt: Fucking greedy telcos. Everywhere. The fucking capitalists are begging for tumbrel rides.
BGinCHI
Countdown until Cole gets caught in that door.
3…2…1…
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Cognitive, or psychological? It’s probably not cognitive impairment but cognitive distortion stemming from a personality disorder.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: My wife’s grandmother, when she started to ail, was given a wheelchair to take on Epcot’s long distances, but insisted on pushing her own chair for much of the day … much like a walker. OTOH she was really old so I don’t think anyone questioned it.
Everyone’s still bitter, though, about random people using the family restroom while they were waiting to get Grandpa in there, who couldn’t transfer from chair to toilet without help because of Parkinson’s.
2014 was the last time. They passed within a few months of each other.
Another Holocene Human
@Mike in NC: If you’re in Nuernberg, check out Fuerth. Small town where Jews and Christians lived together from medieval times. Also the home town of Kissinger and my wife’s late Opa. Opa was an engineer who worked on the Golden Gate Bridge restoration project. Only the good die young and all that. (Okay, he wasn’t young, but how do you explain Kissinger??)
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: There are plenty of public sector candidates.
I get so ragey about it sometimes. “WTF is your problem? You’re supposed to SERVE. THE. PUBLIC. God fucking dammit!!!”
Is there anywhere not dominated by right whingers, white wingers, and greedheads where you can collect an actual paycheck? Note: not an artist, a little late to learn.
raven
wtf-k?
NotMax
@raven
Que pasa?
BGinCHI
@raven: You see the newest Oxford American music issue is all about Georgia?
Really interesting stuff.
raven
@BGinCHI: Yea we bought a bunch for gifts this year!
raven
@NotMax: @NotMax: I don’t know, I wrote a couple of long posts about our built in door for the pups and they vanished.
I watched about an hour of the Pipeline yesterday live! Killer waves.
raven
So “Doggie” gets 86’d? eta, Now it doesn’t?? We had one built in the remodeled kitchen but I just got the fence back up. Bohdi got back into using it but Lil Bit remains on limited duty and can’t go out unsupervised.
NotMax
@raven
Was a bit blustery and chilly up on the slopes yesterday. Presume about the same down at the shore.
raven
@NotMax: They are having the World Surfing Championship at the Pipeline right now. The shape of the waves was perfect for a good part of the day making for awesome rides!
bemused
The sole benefit of a pet door letting the pets go in and out instead of bugging their owners is far outweighed by the downsides. Even if you live in a town or city instead of rural as we do, the odds of other critters coming uninvited in your home are high, mice, raccoons, feral cats, the list is endless. Our present kitties are indoor only but for decades our previous cats were indoor/outdoor and I couldn’t even count the number of mice/bird/chipmunk gifts they brought home and laid on front steps for us and a few times even managed to sneak in with their prey. A couple of times their kills weren’t actually dead resulting in frantic “fun” capturing them and getting them out of the house.
I look forward to reading about a critter or more figuring out there is a way in to get to the source of those tantalizing human and pet food aromas in the Cole home. Discovering a raccoon or skunk in the kitchen is not something I’d want to experience. Pet doors, what could possibly go wrong?
raven
@bemused: Never been a problem for us.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@bemused:
Radio collars.
If my house were a less open plan, I’d consider installing a radio collar equipped pet door to allow one cat into a given room and keep the others out.
bemused
@raven:
Do you have a cat? With a pet door, it’s not a matter if a cat will bring in a mouse or something else, it’s how many times a day depending on good the hunting is. No thanks. Moot for us anyway now that our cats are strictly indoor. Far more big predator birds such as bald eagles fly over our house now and too many other risks for them outside. The bonus for me with indoor cats is I now longer have cat poop in my garden beds.
Paul in KY
@Arm The Homeless: She’s been auditioning (and failing) for ‘female attack dog on Hillary’.
Paul in KY
@TaMara (BHF): If the outside catfood is still out around at 11 PM & the raccoons come by, the cats just sit on a chair & look at them. They don’t hide, but they don’t interfere.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne: Hope y’all have a great time! Sounds like you’ll get a good aerobic workout.
