I swore I wouldn’t write about the dogs all the time, but I can’t pass on this.
There was a story this week about a study showing that dogs experience the feeling of being cheated if they’re dealt with unfairly. The long and short of it is that two dogs are offered treats to do a trick. At some point, one dog starts getting better treats to do the tricks and the other dog gets resentful and stops performing. Who wouldn’t?
This got me wondering about what dogs really think. During the ice storm, Scarlett and Maddy spent time away from home where they’d be warm. Ann says they missed us, but who can say? I’m convinced that after 12 hours, the dogs are like, “Hey, remember those people? You know, the lady who used to walk us…and that guy?
“What guy?”
“You know, the one with the tennis ball?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, right…whatever happened to them?”
Friday morning I was feeling smug about being one of the people with electricity —but by 11am our household joined the nearly 200,000 in the region plunged into darkness by the ice storm.
Ann and Zack fled to a friend’s house, but I decided to huddle in the darkness and ride out the disaster. There I was with my glow sticks and headlamp, curled up with the dogs. At 1am I couldn’t sleep, so I texted Alex. I’ve written before about how long it takes me to compose a text message, so at about 1:15 he got this:
no electricity at home just me scarlett and maddy
Naturally, he was awake —probably out having fun.
haha why isnt there power
Hmmm. Somebody hasn’t been reading the paper.
ice storm widespread chaos will eat dogs eventually
The dogs stirred uneasily. He wrote back:
lol well cats before dogs
Good point. I fell back to sleep wondering about in which order I’d eat the pets. Let’s hope the power comes back on before push comes to shove.
If you’ve ever worked in advertising, around advertising, or even seen any advertising, you’ll enjoy this special rendering of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Anyone who grew up watching Bugs Bunny cartoons knows that Steve Brodie is the guy who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. In Bowery Bugs, all Brodie wanted a rabbit foot for good luck —but in real life what Brodie wanted was to be a celebrity, and that’s what he got after his 1886 plunge. Turns out that the Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t the only one that Brodie jumped off. He almost died after taking a leap from the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge in 1888, a towering structure that right now is being converted into a spectacular pedestrian walkway.
Half a mile south of the railroad bridge is the Mid-Hudson Bridge, where they once had such a problem with people jumping off that in 1985 they installed several suicide prevention hotline phones. They were early adaptors of this idea, and the phones are credited with saving dozens of people who went to the span thinking of jumping to their death.
One river, two bridges, and a couple of very different stories —and something to think about next time you cross the bridge into Poughkeepsie.
“Do you yearn for the yearly family trip to the woods, the smell of a fresh-cut evergreen, and the experience of dragging the family tree through the snow?”
Yearn? Dread is more accurate, because in the past our yearly family trips to Bob’s have threatened to ruin Christmas before it even started. Like the year of the ice storm, when cars were doing 360s in the road on front of the tree farm. Or the time I lost my shoe in the mud —and then the car got stuck in the same mud. Or when I accidentally tied the doors of my car shut. I could go on and on. Freezing weather, rain, snow, slop, filthy stinking dogs, crying children, bitter arguments —these are the spirits of Christmas past at Bob’s trees.
So naturally, if it goes too easily I get suspicious.
Friday we drove up the hill at Bob’s, found a tree, cut it down, and had it on top of the the car in no time at all. No fuss, no muss, in and out in five minutes. How is this possible, I wonder? There must be something wrong with this tree. Will a colony of spiders hibernating deep in its branches come to life and infest the house? Will I get home and find that it’s shed all of its needles? Will it mysteriously burst into flames?
There’s no way to tell, but meanwhile I am keeping an eye on this tree that came to our home without struggle or strife. Either there’s a catch somewhere or after twenty years we’re getting good at it.
OK, here it is, the Thanksgiving recipe that makes grown men weep, children scream out for seconds, and women regard you a culinary god: Albany Eye’s Sweet Potato Crunch. When I first posted this recipe online in November 2006, I was shocked to learn that many people actually tried it. Several folks took the time to write that even though they still hated me, they loved the sweet potatoes.
