Turkish Dogs - particularly Anatolian Shepherd Dogs

Pikachu Wallpaper (image source)

I still know next to nothing about Pokemon, but years ago I remember buying a box of Kellogg's Pop Tarts merely because the packaging promised a Pokemon toy surprise inside. Okay, roll your eyes. I'm not a fan of Pop Tarts but for some reason I gave in to the impulse, and I wasn't even sure what Pokemon was anyway. So help me, maybe Pop Tarts were on sale that day too.

The wonderful prize that was in the box was the cutest little yellow 3D plastic pencil topper. Something you slide over the eraser end as a decoration. I quickly learned that the charming, tubby little yellow critter with the black tipped ears was Pikachu. I had often used the same pencil as a hair stick and after adding Pikachu over the eraser end, I was absolutely tickled. I wore that pencil a lot more. I have long hair, so twisting it into a bun and sticking my Pikachu pencil through it made for a instant fashion of questionable taste, but hey, it did the job and kept hair out of the way. If I needed something with which to write, all I had to do was let my hair loose. ha!

Anyway, Kath sent me this link on eBay several days ago which featured a hilarious story about the mysterious appearance of a package of Pokemon cards in a mom's shopping cart. Fun read! If the eBay link expires, see her blog post with links to related interviews or the story originally posted at eBay here. Oh, just go see her blog and subscribe! She is a very talented and funny writer whose children have obviously inspired a lot of creative mayhem. :)

Labels: blogging, ebay, humor

Left to Right: Marlowe (3 months) & Matty -mid-January 2007 Idaho

Marlowe's owner sends wonderful photos of her Anatolian Shepherd Dogs from time to time. Today I'm posting a small collection of similar pics. He's older than in the pics featured here as the pics only go up to March 2007 for this collection, but I'll post more recent photos later.

The young pinto female is Matilda. She's a beautiful, brindled Anatolian Shepherd who comes from another bloodline. Matty used to live nearby and has been on this blog before. The pics I've chosen for this posting are all taken from the same porch landing, featuring winter snow and the twosome with the boy getting bigger in every picture.

SNOW! Nice change of pace from all the heat and humidity of summer here in this part of California right now. :)

Marlowe is a baby from our October litter of last year and is featured on this link with his momentarily single minded sister, Coco. Marlowe's littermates who live here with us currently are Coco and Helmut, both of whom are also rough coated. Marlowe's nickname used to be 'Batman' and Helmut we called 'Darth'. You can see more of the litter by selecting the 2006Litter label (slow loading, due to all the pics!)


Matty & Marlowe -end of February

Yes, he does have a LONG tail! His dad, Boone had a tail that could nearly touch the ground during his teething period and up to about his first year. Kind of startling! But it seems these guys grow into their tails! :) Boone's tail tip now comes to just below his hocks as per breed standard.


Marlowe & Matty -end of February

Beautiful picture!



Matty & Marlowe -early March

Clearly they love being together. :)


Marlowe (5 months) & Matty -early March

Synchronized shapes in all the pics! :D

Labels: Marlowe, Matty

Ratatouille Elegance!

Looking forward to this new Rat movie.

I'm not much of a movie watcher but James has been occasionally picking up some cinema titles from Netflix for me. I never go to movies since becoming completely deaf. Not having handy dandy closed captions while at the cinema is a bummer. I miss the pop corn ambience. I understand that where cinema captions are available, deaf folk have problems simultaniously seeing the action in the movie, noting who is speaking -- while correlating the info with a separate caption device provided for deaf viewers - boy IS that even a mouthful. You probably need Marty Feldman eyes to do all that ALL at the same time. It is just more sensible for the time being to wait for shows to be on DVD or VHS format. And lately DVD movies from Netflix are just what Semavi Lady ordered! Convenience, captions (usually) and fun!

