Florida outlawed wagering on dog racing at the end of 2020, which effectively closed all of the dog tracks. The rationale for the ban was that the greyhounds who race professionally are treated cruelly, e.g., living in cages. Dogs love to run, though. I wonder if it would make more sense to allow gambling on dog racing, with classes organized by breed, so long as each dog lives in a standard family pet environment (no more than one dog per human household member, for example). Mindy the Crippler could compete in the Vicious Retriever 9-12 years category, for example, and would be thrilled to chase a rabbit. I would bet on her!
This might fall into the same category as my desire to see a Honda Odyssey minivan as an Indy 500 or Formula 1 pace car.
My favorite group on Facebook is the Golden Retriever Club. The gift that keeps on giving recently yielded a linguistic innovation. You know how people who are not, in fact, pregnant people will say “We’re pregnant” when a household member is a pregnant person? Here’s the natural extension…
Another example of why Mindy the Crippler and I love this group:
And here’s a story about the SWAT team:
Separately, a native German speaker got in trouble with the moderators for using the word “bitch” (literal translation from the German) to describe a canine identifying as female. Speaking of pregnancy and Europe, a friend over in that correctly governed part of the world informed me of the recent birth of a daughter. My immediate response regarding the 6-week-old was to ask, “Has she received her first COVID-19 vaccination yet?”
Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to live in his or her city? Probably not. Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to work in his or her city? Sure! That’s the minimum wage.
(Imagine that in 2017 a $13/hour wage rising to $15/hour was considered princely. Where in the country right now one could hire a reliable worker for $15 per hour?)
I wonder if something analogous is happening in our neighborhood in Florida, the planned-but-not-gated community of Abacoa (within Jupiter; see our search process). There is no means-tested public housing in our neighborhood and therefore we are missing the social/economic class of those who have managed to obtain a lifetime of taxpayer-funded housing. But there is also a missing class of folks who likely could afford to pay market rent here (as low as $1500/month): white trash.
Palm Beach County is not exactly the white trash capital of Florida, but we do sometimes see tattooed folks walking their pit bulls not too far from here and in neighborhoods that aren’t much less expensive. Why don’t we have tattooed pit bull-owning neighbors within a 1-2-mile radius? The Homeowners’ Association (HOA) for each area within Abacoa specifically bans pit bulls and some other dog breeds with a reputation for aggression.
I wonder if the dog breed rules are partly designed to keep out undesirable breeds of humans…
Separately, is “All Dogs Welcome” hate speech in the same way that “All Lives Matter” is?
Regarding the digging, my Samoyed breeder said “They dig in the winter to stay warm. They dig in the summer to get cool. They dig in the fall and spring to keep in practice.”
Finally, check out the adjacent playground for kids, almost entirely covered by shade structures:
One thing that I have noticed about Florida is the investment in public leisure facilities: parks, bathrooms, playgrounds, water parks, etc. All of these are vastly superior to and better-maintained than their counterparts in Maskachusetts despite the higher percentage of residents’ income consumed by taxes in MA (Tax Foundation). Also, as long as we’re talking infrastructure, the electricity grid here is remarkably robust. Every day or two it sounds like the world is ending via a thunderstorm and yet we have yet to observe even a momentary power glitch.
Related:
Government, Hygiene, and Coronaplague (the filthy public bathrooms on Martha’s Vineyard prompt some original thinking from a 12-year-old passionate Democrat)
Although I have new respect for Elon Musk due to his scorn for coronapanic and his success with SpaceX, I still don’t love the idea of driving a Tesla (no Apple CarPlay, dashboard replaced by an oddly-placed screen, the image of being a climate zealot (like the jet fuel-pumping Bill Gates!)). Hyundai has all of the bones for a good dog mode, so to speak, e.g., a big battery and an efficient heat pump. This presumably extends to Hyundai’s sister car company, Kia, which just released the EV6 (charge for 4.5 minutes to drive 60 miles… after driving 60 miles to the nearest high-speed charging location).
The clever British have figured out that dog mode already exists in Hyundai EVs. It is buried in the menu structure as “utility mode” and locking the car while in this mode requires using the mechanical key (buried inside the electronic key).
I don’t think I would buy one until I had verified at the dealership that this works on a U.S.-spec car.
One good thing about Hyundai and Kia is that they remain eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit, unlike Tesla. So if you’re a high-income person you can enjoy the spectacle of low-income Americans being forced to work longer hours to pay for a portion of your shiny new car.
Tesla anecdote: I asked an engineer friend if he still liked his Tesla 3. He said that he did, but his wife (a doctor) hated it, finding the “autopilot” jerky/scary. “I enjoy monitoring the system,” he said. I’m consistently confused by the conflation of attempted self-driving and electrification. Why should we expect an electric-powered car to drive any differently than a Toyota Camry? We used up so much energy plugging the thing in every night that now we’re too tired to turn the steering wheel?
A Nobel Prize-winning economist says he not only endorses President Biden’s expected $4 trillion infrastructure spending plan, but expects that it could break the U.S. out of the low-growth, low-inflation environment that has existed for the past 20 years.
… show them this post from a Facebook breed group:
I am extremely allergic to my golden too. Three or four times a year I was getting sinus infections that turned into pneumonia and kept me sick for MONTHS. We made these changes:
We bought a dyson vacuum and religiously vacuum every other day.
I pull the bed out and vacuum under and behind it because I found her fur actually quickly builds up in those areas “hides” behind places like that and the sofa.
I use a swifter wet jet under the bed and under other surfaces help a LOT because it picks up those micro dust hair particles which affects allergies.
We deep brush her twice a week.
We change the AC filters monthly to the strongest allergic kind.
I’ve not been sick for over a year since we started this routine. (I do still take singulair, levocetrizine and Flonase daily). But this has all really worked. Good luck.
(The gal who posted the above followed up with “I absolutely love love love my dog so much. She’s worth every minute.”)
I feel that this is a contender in the topping competition that one sees regarding coronaplague masks. “Our First Responders do X, Y, and Z, and you can’t simply wear a mask all day?”
Readers: Agree?
Also from this golden retriever group, an owner with a 6-month-old golden and a 2-month old Chihuahua asked how to prevent the two from breeding. I responded
Every Chihuahua should be neutered! No dog should be smaller than a big rat.
The comment attracted 10 positive reactions (like/laugh). I dug into these. All but one reaction was from a Facebook user with a female-associated first name.
If there is a dispute in your household regarding whether a big furry dog is allowed to sleep in the bed… Togo is the movie for you! This is a fantastic (in all senses of the word) dramatization of the 1925 dog team relay that brought diphtheria antitoxin serum to Nome.
The best part, from my point of view, is that the growth of a character (and in every Hollywood movie, of course, someone has to grow!) is demonstrated by abandonment of a previous objection to a dog sleeping in the (humans’) bed.
Recommended if you’ve got a Disney+ subscription. (Does it qualify as “the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life,” as Michelle Obama said of Hamilton? Maybe not, but it has Arctic dogs and, at least when presented on a TV, it holds the viewer’s attention much better than Hamilton.)