Truth be told, recipes like this are a dime or dozen in the south, but it’s a dish that seems rare in these parts. When done right, it’s so creamy, fluffy, and delicious that you could just a well serve it with a big dollop of whipped cream as on the plate with your bird. I will repeat my warning here: do not make this with canned sweet potatoes. The only thing that should come out of a can on Thanksgiving are those onions you put on top of the green beans.
I was at a meeting recently where someone stood up and said, “Fall is here, so please remember not to drive through piles of leaves along the road. There could be children playing in them.”
I’ve heard that a hundred times, and a hundred times it sounded like something that grew out of urban legends. On the flip side, we were told as kids not to play in the leaves near the street for the same reason. As usual, this drove me to the internet. Low and behold, SNOPES.COM does not dismiss the warning as a myth, but cites several horrible accidents as proof that playing in the leaves can have deadly consequences.
But there’s a more pressing reason you shouldn’t play in the leaves, particularly not the leaves piled on the street in front of my house. That’s because they are filled with dog poop. Those are the leaves I raked from the backyard over the weekend, and while we try to stay one step ahead of the dogs, it’s tough in the fall. The problem? Their droppings are camouflaged by nature’s colorful bounty. That sounds very poetic until you stroll through the leaves, or worse yet, you spend three hours raking them up. Then nature’s colorful bounty is a stinky, disgusting mess.
So, don’t play in the leaves and don’t drive through the leaves, and for Gods’ sake, wear clean underwear in case you get in an accident.
November sweeps is a big deal in TV because that’s when your audience gets measured. During these Nielsen Ratings periods, local TV rolls out “special reports” to bring more eyeballs to their newscasts. Most TV stations are content to do stories about things like internet predators, violent video games, or the hot topic du jour, internet predators who prey on kids playing violent video games —but KTLA in Los Angeles has raised the bar. Or lowered it. They’ve pulled out all the stops this month with a story they call Done Up Down There, a report on shaping and coloring your pubic hair. And you thought tasering news anchors was bad.
Jack Owen Blake would be about my age today had Arthur Shawcross not murdered him in 1972. He was ten. Four months Shawcross raped and killed eight-year-old Karen Hill. She’d be 44.
Arthur Shawcross confessed to the murders, but Jefferson County District Attorney William J. McClusky was doubtful about his case and eager for a conviction. So he made an offer: Shawcross would be spared a murder charge and a life term if he’d tell authorities where he had hidden the body of Jack Blake. Shawcross accepted and served 15 years of his 25 year sentence. He was paroled and later went on to kill eleven women in the Rochester area.
Nothing could have saved those two innocent children in 1972, but you’ve got to wonder about DA McClusky. What could have made him think a jury in Watertown, NY wouldn’t want to lock up Shawcross and throw away the key? Instead he got to walk free and murder again.
Shawcross died in an Albany hospital this week, brought there after falling ill at Sullivan Correctional Facility. Unlike his many victims, Arthur Shawcross went the way many of us will go, in a hospital being cared for by people fighting to keep us alive.
There hasn’t been an execution in New York since 1963, but if anyone ever deserved it, it was Arthur Shawcross. And if you think you can explain why a man who murdered thirteen people shouldn’t have been put to death, you’re welcome to try.
I try not to fall into any “should have done this” or “could have done that” thinking, but I’m really starting to wonder about passing on the plumbing thing.
My father owned a small plumbing business, and a couple of summers as a laborer convinced me that I wanted nothing to do with it. All I could see from my narrow slice of the world was a pathway that lead to a life in basements and under sinks —but what I didn’t see was the opportunity to be a businessman. My thick teenage skull couldn’t understand that the goal was not to be the guy doing the work, but the guy making the money.
I was reminded of this after the NY Times did the inevitable plumber story after Joe the Plumber became a national celebrity. But the plumbers the Times wrote about? These were successful, Einstein-quoting guys with 4,000 square foot offices running shops where their top employees “clear two, maybe two-and-a-quarter every year.” Yes, the workers, not the managers.
But, no…I had to go work in TV.
Anyway, no point in having regrets or in making the obvious TV career vs. plumbing career crap joke. Life is life and when you get right down to it, it’s just a matter of which end of the pipe you’re looking through.
