Beach Guard Dog

I ran down to the beach the other morning and watched a guy run into the surf.  I looked up on the beach to see this guy was guarding his bud's clothes while he was off in the surf. 

















And he was out in the water, not worrying about someone stealing his stuff. 

Occupy the Cold - Anchorage Protesters

I stopped by the Occupy Anchorage site today.  It was a chilly 5˚F (-15˚C) or lower.  There's an open side tent and three other tents on the edge of Town Square at the end of F Street.  I got there a bit after 4pm and there were three people and two dogs.  More folks dropped by after a bit.

I didn't have enough room on my camera disk to get more than this 28 second video.  (Sorry, I'd backed the disk up on my external hard drive, but then I couldn't access those pictures and videos on my camera to delete them.  I better read the instruction manual better.  I can delete them using the computer.)

Next Friday, Black Friday, is the day they're expecting to have trouble with the Municipality.  They'll be lighting the official city Christmas Tree on Town Square and they don't want the protestors tents there.  The said they are being left alone even though they don't have a permit ($800, they said per week).  But the Muni has a permit for next Friday.  They are playing it by ear.


They said there were 14 sites in Alaska.

Here's part of a forum post from Nov. 11 by Dub - the guy in the black hat in the picture.

My name is John Westlund. I am 21 years old. I have been working since I was 11 trying to support my family and myself. Trying to have stability. Recently I quit my job, left my still paid for apartment, and joined the occupy wall street movement 24/7 for the past few weeks. I have never felt better about what I'm doing with my life. All I wanted was stability, and I found no way to truly accomplish this while relying on money. I realized it could and should be worth nothing tomorrow. The economy everywhere is unstable because of ecological practices worldwide. Money is truly worth nothing! Until we have a perfect system. Until that day I will stay a protester, an environmentalist and a part of Occupy. We have learned enough over the past 200 years to create this system, a unified peaceful system. One of stability. One that is permanent. Sustainable. For all. No more overpopulation problems from idiotic food manipulating meant only to make the most amount of money possible.

BTW, there are heaters in the tent, but they weren't getting any electricity when I was there.

Tracked Down By A Blood Hound

I never know what adventures await me.  There I was tonight, against a chain link fence, somewhat behind the bushes, knowing that a blood hound was trying to find me.  The sun was just going down.   And then I heard a dog yelping. 

Our meeting today back in the Frontier Building was winding down and a woman came in looking for volunteers for an outdoor adventure.  It turned out it was Cindi of the Alaska Search and Rescue Dogs (ASARD).  She needed a body for the training of a dog.  My colleagues volunteered me.  We went to a nearby park area and she gave me a map of where she wanted me to go. [I noticed when I got home that I didn't quite follow the route in one part.  Sorry Cindi.]

The route included parking lot, grass, woods, alongside a wet area, more parking lot, and a sidewalk.  It was somewhere between a quarter and half mile.  When I got to the destination, she picked me up in her car, gave me a gauze pad to open and wipe on my hands and neck and stick in a plastic baggie.  Then back to where the meeting was and I biked home.

Then I had to return to the scene of the crime about 90 minutes later.  This time by car and I sat and read until I got a call to wait by the fence.  That's when I saw the berries and a bunch of other plants I hadn't noticed before.  I thought about different people who had been sought by blood hounds - lost children, elderly folks who wandered off, runaway slaves, criminals and thought about how each might feel in my spot.  I leaned against the fence waiting to be discovered. And then I saw the faint moon.


And then I heard the yelping.  A big floppy dog rushed to me and a happy handler followed, delighted her dog had sniffed me down.

In the video (it's real short) Cindi explains what the exercise was about.




Want to train your dog to sniff down lost kids and hikers? Here's what the ASARD website says in answer to the question "What are ASARD's expectations of me and my dog?"

"We expect the following from all new dog team members:

• Attend at least one or two training sessions per week.
• Train in all types of weather.
• Attend outside classes (obedience, agility, first aid & specialty classes).
• Work with other handlers on practice search problems.
• Volunteer to be a subject for ASARD training and tests. [I guess that was me.]
• Have a positive and constructive attitude.
• Develop/demonstrate adequate physical fitness.
• Be willing to train up to 2 years to achieve mission-ready status.
• Be willing to train independently.
• Purchase necessary personal equipment.
• Work with your dog every day outside of unit training.
• Maintain a written daily training log."

2000 As Seen in 1910 And A Few Other Goodies

I offer you few examples of human imagination to remind you there's always a better - or at least different - approach.  (They all have images, though in respect to the creators of the images, I've limited my use of them severely and altered the ones I used.)


