“The angel who is bringing me money stops for a beer.”
Thus does Mr. Doyle begin the story of his personal financial equilibrium.
“Seinfeld,” he explains, “has a belief that in the end, you end up even. For instance, if he were to lose twenty bucks on the subway on the way to work, somehow, by the end of the day, somebody will come to him and say: ‘Seinfeld, I’ve got twenty dollars worth of comp tickets. Take them!’” Read the rest of this entry »
Noir was found in a slaughter pen, waiting—although he didn’t know it—to be transported to Canada or Mexico where it is still legal to slaughter horses for food. A volunteer from New England Equine Rescue (NEER) spotted the black gelding. He was clearly bright. He had obviously been highly trained. And he also had sarcoids on his ear, sheath and chest. The presence of the sarcoids (cancerous growths) suggests the reason he was in the slaughter pen. Sarcoids are expensive to treat, difficult to cure and sometimes fatal. That an animal with sarcoids could even be considered as a food source, provides a peephole into that nasty world where horses are killed to provide “gourmet” meat to places on the globe where horsemeat is considered a delicacy.
NEER volunteers patrol the slaughter pens on bailout missions, looking for horses to save and hauling them into the rescue network. The black gelding was one of the lucky ones. Mary, his rescuer, called him The Trick Horse when she discovered that someone had taught him to bow, to beg and to rear on command and balance on his hind legs. That owner may have fallen on hard times and perhaps sold the horse to a new and less caring owner. His story will probably never be known. Horses in slaughter pens are acquired without disclosure, and fraud and misrepresentation are common. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve just come from another library speaking engagement where I talked about alopecia and my book BALD AS A BEAN: The Experience of Sudden Hair Loss. Librarians like me. I suspect it has more to do with my willingness to speak for free than with my subject, however, BEAN usually draws a good crowd. A bald woman does have a fascination factor. In any case, I start my talk with a quiz—a tonsorial version of consciousness raising—which I call “hair raising.
This is the quiz: Read the rest of this entry »
So now it’s blogging. Okay, call me a Luddite. Several have. I’ve been operating computers since 1985 and I’ve bought more PCs than cars. But truth to tell, cars and computers are a lot alike to me—I drive them both without any idea of what’s going on
under the hood. As long as the thing gets me where I want to go, I’m satisfied.
And as I’ve told Dickie time and again, there’s no point in learning something if that thing happens to be a passing fad—like DOS, for instance. If I had been able to learn DOS (and I wasn’t able, as Dickie’s epic teaching sessions tearfully demonstrated) it would have been time and good brain cells wasted. Because where is DOS today? Gone, that’s where. Vanished at the whim of some computer wizard named Gates.
But now blogging is here where DOS once was.
Until very recently I bundled blogging into the tech package with texting. I though blogging was 1) unsafe 2) incredibly narcissistic and 3) completely devoid of profitability. But now the Luddite is a blogger. And I’m reminded of the late Don Marquis who wrote: “wotthehell, wotthehell, there’s a dance in the old dame yet.” And as if to prove I’m still here, this is the opening entry on my new blog Old Dame Dancing. Read the rest of this entry »
GOT MICE? ADOPT A BARN CAT
June 30th, 2009The tipping point came the morning she turned ov
er the hay bale and found the rat’s nest. Rodents are almost a fact of life in buildings where feed is kept for livestock. She understood that. Still … rats! Realizing that even her immaculate grain room—pristine by most barn standards—wasn’t immune to rodents, she started the process of acquiring a pair of barn cats.
Now a barn cat is a different “breed” of cat, and fortunately, there are rescue organizations that recognize this and are dedicated to finding safe, comfortable homes for animals that can’t be house cats. The barn cat adoption program gives these former feline misfits a way to be productive, working members of society. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: barn cat programs, barn cats, cat adoption, ferals rescue
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