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More of Non-Doggie Sites and Readings
compiled by Geoff Stern
Let us know of DEAD links.

Non-Doggie Sites

Best jobs in America -- by salary and other criteria

Recipe: Toasted angel hair pasta (*fideos*) with pancetta, tomatoes, mushrooms, and basil

Marksmanship guide Even if you don't shoot, this is a very cool graphical training aid

40 more stunning examples of high-speed photograph

Collective nouns

Animal adjectives

Hidden billing on the BPL

Doggie and non-Dog Reading

What does the idiom: "Give a dog a bad name" mean? A person who is generally known to have been guilty of some offence will always be suspected to be the author of all similar types of offence. Once someone has gained a bad reputation, it is very difficult to lose it.

Dunedin Dog Show- 1897- the first one!

Everything for a Dog (5 hours audio) from Christchurch Library
Grade Level: 4-6 Age Level: 9-11 Listening Level: Grades 4-6
Bone and his sister, Squirrel, are stray dogs born in a shed. Left mother-less as puppies, the two dogs survive together for a while, but are soon wrenched apart, and Bone must now go on, alone. Charlie is a boy who has suffered a terrible loss. And, as he's healing with the help of his dog, another tragedy occurs.

Back4Sure -- freeware tool for easy backups

Alan Cooper's All About Homonyms

Robo Plow (video) a real boy's toy for North American winter!! I wish I had one when I was a kid.

Photoshop altering isn't new

Feeding a family for a week: a photo essay

Adjectives of Relation

Venn diagrams to explain everything

The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything?—?from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels?—?is proportionate to everything else, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history.

Do the Time Warp Take a trip through Time Warp's high-speed scenes frame by frame. Watch how a dog shakes his head and the saliva goes everywhere.

"William And The Windmill" is a multimedia presentation from "The Star" in Canada about William Kamkwamba and is story (that is getting more known everyday) of putting together scraps to make a windmill to generate electricity in Malawi. Not only is the video well-made, most of it is closed-captioned and accessible to English Language Learners.

Malawi windmill boy with big fans is a BBC article about the same story, just in case you want to learn more about him.

Atomic dogs: The making of an internet sensation On the floor, 16 golden retrievers stare up at me bemused. They are arranged in a square, four by four. I watch through the viewfinder of my video camera. This, I think to myself, could make me famous.

How Memory Works This is great multimedia resource created by the Public Broadcasting System NOVA scienceNOW program.  The show aired originally on August 25, 2009, but you can still watch portions of the program online. The main video describes the work being done on the brain of "H.M.," a man who had brain surgery that left him unable to form long-term memories.

VoiceThread — You can upload pictures and create an audio narrative to go along with them. In addition, audio comments can be left by visitors. VoiceThread also provides a great deal to teachers by allowing them to get their premium services for free, including allowing them to create a zillion VoiceThreads for free.

Behaviour Training Improves Connectivity and function in the brain

Non-Invasive Technique Blocks a Conditioned Fear Recalling Emotional Memory Opens Window of Opportunity to Re-Write It

NCBI The Life Sciences Search Engine

Sporcle trivia, quizzes, language games, etc.

376 of the best one-liners on the Internet

ManualsOnline Locate user manuals, how-to guides, installation instructions, and tutorials from thousands of manufacturers and products]

Increase in federal prisons in the States since 1950 Superb example -- if it's accurate -- of data visualization

Dale's Cone of Experience rebutted People do NOT remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, etc. That information, and similar pronouncements are fraudulent.

Recipe: Turkish Chicken & Vermicelli Soup with Egg & Lemon

Shrink Pictures -- image resizing -- anyone can Resize Images and Digital Pictures .

Recipe: Asian roasted carrots

List of 886 Palindromes Palindromes are words, phrases or sentences that read the same backward as forward. Some of them don't make much sense, some are quite cool.

Billions Served: Norman Borlaug interviewed by Ronald Bailey Three decades after he launched the Green Revolution, agronomist Norman Borlaug is still fighting world hunger--and the doomsayers who say it's a lost cause.

Desert Island Discs Long-time BBC show where guests are asked to name 8 pieces of music to have on a desert isle, which presumably has a gramophone powered by coconut oil. The guests also choose a book, other than the Bible or complete Shakespeare, and a luxury item -- an inanimate object, not for escaping the island or communicating.

Literary map of San Francisco


Recipe: Carbonnade de boeuf flamande
Beef stew -- sort of a Belgian version of *boeuf à la bourguignonne* with beer instead of red wine, and usually more onion-y, sometimes even sweetened. This what I'll make for this weekend's bash

Babel Fish Translation Service

The 10 Oldest Bars in America

Take a nap! A siesta recharges you -- short, 20-40 min power nap

Plan B: What to Do When All Else Has Failed to Change Your Kid's Behavior More child-rearing advice for dealing with rotten kids

Police Squad variation on "Who's on first?" (video) This is really funny

The top 10 doctored photos

Going for baroque -- slide show of churches in Italy

Sibley Guide to Birds online

Recipe: Tostones -- twice-fried plantains

Dr. Johnson's House Gough Square, near Fleet St, in London, where he lived for about 10 yrs and worked on his dictionary. For me, this is one of the holy shrines of the western world

Samuel Johnson Tercentenary "There is no bad faith in or about Dr. Johnson," says Harold
Bloom, "who was as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree"
           
John McIntyre's spot-on assessment of a recent biography of Johnson by Jeffrey Meyers
The Meyers book is repetitive, as though cobbled together from dictation -- gawdknows Meyers does churn out  books industriously. More importantly, Meyers is almost prurient in his insistent focus on Johnson's  apparent psychosexual conflicts. He seems to reduce Johnson to a collection of symptoms, rather than presenting Johnson's flaws in the context of a struggle between his genius and his defects. So I've turned now to Peter Martin's biography of Johnson which is a little dryly academic but somewhat less insistent on being a case study.

How a sewing machine works

Water lilies at Giverny -- proof that  Monet was a photo-realist

Musée des Peevologies (John McIntyre)

1001 things to do with Liquid Nitrogen

How to teach your rat to fetch things

People Naturally Walk in Circles In a follow-up experiment, the researchers challenged 15 people to walk straight while blindfolded. When they couldn't see at all, the walkers ended up going in surprisingly small circles -- with a diameter of less than 66 feet.

Go Animate- Anyone can create an animation!

Popurls- Genuine aggregator (not alligator)

Post Crossing “send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!”

1959: The best year in jazz

Ten mysteries of you

Memory tips and tricks

Common Fish Species Has 'Human' Ability To Learn

Medical slang

Reardon Shipping -- video snippets from the superb Canadian TV series *Intelligence* [Unforgivably cancelled after two seasons]

Abandoned places Eerie, creepy

Folk Alley's 100 essential folk songs

Interview with Elmore Leonard

How to e-mail a text message to someone's cell phone

Constitution Finder Constitutions, charters, and other related documents for the nations of the world

The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Killed more than 20M people, rather more than died inWW1

At the movies: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in *Heat*

New York Sites' Science section- I love it!

Boustrophedon text reader and sample page

Rules of Ranging -- Maj. Robert Rogers

The Eaten Path -- foodie blog

Recipe: Saveur's Reuben Sandwich

At the movies:

        Give the Devil benefit of law from A Man for All Seasons

        Christmas court from The Lion in Winter

Tipcam  You can create videos as FLV or AVI.  No limit to the length of the video.  

ScreenCastle the screencast recorder and record a screencast directly from you browser

Recuva shareware file recovery tool- Supposed to be one of the better tools for recovering accidentally deleted files

Recipe: Salt-crusted fingerling potatoes with a cilantro-parsley dipping sauce

The Most Dangerous Roads in the World

American Tricruiser -- semi-recumbent bicycle (or tricycle, I guess) [Not sure you can attach a thingy for biking with your dog]

Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote Hugh Laurie interviewed and interviewed and interviewed and interviewed

Online companion to the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry

Seduction 101 for Logicians and Economists (John Allen Paulos)

Lashing Back: Israel's 1947--48 Civil War

Really cool assorted photos- Check out all the other photos on his website.

Elizabeth Warren on *The Daily Show*, explaining TARP and the
financial mess

Eco-conscious Battery World Aust/NZ Points to free battery recycling

Gordon Ramsay making a scramble out of scrambled eggs

Addictive time-waster (I'm warning you) Who invented this?

What It Costs

Blues lyrics online -- various compilations

DrugWatch database: It reveals the side effects and herbal interactions of more than 540 popular brand name drugs .

Wagon Stays in Christchurch If I weren't living in Chch already, I'd probably spend the night there. I wonder if it gets pulled by horses?

Torpedo7 (NZ) Sports equipment online. They also have 1-Day which offers daily specials.

A.nnotate Whenever I receive annotated documents, they always come to me through e -mail, so this means that a series of e-mail messages are sent back and forth. This isn't exactly the best and most effi- cient solution, and that's why A.nnotate is an interesting service.

Music Catch Catch the colourful shapes that appear when the music plays!

BitMeter BitMeter is a bandwidth meter that allows you to visually monitor your Internet connection by displaying a scrolling graph that shows your upload and download speed over time.

PriceSpy (NZ) A site dedicated to providing information on the best deals in cameras, cell phones & computer hardware/software in New Zealand. One has to be quite sure of what exactly they require before beginning to search for items on this site be- cause of the immense amount of information presented one could easily get overwhelmed with it

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

Cards - Quick!
The software has a great library of templates that make it quick to create something that can be printed on Avery products.

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know You probably had no idea you could even do these things. Whether you want to is another matter.

Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant
http://conantparkmysteries. googlepages.com
[Susan is the author of the very enjoyable "Dog Lover's mysteries"]

Top 100 Stories of 2008 from *Discover* magazine
One of the more interesting of the many year-end compilations

50 Jokes for 50 States
"It's so hot in Arizona, cows are giving evaporated milk and the trees are whistling for dogs"

Font Types: Da Font and 1001 Free Fonts

Chinese pregnancy calendar to predict gender of child --various URLs all over the Web

Fimoculous list of lists for 2008
Irresistible -- master index to all those other lists, from various magazines, Web sites, etc. You can also check the lists going back to 2001

Crunks 2008: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections
[Don't miss the apology from Dave Barry]

Indexed -- Jessica Hagy's funny cartoons using Venn diagrams

E-mail to cell phone

Secunia vulnerability scanning
Nice. You can run the applet over the net to scan your system for applications vulnerable to computer malice -- for example, unprotected
versions of Firefox or Adobe Flash, etc.

Moleskine notebooks

DIY laptop stand using a coat hanger

Reading Test- The paomnnehel pweor of the hmuan mnid

Be irrepressible Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

Will it blend? These guys put anything in a blender to see if it will be blend?

Colour Lovers Colours for inspiration. Great to figure out the colour scheme of a new website.

Excerpt from *The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness* by Mark Rowlands

Something About Harry: Old Dogs are the Best Dogs

Choosing the Best Dog for Your Family

Babies Understand "Dog Speak"

A study was recently released from Utah's Brigham Young University which shows that babies from 6 to 9 months old can understand how canines communicate.

The study worked with infants who had never been around dogs before and determined that the children could match the friendly stance of a dog to a friendly bark, or the photo of an aggressive stance of the same dog to a warning bark.

BYU psychology professor Ross Flom, lead author of the study, said, "We chose dogs because they are highly communicative creatures both in their posture and the nature of their bark.

BYU's Infant Development Lab researchers wanted to find if infants could understand the emotions of communication before their ability to speak. The complete findings were published in the July edition of "Developmental Psychology."

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Supposed to be a very well done book explaining quantum mechanics and other arcana. Here's the book itself

Crash test -- 1959 Chevy Bel Air vs. 2009 Chevy Malibu.  They don't build 'em like they used to. And that's a good thing

Diplodocs -- user manuals, how-to guides, installation instructions, and tutorials from thousands of manufacturers and products

Base jump from the top of the Dubai tower

My latest summer reading Richard Russo's The Old Cape Magic. This book is available at the Christchurch library.

The plot: The story revolves around a past-middle-age former Hollywood screenwriter, Jack Griffin, who is presently teaching creative writing at a New England college. He loses both parents within a year of each other, and he travels considerable distance to attend two weddings during the same time. As he travels, and as he interacts both with his family and his in-laws, he ponders marital and family relationships. He is also mulling whether to remain in New England or return to the uncertainty of Hollywood.

The annual round-up of books, in time, I hope, for your howliday shopping:

Patricia McConnell's Tales of Two Species: Essays on Loving and Living With Dogs collects her columns or essays from *The Bark* magazine, and there's a new edition of Jean Donaldson's *Dogs Are from Neptune*

Alexandra Horowitz's Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know is enjoyable and sometimes insightful, esp. on the primacy of scent in dogs' apprehension of the world

Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog is a lovely recollection of a dog with a remarkable personality

The Sport of Schutzhund by B. J. & Peter Spanos is a very pretty collection of photos even if you don't know much about the sport or your breeds are other than, say, GSDs

The Encyclopedia of Dog Sports and Activities: A Field Guide of More Than 35 Fun Activities for You and Your Dog by Diane Morgan gives very good summaries of almost every sport and pastime involving dogs

Michael Schaffer's One Nation Under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food describes the current sociology of dog ownership in the U.S.

Mike Darton's Spott's Canine Miscellany is a parody of Schott's Original Miscellany -- very funny

Off and on watching the Janice Gunn videos. For some reason, Gunn excludes any footage of people presenting their own dogs out of respect for privacy. This seems a little odd to me, since in so many videos -- such as the recent one by Michael Ellis -- the whole point is to demonstrate how to work through a problem, how to apply the method correctly.

Couple of "graphic novels" -- comic books, really: Michael Keller's illustrated version of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation and a philosophy survey called Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by -- I love these names -- Aposotolos Doxiadis & Christos Papadimitrou, which may be esp. notable because Bertrand Russell is the hero.

Lots of graphic adaptations are just shortcuts to writing a real novel, I suppose --  Greg Rucka's *Whiteout* books, for example Final Crisis: Revelations HC -- but sometimes the collision of the children's format with a grown-up theme or contents produces something startling, enjoyable, and clever, as with Art Spiegelman's Maus or the graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission's report. /Written by Geoff Stern

Getting to the end of my stack of books on the Battle of Britain --  Michael Korda's With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain. Doesn't seem to be very original historiography, more like a very bright student's term paper, but nicely written.

The F Word by Jesse Sheidlower, giving the history of everyone's favorite English verb.

Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog   This is a wonderful story about a dog and his companion. Ted writes in such an insightful way, and uses the experience of living with his dog by talking about research in dogdom. If you are gonig to read one dog book this month, this is it! (Available at the Chch library)

Couple of language books. I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World The title, for example, is the Russian way of saying "I'm not pulling your leg." Very interesting collection, but the book simply gives the literal (?) English translations without the original, so you don't get the musicality, alliteration, rhyme, and so on. Stephen Dodson's Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World is another round-the-world collection, this time of insults and imprecations. It's a slimmer but better organized book.