1.   How about a pocket garden?  Literally, a garden in an altoid tin?

2.   Get a quick nap in a sleepbox at the Moscow Airport.

Click to enlarge and read small text

3.   Then there's this great poster.    Click on the image to go to the original and read the all important small text. (The image info says it's from Motifake.com, but I can't seem to use the search there successfully.)

4.    If you've ever wondered what those initials stand for, you can find out at Mental Floss.

H.G. Wells
H.P. Lovecraft
J.D. Salinger

F. Scott Fitzgerald

J.K. Rowling

E.E. Cummings

W.B. Yeats
T.S. Eliot

P.G. Wodehouse

There are nine more.

5.  How about the year 2000 as envisioned in 1910?  Here's one of French artist Villemard's  visions - teleconferencing. 

See more the images with descriptions at Sad and Useless.

The Paris Traveler has posted some of these and others from the National Library in Paris.

Anchorage Fourth of July - Something For Everyone

We biked down to the Delaney Park Strip for the Anchorage July 4 celebration.  We were too late for the parade or the reading of the Declaration of Independence, but then I'd just read it preparing for the previous post.





This will just be pictures and a few comments of a sunny day enjoying being with others on the Fourth.

The Marines were there.















J wondered why they didn't hire vets to interact with the kids - particularly vets in wheel chairs,

and with missing limbs.  Give the kids a more realistic idea about war and the vets some work.

One of the things that makes the US great is the richness that we've gained over the centuries from immigration.  While most citizens of the world know more about the US than the average American knows about any of their countries, we can know people from all those countries. We have absorbed not only the people, but their cultures which gives us access to understanding them in a totally different way, if we choose to engage them.  




I've been a fan of Taiko drumming since the very first time I saw and heard a group from Japan perform at West High School, eons ago.  The physical strength, discipline, and group coordination necessary to do this is amazing, and the result is mesmerizing as you can sense in the video.

You can learn to drum like this in Anchorage.  Just think, you get exercise, music lessons, and cultural training all in one.  From their website:

Tomodachi Daiko offers beginning taiko classes for adults (13+ years) on Wednesday evenings from 6:00 - 7:00 p.m., starting September 1, 2010.  All classes are held in the gymnasium at Sand Lake Elementary School on Jewel Lake Road. (Please wear comfortable clothing for this activity.  New students are required to purchase bachi (drum sticks) which are available at class.)

There was lots of food.

This young lady was soliciting donations - very successfully I would say - for Alaskan Assistance Dogs. 



Their mission statement, from their website, is:

"Alaska Assistance Dogs provides professionally trained service dogs to Alaskans with special needs including mobility impairments, autism and post traumatic stress disorder. We also incorporate service dog training into therapeutic programs to improve the lives of Alaskans from pre-schoolers to adults."

A lot of relatively young kids were having a great time on the climbing tower, well strapped in.

 The Bird Treatment and Learning Center had several birds there.  They were either disabled or too adapted to humans and couldn't be released into the wild.  It was a great opportunity to get some good pictures since my little camera doesn't do well with telephoto.  This is a great horned owl.  The owls that really do go Hoo, Hoo, Hoo. Hoo.

 From the Bird TLC website:

The Bird Treatment and Learning Center

is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization dedicated to rehabilitating sick, injured or orphaned wild birds and providing avian education programs to the public. Dr. James R. Scott, an Anchorage veterinarian, now retired, founded Bird TLC in 1988. Dr. Scott, along with other Alaskan veterinarians and volunteers, donate their time to treat these birds in need. In addition to medical care, Bird TLC provides a variety of educational programs to increase people's awareness of the wild birds around them and to encourage preservation of their habitat. Bird TLC is supported by education program fees and contributions from individuals, private foundations, and corporations.

Seattle Shots

Some pictures I took while in Seattle.

Walking up into Seattle from the underground light rail station.

How do you know your dog was stolen?  I guess if it had a collar and tags and it was spotted with someone else.  Later we saw the same dog on a Lost poster.

Lunch at KauKau's

In the bus tunnel

 

Ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle

Waterless Urinal

Graduation at UW Botanical Garden

I was reminded of the Berlin football fans as I saw all these people with green jerseys and a number with scarves.  But they hadn't had near as much beer as the Berliners and they weren't chanting for their team.  Looking now, I see it ended a 2-2 with the Vancouver Whitecaps.