Paul in KY
@Adam L Silverman: Great post, except you didn’t call him ‘General Bud Ice Lime’.
gvg
I hope you know what you are doing with the pet door. We have had pet doors for cats that led to a screened in pool enclosure, never to the regular outside world. Even so, racoons were a problem. They liked to poop on top of the screens. Charming.
I have been researching cat fencing as my big cat has been escaping frequently and we are planning to move. It sounds like a good idea but I will have to do a sort of collar around the trunks of any trees whose branches could lead over the fence. He does it for attention but we don’t always have time to chase him. Also tracking collars as one of the dogs has become senile and likes to escape.
gvg
@Adam L Silverman: Do you think it was McKrystal or the consultants ideas that were faulty? I get that he was going to be dumped on, but I really would prefer to know whose bad judgement was leading to the bad outcomes. Of course that also doesn’t account for perhaps the policy goals were not achievable.
Adam L Silverman
@gvg: I can’t say as everything in that strategic review was classified – though someone did leak the strategy to the press. I don’t know if they hammered reconciliation – political or social or religious or otherwise every day for weeks or if it came up once. All I can relate is what seemed to be happening.
From what I understand of the theater strategy that he adopted it made sense. But, and it’s a doozy, it was a theater strategy that needed to be implemented over several years. For the first time we had placed am Army Special Forces general officer, specifically a Green Beret, in charge of a theater where all operations were supposed to be based on variations and adaptations of Special Operations concecepts and doctrine. My understanding is that what GEN McChrystal was trying to do as a strategy was to elevate these concepts and doctrine for theater strategic application. Given the realities of the Afghan theater, as well as the Iraq one, this makes sense. “By, with, and through” and what we’d now formally call Engagement as the explicit means for dealing with most of the Afghan theater problem sets, with more kinetic/lethal operations targeting insurgents and terrorists was a good idea. But this is a long, slow, time and personnel intensive process. He, and his predecessors and successors, never did have enough personnel as we ignored our own doctrinal rations for our personnel to host country nationals. We never actually got a civilian surge of subject matter experts from different departments civil service ranks to assist and in some cases be in the lead. And he ran out of time. Specifically political time. First with his own handpicked consultants and then with the press and finally with the President.
Also, I do NOT know GEN McChrystal or any of three people I mentioned. I can say as one of the primary briefers for the I Corps Commander and Command Staff, including the incoming State Department director for Iraqi Reconstruction and the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works (reconstruction) when they were getting ready to go to Iraq and take over as the theater command element, that I did deal with social reconciliation. Moreover, when there were issues down range I didn’t write an op-ed lambasting them and their efforts, I sent an email with support materials to assist them. That doesn’t make me special, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you have access to the principals and their senior deputies trying to fix or manage these types of things. I consider what they outside consultants did to be unprofessional, to say the least.
steverinoCT
Late to the party. I lived in an apartment with my two cats in Florida: no permanent kitty doors. So I made an insert for the sliding door to the patio with a hole in it, put a double flap of carpet over the whole, and “locked” the slider with a pvc pipe in the track. At night I moved the ottoman in front of the flap, and that kept undesirables out. In the morning the cats found they could just shove the ottoman out of the way enough to get out and back in– I never had to clean the litter box. They did like to catch lizards and bring them in to play and eat in the A/C: a bit disgusting to come home to. Once I came home to a live pigeon and a room full of feathers, with the cat just laying next to the bird. I was able to just pick it up and carry it outside. Same with a live mole hiding behind the dresser– what do you do with that? I dumped it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Also had the neighbor’s cats come by now and again: I chased them out with yells to scare them from coming back.
When I moved to CT I did the same with the door but used a store-bought one because of the cold issue. Dragged a string through it a few times and they caught on. It lead to a screened-in porch– too much wildlife here to allow them outside, or the racoons/woodchucks/ferals inside. They adapted well.