Also, a thrilled, Vanished by Joseph Finder -- seems to be the first of a series about a character not unlike Lee Child's Lee Child or the old Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald. Pleasant enough reading, except sometimes the hero is insufferable about being smarter than everyone else.

In the book Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous, Janis Bradley shows in a convincing and entertaining manner that dogs are in fact much safer than many common household objects and activities.

The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger by Dan Gardner (Ottawa Journalist for the Ottawa Citizen- my hometown) Good reading especially since this episode in Invercargill (and Rotorua) where they think that killing puppies is okay... Reason: they have the ''potential'' of being aggressive.


For word lovers, Foyle's Philavery and Foyle's Further Philavery, two collections of more or less unusual words, compiled by Christopher Foyle, the owner of the famous London bookshop.

I didn't expect to like A Summer Bright and Terrible: Winston Churchill, Lord Dowding, Radar, and the Impossible Triumph of the Battle of Britain by David E. Fisher, figured it would be a dry account of the technology. But Fisher writes in a lively, blunt-spoken way, clearly listing his heroes (Dowding, Keith Park), villains (Hitler and Göring, of course, but in another sense, Leigh-Mallory and
Sholto Douglas), and fools (Lindemann, Douglas Bader, and, in some ways, Churchill). The Battle itself gets somewhat compressed coverage, but the background wheeling-dealing and the unusual personalities of some of the principal players are quite well presented.

The Unwritten Rules of Baseball: The Etiquette, Conventional Wisdom, and Axiomatic Codes of Our National Pastime by Paul Dickson covers various issues of etiquette and procedure, many more honored in the breach, etc.

Unfortunately, Dickson keeps repeating the point that when "going against the book" works, you're a genius, and when it fails, you're a dolt. This is true with any kind of heterodox approach, and moreover, what seems novel now will become SOP later. For example, it was very radical when teams first used "the shift" against Ted Williams, but that kind of defensive alignment is now quite common against some hitters.

The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss, one of several historical mysteries he's written -- this one set in 1792 when the young American republic was struggling over Hamilton's nat'l bank.

I think I mentioned I'm re-reading Pamela Reid's Excel-Erated Learning: Explaining in Plain English How Dogs Learn and How Best to Teach Them which is quite good, but needs some updating (on the latest in bridge & target trng, behavior research, and so on), and esp. needs an index and glossary.

One of the dangers in reading books like this is that you get swamped by doubts that any dawgg ever learns anything you try to teach -- "Oh, migawd, what if my reinforcers aren't salient? What if my cues are blocked (or blocking)?" Makes you wonder how any dawggs were trained for the 10,000 years before clickers.

Another book on British culture and life by another American married to a Brit -- The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall, very keen, very funny -- you shouldn't read some chapters with your mouth full.

Roy Blount's meanderings about words and language, Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory.
Very funny, esp. if you can hold in your mind's ear the pace and accent of Blount's voice.


Ben Crystal's Shakespeare on Toast is a nice little book. Crystal, who's the son of an eminent linguist, is very good on matters of Shakespeare's language ("thou" vs. "you" which is always important in Shakespeare), on how much it cost for Elizabethans to go hear a play (note: hear, not see), cost of the costumes, how the design of the Globe theatre informs the plays, and so on. Good book for a send-off gift to a freshman.

Another of Lee Child Killing Floor thrillers. It's customary for the heroes of such series to have various eccentricities -- even implausibly. How did Nero Wolfe manage to avoid a coronary infarction? How does Reacher manage to get two or three days out of the same clothes?

Also, Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, the latest book on usage and abusage, perhaps less fervid than some others. For myself, I believe people who use the first person nominative as the object of a preposition ("She went with John and I") should be executed ignominiously. JMHO.


In honor of Dr. J's tercentenary, there are some new biographies to read. I'll start with Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers who seems to write a book or two every week. May have to re-read Bate, Wain, and Fussell, too. If I could travel back in time, one of the people I should like to meet is Himself, maybe at the house in Gough Square.


"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


"The Big Blue Book" -- no official name, I guess -- is Lori Drouin's brain dump of everything she knows about obedience training, which is a
helluva lot, as you might guess from her "Training Zone" column in Front & Finish. Quite superb.


The history of animals in New Zealand

I've liked all of Patricia McConnell's books and booklets, so no surprise I liked Tales of Two Species: Essays on Loving and Living With Dogs, her collection of columns or essays from *The Bark* magazine. Nice lunch-hour or coffee-break reading. Could use some editing (McConnell thinks the mind boggles instead of being boggled and gets the title wrong for *The Miracle Worker*).

Another of Alan Furst's superb World War II espionage thrillers, Dark Voyage: A Novel . This one seems a little less world-weary, less sombre than some of Furst's other books.

Also, another favorite writer has died, Donald Westlake, known for very funny "caper" novels, including a series about the hapless Dortmunder and his gang who are a kind of parody of the heistmen -- the "Parker" series -- whom Westlake wrote about under the pen name Richard Stark. Terrific books, not only for the crime adventure, but also for a keenly perceptive, if understated sociology of modern America. Somebody Owes Me Money, What's So Funny? God Save the Mark: A Novel of Crime and Confusion

At last, Thomas Perry has written another "Jane Whitefield" thriller, Runner . Great way to start the year. Perry is one of those writers who seems to be congenitally incapable of writing badly.


*The Expert's Guide to Doing Things Faster: 100 Ways to Make Life More Efficient* is the latest compendium of practical wisdom by Samantha Ettus. It includes, for example, advice on curing a stomach ache by Crazy Legs Conti, said to be Major League Eating's 11th ranked competitive eater. (I'm not making this up.) Conti offers a persuasive endorsement for an Italian digestif called Fernet-Branca. Who knows.

Watched a Sandra Ladwig video -- three discs Beyond Puppy Training: The Next Level. The production qualities are good. However, Ladwig has, ostensibly, a "system," so she's always saying that something or other was covered on a previous tape, and you come away a little dizzy, a little unsure of what she has or hasn't explained.

What Ladwig does, and does explain, is quite impressive. Gorgeous heeling, very precise, with exceptional attentiveness on the dog's part, on Ladwig's part. Her method is fairly compulsional. She seems to wean the dog off food treats early; she does a lot of force corrections, albeit somewhat mild -- more like annoying reminders -- and seems to introduce or incorporate proofing and discrimination early in the trng. The section on scent articles was very intriguing. Oh, one more thing. Disconcertingly for me, Ladwig's voice and accent were irresistibly reminiscent of Sarah Palin's -- same Midwestern vowels and pitch.

The latest "Spenser" from Robert B. Parker. The series has become much more manufactured, sort of stamped out in a kind of template, rather than written. The books aren't unpleasant, and they're hard to resist, but they're not really satisfying -- sort of like fast food. Here and there, Parker finds himself actually writing a plot and actually sketching a character, but for the most part, the Spenser series has become a kind of repetitive exercise, like a jogging route.

Revisiting a couple of books from my youth when the spy novel boom was fresh: The Spy's Bedside Book, an anthology compiled by Graham Greene& Hugh Greene, and You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger by Roger Hall, an exceptionally funny account of his experiences in the OSS during WW2. I've long wondered why no one has turned it into a movie.

The Well-Connected Dog: A Guide to Canine Acupressure This book does for canine acupressure what my books do for human acupressure, presenting the traditional theory in an easily digestible way and making it very do-able. Just by reading this book and trying the stretches and the point recipes for common problems, you can help your dog's health. -- Iona Marsaa Teeguarden, MA, Author

Mary Roach tends to write about squirmy subjects -- corpses, ghosts, and now sex, or rather, sex research -- Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. She's very funny, but I wish she didn't think footnotes were a way to mutter an acerbic or ironic aside. Someone (Dwight Macdonald?) said that having to read footnotes was like answering the doorbell on your wedding night.


Rachel Page Elliott's memoir, From Hoofbeats to Dogsteps: A Life of Listening to and Learning from Animals, which is extremely enjoyable for its depiction of a bygone era -- and perhaps a bygone relationship to horses and dogs -- and for Mrs. Elliott's wit. Pagey is, of course, the doyenne of the Golden Retriever and one of the truly great authorities on canine structure and movement.


Somehow, in the great migration from Brookline, Norfolk County, to Littleton, Middlesex County, I lost or lost track of some books, including Sheila Booth's Purely Positive Training: Companion to Competition, which I once regarded highly. So I had to buy a replacement copy and, of course, reread it, if somewhat skimmingly.

It seems dated now, the proselytizing against "corrections" and the preachiness. Maybe it's still a good book for beginners to read as a way of reinforcing the exigency of building a *relationship* with a dog as logically prior to skills training; and of course it was bittersweet to read Booth's admiring mentions of Patty Ruzzo. But by now, I hope, we can bet past the ideological disputes about training methodologies, as though what were really important is doctrinal purity rather than practicality.  

 

Are You a Vending Machine or a Slot Machine?

Realigning the Groups Proposed rearrangement of AKC conformation groups

Territorial Marking

Safedog crash-tested dog crates

Are you on Facebook?- The following is a good read Facebook in a Crowd It makes my real life feel real now.

Whole Latte Love online store for coffee, tea, and equipment

Recumbent bicycles -- various:
* www.cruzbike.com
* www.sunbicycles.com

Figures of Reasoning
Enthymeme, sortites, anthypophora (a favorite of Donald Rumsfeld's)....

Snowy Tree Cricket Snowy Tree Crickets can tell you the temperature (no kidding). Just count the number of their chirps in 13 seconds (okay, I'll admit, you often have to record them and slow it down to count!) and add 40, and you've go the temp in F. (taken from Patricia McConnell blog)

When is it good for you? A good little website to help you and your mates find a suitable time.
http://www.whenisgood.net/

The Periodic table of Videos The crazy academics at the University of Nottingham have put this site together. There's a video explanation including cool scientific experiments for each of the chemical elements in the periodic table. Far from being boring and nonsensical, these guys make learning about science look fun, and more than a little dangerous.
http://www.periodicvideos.com

Strange Maps: Pop vs. Soda
www.popvssoda.com:2998/ countystats/total-county.html

T@DA-
check out this caravan
http://www.tada-rv.com/index.php

Elephants master basic mathematics It may be a side effect of their bulging brains and an evolutionary kinship to other "smart" animals

Do Somethin. Never be bored again (NZ)

Amazing panaramique pictures- I don't know how he does it, but I've never seen anything quite like this. Use your mouse to move the picture. You'll prob need broadband
www.photojpl.com

Take your time putting -- This will drive you crazy; you will become addicted - Putt (click on putt)

Decisions: How Do We Animals Decide What To Do?
Grey Matters
is a series of 15 lectures (each about 60 minutes in length) "to enhance public awareness of recent developments in brain research."  

Best store names - an array of great pictures

Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo

Dennis Lehane's *Shutter Island* is a very intriguing mystery, but it's a little chubby around the middle, esp. compared with his earlier books, the "Patrick Kenzie" series. Lehane could use a crash course in George V. Higgins to learn how to have the dialog tell the story, and a seminar in Elmore Leonard to learn how to pare things down. (How many sentences
do you need to describe someone's lighting and smoking a cigarette?)

Robert B. Parker's *Resolution* is a sequel to his western, *Appaloosa* -- sort of a "Spenser" thriller moved from current Boston to the 19th C. frontier, six-guns instead of wonder-nines, horses instead of motorcars.

 

Mind 42.com Manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world - collaborative, browser-based and for free.

Spam Proof your email address

Radio3 Do you want to listen to Canadian music on your computer? Excellent site for upcoming concert list, etc.

An Open Source Computer Location Tracking System: A free program helps you get a lost or stolen laptop back.

The Cheap Petrol Project (NZ) Sick of Petrol companies telling you what to pay for your petrol? Thousands of people are more powerfull than one, join us now and get discount petrol!

For Fuel Saving Tips: (NZ) click here, to find out how your vehicle rates for fuel economy click here and for tips to help you be transport efficient click here

SuperMemo algorithm for memorization practice

BMW R1150GS Motorcycle

*Ulyssses* for Dummies

Strange Maps: Manhattan neighborhoods

Recipes: A white sport coat and a pink crustacean  Barbecued Shrimp with Cheese Grits and Spicy Sautéed Shrimp and Cheese Grits

IRD unclaim money (NZ)
Check to see if your name is listed

Petrol price finder (NZ)

The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child

Take my kids please!! For Parents of More Than Usually Trying Children, New Approach May Help

The Company We Keep Character - the influences on the mind that shape the kind of person we are becoming, for better and for worse.

Bookshelf designs

More on David Belle and parkour:
No Obstacles: Navigating the World by Leaps and Bounds
 
The Rise of Parkour: Part Jumping, Part Gymnastics in an Urban Playground

Emily Dickinson Internat'l Society

Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst MA

Recipe: Texas chili [No beans]

Saddle up, lock and load:

Cowboy Mounted Shooting Assn

Mounted Shooters of America

Basketball: The Bill James method of calculating when a college basketball game is
out of reach

Better View Desired Online -- reviews of binoculars and other optics, esp. for birders

Politicker -- "inside politics for political insiders" Fair, objective, non-ideological coverage of local, state, and national politics

Esquivalience and Other Mountweazels

Pop culture as opera

The Cave Paintings of Chauvet date to 30,000 to 32,000 years ago.

Col. Ichabod Conk Shaving Products

Stop using plastic dispo razors, which are environmentally lousy. Likewise aerosol can shaving cream. Go back to the future with safety razors and brush-on soap

Re-Enable Right-Click
When Web Pages Turn It Off

Simply Soups Good recipes

Work Online
If you don't want to use Microsoft products and bloat your computer, use this online tool. It even does databases!

GoSlide.ca/LaGlisse.ca -- Scandinavian kicksled. Can also be used as a dog sled. Cool way to give your kids a ride

Safe2Pee -- find a public bathroom This can be a challenge in USA whereas in NZ, we are civilised (as a foreigner told me) and have them splattered around.


Nissan Cube -- competes with the Honda Element, Scion XB -- possibly
good dog vehicle

100 best mystery novels:

* Mystery Writers of America (PDF)

* H. R. F. Keating

* Independent Mystery Booksellers' Assn

North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission
Interesting recipes

The Most Dangerous Road in World

A Barrel Full of Fun Names, words, notions, etc.

Says You! -- very funny word game show on NPR

Annual Banished Words List from Lake Superior State Univ.

Toiling in the Dream Factory The American movie in the era of the big studios

Vegetarianism in a nutshell: read PETA's Bruce Friedrich's essay on vegetarianism

Richard III Society -- American Branch
www.r3.org

The Universal Heritage Poster Summarizing 13.7 billion yrs in a series of timelines, from the Big
Bang to the 21 C]

72 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena


Recipe: Penne with Pork and Pears

About French All things French. Interesting website

PalindromeList.com

Phonetic Converts phone numbers into words and v. v.

St-Viateur Bagel (Montreal QC)
Very different from what you get in NY or Boston -- equally likable, but just different

Would you like between $25 and $1,000? Open a RaboPlus savings account. You need to click the link to open your cash present

Oh BehaveAh! Good. A new collection of essays by Jean Donaldson, Oh Behave!: Dogs from Pavlov to Premack to Pinker

Some of the essays, most of which are just a couple of pages long, may have come from her Dogs in Canada column (which is worth the price of a subscription). OK, yeah, I have a crush on Donaldson, but really she's very deft with turns of phrase and has a functional sense of humor -- and she's less jargon-y here than in some of her other books.