AIFF 2010: Iditarod Film - Mush's Maker Alex Stein Video

I ran into Alex Stein Sunday night at the Bear Tooth. He and I were on Shannyn Moore's show at KUDO (1080 am) together Friday - but we were both calling in - to talk about the film festival. Shannyn's asked me to call in after the 1pm news during the festival to talk about what looks good each day. I think I might have said that in an earlier post, sorry. It's hard keeping things straight. For tonight's lineup, click on the Alaska International Film Festival tab above.

Anyway, Alex gave a brief description of the film on the video.  Mush  plays again  

Saturday evening at 7:30 in a Snowdance (Alaska films) program at Out North.

Alex focused on some of the mushers who were bringing up the tail end of the race to learn about their motivation when they know they can't win. (Why does everyone have to always win? Just being able to mush to Nome is adventure enough.) He's scheduled to be at the presentation Saturday.

Arctic Streakers Agility Club

Last Sunday, while on a bike ride we ran into a bunch of tents in the Waldron Park off Tudor Road east of Seward Highway.  We discovered the Arctic Streakers Agility Club.  

Wikipedia seems to have the best description of agility

Dog agility is a dog sport in which a handler directs a dog through an obstacle course in a race for both time and accuracy. Dogs run off-leash with no food or toys as incentives, and the handler can touch neither dog nor obstacles.

Consequently the handler's controls are limited to voice, movement, and various body signals, requiring exceptional training of the animal and coordination of the handler.
In its simplest form, an agility course consists of a set of standard obstacles, laid out by an agility judge in a design of his or her own choosing on a roughly 100 by 100-foot (30 by 30 m) area, with numbers indicating the order in which the dog must complete the obstacles.

Courses are complicated enough that a dog could not complete them correctly without human direction. In competition, the handler must assess the course, decide on handling strategies, and direct the dog through the course, with precision and speed equally important. Many strategies exist to compensate for the inherent difference in human and dog speeds and the strengths and weaknesses of the various dogs and handlers.

The North American Dog Agility Council website tells us:

The North American Dog Agility Council (NADAC) was formed in 1993 to provide North American dogs and their handlers with a fast, safe and enjoyable form of the sport of dog agility. NADAC sanctions agility trials sponsored by affiliated clubs.

The purpose of a NADAC agility trial is to demonstrate the ability of a dog and its handler to work as a smoothly functioning team. With separate class divisions for Veterans and Junior Handlers and a variety of games, NADAC dog agility offers something for everyone!

Looking a little further, I found the United States Association of Dog Agility Clubs.  I wonder what the story is about these two organizations.

As evidence of the pioneering spirit and leadership role of USDAA and its supporters, we count among our accomplishments -

Introduction of the sport to North America in its international form (1986)

• First organization in the world to separate competition into four jumping height divisions, fostering participation among competitors with virtually all sizes of dogs
• First officially sanctioned event in the United States and North America (1986)
• Introduction of the first competitive tournament series in North America - the "Grand Prix of Dog Agility^®" (1988)
• Introduction of the first certification tests in the world in five distinctive classes of competition (1990)
• First U.S. canine sports authority to field teams in "world" competition (FCI World Dog Show, Germany, 1991)
• First championship tournament series on a major national television network when the USDAA Grand Prix of Dog Agility^® Championships was telecast on Animal Planet (1999)

Best Dog Blogs Awards

I got an email forwarded from a friend.  His friend's wife's blog (still with me?) was nominated for the  Best Dog Blog.  I guess I got it because I'm a blogger.  They were asking for people to go to the site and vote for the blog.

I have mixed feelings about 'best' anything.  On the one hand it gets attention to different fields - Olympics, Nobel Prizes, World Cup, Academy Awards, Spelling Bees, Miss Universe - but it also artificially creates this idea of 'best' which is pretty hard to judge in most cases, is temporary, and creates more 'losers' than winners.  It encourages some people to work much harder, some to work maniacally, and yet other to cheat and take shortcuts.  I don't think the dog bloggers are in the competitive class of Olympians and they do get  more people to their blogs and a pat on the back. 

Probably the main purpose of these things is to drum up publicity.  The website that is giving out the awards says on the bottom of the page:

Encourage your readers, friends, family to vote for your favorites! The blogs with the most votes will win! Voting will close on August 20, 2010.

Which translates into lots more hits on the site where people vote.  More hits means more ad revenue.  OK, I know I'm a cynic.  This is starting to sound like American Idol. 

I've briefly looked at the Best Pet and Best Dog nominees.  I surely don't have enough knowledge to vote seriously.  (Of course, you can legitimately ask, after all I said, how can I think that there is such a thing as a serious vote?)