Actually, the captions don't always work as they should. On our entertainment center DVD player, sometimes the captions do not resolve, so it's yet another silent movie for me (not to be confused with the comedy called Silent Movie) --but it is rare enough that it is not a huge issue. Also... playing the DVD on the computer sometimes gets different results than our TV/DVD player. At least a couple movies had separate screens for subtitles on the computer, but no caption on the movie itself. While on TV it was all hunky dory. It probably less than 5% of the time (I'm not keeping track). So it's still a good deal, most movies play just fine on the computer.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing Ratatouille and all the older Pixar movies I haven't yet seen. Finding Nemo was one of the last ones I got to see. Hard to pick favorites but if I had to so far, my absolute favorite is Cars! Pixar is wonderful at telling stories and the artwork is in a league all its own.

In order to help plan out which of the oldies to rent, I checked out the Pixar site to discover what all the names of their feature movies are ----- and then I noted that they had this video material below for bloggers and web sites. I can't resist so here you are! There are several movies on the play list button. I just wish they had these things captioned! Nevertheless it's wonderful eye candy and fantastic animated art!



Noted from my about.com news that Sony seems to be in the rootkit business again. :( At least I don't have to worry about inadvertently installing a Sony Rootkit, since I'm never playing music on my machine but the warning mentions games too? ...hrm, what about movie videos?

Labels: deaf, Video

It should go without saying that what Vick did to support dog fighting is wrong. He is not however getting a fair trial where the whole story could become public. That's a concern that borders on other issues such as some of the cover ups that can happen in our judicial system due to plea bargains. We know he denied it all at first and due to strongarming from several sources, each looking out for their own interests, a different series of events took place -- including Vick finding Jesus...

Opportunists GALORE! I'm really tired of all the focus on this event mainly due the opportunists, HSUS and PeTA being just as horrible for grabbing the event and wringing it out like a CASH COW and using it for PR. Sport figures have gotten into trouble before with all kinds of mayhem including murder and rape of other humans. People are letting HSUS and PeTA take control.

An apt caricature, see Wayne Pacelle with a 6 figure income, wringing out these events to milk the gullible public into thinking they are doing some good with this ongoing 'croc'. HSUS has 200 Millions in assets but does little to nothing to save animals and is now mainly concerning itself with forcing idealist and costly legislation that is turning everyone into criminals.

And to top it off, PETA, which is known for its alliance with terrorist organizations that via arson and bombs, animal releases, threats and other chaos, creates major setbacks in genetics, cancer research and other necessary medical advances is asking Vick to donate to THEIR cause with time or money to show he is a 'changed man'. Frankly, finding Jesus is good. Finding PeTA is not! How is it that an organization that is so proVegan, can attack research and yet use research (albeit inconclusive research) to support a vegan lifestyle and abolish any ownership or use of animals? Opportunists galore!

Who's Killed More Animals?

[Picture of Michael Vick under which it says 8]

[Picture of a policeman preparing to bury a puppy killed by PETA
workers...under which it says 14,400]

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) loves to point the finger at others, when they should be looking at their own record of killing more than 90% of the animals left in their care. According to government records PETA has killed more than 14,400 animals since 1998.

Find out more about PETA's hypocrisy at:
PeTA Kills Animals

See the specific Photo Ad above at ConsumerFreedom.com

Labels: animal_control, Animal_Rights, BSL

I'm not going to blame this on anyone in particular, especially a certain someone whose name starts with "D", but as you all know, I haven't spent very much time with Google Earth recently -- no really, I still haven't finished checking out the rest of Easter Island and certainly you understand that such a thing is a clear demonstration of the epitome of self control? haha

Well, because of D's tip, I had to check out Google Earth's Sky enhancement and found this video at google:


Okay, fine. I'm busy, I'm not going to download Google Earth v4.2(beta) today. (said I to myself). uh-huh

umm... and I need to work on the backlog of emails and other stuff I have.

Then I check out my own igoogle.com page (this link will go to your own igoogle page) where I incidently uh... happen to have a google gadget for Google Earth, and I saw an intriguing small picture of something to do with astronomy, so I clicked on it and OH BOY, my copy of Google Earth phoned home and updated itself pronto! (wink wink wink, I may have had to agree with something and click, but I don't remember!) Then Google Earth opened up with it's renewed interface with little WMAP images scattered around the globe.

Okay, I do still have some semblance of self-control and didn't click any links. Just shut down Google Earth with a sigh. "I'll get back to you later," I tell my eagerly responsive and newly updated Google Earth.