Glenda Brown, in one of her excellent articles on retriever training, cites a book by Mark Rashid about trng horses called Life Lessons from a Ranch Horse, which gives six rules that work as well for dogs as for horses:

        1.  Carry a non-confrontational attitude
        2.  Plan ahead
        3.  Be patient
        4.  Be persistent
        5.  Be consistent
        6.  Fix a setback and move on

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
Originally in the New York Times, 6/25/06. Operant conditioning for
humans.

Book: What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers

House Cleaning & Housekeeping Advice, Hints & Tips

Recipe: Pork Tenderloin with Figs, Brandy, and Parsnips

Self-enumerating pangram

Reusable Bags -- non-dispo grocery bags, water bottles, etc.

The St. Gabriel Possenti Society
Patron saint of handgunners. I'm not making this up. Now, I'm a 2nd Amendment absolutist (likewise, the rest of the B. of R.) but this strikes me as a little weird

What is really required is that the dog's intelligence should be trained. The correct method of training is by reward and encouragement, and the tricks should be entered into as an amusing game. Under this
aspect the dog will readily respond, and my own experience has been that such diversions have always been thoroughly enjoyed by both pupil and master.

Some people imagine that the animal is starved beforehand, and performs under the goad of starvation. This is, of course, nonsense. Such cruelty may be practiced by stupid trainers, but is certainly not necessary, as a dog will learn to walk on its hind legs, turn somersaults, do sums, etc., etc., just after a hearty meal, for the sheer pleasure of entering into a game with its master, even without a reward; but no healthy, normal dog thinks lightly of ginger-snaps or a piece of sugar, and will do a deal for either.

-- Col. H. E. Richardson, quoted by Patricia Gail Burnham,
Treats, Play, Love: Make Dog Training Fun for You and Your Best Friend


Poems often expose emotional truths we can't otherwise describe or disclose. Here's a short poem, "Things," by the New Zealand poet, Fleur Adcock:

        There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
        There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
        committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
        than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
        It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
        and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
        and worse.


Batch of language books: Common Errors in English Usage by Paul Brians is another guide to confusables, solecisms, and troublespots. Very sensible, although some of the explanations are overly terse and others seem to be very elementary confusions of homonyms.

Barbara Ann Kipfer's Word Nerd is an enjoyable compendium of unusual words and oddities about words -- similar to Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary ofUnusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words. Some entries are ill-informed. "Alsatian" isn't really another name for the German Shepherd Dog. It was a name started in the UK during WW1 on the same principle as, more recently in the U.S., the coinage "Freedom fries."

Also, someone should be beaten about the head and shoulders for printing
this book in a sans-serif font which makes every page look like a sign in a K-Mart, and for starting each entry in lowercase, which makes you think there's been a dropped paragraph or page. Conventions in
typography, as in other aspects of life, exist because they make things
easier.

And for subway reading, The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson about an American spy in Al Quaeda. Seems to be a fairly accurate account of tradecraft, and decently written.


Linda Mecklenburg's Developing Jumping Skills for Awesome Agility Dogs collects some of her superlative articles from Clean Run -- I wish the book had more photographs in addition to the linear graphics, but it's still terrific

Patricia Gail Burnham wrote one of my favorite trng books, Playtraining Your Dog -- I'm told it was meant to be a kind of rebuttal to the mordant severity of Koehler, et al. That was over 20 yrs ago.

Now she has a revised version, Treats, Play, Love: Make Dog Training Fun for You and Your Best Friend. When my copy arrived from Amazon.com , I sort riffled the pages as I walked from the mailbox into the house, and all of a sudden, I was sitting at the table, still wearing my jacket and scarf, and reading the damn thing. It's that good.

Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda is a kind of reader's guide to books and writers he may have omitted from his previous collections. Dirda has one of the chief virtues of a critic -- or teacher, for that matter: he makes you want to read the books he discusses.


The Jenny Damm agility DVDs from Clean Run -- *Handling Foundation* and *Advanced Handling* -- are quite good, esp. once the "talking head" part is done and she's shown working with her dogs.


The Syn Alia Series on Animal Training

        * Animals have lifestyles and cultures very different from ours. This means that they may think humans do some strange stuff and have some stupid ideas and customs. Imagine what your dog thinks when you want to clip his nails. This is not something that his mother recommended he have done. Neither is getting a bath. Here you come along and want to make him smell like a bunch of flowers just after he finally got a great stink going by rolling in a bunch of cow manure.

        * A rule of thumb for all animal trainers: If you have to choose between being liked and being respected, opt for respect. 

* When I train, physical punishment is generally limited to correcting those behaviors which if uncorrected could result in harm or injury to animals or people. Physical punishment is not appropriate
during the learn process, except with aggression. This brings us to another rule of thumb: The trainer does not coerce the animal and tolerates no coercion from the animal. Another axiom of mutual respect.

        * When the trainer returns to an animal after a "time out," [she] should treat the situation as a fresh start, offering a positive, enthusiastic attitude toward the animal. However the trainer should not
relax her standards. If the animal still does not cooperate, [the trainer] should give another "time out" . In general, if an animal fails twice in a row, change what you are doing. If it fails a third time, end
the session and reassess what is causing [or] allowing the animal to fail.


BTW, I watched a science fiction thriller on DVD, Equilibrium, which had been recommended to me for the choreography of its fight scenes -- gunfights like kung fu duels, very interesting. The premise is that in the future, a totalitarian society has banned human emotion as a way of preventing evil.

At one point the hero, who moves from being an enforcer of the totalitarian law to a being an, um, insurgent, discovers love and kindness because of a BMD puppy whom he manages to save.


Understanding Your Dog For Dummies Like all the "Dummies" books, it's pretty good, not great.

A poem by Norman MacCaig, the poet laureate of Edinburgh, "Praise of a Collie" (fair warning: keep a hankie close by):

        She was a small dog, neat and fluid --
        Even her conversation was tiny:
        She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.

        Her sons stood monumentally over her
        But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
        Till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

        Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
        I remarked how dry she was. Pollochan said, "Ah,
        It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie."

        She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
        Where's a burn? -- she's first on the other side.
        She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.

        But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled .
        I grieved for Pollochan when he took her a stroll
        And put his gun to the back of her head.


The latest from Robert B. Parker, Spare Change, is another in the"Sunny Randall" series which seems fresher than the "Spenser" series -- very enjoyable.


A poem by Norman MacCaig, the poet laureate of Edinburgh, "Praise of a Collie" (fair warning: keep a hankie close by):

        She was a small dog, neat and fluid --
        Even her conversation was tiny:
        She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.

        Her sons stood monumentally over her
        But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
        Till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

        Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
        I remarked how dry she was. Pollochan said, "Ah,
        It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie."

        She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
        Where's a burn? -- she's first on the other side.
        She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.

        But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled .
        I grieved for Pollochan when he took her a stroll
        And put his gun to the back of her head.


A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro concerns the year WS wrote in part or wholly Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, andHamlet (not bad. Sort of a MACH-OTCH-UDX-CT sort of thing).

What was going on in his life then? What was going on in his society? Oh, just a rebellion in Ireland, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the usual religious strife and political feuds, the death of a child, the loss of some friends, vicissitudes of business. The book has a slightly academic style, but is very enjoyable, very perceptive -- scholarly without being pedantic.

 

For Fuel Saving Tips: (NZ) click here, to find out how your vehicle rates for fuel economy click here and for tips to help you be transport efficient click here

SuperMemo algorithm for memorization practice

BMW R1150GS Motorcycle

*Ulyssses* for Dummies

Strange Maps: Manhattan neighborhoods

Recipes: A white sport coat and a pink crustacean  Barbecued Shrimp with Cheese Grits and Spicy Sautéed Shrimp and Cheese Grits

IRD unclaim money (NZ)
Check to see if your name is listed

Petrol price finder (NZ)

The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child

Take my kids please!! For Parents of More Than Usually Trying Children, New Approach May Help

The Company We Keep Character - the influences on the mind that shape the kind of person we are becoming, for better and for worse.

Bookshelf designs

More on David Belle and parkour:
No Obstacles: Navigating the World by Leaps and Bounds
 
The Rise of Parkour: Part Jumping, Part Gymnastics in an Urban Playground

Emily Dickinson Internat'l Society

Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst MA

Recipe: Texas chili [No beans]

Saddle up, lock and load:

Cowboy Mounted Shooting Assn

Mounted Shooters of America

Basketball: The Bill James method of calculating when a college basketball game is
out of reach

Better View Desired Online -- reviews of binoculars and other optics, esp. for birders

Politicker -- "inside politics for political insiders" Fair, objective, non-ideological coverage of local, state, and national politics

Esquivalience and Other Mountweazels

Pop culture as opera

The Cave Paintings of Chauvet date to 30,000 to 32,000 years ago.

Col. Ichabod Conk Shaving Products

Stop using plastic dispo razors, which are environmentally lousy. Likewise aerosol can shaving cream. Go back to the future with safety razors and brush-on soap

Re-Enable Right-Click
When Web Pages Turn It Off

Simply Soups Good recipes

Work Online
If you don't want to use Microsoft products and bloat your computer, use this online tool. It even does databases!

GoSlide.ca/LaGlisse.ca -- Scandinavian kicksled. Can also be used as a dog sled. Cool way to give your kids a ride

Safe2Pee -- find a public bathroom This can be a challenge in USA whereas in NZ, we are civilised (as a foreigner told me) and have them splattered around.


Nissan Cube -- competes with the Honda Element, Scion XB -- possibly
good dog vehicle

100 best mystery novels:

* Mystery Writers of America (PDF)

* H. R. F. Keating

* Independent Mystery Booksellers' Assn

North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission
Interesting recipes

The Most Dangerous Road in World

A Barrel Full of Fun Names, words, notions, etc.

Says You! -- very funny word game show on NPR

Annual Banished Words List from Lake Superior State Univ.

Toiling in the Dream Factory The American movie in the era of the big studios

Vegetarianism in a nutshell: read PETA's Bruce Friedrich's essay on vegetarianism

Richard III Society -- American Branch
www.r3.org

The Universal Heritage Poster Summarizing 13.7 billion yrs in a series of timelines, from the Big
Bang to the 21 C]

72 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena


Recipe: Penne with Pork and Pears

About French All things French. Interesting website

PalindromeList.com

Phonetic Converts phone numbers into words and v. v.

St-Viateur Bagel (Montreal QC)
Very different from what you get in NY or Boston -- equally likable, but just different

Would you like between $25 and $1,000? Open a RaboPlus savings account. You need to click the link to open your cash present

The Jenny Damm agility DVDs from Clean Run -- *Handling Foundation* and *Advanced Handling* -- are quite good, esp. once the "talking head" part is done and she's shown workingh her dogs.


The Syn Alia Series on Animal Training

        * Animals have lifestyles and cultures very different from ours. This means that they may think humans do some strange stuff and have some stupid ideas and customs. Imagine what your dog thinks when you want to clip his nails. This is not something that his mother recommended he have done. Neither is getting a bath. Here you come along and want to make him smell like a bunch of flowers just after he finally got a great stink going by rolling in a bunch of cow manure.

        * A rule of thumb for all animal trainers: If you have to choose between being liked and being respected, opt for respect. 

* When I train, physical punishment is generally limited to correcting those behaviors which if uncorrected could result in harm or injury to animals or people. Physical punishment is not appropriate
during the learn process, except with aggression. This brings us to another rule of thumb: The trainer does not coerce the animal and tolerates no coercion from the animal. Another axiom of mutual respect.

        * When the trainer returns to an animal after a "time out," [she] should treat the situation as a fresh start, offering a positive, enthusiastic attitude toward the animal. However the trainer should not
relax her standards. If the animal still does not cooperate, [the trainer] should give another "time out" . In general, if an animal fails twice in a row, change what you are doing. If it fails a third time, end
the session and reassess what is causing [or] allowing the animal to fail.


BTW, I watched a science fiction thriller on DVD, Equilibrium, which had been recommended to me for the choreography of its fight scenes -- gunfights like kung fu duels, very interesting. The premise is that in the future, a totalitarian society has banned human emotion as a way of preventing evil.

At one point the hero, who moves from being an enforcer of the totalitarian law to a being an, um, insurgent, discovers love and kindness because of a BMD puppy whom he manages to save.


Understanding Your Dog For Dummies Like all the "Dummies" books, it's pretty good, not great.

A poem by Norman MacCaig, the poet laureate of Edinburgh, "Praise of a Collie" (fair warning: keep a hankie close by):

        She was a small dog, neat and fluid --
        Even her conversation was tiny:
        She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.

        Her sons stood monumentally over her
        But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
        Till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

        Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
        I remarked how dry she was. Pollochan said, "Ah,
        It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie."

        She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
        Where's a burn? -- she's first on the other side.
        She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.

        But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled .
        I grieved for Pollochan when he took her a stroll
        And put his gun to the back of her head.


The latest from Robert B. Parker, Spare Change, is another in the"Sunny Randall" series which seems fresher than the "Spenser" series -- very enjoyable.


A poem by Norman MacCaig, the poet laureate of Edinburgh, "Praise of a Collie" (fair warning: keep a hankie close by):

        She was a small dog, neat and fluid --
        Even her conversation was tiny:
        She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.

        Her sons stood monumentally over her
        But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
        Till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

        Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
        I remarked how dry she was. Pollochan said, "Ah,
        It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie."

        She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
        Where's a burn? -- she's first on the other side.
        She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.

        But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled .
        I grieved for Pollochan when he took her a stroll
        And put his gun to the back of her head.


A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro concerns the year WS wrote in part or wholly Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, andHamlet (not bad. Sort of a MACH-OTCH-UDX-CT sort of thing).

What was going on in his life then? What was going on in his society? Oh, just a rebellion in Ireland, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the usual religious strife and political feuds, the death of a child, the loss of some friends, vicissitudes of business. The book has a slightly academic style, but is very enjoyable, very perceptive -- scholarly without being pedantic.


Couple of good mysteries:

The Accidental American by Alex Carr (pseudonym for Jenny Siler) is a pretty good thriller, with an interesting background of the Lebanese civil war and the internecine treacheries of espionage and smuggling.

George Shulman's 18 Seconds, which has a premise I'd ordinary avoid: the detective heroine, who's blind, has a preternatural ability to tap into the short-term memory of a dead person, to see what that person saw in the last few seconds of life. Yeah, it's silly, but Shulman manages to make it plausible and eerie. The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism by James Geary
is very enjoyable mixture of brief biographies and commentaries -- and
of course, samples. Might be a nice book for a youngster.

Finally getting around to Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series , I started Killing Floor, the first in the series and was enjoying it. But one of our dogs -- probably the Rapscallion Princess -- has been chewing whatever book I was reading in bed. Really: I'd come home and find that the book I'd read the night before had been toted into the living room and eviscerated. I'm not sure if B'sette is having a false pregnancy (and therefore, trying to make a nest), or ticked off about my reading habits, or bothered by the cellist on the second floor practicing scales.