I do think the blogs do offer pet owners some useful information on a wide variety of topics from pet health, training, dealing with issues like "taking your dog to college with you."  So, if you are interested, you can check them out and vote.  I won't tell you which one to vote for though.  The email I got said that you have to leave your email to prevent people from voting more than once, but be careful to uncheck the box that says to sign up for the newsletter if you don't want lots of email from them. 

Here's the link to voting page on Dogtime.com.

In the Shadows of Lives Lived

We only learned after we got back that two special friends had died while we were gone.  Yakov and Lisa (as we knew her) came to Alaska from Moscow in 1994.  Both were doctors there and ended up in Anchorage near Yakov's sister.  They loved Anchorage's wilderness, frequently walking and biking the bike trails.  Although their English was much better than my non-existent Russian, there was much left uncommunicated in words.  Instead they used their eyes and smiles and love of life to make us appreciate how special they were and made us feel.  Yakov invited me several times to come play pool with him at the senior center where he would tell me how good I was playing as he pocketed his balls.  They taught us the joys of king boleta mushrooms - showing us how to choose good ones and various ways to cook them.  And don't forget vodka.  Lisa. Lisa. Lisa.  I felt like I'd known Lisa all my life.  She had such a warm smile and lively eyes.  There was a special connection.  I just felt completely comfortable around her.  We could talk seriously and playfully; there were no facades, just real human to human connection.  Unfortunately we weren't together often enough.   They'd had health problems on and off, but I didn't realize I would never see them again.  They were both 80.

My aunt Bert died last weekend in Los Angeles.  She is someone who has been on the periphery of my life since I was born.  She was my mother's brother's wife.  I did connect meaningfully with my uncle as an adult, but never really had any serious conversations with my aunt, except maybe about her paintings.  They were married for over 60 years.  The pictures I've taken in our last visits were mostly of my uncle who was always the more outgoing of the two.  But here's my aunt (in the turquoise shirt) with my mom and uncle.  She's about 90 in this picture. 

And Johnny Wooden died too.  I started UCLA in 1963.  So I had student season tickets for the 1963-64 basketball games.  I still remember vividly the LA Classic game at the Sports Arena near Exposition Park in December 1963 when UCLA, having won a few games, went up against Michigan, which may have been number 1 at the time.  It was the game sports writers said UCLA would face a real team.  In the first few minutes it was 16-0 UCLA.  That was the first big game of that initial undefeated season.  Each game that year was fantastic since UCLA, up to that point, had been a mediocre team and each win was like a surprise gift.  In later years, while the basketball got better, every game was also the one in which the winning streak might end.  The danger of losing replaced the excitement of winning.  But that first year, despite their winning streak, UCLA was often seen as the underdog just waiting for their luck to run out.

I got to see the team and Coach Wooden close up at many of the games as the dynasty began.  I attended the preseason game when the freshman team - which included Lew Alcindor - defeated the national champion varsity team.  I'm not among those who deify Wooden.  There were things that have been rumored to go on with gifts to players that may have been ok then, but aren't today.  Wealthy patrons of UCLA looking after the team members on the side.  So I suspect things were not all as squeaky clean as they are portrayed.  But it was fantastic basketball and I was at the right place at the right time to experience it.  Wooden was 99 when he died the other day.  He lived a good, fulfilled life.



Mary died last week too.  Mary was our friend Lynn's guide dog.  Cancer.  She was a working dog whose life wasn't carefree and who made Lynn's life much easier.   There's Mary on the floor at work at Cyrano's.

Finally I want to mention "three Afghan civilians" who were mentioned in the news this weekend too.  From what I can tell, they died in separate incidents between January and May.  I didn't know them.  Their names weren't even in the newspaper.  They were just three anonymous people.  All the attention was on an Alaskan, from Wasilla, who has been accused of shooting them. The Alaska link is my excuse for mentioning them here.  People die every day and we can't interrupt our lives for everyone who dies in the world.  We need to keep on with our own lives.  But we should take time to remember the the people (and in this case also a dog) we knew as well as those whose lives we are through strange twists of fate linked to, such as the three Afghan civilians.  I've emailed the reporter and the base public affairs officer Lt. Col. Tamara Parker to see if they know the names of the civilians.  If they respond I'll let you know. 

Meanwhile, spend a moment in the shadows of these lives lived.  Then reflect on what's truly important to you and stop worrying about the unimportant stuff and get out into the sunshine and live your lives boldly and lovingly.  Do things that make the world better.  Make other people's lives happier, not harder.  You don't have much time to waste. 

For those interested, you can double click the images below to enlarge them.