BTW, was too tired last night to stay up for the lunar eclipse. We usually have trouble seeing them from the yard due to all the oak trees in the neighborhood. Too late to go for a drive.

Glitter graphic, courtesy of CommentHaven.com

Labels: compu-internet, Google

This report from University of Minnesota astronomers (UofM link of press release) heralds discovery of "an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all."

The 'bullhorn' illustration at the top is from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory website. The black 'nucleus' in the bull horn image is the big hole. The graphic gives perspective on how the information from radio waves of the earthbound VLA Sky Survey (seen in blue square above) combined with microwave energy reported (from space by) the WMAP Spacecraft (the orange square) have both, using different perspectives, helped to locate this enormous hole devoid of any dust/matter in our universe.

A Void Within the Void -- Berardelli 2007 (824): 1 -- ScienceNOW-

A team from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, had been studying data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey, which is mapping the entire universe with radio waves. The team members focused on one part of the survey where the temperature of the CMB is lower than normal [the blue gap on the psychedelic looking pic]. This cooling is significant because interactions with both visible and dark matter warm the CMB slightly, and so the team suspected that matter [in the cold spot] was absent.

[NOTE: CMB is Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - source WMAP NASA site:

"The CMB radiation was emitted only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, long before stars or galaxies ever existed. Thus, by studying the detailed physical properties of the radiation, we can learn about conditions in the universe on very large scales, since the radiation we see today has traveled over such a large distance, and at very early times."]

Further observations of the zone, located between 6 billion and 10 billion light-years away, revealed it to be not only devoid of galaxies but also about a billion light-years wide, the team will report in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal. "What we're suggesting is that there is no matter in this void, either normal or dark," says radio astronomer and co-author Lawrence Rudnick.

The pie chart shows the generally accepted proportions of three components of our universe.
EDIT/added - Aug 31 - Pie chart above and previous cylindrical image are from the previously mentioned WMAP site where interesting graphics and other info can be found. Content of the Universe-WMAP data reveals that its contents include 4% atoms, the building blocks of stars and planets. Dark matter comprises 22% of the universe. This matter, different from atoms, does not emit or absorb light. It has only been detected indirectly by its gravity. 74% of the Universe, is composed of "dark energy", that acts as a sort of an anti-gravity. This energy, distinct from dark matter, is responsible for the present-day acceleration of the universal expansion.

Concluding that the zone is free of dark matter might be premature, cautions astrophysicist Harvey Tananbaum of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Making that determination is difficult and will require confirmation, he says. Meanwhile, cosmologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University in Tempe says the discovery is "potentially very important" for testing theories about the very early universe. The potential deviation from the inflation model is "a tantalizing pointer to some new physics at the dawn of existence."

To read more about current study of the Universe and the BIG BANG theory as these have been modified with recent information from WMAP, go here.

A funny quote from Wired's version of this story: Retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran said of the discovery: "This is incredibly important for something where there is nothing to it." :D




Now for something a little more down to earth.
Science News has an article on a virus that seems to have some correlation with obesity in some people.

Magdalena Pasarica of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who led the new work, stresses that obesity has many causes, including genetic factors, overeating, and a sedentary lifestyle. In some people, however, adenovirus-36 may be the culprit, she says. Adenoviruses cause colds, but adenovirus-36, apparently, does more.

In a 2005 study of 502 obese and normal-weight people, researchers reported that 30 percent of the obese group showed signs of previous adenovirus-36 infection, while only 11 percent of the lean group did. ...see Science News article above

I think this has the potential to tie in very easily (so far) with issues of epigenetics/nutrigenetics. The genetic factor seems to be that when certain triggers reach a threshold in individuals, who have lost certain protective alleles (which can make them a genetic variant), various degenerative cascades have the potential to happen in that population. A very interesting article I have bookmarked from The Scientist tends to go offline occasionally, so here is cache link to --

Eat Your Way To Better DNA Why what your grandmother ate while pregnant with your mother might affect your children's health, and other findings from the growing field of nutrigenomics. By KATE TRAVIS

And next this piece from The Scientist is interesting to me, has to do with certain receptors of bacteria being sensitive to light, and this factor having something to do with changes in potential virulence.