Dennis Lehane's *Shutter Island* is a very intriguing mystery, but it's a little chubby around the middle, esp. compared with his earlier books, the "Patrick Kenzie" series. Lehane could use a crash course in George V. Higgins to learn how to have the dialog tell the story, and a seminar in Elmore Leonard to learn how to pare things down. (How many sentences
do you need to describe someone's lighting and smoking a cigarette?)

Robert B. Parker's *Resolution* is a sequel to his western, *Appaloosa* -- sort of a "Spenser" thriller moved from current Boston to the 19th C. frontier, six-guns instead of wonder-nines, horses instead of motorcars.
Mind 42.com Manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world - collaborative, browser-based and for free.

Spam Proof your email address

Radio3 Do you want to listen to Canadian music on your computer? Excellent site for upcoming concert list, etc.

An Open Source Computer Location Tracking System: A free program helps you get a lost or stolen laptop back.

The Cheap Petrol Project (NZ) Sick of Petrol companies telling you what to pay for your petrol? Thousands of people are more powerfull than one, join us now and get discount petrol!

For Fuel Saving Tips: (NZ) click here, to find out how your vehicle rates for fuel economy click here and for tips to help you be transport efficient click here

SuperMemo algorithm for memorization practice

BMW R1150GS Motorcycle

*Ulyssses* for Dummies

Strange Maps: Manhattan neighborhoods

Recipes: A white sport coat and a pink crustacean  Barbecued Shrimp with Cheese Grits and Spicy Sautéed Shrimp and Cheese Grits

IRD unclaim money (NZ)
Check to see if your name is listed

Petrol price finder (NZ)

The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child

Take my kids please!! For Parents of More Than Usually Trying Children, New Approach May Help

The Company We Keep Character - the influences on the mind that shape the kind of person we are becoming, for better and for worse.

Bookshelf designs

More on David Belle and parkour:
No Obstacles: Navigating the World by Leaps and Bounds
 
The Rise of Parkour: Part Jumping, Part Gymnastics in an Urban Playground

Emily Dickinson Internat'l Society

Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst MA

Recipe: Texas chili [No beans]

Saddle up, lock and load:

Cowboy Mounted Shooting Assn

Mounted Shooters of America

Basketball: The Bill James method of calculating when a college basketball game is
out of reach

Better View Desired Online -- reviews of binoculars and other optics, esp. for birders

Politicker -- "inside politics for political insiders" Fair, objective, non-ideological coverage of local, state, and national politics

Esquivalience and Other Mountweazels

Pop culture as opera

The Cave Paintings of Chauvet date to 30,000 to 32,000 years ago.

Col. Ichabod Conk Shaving Products

Stop using plastic dispo razors, which are environmentally lousy. Likewise aerosol can shaving cream. Go back to the future with safety razors and brush-on soap

Re-Enable Right-Click
When Web Pages Turn It Off

Simply Soups Good recipes

Work Online
If you don't want to use Microsoft products and bloat your computer, use this online tool. It even does databases!

GoSlide.ca/LaGlisse.ca -- Scandinavian kicksled. Can also be used as a dog sled. Cool way to give your kids a ride

Safe2Pee -- find a public bathroom This can be a challenge in USA whereas in NZ, we are civilised (as a foreigner told me) and have them splattered around.


Nissan Cube -- competes with the Honda Element, Scion XB -- possibly
good dog vehicle

100 best mystery novels:

* Mystery Writers of America (PDF)

* H. R. F. Keating

* Independent Mystery Booksellers' Assn

North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission
Interesting recipes

The Most Dangerous Road in World

A Barrel Full of Fun Names, words, notions, etc.

Says You! -- very funny word game show on NPR

Annual Banished Words List from Lake Superior State Univ.

Toiling in the Dream Factory The American movie in the era of the big studios

Vegetarianism in a nutshell: read PETA's Bruce Friedrich's essay on vegetarianism

Richard III Society -- American Branch
www.r3.org

The Universal Heritage Poster Summarizing 13.7 billion yrs in a series of timelines, from the Big
Bang to the 21 C]

72 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena


Recipe: Penne with Pork and Pears

About French All things French. Interesting website

PalindromeList.com

Phonetic Converts phone numbers into words and v. v.

St-Viateur Bagel (Montreal QC)
Very different from what you get in NY or Boston -- equally likable, but just different

Would you like between $25 and $1,000? Open a RaboPlus savings account. You need to click the link to open your cash present

Linda Mecklenburg's Developing Jumping Skills for Awesome Agility Dogs collects some of her superlative articles from Clean Run -- I wish the book had more photographs in addition to the linear graphics, but it's still terrific

Patricia Gail Burnham wrote one of my favorite trng books, Playtraining Your Dog -- I'm told it was meant to be a kind of rebuttal to the mordant severity of Koehler, et al. That was over 20 yrs ago.

Now she has a revised version, Treats, Play, Love: Make Dog Training Fun for You and Your Best Friend. When my copy arrived from Amazon.com , I sort riffled the pages as I walked from the mailbox into the house, and all of a sudden, I was sitting at the table, still wearing my jacket and scarf, and reading the damn thing. It's that good.

Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda is a kind of reader's guide to books and writers he may have omitted from his previous collections. Dirda has one of the chief virtues of a critic -- or teacher, for that matter: he makes you want to read the books he discusses.


The Jenny Damm agility DVDs from Clean Run -- *Handling Foundation* and *Advanced Handling* -- are quite good, esp. once the "talking head" part is done and she's shown working with her dogs.


The Syn Alia Series on Animal Training

        * Animals have lifestyles and cultures very different from ours. This means that they may think humans do some strange stuff and have some stupid ideas and customs. Imagine what your dog thinks when you want to clip his nails. This is not something that his mother recommended he have done. Neither is getting a bath. Here you come along and want to make him smell like a bunch of flowers just after he finally got a great stink going by rolling in a bunch of cow manure.

        * A rule of thumb for all animal trainers: If you have to choose between being liked and being respected, opt for respect. 

* When I train, physical punishment is generally limited to correcting those behaviors which if uncorrected could result in harm or injury to animals or people. Physical punishment is not appropriate
during the learn process, except with aggression. This brings us to another rule of thumb: The trainer does not coerce the animal and tolerates no coercion from the animal. Another axiom of mutual respect.

        * When the trainer returns to an animal after a "time out," [she] should treat the situation as a fresh start, offering a positive, enthusiastic attitude toward the animal. However the trainer should not
relax her standards. If the animal still does not cooperate, [the trainer] should give another "time out" . In general, if an animal fails twice in a row, change what you are doing. If it fails a third time, end
the session and reassess what is causing [or] allowing the animal to fail.


BTW, I watched a science fiction thriller on DVD, Equilibrium, which had been recommended to me for the choreography of its fight scenes -- gunfights like kung fu duels, very interesting. The premise is that in the future, a totalitarian society has banned human emotion as a way of preventing evil.

At one point the hero, who moves from being an enforcer of the totalitarian law to a being an, um, insurgent, discovers love and kindness because of a BMD puppy whom he manages to save.


Understanding Your Dog For Dummies Like all the "Dummies" books, it's pretty good, not great.

A poem by Norman MacCaig, the poet laureate of Edinburgh, "Praise of a Collie" (fair warning: keep a hankie close by):

        She was a small dog, neat and fluid --
        Even her conversation was tiny:
        She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.

        Her sons stood monumentally over her
        But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
        Till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

        Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
        I remarked how dry she was. Pollochan said, "Ah,
        It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie."

        She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
        Where's a burn? -- she's first on the other side.
        She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.

        But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled .
        I grieved for Pollochan when he took her a stroll
        And put his gun to the back of her head.


The latest from Robert B. Parker, Spare Change, is another in the"Sunny Randall" series which seems fresher than the "Spenser" series -- very enjoyable.


A poem by Norman MacCaig, the poet laureate of Edinburgh, "Praise of a Collie" (fair warning: keep a hankie close by):

        She was a small dog, neat and fluid --
        Even her conversation was tiny:
        She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.

        Her sons stood monumentally over her
        But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
        Till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

        Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
        I remarked how dry she was. Pollochan said, "Ah,
        It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie."

        She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
        Where's a burn? -- she's first on the other side.
        She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.

        But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled .
        I grieved for Pollochan when he took her a stroll
        And put his gun to the back of her head.


A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro concerns the year WS wrote in part or wholly Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, andHamlet (not bad. Sort of a MACH-OTCH-UDX-CT sort of thing).

What was going on in his life then? What was going on in his society? Oh, just a rebellion in Ireland, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the usual religious strife and political feuds, the death of a child, the loss of some friends, vicissitudes of business. The book has a slightly academic style, but is very enjoyable, very perceptive -- scholarly without being pedantic.


Couple of good mysteries:

The Accidental American by Alex Carr (pseudonym for Jenny Siler) is a pretty good thriller, with an interesting background of the Lebanese civil war and the internecine treacheries of espionage and smuggling.

George Shulman's 18 Seconds, which has a premise I'd ordinary avoid: the detective heroine, who's blind, has a preternatural ability to tap into the short-term memory of a dead person, to see what that person saw in the last few seconds of life. Yeah, it's silly, but Shulman manages to make it plausible and eerie. The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism by James Geary
is very enjoyable mixture of brief biographies and commentaries -- and
of course, samples. Might be a nice book for a youngster.

Finally getting around to Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series , I started Killing Floor, the first in the series and was enjoying it. But one of our dogs -- probably the Rapscallion Princess -- has been chewing whatever book I was reading in bed. Really: I'd come home and find that the book I'd read the night before had been toted into the living room and eviscerated. I'm not sure if B'sette is having a false pregnancy (and therefore, trying to make a nest), or ticked off about my reading habits, or bothered by the cellist on the second floor practicing scales.

On the Recent Publication of Kahlil Gibran's *Collected Works* by Alan
Jacobs [Very funny and acerbic -- sort of combining parody with book review]

"Rerunning Film Noir" by Richard Schickel

Collection of articles and essays on film noir

Edward Tufte highlights some news graphics done by Megan Jaegerman for
the New York Times

Recipe: The Pasta Salad That Rhymes with O [Tomato, chorizo, pistacchio]

Imaging Resource -- digital camera reviews

Fone Finder -- locate by phone number

Mnemonic Devices for Students
"Dr. (and) Mrs. Vandertrampp" for list of French verbs that take *etre*
instead of *avoir*

Mnemonic Devices
(hard to read background)
"May I have a large container of coffee?" = pi to seven places

Baked French Toast

Walking sticks and canes USA

Walking sticks in New Zealand

Mark Poyser's diagrams -- Wars of the Roses, etc.


The Bixby Letter
Made famous by *Saving Private Ryan*, the letter purportedly by Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby on the news of the death of her five sons in the Civil War. Well, the letter may have been written by Lincoln's secretary; Mrs. Bixby was a Confederate sympathizer; and it was two sons died in battle,
not five. Still a superb piece of prose

Letters - New Zealand in the South African ('Boer') War

Excursion to Gulag (Elena Filatova)
Another of her photo-esssays -- here abandoned Stalin-era prison camps

Souvlaki recipes

Kids in the Kitchen

Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Lots of stuff, somewhat academic, covering fiction and film

Laws of Software Development

"19 Eponymous Laws of Software Development"


Grilled corn on the cob

Miles Davis[Look up "cool" in the dictionary. He's the illustration next to the
definition. Steve McQueen, Chow Yun-Fat, all those others, are just also-rans

Fancyapint -- guide to UK pubs

I wrote an article called Periodic Tableware , about how people have taken the periodic table of the elements and adapted the form in interesting ways. Since then, I've run across quite a few more examples.

11 Central Ave -- This four-minute radiostrip plays out in the kitchen of 11 Central Ave, the home of an extended family where a hodgepodge of other characters regularly drops in.

Wild Mushroom & Roast Garlic Sandwich

Two views of the controversy about climate change:

Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society" by Freeman Dyson

Rebuttal by Alun Anderson


"A Literary Knight's Tour": Solution


Yuwie vs My Space The difference
between Yuwie and, say, MySpace is that it shares its advertising revenue with its members on the basis that the more you use it, the more you make.

How to Tie the 10 Most Useful Knots
Very nice illustrations

Travlang's Language & Travel Resources
Translation, language learning, currency conversion

A very quick meal -- chickpeas and chorizo -- various recipes, mainly
Iberian

Tank on Empty
[How far can your car go when the fuel warning light comes on?
For R's Honda Element

Grilled Skirt Steak with Caramelized Butter & Cumin

Better Homes & Garden Home
Improvement Encyclopedia

Walk Score
-- how walkable is your house? Rating for what you can walk to in your neighborhood.

Spam

"Henry David Thoreau & the Hard Boiled Dick" by Lonnie Willis
[The detective as transcendentalist]

Climate change: A guide for the perplexed
Myths and truths

Results from the *MythBusters* TV show
Do you stay drier running in the rain or walking in it?

A Hamburger Today (Adam Kuban)
Blog on burgers. (The name derives from a phrase used by Popeye's friend Wimpy.) Sinfully omits two joints in MA -- Bartley's in Harvard Sq and the White Hut in W. Springfield

Thinking with Type Online companion to *Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for
Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students* by Ellen Lupton

Anyway, needing a dose of  macho shoot-em-up until I could find a replacement copy of the Child book, I started the new one by Robert Crais, The Watchman: A Joe Pike Novel (Joe Pike Novels), in which Joe Pike is the lead character and Elvis Cole is sort of the sidekick. (This is like my childhood comic books when Tonto or Robin appeared without the Lone Ranger or Batman.) Pretty good as usual. And we're going to close the bedroom door when we leave for work, so B-girl can't editorialize my reading.

*A Useful Dog* by Donald McCaig collects some of his shorter pieces, mostly on sheepdogs. Very nice little gift book.


New training book Flatwork Foundation for Agility by Barb Levenson -- is just superb, one of the best trng books I've seen in a while. Levenson is accomplished in obedience as well as agility , so the book has a lot that's applicable to obedience and rally, esp. on how your body language cues your dog, perhaps intentionally, perhaps
inadvertently.

The sections on circle work, meant to teach an agility dog serpentines and other sequences, is helpfully relevant to the F8 and changes of pace in heeling. I loved the section on shaping a dog to stand with his front feed on a box (say, a phone book) as a way of getting the dog to maneuver his butt. (At her recent seminar in RI, Debbie Zappia did something similar, because it's useful to teach the dog physical self-control for, say, stand-stay exercises.) Nicely written, nicely illustrated (well, my aging eyes would have liked a larger format).


Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it, wrote a kind of adventure novel, If Not Now, When? (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics), about a band of Jewish partisans who, in the finale of WW2, made their way from Russia to Italy in hopes of getting to Palestine -- sort of an updated *Anabasis* with automatic weapons.


The Triumph of the Thriller by Patrick Anderson replays some of his reviews of crime and mystery fiction from the *Washington Post*.

