The city's Emergency Operations Center is open and ready to go for today's storm pic.twitter.com/iNbupTdd9c
— City of Worcester (@TweetWorcester) March 14, 2017
Everybody picks on poor Wistah (local pronunciation). The city’s in a geographical anomaly where it tends to pick up more snow than its neighbors (much less the local coastal elites), so the local TV weathercasters always prep some ‘blasted hills of Worcester’ B-roll for every weather event.
Our house is just outside Rte 128 (the off ramp runs behind our neighbor’s yard), which is a dependable meteorological dividing line (as is the second ‘ring’ outside Rte 495). But this time, for once, we got rather less than some of the communities between us and Boston proper — “only” about 8 inches, from my unscientific tally. It was eight nasty, sludge-based, top-crusted heavy inches, though. I cleared the front steps and walkway, but there’s no way we could break through the waist-high ice berm at the road edge… if the Spousal Unit’s plow guy doesn’t show up as promised this morning, we’re not gonna be leaving the house.
Apart from digging out — or mocking us diggers, if you weren’t in Stella range — what’s on the agenda for the day?
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Speaking of niche enthusiasms… several BJ commentors enjoyed rescue terrier Ollie’s agility adventure at Crufts (Britain’s national show, proudly the ‘biggest dog show in the world’). Ollie’s antics are indeed a mood-lifter, but what caught my eye was the flyball competition, a sport that has certainly come a long way in the quarter-century since I enjoyed watching my Midwestern dog-loving friends compete…
Here’s the (full, 22min) 2017 finals, if you’ve got extra time on your hands. A lurcher is a cross between a sighthound and a ‘working breed’ — usually a border collie or a terrier, these days. You might think that purebred sighthounds (whippets, greyhounds, basenjis) would have an unbeatable advantage at flyball, but sighthounds are notorious divas… they love to run, but not necessarily to retrieve. (Sighthound fanciers will tell you their dogs were bred to run down prey well ahead of their human partners, and it was more profitable to have a dog that would bring down the bunny/deer/mountain goat and then lose interest while the human caught up to do the retrieving part.)
Speed, as the announcers keep mentioning, is the key factor in these top-rank races… but I can tell you from my days observing the sport, the foundation of a winning team is finding “high-intensity” dogs with the drive to gettheballgettheballgettheball and then bring it back, not just once but dozens of times a day, hundreds of days in a row. You’ll notice in the embedded video that one of those very speedy lurchers spits out the ball once he’s just barely past the finish line — in the 2017 race, the same dog (IIRC), despite his record-breaking speed, ‘faults’ his run by dropping the ball too soon and cheats his team of the win. That’s why there are so many border collies and collie-crosses on these teams; their prey drive is as intense as a sighthound’s, and while they may not be quite as fast, they’re less likely to flake out at a crucial moment.
Just in case you’re curious… yes, there is a North American Flyball Association, and probably a group that trains in your area. It’s open to dogs of any and all breeds, and (unlike, say, dog agility) doesn’t require the humans involved to be in good physical shape — teenagers and creaky old people with fit dogs can compete on equal terms.