It actually makes a lot of sense since it seems many living organisms from plants and even larger complex animals have responses to various wavelengths of light in our environment.

I never gave much thought to lighting for the bugs we grew in the various incubators and our tests were pretty standardized anyway, growing critters that preferred dark places in humans. Even the few incubators with small clear panels at the door seemed minutely important to me, just a way to see how full an incubator might be, and what might be in there without opening the door and letting the warm air out. We always had the lights off in microbiology lab if no one were in there doing stuff anyway. The heat in a laboratory in general can get pretty stuffy due to all the fridges, centrifuges, incubators and analyzers, etc. You can't use a fan due to potential biohazardous aerosol. Air conditioning is nice but is not always very efficient in rooms full of machinery.

EDIT: 25 Aug - Yeegads, had lots of trouble with internet connection lately, add on Blogger/FTP has been temperamental for the past day. grrrr...

Labels: genetics, micro, NASA, Science

I'm so behind on web stuff, email and everything else! But just wanted to say, doggies are doing fine. I'll be blogging about them again soon. Stuff has backed up, stress has taken me for quite a ride. Many posts I started (on MY dogs) were never published but need to be re-dated and finally put online. It's always more fun to make a photo blog and what happened was that I was never getting around to taking new pics. :)

Other stuff... I am so wanting to get back to finding time to play The Sims 2, I'm having trouble remembering all the tricks I used to know about the game so I'll probably have to relearn a lot. I am several stuff packs and expansion packs behind and have little clue what they involve and add to the game, aside from Seasons which is giving the game complications of weather and of the leaves on trees turning color (which must look pretty cool but probably needs lots more memory to run). There's a new expansion that lets you do Vacations, called Bon Voyage (boy I can't remember my last real life vacation!). I'm far from tired of the expansion packs that I do have; I've got an idea for using the game for a real life dog related project which I have roughly formulated in my head. (yep, gotta find some productive use of computer games, haha!)

Soooooo.... Anyway, you probably are wondering what is the story that goes with the above collar pic.

sigh... If you're a regular reader, you probably already have an idea given the tooth marks in the webbing... ;)

To my dismay, our resident collar bandit(s) has demolished yet another collar. See above, this is was Coco's collar. It's a new one I ordered back in June (didn't get for a month cos the order got lost). I ordered 3 web martigale collars several months ago in the same style but different colors, one each for Ruya, Coco and for Coco's brother, Helmut. Doesn't above remains look a lot like what happened to Ruya's collar?

And that's not all, Ruya's collar (a black one this time) has gone missing again! I suspect that pieces will turn up eventually.

AND Helmut? Oh yep, I put a nice blue collar on him and his is missing too.

Between the three of those guys, I can't keep collars on them! Tags get twisted off and lost too. What to do? I don't want to put tight buckle collars on them for fear that one will get teeth hooked in and there could be a panic that might result in a serious fight if no one is home, but at the rate we're going, this is deja vu. It happened with Ruya and Boone when they were growing up. I think I'll keep collars off the trio for another year or so!

Zor (mama) and Boone (adult male) still have their collars but neither of the two care for the neck grabbing war games that the trio enjoy, so it's just a Coco, Ruya and Helmut thing about war games that involve grabbing collars.

Pictures coming... I haven't taken new ones for quite a while! (but don't hold your breath!) ;)
My first experience with rough coated Anatolians and both Coco and Helmut are turning out to have quite different coats!

Labels: Chewing, collars, Helmut

Fascinating!

Easter Island is such a remarkable mystery all on it's own, but a recent article in The Scientist really got my attention when it linked to a site that utilized Google Earth to wonderful effect -- showing information about an excavation project at Easter Island.

If you're not familiar with Google Earth, you're really missing out. It is freeware that lets you explore our planet and pinpoint and bookmark places of interest. I downloaded it a couple years ago (2005, this month, has it really been that long?!) and immediately set about locating places I have visited, dream of visiting, and places I lived abroad including within view of Mt Pinatubo, Mt Fuji, places in Taiwan and more. I located some of the houses I lived in while abroad or at least the areas they would be if still standing (some have been demolished for new developments). Not all countries have so much detail in different areas. But the cool thing is that once you have bookmarked these and want to go on a trip, the Google Earth experience is pretty awesome.