Anderson is very good on Hammett and Chandler -- well, the whole book is good, although now and then he lapses into the kind of plot summaries you expect in high school book reports, as though proving to the teacher than you did, in fact, read the book.


 

A poem by David Budbill, "Winter: Tonight:
Sunset":

        Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
        my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

        through the woods, then out into the open fields
        past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

        and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
        green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

        I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
        and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

        a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
        in this life, in this evening, under this sky.


From Agility Warehouse in the UK, a little pamphlet called Your First Obedience Show: A Survival Guide written by a couple of teenagers, Sally Rowe & Rachel Dowman.
Compared with the simply trinity of American obedience classes, British obedience seems to me to be as incomprehensible and unnatural as cricket. American obedience classes are sort of like academic degrees -- Novice =
Bachelor, Open = Master, Utility = Doctor. British obedience is some sort of class and caste hierarchy, like the peerage.


I'd skipped the last couple or three Elmore Leonard novels, because he seemed to have locked into a Hollywood view of himself -- an offshoot of his commercial success -- with almost sitcom settings and characters instead of the straight-ahead realism of his earlier fiction.

But between symptoms of the 1918 flu this week, I started The Hot Kid which seems pretty good, a return to an era Leonard has written well about before. ("Well about before"? Now there's a trio. This is what the flu does to your syntax. Not pretty.)


A poem by John Ciardi, "Suburban":

Yesterday Mrs. Friar phoned. "Mr. Ciardi,
how do you do?" she said. "I am sorry to say
this isn't exactly a social call. The fact is
your dog has just deposited --forgive me--a large repulsive object in my petunias."

I thought to ask, "Have you checked the rectal grooving
for a positive I.D.?" My dog, as it happened,
was in Vermont with my son, who had gone fishing --
if that's what one does with a girl, two cases of beer,
and a borrowed camper. I guessed I'd get no trout.

But why lose out on organic gold for a wise crack?
"Yes, Mrs. Friar," I said, "I understand."
"Most kind of you," she said. "Not at all," I said.
I went with a spade. She pointed, looking away.
"I always have loved dogs," she said, "but really!"

I scooped it up and bowed. "The animal of it.
I hope this hasn't upset you, Mrs. Friar."
"Not really," she said, "but really!" I bore the turd
across the line to my own petunias
and buried it till the glorious resurrection

when even these suburbs shall give up their dead.


The History Net: The Wild West

Diagram of the interstate highway system

The Generic Casserole Recipe

Duck confit -- various recipes:
* culinarycafe.com
* epicurious.com

Cambridge History of English and American Literature
encyclopedia, reputedly definitive for its time

Sun Tzu on The Art of War

The singular *they* in the Bible (KJV)

Karen Armstrong on prayer

Chorizo with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Cider
Of many variations on the classic Iberian pairing of chorizo and apple cider, this one is a little more robust, more of a meal than tapas. You could put it over pasta or rice, of course, or serve it with oven-fries or just some hearty bread for sopping up the sauce

9th and 10th eds. of Encyclopedia Britannica (1875, 1902)
Reputedly among the most scholarly editions

Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, an Oral History
by Jeff Kisseloff

Mathematical Quotations

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
Pi for pie chart, Tb for table, Hi, for histogram, etc.

Shorpy, the 100-yr old photo blog
What life used to look like

"Spy Games: The literary -- and literal? -- life of Ross Thomas" by Roger L. Simon
If you haven't read Ross Thomas's thrillers, well, I envy you the joy of discovery

Global Gourmet Foodie reviews, recipes, etc.

Typetester -- to compare fonts for the screen
Nice little tool for Web developers

Judge William Young's statement in sentencing the "shoe bomber," Richard
Reid

Animated Exercise Examples


2008 Central -- coverage of the presidential campaign

Right triangle calculator and Pythagorean theorem calculator

50th anniversary of the Helvetica typeface

Grilled cheese sandwich with a steam iron {This may be important to Uni. students in less luxurious dormitories]

Rhymezone Shakespeare Search

Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook
Oxfordian -- that is, supports the claim that Shakespeare's plays were
written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford

HarpWeek -- American history through Harper's Weekly, starting 1857

Official Robert's Rules of Order

Heath Robinson -- sort of a British version of Rube Goldberg

More on the car chase scene in *Bullitt*

Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines

Nissan Xterra Not as cool as a Land Rover Defender r a Toyota FJ -- or a Jeep for
that matter -- but it would be OK.

The Routine Autopsy -- the Procedure Related in Narrative Form: A Guide for Screenwriters and Novelists (Ed Uthman, MD)

Time and Date

You can generate a calendar for any year, and you can customize it variously, such as having the weeks start on Mon and end on Sun, which is very nice for tracking doggy events on the weekends.

Learn CPR -- Includes information on CPR for cats and dog.

PBS *American Experience* episode on New Orleans
Don't miss the section on gumbo, and how the recipe recapitulates ethnic history

Housekeeping Channel
Articles such as "Eight Myths of Vacuuming"

John Gall's *Systemantics*
Laws of system failures

Village Smokehouse

Chez Schwartz -- BJL's latest film
Schwartz's is the legendary Jewish deli in Montreal, purveyor of smoked meat which is sort of like Romanian pastrami and one of the great foods of the Western world.

Marsha Wilcox's photography
Very nice. Don't miss the one of the Blonde Assassin, squinting like a bank robber casing a job.

2500 words for cursing the weather

Seven wonders for each state

Dave Barry interview in *Reason* magazine Possibly the funniest guy who's ever lived

The Most Dangerous Roads in the World

Geoffrey Nunberg's timeline for the history of information

Fred's Recipes

Rear Adm. Dr. Grace Murray Hopper
The greatest genius I've ever met

Map24 -- another map & directions site, U.S., Canada, Europe

More on "less" and "fewer"

Striplings sauces, sausage, etc. (GA)
Mystery File A "crime fiction research journal" about mystery novels and novelists

Food 411 -- foodie resources
Links for online shopping, etc.

Internet Tutorials
Hints on Web searching and researching

Dutch for Beginners --- grammar and vocabulary & forbeginners.info

Literature Map
Type in the name of an author and get a conceptual map of authors that people who like that author also read, whether related by topical interests (John McPhee to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, etc.) or style.

Robert Louis Stevenson's prayers written at Vailima He wrote these for family and friends while in Samoa. They're quite beautiful, even to an unrepentant atheist like me. You might find a copy of Stevenson's *Prayers* via a Web search -- the edition published a few years ago by a small press in California is an especially beautiful
little book which would make a lovely gift.

830! How a Massachusetts carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever

Grilled Lobsters with Southeast Asian Dipping Sauce


Mutt Lynch Winery

Merlot Over and Play Dead, Portrait of a Mutt Zinfandel, and Canis Major Zinfandel, Syrah, and Cabernet, etc. I've had some of these and they were pretty good

Raymond Chandler
At his best, he ranks with Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Nathanael West. "[She] was a blonde . to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." -- *Farewell, My Lovely*

NC Sweet Potato Commission -- recipes


Every Rule -- sports, board games, quiz shows, etc.


NotStarring.com
Movies and movie stars -- and the roles they didn't get

10 Shades of Noir
Introduction to film noir

Shakespeare Searched -- a search engine for the bard

Perpetual calendar (Karen Deal Robinson)

The Archimedes Palimpsest

At least his dog didn't chew it up. Amazing bit of scientific detection.

History of Sandwiches


WorldCat online computer library ctr
Purportedly the largest library network in the world. I haven't played with this yet, but Teri seems to think it's pretty good.

ASL University Resources for teachers and students

Alaska is, well, big, very big

North Carolina Barbecue Quest

Separated by a Common Language
[Blog on the differences between British and American English, by a Yank linguist living in the UK]

"September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden
["As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade"]

When Smokey Sings What's Smokey Robinson been up to? Well, he recorded an album of jazz standards (like every other ageing rock/pop singer) and he's got a line of food products

 

Stanley CorenFinishing Stanley Coren's latest, Why Does My Dog Act That Way: A Complete Guide to Your Dog's Personality which contains a gruesome account of an organized dog fight (with pit bulls) and the kind of breeding and training operation to produce fighting dogs.

Unfortunately, Coren's commentaries and analyses may tend to support breed banning and prejudices against this or that breed. People with Labs and Goldens,
Beagle, Poodles -- won't understand this, but for those of us with prick-eared, point-nose, black-faced dogs, it's very much a concern, and perhaps more of a worry for people with Rotties and bully breeds. Given the idiotic breed bans in Ontario, Coren isn't helpful here by chiming
in with what is, in the end, arguable opinion.


Bruce Fogle is a vet in the UK and prolific author of dog books. I came across his Travels with Macy in which he and his Golden Retriever retrace the route of John Steinbeck and his Poodle in Travels with Charley. I'm not sure if the book is published in the States. Boston and Cambridge have bookstores which carry some UK books.

Fogle writes well, although without the spirit humor and self-mockery of, say, Bill Bryson. Also, Fogle strikes me as a less than savvy trainer.

FWIW, Steinbeck & Charley made their trek in an old truck. Fogle & Macy are in a spiffy RV. I'd love to do a similar trip -- maybe a quest for barbecue through the South and into Kansas -- with Quip or Bluesette or Deasil. Yeah, Deasil, because Goldens magnetically attract young women. D-boy isn't quite as adept at this as Lindy or Cody, eitherof whom we could have rented out to lonely bachelors who wanted to meet nubile women.


Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers I know. If you haven't read any of his books, well, I envy you the joy of discovery.

The problem with Bryson is that if you're reading any of his books while anyone is nearby, you start reading whole passages aloud while gasping in laughter. This isn't so bad unless the person nearby is Roseann who, inexplicably, doesn't like Bryson.

To me, that's as bizarre as not liking pistachio ice cream. Bryson's latest,  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, describes growing up in '50s Iowa with his slightly ditzy parents and the slightly ditzy culture.


Bruce Fogle is a vet in the UK and prolific author of dog books. I came across his Travels with Macy in which he and his Golden Retriever retrace the route of John Steinbeck and his Poodle in Travels with Charley. I'm not sure if the book is published in the States. Boston and Cambridge have bookstores which carry some UK books.

Fogle writes well, although without the spirit
humor and self-mockery of, say, Bill Bryson. Also, Fogle strikes me as a less than savvy trainer.

FWIW, Steinbeck & Charley made their trek in an old truck. Fogle & Macy are in a spiffy RV. I'd love to do a similar trip -- maybe a quest for barbecue through the South and into Kansas -- with Quip or Bluesette or Deasil. Yeah, Deasil, because Goldens magnetically attract young women. D-boy isn't quite as adept at this as Lindy or Cody, eitherof whom we could have rented out to lonely bachelors who wanted to meet nubile women.Among my vacation reading was *Drive* by James Sallis
( www.jamessallis.com ), a nice little *noir* thriller. Also, two more of volumes in the "Spirit of Thoreau* series -- Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education and Material Faith: Thoreau on Science.

*… And Be Merry: A Feast of Light Verse and a Soupçon of Prose About the Joy of Eating*, ed. William Cole -- very enjoyable collection of poems and quips on wine, cheese -- you can expect some snippets to appear in
"Quotes of the Week" by and by.


Nobody asked me, but...

It's that time of year when you may be obliged to contribute to the greater glory of American (and world) capitalism -- and bestow gifts upon friends and kin. So, here, gleaned from this years' weekly missives, are some books and videos which I thought were pretty good in 2005.

This was the year of the pamphlet -- some of the best doggy reading was in pamphlet or booklet form, including new editions of old favorites, such as Try Tracking by Carolyn Krause, an update of The Puppy Tracking Primer, one of the better books (or booklets) on tracking. This is ideal to give someone just getting started in tracking.

Likewise, for someone getting started in agility, Cindy Buckholt has a new version of her pamphlet, Competing in Agility: Entering Trials and What to Do When You Get There.

And there's a new edition of Patricia McConnell's excellent booklet, The Cautious Canine, which should be required reading for all dog owners, even if your dog isn't fearful or skittish. It's simply the best brief guide to counter-conditioning and de-sensitizing to solve real training problems.

If you could get copies cheap enough to hand out, John Rogerson's little pamphlet, How to Get Your Dog to Play, would be very worthwhile for KPT and beginners obedience. One of the ways in which Novice is
painful to watch <smirk> is that the handlers have such limited
relationships with their dogs. They don't play with their dogs in
warmups or between exercises, because, I suppose, they don't know how
to.

A booklet by Dara & Les Flores,*Schutzhund Handler Trial Tips
(), helped at least three people this year get through the BH test, and I suspect my dog-eared copy of this booklet
will get passed along to some other friends whom I'm trying to sucker into the B.

Operant conditioning was all over the bookshelves this year. There's the first of a planned series of agility DVDs by Julie Daniels, Agility Fix-It: Contacts & Weaves. Daniels is great to watch, has that same grace and clarity of gesture in agility handler that you associate with some of the best handlers in obedience.

Despite my persistent doubts and deprecations about "pure positive" training, I loved Susan Garrett's book, Shaping Success: The Education of an Unlikely Champion. I've been reading it in a kind of iteratively looping fashion, a chapter or two at a time, then going back to re-read sections. The focus is agility, but the book is worth reading for obedience or other training.

And, of course, there's a new edition, substantially revised, of The Culture Clash by Jean Donaldson, one of the most influential dog books of the past 10 years or more, and a sort of Talmudic document for pure positive trainers. Donaldson may be the best dog writer on the planet -- her column in Dogs in Canada is alone worth the price of a subscription.

Speaking of Canadian magazines: D in C is pretty good, but the best dog magazine I know of is Dog Sport from
Canada. There's nothing like it in the U.S., except Clean Run for agility. Magazine subscriptions are always nice gifts.

A few more DVDs: Of Belgianological interest, the Rt. Hon. Russ Beach's Grooming from Nose to Tail & Handling Seminar" is excellent. I've passed it on to a couple of people who don't have Tervs and they still found it informative and entertaining. At one point, I tried watching it with my dogs and a bunch of combs, brushes, and clippers laid out on the carpet, in hopes Quip and Bluesette would learn a little about self-grooming. Nope.

The U.S. Mondioring Assn has a DVD of the 2004
Internat'l Championship in Spain. There are rumors of Mondio
obedience -- that is, sans bitework -- and I think that would be a hoot.

The Underdog is a documentary about SchH, in particular a guy named Kevin Lanouette going to Europe to train
and to buy some GSDs, and then competing at the SchH nat'l. Like all good documentaries, it reveals rather more about the people than they might have intended when they agreed to be filmed.

The best training book of the year is Building a Bridge: From Training to Testing by Marsha Smith & Shalini Bosbyshell. Very sensible approach to training and good hints on how to practice; good advice on attention training. This would be a terrific book for a Novice to read.

The best non-training doggy book of the year is First Friend: A History of Dogs and Humans by Katherine Rogers.

And the overall best dog book of the year: Making the Connection , a posthumous collection of Donna Rioux's e-mail
messages on the BouvTrain list, giving you an insight into the life and practices of an accomplished, dedicated, and thoughtful dog person.


New edition of Patricia McConnell's excellent booklet, The Cautious Canine, which should be required reading for all dog owners, even if you don't have a fearful or skittish dog. The changes in the second
edition are pretty minor. The chief difference is that McConnell no longer uses the term "desensitization," and she has dropped the final step in her treatment plan, presumably for simplicity's sake.


Irresistibly handy reading for the subway, The Shakespeare Miscellany by David & Ben Crystal, esp. for some of the comments by various actors
and directors. There are some very handy explanations of "false friends," words whose meanings have changed since Shakespeare's time.

The Crystals also make a good deal out of when a character uses "thou" or "you," although in some cases, I think their analyses are less than cogent. The rules for second person pronouns in Elizabethan English were complex and vague, a mixture of grammar and manners; I suspect some instances of this or that pronoun were just, well, whatever Shakespeare happened to jot down, rather than the kind of intricate shading of meaning the Crystals infer.


The current issue of Dog and Kennel magazine has a cover story on the Belgian Tervuren, including sage advice from
two aesculapian doyens of the breed, Rt. Hon. Libbye Miller and Rt. Hon. Deb Eldredge. The cover photo isn't very good, but inside there's a nice picture of one of Libbye's dogs.

The Battle of Mogadishu, ed. Matt Eversmann & Dan Schilling, is an account of the Battle of the Black Sea (that's the official name in U.S. military annals) as in the movie and book Black Hawk Down -- this time, by some of the men who were in the fight.

The latest issue of Dog Sport magazine (www.dogsportmagazine.com)
focuses on obedience and is especially excellent. This magazine, from Canada, is always good, and I end up making copies of this or that article for friends at CRDTC; this month, I should like to have run the whole issue through the copier.


Needed something to read on a train ride recently; the trip was going to be long enough I didn't want to risk a book I mightn't like. So I got a copy of Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry, the excellent sequel to his excellent first novel, The Butcher's Boy. All of Perry's books are good (and some are superb), and they hold up well on re-reading. In this one, after several years of quiet retirement in the UK, the Butcher's Boy, once a hired killer, is spotted by a young mobster who sets off a
hunt. In a lesser writer, this would simply be a brutal tale, more about weaponry than the people using it.



Came across the following uncredited advice on www.thepuppyplace.org:

Most experts agree that Tug-of-War teaches dogs to compete against their handlers, and they advise against this aggressive game. That's certainly true of Tug-of-War, but Tug-of-Peace is different. It teaches self-control, instead, and provides an "off switch" for excitement. Begin by telling Fido to take the toy, then encourage him to tug a little before you ask for it back using the techniques described in teaching Thank You/Take It.

When he releases, praise him. Teach Fido to pull only as vigorously as you do. Let the toy slip through your fingers if he pulls too hard. When you let go without tugging, Fido won't feel he's beaten you and may quickly give the toy back, hoping you'll hold on a bit tighter. Everyone wins Tug-of-Peace, because it's really not a competition; it's a game of cooperation. Keep in mind that even though Tug-of-Peace is a positive game, it should be played in moderation. Overly rough tugging can cause a dogneck strain or jaw problems. Children and dogs must be supervised whenplaying Tug.


Another of Alan Furst's superb spy thrillers set before and during World War II. Furst seems to like having a dog make an appearance in his novels. In *The Polish Officer*, a Tetra (sort of the Polish version of a Kuvasz or Maremma). In *The World at Night*, a Terv named Tempête. In
this one,*Kingdom of Shadows* a Groen named Séléne, and later on, a pack of very funny Vizslas.

Came across a reprinting of *The Dog in British Poetry*, an anthology first published in 1893. Some of the poetry is, um, very minor, and some of it is enjoyable if sentimental. Interesting how much we have lost in
familiarity with classical literature, history, and myth (some
retellings here of Odysseus & Argus, of Gelert the loyal Irish
Wolfhound, and so on).

Horse Breeds of the World

Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction


The Great Taco Hunt: A guide to the Los Angeles taco scene

Wrap It Up: A Guide to Mexican Street Tacos

CIA World Factbook U.S. govt's complete geographical handbook -- country profiles. Very
nice

Internat'l Cat Agility Tournaments I'm not making this up!

Hidden In-n-Out Burger Secret Menu

Political Compass -- assess your political position, left/right,
libertarian/authoritarian

Popular Cookie Recipes

CliveJames.com

Tour of Central Park West, NYC

Martin Waugh's Liquid Sculpture
Photographs of fluids in motion. You'll never look at a kersplash of morning coffee in the same way again

MissAbigail.com -- etiquette advice based on a collection of books from 1822--1978

Tex's French Grammar (Univ. of TX at Austin)

Chili Recipe
[Jive. Some of 'em have beans. Gah!]

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April--May 1943

Everypoet.com -- another very good poetry repository

Professor Solomon -- How to Find Lost Objects

Ithaki meta-search

ProCon.org -- Pros & Cons of Controversial Issues
Nonprofit, nonpartisan presentation of the arguments for and againsts
this or that

The Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Daniel C. Dennett
Jokes for philosophy majors

Shrimp & Smoked Tomato Marinara -- recipe from the Gumbo Shop in New
Orleans LA

The parable of the two wolves

"A Short Walk in the Wakhan Corridor" by Mark Jenkins-- Terrific article -- originally in Outside magazine, 11/2005 -- about trekking and climbing in a remote part of Afghanistan.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin: Interactive map of the NYC subway system

Going to New York? New York Subway Finder- Subway directions to any Manhattan street in seconds

Obituaries 101 Links to all the obits in all U.S. newspapers. Useful if you're waiting to inherit

Ode to Joy (*An die Freude*)
wikipedia's definition

North American Bear Nice slide show

Power naps

SNOW WOES PLAGUE IQALUIT HOMEOWNERS
The thought of a caribou sliding off their roof was the last straw for
a family in Iqaluit whose house is buried under snowdrifts every
winter. Now, they want to sue the city.

McCormick "En-spice-lopedia" -- herb and spice encyclopedia [Kinder to chervil than I should think is deserved]

Smart Money's 10 Things Archive
[What you don't know will scare the crap out of you]

IVR Cheat Sheet™ Repeatedly pressing 0, *, or # often works, but it's not as emotionally satisfying as a .45 ACP double-tap to the headset

Simplehuman household tools, utensils, etc.

The Greatest Discovery Since Fire Origins of the microwave oven

Anthony Bourdain, chef and author
I rather liked all of his books. The foodie ones are as though Hunter
Thompson was having lunch with Calvin Trillin and Julie Child and spiked the wine with LSD; the fiction,(esp. the Bobby Gold stories, reminded me of Elmore Leonard.

Optical illusion- If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot...

AnsMe.com dictionary Definitions, rhymes, etc.

The Hundred Greatest Theorems From the irrationality of the square root of 2 (always a crowd favourite) to Descartes' Rule of Signs (which, of course, is unknown to
Boston drivers)

The Why Files -- The Science Behind the News

Cans to Cups Conversion An 8 OZ can is 1 CUP

Plain English: A User's Guide by Phillip Davies Roberts. Whenever I read a book on English usage, I feel unsteady in writing or speaking for having been shown the chasms of error one might fall into.

How to Shuffle and Cut a Deck of Cards One-Handed

WhiteBlaze.net -- Appalachian Trail hiking

The Pocket Mod Oh, this is nice. It's an online -- or downloadable -- application for
creating a simple pocket memo book, with various kinds of pages youmight want (lists, calendars, grids, etc.). You print on, say, 8½X11 and then follow the instructions for folding]

272 words -- November 19, 1863

Noah's ark quiz I was 80%, which is pretty decent for an atheist

Smooth skin with Photoshop

Anagram Genius

iGourmet.com -- specialty foods, esp. cheeses

The Reduced Shakespeare Company

Razzle Dazzle Recipes
Holiday recipes, esp. grilling and barbecue

Newspaperindex
Links to online newspapers in all countries

War Poetry of the WW1 and Today
Plus ça change…

Cuisine Perel
Unusual vinegars in unusual bottles. I've marinated pork loin in the black fig vinegar, and I want to try the blood orange vinegar to make a glaze for paillards of duck -- add a little red wine, maybe honey, lemon zest, minced shallot, some herbs

Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp.
NPO to recycle portable rechargeable batteries. These batteries contain
toxic materials, so you really shouldn't just toss the batteries into the trash. This site contains a map for locating a recycler near you

Interactive Chessboard with Diagram Editor

Disabled Travelers.com

Beginners Guide to Computer Hardware

Why is Baseball So Much Better Than Football? Only as Americans know Classic article by one of the better baseball writers around.

Illustrated History of the Roman Empire

Paula Wolfert, author of several cookbooks, mainly Mediterranean

CIA World Factbook One of the best sources of current information on geography, politics,
economics, climate, and so on, for any country. Each time Kim tells me she's on standby for a search in some gawdforksaken Third World
backwater, I check the CIA book for a summary and -- sad to say -- it's almost always bleak. The world seems rife with narcoterrorists,
ex-revolutionaries turned kidnappers, and straight-ahead, old-fashioned pirates, brigands, and barbarians

Building a Bridge: From Training to Testing* by Marsha Smith & Shalini Bosbyshell is
likable little book with a sensible approach to training. "Dog Talent + Human Talent + Time Spent Practicing = Training Results."
I really thought this book was going to be some New Age crap compounded with religious clicker training, "animal communication," and criminal assaults on English usage; but instead, the book is quite sensible and helpful, quite enjoyable.

Smith points out that obedience is the only dog sport in which the team works in nearly total silence -- at least in trialing. The handler can't coach the dog during a trial, whereas in tracking, you can praise and encourage the dog as he's working the scent, in agility you can be as voluble as your lung capacity allows, and so on. Smith presents a scheme for progressing from teaching and motivating, to confidence building,
and finally to proofing and trialing.

In the first phase, where we spend most of our training time, we tend to do a lot of talking and give the dog lots of extra cues and reinforcements. The danger is that we then leap into the testing phase which is largely silent and unrewarding (except, say, a jackpot given after you leave the ring). We need a middle phase of more limited chatter and reinforcement, so the dog learns that the dog works confidently and assuredly even when the handler is silent.

The book also has some techniques for attention training-- not much new there, but very well presented. If there's still money in the budget, I'll nudge Roseann into ordering a copy for the CRDTC library.


The World at Night by Alan Furst, another of his superb WW2 thrillers about spies and treachery. This one, and Red Gold, deal with the unlikely hero Jean Casson, a French film producer who gets caught up in
the Resistance. Interestingly, Casson has a sumptuous country lunch with, among other things, Andouille cook in vinegar


LET DOGS BE DOGS, PETA PRESIDENT ADVISES IN NEW BOOK
April 15, 2005
Is Rover excavating the azaleas? Is Fifi barking at the door? Before you scold your canine companions, stop to consider why your dogs are acting the way they are—and what they’re trying to tell you. In her new book, Making Kind Choices: Everyday Ways to Enhance Your Life Through Earth- and Animal-Friendly Living (St. Martin’s Griffin), PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk presents a refreshingly simple approach to living with dogs: Let them be dogs
.

Royal Canin, the dog food maker, has some interesting books for sale, including *Practical Guide to Sporting and Working Dogs Practical Guide
for Sporting and Working Dogs* by Dr. Dominique Grandjean, DVM, et al.

This book was cited recently in an column in *AKC Gazette*. The titular participles aren't designations of breed groups but of activities. Most of the book deals with health care and related topics for performance dogs. A couple of chapters briefly descrbe various dog sports and activities, French-style.

For example, there are two sections on truffle-hunting dogs. The summary of French obedience competition is quite interesting, but unfortunately it's mostly about the classes and scoring system, sans details of the exercises. Each exercise or aspect of performance is scored on a 10 scale; some exercises have a coefficient to double or triple their value. Some nice pictures.

The translation (from French) is awkward here and there, and Aussies are called Australian Bouviers, not Shepherds, but the book looks very comprehensive, and yes, we bought one for the CRDTC library, too. Meandering through a bunch of books, catching up, finishing off, going back. A snippet from "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" --

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
our dishonest mood of denial, the concupiscence of the oppressor.

-- drove me back to Auden's *Selected Poems*, the Mendelson edition which restores some earlier versions and some poems which Auden had disowned. Also reading The Easiest Thing in the World, a collection of short fiction by George V. Higgins. Some of the stories remind you of
O'Hara, whom Higgins idolized, and Fitzgerald, but also of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford.


picture
Hopscotch
, a very clever spy novel. Some good writing here and there, and some clunks.

Susan Barwig & Stuart Hilliard, Schutzhund: Theory & Training Methods
book

A good dog trainer is patient. He understands that training takes time and is willing to spend the time. He is intelligent, and he thinks clearly about what effect his actions will have upon the dog. Also, he has "feeling," an accurate intuition for what makes dogs do the things that they do. He is decisive -- fast-handed and effective in all that he does. He is not dogmatic, but flexible -- always ready to reexamine his own beliefs and methods and adapt them to the particular nature of his pupil.

A good trainer is emotionally disciplined and has an even disposition. He is not prone to temper tantrums and can administer both praise and
punishment appropriately. When he physically punishes the animal, he does so impartially -- he punishes as the result of a thoughtful decision to use force in order to get results, rather than from wrath and the desire to relieve some of his frustration by taking vengeance upon the dog.

The trainer must have integrity, in the sense that he is his own person and does not depend upon his dog's behavior or performance to give him a
sense of worth or importance.

Finally, the good dog trainer has a worldly understanding of his pupil, and knows it for a dog and only a dog.

 

A. C. Grayling, professor of philosophy at Univ. of London, seems to be the heir to Bertrand Russell -- not only for the lefty humanism, but also the clear, "plain" style (a tradition of English prose associated with Orwell, Shaw, Hazzlitt, Swift) and a way of bringing logic and clarity to the problems and issues of real life and ordinary people. I'm
reading his *Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God*, a
collection of his brief essays, from the *Guardian*'s "Saturday Review" section, which have relatively low percentage of blather (unusual for any regular column).


Book by Martha Covington Thorne, Handling Your Own Dog for Show, Obedience, and Field Trials:

Four St. Bernard breeders returning from a show were trapped in a mountain snowstorm. Seeking help, they sent the first dog,aparticularly typey specimen, but his foreshortened face made breathinga problem and the snow built up in his haws, so he couldn't proceed.

The second dog, bred for color and size, collapsed from
dysplasia. [Yeah, you see where this is going, huh?]

The third dog was free health problems but it couldn't
negotiate the snow drifts because of its generally unsound structure.

The last dog, a faultless mover with none of the others'
defects, had been bred to the letter of the standard. On the move, he was flawless. So his breeder proudly watched his big, handsome St. Bernard drive into the blinding storm just like the rescue dogs of old.
The dog made it up the road almost effortlessly. A passing state trooper saw the dog and stopped to investigate. As he got out of the patrol car, the dog attacked and ate him.