First, be sure you have installed Google Earth on your machine (I hope it runs on your machine!). Next enjoy the following introductory (standard webpage) article to help put context into your trip. Then take the link at the end of the The Science article to the public database that is mentioned at the end (database is at www.rapanuidatabase.org/).

The Scientist : A summer of statues

EDIT: 24 Aug 2007... the article keeps going offline. Here's the essential text and the link to the database featuring the Google Earth file.

On one side of a quarry roughly two-thirds the size of a football field is "El Gigante," a half-finished stone statue seven stories tall, and weighing almost 300 tons. Prehistoric tools lie scattered nearby. Whoever made these head-and-torso statues, known as moai, seemed to have decided one day to drop their tools and disappear into history, leaving behind a harsh, barren landscape. It's one of the mysteries of Easter Island, which budding scientists have flown halfway across the world to solve.

During an excavation project last summer, Jeffrey Boutain, who graduated from the University of Michigan, Dearborn, in May, routinely woke up at 7:00 a.m. and rode a jeep 10 miles to reach an excavation site at Anakena beach. The team was digging for signs of the prehistoric civilization, such as animal bones, charcoal, and cooking implements. Boutain also used GPS to help survey the island's archaeologic features, including ancient roads and buried fireplaces, and helped catalogue all 800-plus moai on the island - the most comprehensive attempt to date.

Last summer, Boutain was one of 26 college students who flew to a South Pacific island no bigger than three Manhattans to do summer fieldwork. Although all 20 enrollees this summer are new to field science, they've helped turn some theories about Easter Island upside down.

The traditional view about Easter Island, popularized by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book, Collapse , is that the people who settled on Easter Island destroyed the island's once-lush tropical forests; it is one of the supposedly clearest examples of humans wreaking havoc on their environment. Some of the data that the summer students gathered helped two researchers - Carl Lipo at California State University in Long Beach and Terry Hunt, director of the program and an anthropologist at University of Hawaii at Manoa - propose another controversial theory on what leveled the landscape.

Based partly on charcoal records found at Anakena beach, Hunt and Lipo suggested in a Science paper last year (311:1603-6, 2006) that the early Easter Island settlers colonized the island around 1200 AD, at least 400 years later than previously thought, and around the time the forests began disappearing. It would be hard for humans to systematically destroy vegetation that quickly, they reason, suggesting there may be another culprit to blame, at least partially - rats.

Ancient rat bone DNA evidence from the beach suggests that a few rats stowed away with the first settlers, then exploded into a population of two to three million, and quickly devoured the palm seeds. Without seedlings to replenish the aging stock, the palm forests eventually withered away.

This summer, Hunt's group worked on excavations, sifting through sites for rat-gnawed seeds and nuts to bolster his new theory. He has already found evidence, in the form of hundreds of rat bones deep in the sands at Anakena beach and half-eaten palm seeds scattered across the island, suggesting that the rat population grew much more rapidly than did the human population. Hunt hopes to find signs in pollen embedded in the sediment from the lake near the quarry, showing that the forest started declining before humans began any widespread clearing. "Diamond blames the natives for destroying the island," says Lipo, who also helps run the field school. "But maybe they weren't crazy, and it is us who have lessons to learn on how to coexist with nature."

Well-known in archaeologic circles, the Easter Island field school of the University of Hawaii at Manoa couldn't be more remote. Located 2,300 miles from any sizable land mass (South America), temperatures on the island, known as Rapa Nui by locals, hover at around 65° F (18° C) - on a good day. Sudden rainstorms aren't uncommon. Flights from the United States can take as long as 24 hours, not including delays.

It's worth the trip, says Boutain, who is about to enroll in UH-Manoa's botany program for his master's degree. "I would do it again in a heartbeat." Last year's surveying efforts, including photos and descriptions of 650 moai, can be accessed at www.rapanuidatabase.org, the public database for the mapping project.

"There are field schools all over the world, but to be this isolated in such a spectacular little place is pretty unusual," says Hunt. "It's one of the last places on earth you really have a sense of being remote."