Incidentally, the book by Marta Thorne, though out of print, is quite good -- an old-fashioned (1960s) book from the days when people wrote and read at length -- indeed, it's really too long, too chatty and discursive, as though Thorne figured no atom of advice could be offered without two-pages of supportive anecdote -- and also from a time when
people actually showed sporting dogs in breed, obedience, and field. Agility Fix-It: Contacts & Weaves* by Julie Daniels is purportedly the first of a planned series of DVDs. It's quite good. No, it's excellent.
Clear, concise explanation of clicker training and operant conditioning.
Very nice instructional sequences on the two great bugaboos of agility, contact zones and weave poles. Excellent production values and good use of the technology (that is, the navigational advantages of DVD over,
say, video tape).

Daniels has a certain aspect of demeanor which I associate with other very accomplished dog trainers, irrespective of
methodology or sport.

The Easiest Thing in the World: The Uncollected Fiction of George V. Higgins -- for some reason, he didn't have the audience in the U.S. which he enjoyed in the UK, except, of course, among writers and readers who knew that Higgins was a master of dialogue -- and monologue.

For a friend, I got Ski Spot Run: The Enchanting World of Skijoring and Related Dog-Powered Sports by Matt Haakenstad & John Thompson, and then read it myself. It's quite well done, very funny, good illustrations.
There's a little bit about bikejoring and rollerjoring, and even cani-cross, too (which is trail-running with a dog attached to a waist leash, the kind of thing I imagine Ray Desmarais doing before he became an old fart). Nice book, which may be hard to find.

Nice jute Frisbee-type toy with a squeaker. Double thick. Seems pretty sturdy, but hard
for the dog to pick up on the flat, and its aerodynamic properities are virtually nil -- might as well be trying to throw a slice of whole wheat bread. Best suited as a training toy, not for serious exercise.

Darlene Arden's, Unbelievably Good Deals and Great Adventures That You Absolutely Can't Get Unless You're a Dog
is a compendium of
suggestions on dog-related shopping, travel, and other topics. Scant on performance and dog sports, but if you want to know where to buy gifty
stuff, gourmet biscuits and other sundries, the shopping section is
handy and pleasant reading -- sort of like the "Living" section in
newspapers -- and the "Off-Beat" chapter is indeed quirky and
interesting. Nice lightweight gift suitable for new dog owners.

* Two book from a new TFH series -- The Simple Guide to Grooming Your Dog by Eve Adamson & Sandy Roth and The Simple Guide to Showing Your Dog by Richard G. Beauchamp -- would be very good for junior handlers, maybe 4Hers interested in a career as a handler or groomer.
Nicely illustrated, but almost excessively so.

In one of Edwin Tufte's books on graphics, there's a discussion of "chart junk," the kind of supererogatory effects that distract or even distort the presentation of information in a chart, graph, or table. Well, some of the book design here is like that: photos framed as though snippets of film or as though
paperclipped to the page; pictures which serve to illustrate nothing much more than a dog being loaded in a vehicle. All of this swamps somefairly straightforward, well-written text.

Michael Dirda, editor of the Washington Post Book World has a pleasingly plump collection of reviews, Bound to Please: An
Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books
-- and that's one subtitle too many, esp. the middle of the sandwich, somewhat self-congratulatory. But he's a terrific reviewer, something of a throwback to older literary gentlemen, with a knack for making you an enthusiastic and eager reader.

I don't know what made Donald Westlake resurrect his "Richard Stark" pseudonym and the series of thrillers about Parker, a professional thief, but I'm glad for all that and his latest, Nobody Runs Forever. I'm told that real heistmen read the Parker novels the way real cops read Elmore Leonard

 

Robert G. Ingersoll
Repository of images and documents.

Mid-life crisis car
I still want a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited or a Land Rover Defender. But in the interest of being a true American of middle age and male persuasion, I concede to the urge for a sportscar. This one will do.

Sudoku Drive yourself crazy

Online Etymology Dictionary One of the sources for this is A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Ernest Klein, who had been rabbi of Nové
Zámky in Czechoslovakia from 1931-44. After being liberated from the Dachau concentration camp, Klein discovered "that my father, my wife, my only child, Joseph, and two of my three sisters had suffered martyrdom
in Auschwitz." He moved to Canada, and out of his sorrow and urged on by his surviving sister, he set down his lifelong love of etymology into
that book.

The Blackwing 602 -- The Final Chapter
Beloved of John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Sondheim

Back to Bach (Johann, not Catherine):Bach Central Station, J.S. Bach Home Page

Reviewing the Evidence (Barbara Franchi) reviews of mystery novels

Home Town News -- links to U.S. newspapers' Web sites

*A Cook's Notebook: Reflections on Food and Life with Ali Berlow* -- NPR radio program

Ghost Town Don't miss this site. Belongs to a young Ukrainian woman whose father is a nuclear physicist. She often rides her motorcycle into Chernobyl and the surrounding villages -- now ghost towns -- and has some truly stunning
photos and very interesting, well-written commentary

The Fallacy Files Guide to logical fallacies

The Woodward & Bernstein Watergate Papers (Univ. of TX at Austin)


Burritophile -- locating and reviewing *taquerías*


How to Fell a Tree Using a Chainsaw

Sign and Sight -- English version of the German online magazine *Perlentaucher*

Quiz Farm
For religion, philosophy, and politics, I scored as agnostic,
existentialist, anarchist, respectively, so I stopped taking quizzes

Medieval Cookery
Why?

Rhonda Vincent and the Rage
Terrific bluegrass singer. Don't miss her version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene"

Under pressure, we all of us leak some oil. Going into the obedience
ring -- or into the agility ring, on to the tracking field, or other dog
sport venues -- can be daunting. Here's some encouraging and useful advice from a Mike Macbeth ("Roving Mike") interview (*Dogs in Canada*, 11/04) with Dr. John Patterson, who, apart from his dog activities, serves as a sports psychologist for the Canadian figure skating team and others:

* Rehearse well, so the experience is not overwhelming.
Practise [sic] remaining calm by breath control, and function as if you were well prepared… Try to keep worries to a minimum. If something remains unfinished and it is time to perform, so be it.

* At a dog show, plan for a bit of quiet time with your dog just before entering the ring… Because our bodies react the same to all of these emotions, never deny your own anticipation and bodily changes;
interpret them as excitement, not fear or panic. If you are enjoying the experience, chances are your dog will as well.

* Control your voice… Make sure your pace, motions, and gestures are the same as your practice activities. Your dog will respond positively if you "act as if you are used to it."

Most of us feel that our dogs have something like human consciousness and understanding. Stanly Coren's new book, How Dogs Think, relates a folktale from Zimbabwe which explains why dogs don't speak, although they once could.

According to story, the hero Nkhango makes a deal with the dog Rukuba. If dog would steal fire from the god Nyamaurairi, humans
will be the friends of dogs forever. Rukuba keeps his part of the deal
and gives people fire. Nkhango then asks him to help hunt dangerous animals, stand guard, herd flocks, and so on. Dog does all these things.

Finally, Nkhango decides that dog should be a messenger, but this is too much for dog. After all, since dog gave people fire, he feel he should be allowed to just lie near it in comfort. Rukuba thinks to himself, "People will always be sending me here and there on errands because I am clever and can speak. But if I can't speak, I can't be a messenger." And so, from that day, dogs have chosen not to speak.


Chef's Secrets: Insider Techniques from Today's Culinary Masters by Francine Maroukian is another collection of *trucs* -- kitchen tricks and some recipes using them. However, what steals the show are the sidebars, snippets of interviews with the chefs in which they descant on
favorite utensils, essential ingredients, and so on.


*On the Right Track: A Beginner's Guide & Workbook on Tracking* by Michelle Ross seems to be a nice little primer.

Mark Derr's new book, A Dog's History of America: How Our Best Friend Explored, Conquered, and Settled a Continent, is somewhat dry and humorless, but seems to be very well researched.

Dog's History
Beware the gruesome early chapters, especially the sections on the Conquistadors.


Being confronted with a friend's daughter's essay on Romeo and Juliet -- and figuring I may have more of this during her ensuing high school battles with the bard -- I acquired the Arden Shakespeare, now available in paperback.

Seems to be one of the better editions, although I'm not sure there's much difference for the general reader in choosing the Riverside, Norton, Oxford, et al. You might as well choose by typeface or other convenience. The Arden seems to be a favorite among some acting companies, and the pb seems pretty sturdy.

 

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English
(1993) by Kenneth G.
Wilson

Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston, SJ -- 1948 BBC Radio debate on the existence of God

Associated Press Online Bookstore You can order, among other things, the 2005 AP Stylebook in a handy,
spiral-bound version -- and cheaper than in a bookstore

The Cheese Counter (Steve Jenkins)

Pictoral guide to 15 common knots and hitches

The Julius Caesar Site -- sources and resources for studying Shakespeare's play

Great Images in NASA (GRIN)
[Library of pictures]

Allen Wyatt's WordTips
[Online newsletter and Web site for advice on Microsoft Word for Windows]

Mexican recipes: Carmelized *Carnitas* -- appetizer, Drunken Turkey (*Guajoloto Borracho*)

MeMo: Cultural Blog by Kyrie O'Connor of the *Houston Chronicle*

All 3 Every 3
1. Change your oil; 2. clean your fuel system; 3. check belts, hoses, and fluids; every 3000 miles

Intelligent First Aid Kits

New England Cheese

Zen Koans

Explorer XP -- shareware file explorer for Windows [Nice alternative to Windows Explorer for file management]

Tie a Bowtie & Fold a Pocket Square

Chorizo a la Sidra/ Sausage in Cider
Recipe for a classic *tapas* dish. Sometimes done with apples or sun-dried tomatoes

Political Compass
Take the test and see where you're at on economics,
anti-authoritarian on politics.

Garlic Central

IBM Style Guidelines

American Dialect Society

How to Change a Tire Written by students in a technical writing course at Louisiana Tech
Univ

Columbia Gazetteer of North America, ed. Saul B. Cohen

Fun with Words: A Celebration of the English Language
Contronyms, palindromes, pangrams, oronyms, etc.

Gourmet Spot Recipes and other foodie stuff

Guide to Grammar and Writing

Yahoo Search Shortcuts

Google FAQ

Cooking by Numbers Cook with whatever is in your fridge

Map24 locations and driving directions

AIM acronyms

Internet Acronyms

Acronym Dictionary

Mark Twain House & Museum

Delia Online -- RecipesChristo & Jeanne-Claude
The artists of "The Gates" in New York, wrapping the Pont euf in Paris, and so on

Richard Lederer's Verbivore

The year of the rooster begins 2/9/2005

Tasty Fries vending machine
Is this a great country or what. Roseann says I don't eat enough
vegetables, so I should try to get my company to install one of these
machines in the lunchroom]

Windows 5 Support Ctr
Portal, shareware, support, advice, etc.

La Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale Tour de France pour les femmes

Coming for Dinner

 

Most of us feel that our dogs have something like human consciousness and understanding. Stanly Coren's new book, How Dogs Think, relates a folktale from Zimbabwe which explains why dogs don't speak, although they once could. According to story, the hero Nkhango makes a deal with the dog Rukuba. If dog would steal fire from the god yamaurairi, humans will be the friends of dogs forever. Rukuba keeps his part of the deal and gives people fire.

Nkhango then asks him to help hunt dangerous animals, stand guard, herd flocks, and so on. Dog does all these things. Finally, Nkhango decides that dog should be a messenger, but this is too much for dog.

After all, since dog gave people fire, he feel he should be allowed to just lie near it in comfort. Rukuba thinks to himself, "People will always be sending me here and there on errands because I am clever and can speak. But if I can't speak, I can't be a messenger." And so, from that day, dogs have chosen not to speak.Stanley Coren's new book, How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind, is very good. (The style and vocabulary are simple, and easily suitable for a youngster.) Indeed, it's good enough that reading it on the subway the other morning, I missed Park St and read myself to Gov't Ctr, which made for a nice, brisk walk to work. Coren's comments on canine vision, for example, are informative of what colors to choose for retrieving toys, maybe of the color shirt you'd wear in distance exercises

The Lion in Winter is one of my favorite movies, with bull's eye performances from Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn. The recent remake with Patrick ("Engage!") Stewart and Glenn Close was longer, slower, and softer.

It reminded me of those very precisely enunciated, condensed Shakespeare productions which local theatrical troupes brought to grammar schools. In the earlier version, O'Toole and Hepburn, and for that matter, Anthony Hopkins (as Richard) and Timothy Dalton (as the French king), spoke quickly, like in a screwball comedy. O'Toole was louder, too; he was the king and didn't have to modulate his tone for anyone. This new version was more restrained, slower in speech, and barded with camera shots which could have had subtitles, "Visual symbol." I suppose audiences are, or are considered to be, stupider nowawadays.

K9 Suspect Discrimination by Adee Schoon & Ruud Haak is almost completely useless to me, but it's fascinating for its account of scent training for police dogs, and has some interesting historical anecdotes about early police dogs (the famous "Duwe" murder case) and especially some anecdotes of Belgianological interest, as in this story of one of the foundation Malinois, Tom:

"While we walked together along the canal, M. Huyghebaert gave me his wallet and during a moment when his dog, Tom, was not watching, I threw the wallet in the brushwood about three meters from the road. After walking for a longer distance, Tom's master began to search his pockets and gesticulated as if he [had] lost something. Immediately the dog went back to the place where we had briefly paused[,] and came back without having found anything. Seeing his master still inspecting his pockets, [Tom] ran back faster, first tracking and then searching with his nose in the air. Soon he came back with a triumphant look in his eyes and the wallet in his mouth."

Geoffrey Nunburg's second collection of language commentaries, Going
Nucular
, mainy from his pieces on Fresh Air on NPR. Very enjoyable and clever, such as his wondering whether Pres. Bush's verbal errors are the equivalent of typos or "thinkos." Nunberg's own style is sometimes very elliptical, sometimes cloppity clop, but he's very good at uncovering some surprising effects, such as why Rush Limbaugh and other radio talkers refer to their audiences in the plural, but TV and newspaper pundits use the singular, or why Peggy Noonan likes to use "and" rather than serial commas, or -- Well.


The latest in Resi Gerritsen & Ruud Haak's K9 series is K9 Complete Care: A Manual for Physically and Mentally Healthy Working Dogs. Like some of their other books, this one is textbookish, like something for a course of study for police or military handlers, but there are some interesting, cogent hints on warmups and other stuff.

Donald Westlake wrote, under the pen name Richard Stark, a series of terrific thrillers about a professional thief named Parker. (He's recently revived the series.) At one point, a Parker novel he was working on just turned silly, and Westlake converted it into a kind of
self-parody, with Parker transmogrified (if that's the word I want) into the hapless John Dortmunder. This led to a series of characteristically funny caper novels and, now, a collection of Dortmunder short stories, Thieves' Dozen, which are delightful reading.

Betty loaned us a video from Agility in Motion sort of a monthly magazine on video. There are several training lessons alternating with runs from various agility trials (all in CA, I think).

This tape had Rachel Sanders with some excellent hints on using a play reward, even with a dog who's more accustomed to a food reward, Nancy Geyes on jumping, and Jim Basic on distance control. The only quibble is that on the trial segments, the camera seems to be very distant from the action, compared with, say, The Incredible Dog Challenge.

Re-reading the Jane Simmons-Moake books on agility (see *Not of General
Interest*, below). Her comments on the weave poles sound exactly like Sylvia Bishop's comments on the F8 -- teach the dog to look up and ahead, not down.


An "explainer" is newspaper jargon for a supplementary article, usually a sidebar or boxed note, giving background information, definitions, and so on. *The Explainer* is a collection from *Slate Magazine* and includes, for example, how it's possible for Bill Clinton to become president again (something that may frighten some people, enticingly gratify others), what ear rocks are and how they cause positional vertigo, and who certifies or declares an economic recession.

The Old Corral -- tribute to "B" western movies

ThinkExist.com quotation database

"On Becoming a Philosopher" by A. C. Grayling

Glasgow speech decoded

News portals:
Newshub -- from Tucows
Rocket News

Recipe America Searchable. Also, tons of links to other recipe collections

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Just in case you want a quick summary of Russell's Paradox or John Rawls's notion of "original position" or you're still wondering how the hell Sartre could be an existentialist and a Marxist

The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form

Color Contrast Check for Web Site Design

Winterizing Your Car -- Practical Tips for Safe Winter Driving

Quotationdot.com -- Searchable in a somewhat unweildy fashion

*Bullitt* -- the movie, the Mustang, and Steve McQueen

Copykat Recipes and Copycat Recipes-- Some of these are almost hideous, and really now, why would you want to
imitate the cuisine of some corporate chain of restaurants? Others are more plausibly the work of a real cook

Team Ellen
Ellen MacArthur is attempting to sail around the world solo. This site
charts her progress, including Webcams, etc.

Blue State Shirts
As we said after 1972, "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts"

Whole Foods markets' recipes
I like the grilled cheese sandwich with slices of apple (!), marinated
rib eye steak with lemon pepper sauce, grilled shrimp on lemongrass
skewers, and the pozole

 

Re-readings, actually. First, Karen Pryor's Click to Win! Clicker Training for the Show ing.

Second is one of my favorite books,Schutzhund Obedience: Training in Drive by Sheila Booth & Gottfried Dildei, because I have to work on SOOM and DOOM for Quip for the BH test. . What I've been doing is stepping in front of him as I give both voice command and hand signal. Over time, I'll "slice the pie" so that I'm not stepping in front of him and not pausing; and we'll try to fade the hand signal, because the BH requires voice commands only. (It's very German. Impassive body language and Teutonic yawps.)

R. L. Trask Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English is another compendium on usage and solecisms. Trask, like Bill Bryson, is an American who has worked as an editor in the UK -- and Bryson has also written a usage book (or two). This book is quite good, even if it gives me jitters about whether I've botched some idiom,ignored some distinction in meanings, flubbed in verb tenses.

"There never was a golden age in which the rules for the possessive
apostrophe were clear-cut and known, understood and followed by most educated people." -- Oxford Companion to English Literature, qu. by Lynne Truss, *Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation which is orth reading if only for her explanation of the comma as a kind of Border Collie patrolling the rolling syntactical hills. Hard to imagine a howling funny book on punctuation, but it is.

Commuting on the Green Line these days, I'm reading more, such as one of David Brierley's "Cody" thrillers, Snowline. For some reason, these books haven't been popular -- or even published? -- in the U.S. I heard that there was a film version planned of one of them, with Elizabeth Hurley as Cody, which isn't quite the casting I'd want. Wait a minute: Did I just complain about Elizabeth Hurley? Let's stop now.

And just for the sake of the old erudition: John Barton's Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide, which is sort of a transcript of a series of TV shows with some very good actors (Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Peggy Ashcroft, David Suchet, Patrick Stewart, Roger Rees).

Also, a collection by one of my favorite poets, Wendy Cope, If I Don't Know. A little more somber than usual. And From Here to Eternity, an anthology of poetry selected by Andrew Motion, the current Poet Laureate in the UK. Unusual selection.

Finally, another book on solecisms, Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English by James Cochrane, a British editor. It's quite sensible, and the introduction by John Humphreys of the BBC is terrific.

"Man and Dog," by Siegfried Sassoon,
best known for his writings about his
experiences in WW1.

Who's this -- alone with stone and sky?
It's only my old dog and I --
It's only him; it's only me;
Alone with stone and grass and tree.

What share we most -- we two together?
Smells, and awareness of the weather.
What is it makes us more than dust?
My trust in him; in me his trust.

Here's anyhow one decent thing
That life to man and dog can bring;
One decent thing, remultiplied
Till earth's last dog and man have died.

David Perdue's Charles Dickens Home Page
Very comprehensive

Mountain Lions
They have had the widest distribution of all American mammals, from ocean to ocean, from Tierra del Fuego to the Alaskan panhandle. And now,
in my lifetime, there may cease to be such a creature as a mountain lion

The Global Gourmet Recipes, cookbooks

Digital Camera Resource Page

Digital Photography Review

Paul Szep
Along with Aislin (Terry Mosher), one of cruelest and best political cartoonists

Pesto by Hand Corby Kummer -- which is about as good a name as Basil Pesto -- in The Atlantic Monthly, 8/98

Goldwynisms"I'm giving you a definite maybe"

Albert Camus Critical Interpretation Essays by and about

Panicware Pop-Up Stopper Freeware plug-in to suppress pop-up windows in your Web browser

"Oor Hamlet" (aka "The Three-Minute Hamlet") by Adam McNaughton

Who's on First? The classic Abbott & Costello routine

Database of file extensions and programs that use them

125 Thai recipes
Really, now, isn't it just impossible to be unhappy while eating pad thai?

A Castle for Rent
In the Loire Valley, France. Helluva vacation, huh?

Aidells gourmet sausages

G.J. Demko's Landscapes of Crime
Geographical settings of crime fiction

Fairness & Accuracy and Reporting -- nat'l news media watch group

Barbecue University (Steven Raichlen)

Understanding Binary (Binary Finger Counting)

ARTFL Project: 1913
*Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary*

French Food and Cook
Traditional recipes and techniques

Everything E-Mail -- instructions, advice, resources, on e-mail
addresses, software, lists, and so on

*The Midnight Special -- Folk Music with a Sense of Humor* (Rich Warren) Out of Chicago; locally on WUMB- FM. Terrifically well done program

Tiger Aid Foundation
Lots of organizations, but here's the fact: Within my lifetime, which
has not much longer to go, there will no longer be such a thing as a tiger
.

100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English

Anti Virus 101 -- Computer Virus Software and Protection

Weird Foods of the World
"Tastes just like chicken!"

The Duck Tape Club Duck tape. Duct tape. Along with drywall screws, one of the great forces in the universe

Titles from Shakespeare Barbara Paul's collection of book titles derived from lines in Shakespeare

Hamlet on the Ramparts
Everything about *Hamlet*, I.iv-v, wherein our boy meets his da's ghost

*Says You!* NPR radio quiz program. The
format is somewhat reminiscent of My Word on the BBC

American Tricruiser -- tricycles

Fagan Finder (Michael Fagan)
Handy portal or directory -- a Web page of links to search engines,
research tools, etc.

Fagan Finder Quotations
See above. This is specifically for finding or identifying quotes, proverbs, phrases, etc.

Camping and hiking recipes:
Recipe Goldmine

Desert USA

*The Pocket Guide to Converting Measurements*(this is a PDF file)

Poetry Archive

Pareto's Principle: The 80-20 Rule
"80% of benefit comes from the first 20% of effort"

The Two Things (Glen Whitman)
For every subject, there are really only two things you need to know. Maybe

The Hudson River Sampler on WAMC
One of the many pleasures of our weekends in Becket is getting to listen to Wanda Fischer's radio show. This is, I think, where I first heard Stan Rogers

Julia Child Lessons with Master Chefs
Her final PBS series. Some nice recipes by various chefs

The Arden Shakespeare

Historic Cities -- maps
What did London look like -- on a map -- in 1572? Or Paris in 1800?

Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA)
"... to celebrate, preserve, promote, and nurture the traditional and developing diverse food cultures of the American South"

Oxymoronica

Risa Fashions
Women's clothing that, I gather, is eminently suitable for the show ring -- IOW, has pockets for bait

Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need
Suggestions and guidelines for which search engine or other Web resources to use, depending on what kind of thing you're interested in

Timeline of the History of Information
From cave painting to Web access

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Carb Wire -- news about carbohydrates [I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. I want spaghetti alla carbonara, goddammit]

Chile-Head
Bulgarian carrot? I don't want to know

One Bag -- the art of travelling light. Good hints on packing

Hoax-Slayer online newsletter on Internet hoaxes and scams

Emily Dickinson

Cockeyed.com
Features include "How much is inside?" (empirically determined) and the "McDonald's Order Code" (for which I guess I'm N6bm5). The photos show young people cheerily enagaged in such experiments as trying to determine whether toast lands butter-side up or not

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
In performance in original conditions

Tastingmenu.com
Foodie blog

The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau
Scholarly project to provide accurate texts of his complete works

World 66 "open content" travel guide

Textalyser online text analysis tool Feed it some text and you get word counts, readability level (Gunning Fog Index), character count, and so on

Chicken lollipops

"How to Obscure Any URL: How Spammers and Scammers Hide and Confuse"

The Wine Anorak online magazine (UK)

À La Carte (Peter Hertzmann)

Royal Shakespeare Company, UK

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Web site for the very funny book by Lynne Truss on punctuation. I had one wrong on the apostrophes & commas quiz, because I didn't put a comma before the conjunction in a compound sentence -- I thought the elements were too short to require a comma, and I still think I was right.

Meals for You -- recipe database

Chinese Calendar-- Next Year of the Dog will begin, on the Gregorian calendar, Jan 29,
2006

Malt Madness -- single malt scotch whisky

"The Pluperfect Virus" by Bob Hirschfeld

Ian's Shoelace Site

Craig Claiborne's Mother's Chicken Spaghetti
Originally in his Southern Cooking, now o/o/p. Oh, for the days before Dr. Atkins!

 

Headline of the Day
Recently, the Boston Herald had, in 60-point type, "Perv Mugs Will
Stay
," which baffled me until the caffeine kicked in. (It had to do with a Web site having photographs of people convicted of sex crimes.) One of my brothers was a newspaper reporter and editor, and told me of a headline-writing game played in the press room while everyone waited for the tear sheets. He said the game ended when someone suggested The Ultimate Headline: "Pope Elopes"

Resource Shelf (Gary Price)

Chacarero (Boston MA)
Chilean sandwiches -- superb -- on the Franklin Street side of Filene's, near Downtown Crossing

Computer Gripes
Yeah, like the goddamn bug in Norton Anti-Virus which had you"reactivate" every time you started your computer, and eventually disabled the product because you exceeded the number of installations

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"
In one of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, as I recall, Wolfe is re-reading Huckleberry Finn, and remarks upon that the scene where Huck tears up the letter he was writing about Jim, the escaped slave who has become his friend. Wolfe (speaking for Rex Stout, presumably) says that this is the first scene of modern American literature. It marks the point in American literature where the hero rejects social mores -- political, even religious -- for the sake of a higher ethical standard of individual loyalty and truth, even at the risk of damnation.

Ghost Town
Don't miss this. The site belongs to a young Ukrainian woman whose father is a nuclear physicist. She often rides her motorcycle into Chernobyl and the surrounding villages -- now ghost towns -- and has some truly stunning photos and very interesting, well-written
commentary

Schott's Miscellanies

Identity theft
Modern life has new terrors

La Belle Cuisine
Recipes, including some classics, such as Marcella Hazan's *carbonara*

The New Partridge
A new edition is being prepared of the magisterial Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. This site has some biographical information about Eric Partridge, bibliography, and how to contribute

Robert Kennedy's speech in Indianapolis on Martin Luther King's assassination, April 4, 1968 -- several URLs for the same text:
link 1, link 2, link
These days it's hard to imagine that this speech was impromptu -- even the quotation from Aeschylus. I doubt that our current crop of politicians can order a BLT without having it written out for them by speechwriters

 

Resources for anti-spam, -spyware, -popups, etc.

Isaac Bashevis Singer centennial

The Slot -- Bill Walsh, copy editor at the Washington Post [Don't miss the Sharp Points" and "Carets and Sticks" pages.

From Rick in Canada: These questions about Canada were posted on an International Tourism Website. EXAMPLE... Q: I have never seen it warm on TV, so how do the plants grow?(UK)

"Front ends" for Google:Soople
Try it and you'll find you'll like the diversity of it and Fagan Finder

Classics Unveiled
Greek mythology, Roman history, etc.

The Food Section (Josh Friedland) Foodie writing and photography

Common Errors in English (such as "for all intensive purposes")Paul Brians, professor of English, WA State Univ.

Chowbaby.com Directory of restaurants (USA)

Columbia Journalism Review* (CJR) Campaign Desk
Critique and analysis of 2004 presidential campaign coverage. Seems to be sanely non-partisan -- now that's a rare, fine quality these day

New Search Portal[No-frills directory of links for news, searches

The Apostrophe Protection Society (UK)

RecipeSource
Formerly, Searchable Online Archive of Recipes (SOAR). Database by ethnic cuisine or type of recipe

Poetry Society of America

NightStar magnetic force flashlight (no batteries)
Via the Rt. Hon. Judy Johnstone who, presumably, uses these at night to find her funny lookin' black dogs

FactCheck.org -- Examines recent statements by politicians or organizations of any party, and assesses the truthfulness of those statements

Aroma Wheel (for wine tasting -- well, sniffing):
UC Davis
Zinfandel Aroma Wheel
Internat'l Wine Academy
Alistair Cooke's "Letter from America" Fan Page
The Surreal Gourmet (Bob Blumer)
Poaching salmon in a dishwasher

Nutrition Lowdown
Based on the USDA Nat'l Nutrient Database. Someone once said that after watching a couple of minutes of a pornographic movie, she wanted to have sex right away, and after watching a while longer she never wanted to have sex again. Same with nutrition sites. At first, I want to reform my eating habits and have a wholesome meal of Brussels sprouts and skinned fruit. After a while, I never want to eat anything again.

Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia
Maintained by Jeff Miller, a high school teacher in FL

Cameron Davidson aerial photography
Don't miss the picture of a wildfire from northern Idaho

Langenberg search portal
Oh, very handy!

Vitamin Q -- Roddy Lumsden in Bristol UK Irresistible blog, lists of all sorts, curiosities, jotting, such as the Bristol Royal Infirmary's scale for stool forms to aid diagnosis in patients with bowel problems

Original Pat's King of Steaks Philadelphia Cheese Steak recipe
My preferences are "wid" (with onions) and "Whiz" although I'm not bigoted about it

Allfood.com recipe database

The Mencken Society Honoring the Sage of Baltimore -- one of my favorite writers, despite I have to blink at his private racism, anti-Semitism, and other sins. (Same with Pres. Truman, it turns out.

Via Michelin Like Mapblast or Map Quest, but with maps for Europe

Wind-chill chart & calculator

Back of the Box -- recipes taken off packaging

The Poem Tree Online anthology of -- mostly -- metered poetry

Educator's Reference Desk Including the ERIC database and searchable repository of lesson plans

Rear View Safety Lens for vans and SUVs

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