...

If you're anything like me, you will really get a kick out of the Google Earth downloads (kml files) :) :)

Detail on Easter Island is pretty good; I could see shadows of some of the palm trees. Many photos of the mysterious statues were huge! I'd forgotten how to use the various hot keys and configurations of Google Earth and haven't had the time to see more than a few minutes worth of the files, but I'll be back!

If you want to take other virtual trips, be sure to check out Google Earth Cool Places and you can visit palaces, mountains, amusement parks and assorted aerial weirdness around the world. PC Mag has a download with lots of odd things like a car parked on the side of a building, crop circles and other madness. Of course, googling around brings up fun hits. :D


Related:
Easter Island Guide (short)
More on Easter Island (long)

Labels: compu-internet

Media Mauls Dogs First, then Snaps Back at Actor- Celebrity Dog Watcher upate links to this article at People Magazine-

. . .
The actor says he called Los Angeles police and was told there had been a lack of bites on any fatal areas, but detectives were questioning if the dogs had any part in Adams's death.

Once Rhames returned to L.A., he says he contacted Adams's family in Toronto. About a week later, he says, police and the coroner told Rhames they had ruled out the dogs as well as the heart attack as the cause of death.

"There was such a lack of blood at the scene," Rhames explains. "They think possibly an aneurysm in the brain. They're doing a toxicology report. They will know [the results] in six to eight weeks. Closure for me will be when the coroner says what was the cause of death."
. . .

EDIT 2: 8PM Go here for an analysis of this case at National Canine Research Council

Labels: Animal_Rights, BSL

The little guy at the left could well be me or anyone else trying to deal with stress, dilemmas, and General Pandemonium (...the latter guy whose uncle must be that famous fellow by the name of Murphy).

I got a just got a chuckle out of a recent Doug Savage Savage Chickens comic. If you're not familiar with it, it's a daily comic which is drawn on a square, yellow, sticky note. I get a kick out of it since I'm quite fond of chickens, humor, sticky notes, and Doug Savage's Savage Chickens. :) Check out the Wednesday, August 08, 2007 comic called Jigsaw. While it probably isn't a political cartoon, it struck me as being rather apt in characterizing bad political "solutions" to various problems. When one or more problems with the "solution" is pointed out by the opposition, you often get flocks of adamant "chickens" with a narrow perspective, who persist with their arguments that their solution is the ONE right solution. Of course, the issues of California AB 1634 come immediately to mind but I'm sure that all of us can certainly come up with many more examples inside and outside of politics and personal lives.

Check my label's links below for misc related topic including some free jigsaw puzzles for the PC.

Labels: animal_control, games, humor, puzzles

Check out the Duct Tape Server. From the site, a little about the server's practicality.

Recent Action
Duct Tape Server was on server row at MillionManLan 6, June 21-24th. It hosted a Ventrilo server and a 15 person Armagetron Tournament. Performance was flawless over the four days of continuous operation. Core temperatures hovered around 32 degrees C!

I thought the insulating ability of duct tape would make it difficult to keep that thing from running hot, but that runs cooler than my desktop which has one side of the case removed to help air circulation. (I don't use air conditioning in the house).

A little on the history of duct tape:

From Forbes: Invented in the early 1940s by scientists at Permacell, a division of the Johnson and Johnson Company, duct tape was built to fill the need for a strong, flexible, durable tape that could help the war effort, according to Avon, Ohio-based Henkel Consumer Adhesives, one of the world's largest makers of the stuff. Early versions consisted of medical tape laminated to a cloth backing, covered with polycoat adhesives and a polyethylene coating. It was colored Army green and nicknamed "Duck Tape" because it repelled water.

And similar alternate (amusing!) version.

A little image googling on duct tape and similar permutations is bound to turn up some interesting hits. One of which brought me to interesting photo log of hypnotism (no duct tape on that portion of the log) that occurred at a 2006 QuakeCon (game made by id Software), and a series of pics of a giant Sumatran Corpse Plant (Amorphophallus titanum) which has an interesting and stinky sex life.

Labels: compu-internet, duct_tape, humor

From GaryVarvel.com

Labels: humor