Day: November 6, 2006

Categories
Critters Serious Stuff

Gallop polls

Willie Nelson says we have a lot to learn from horses, and I find it very difficult to disagree with the man. I get to spend a lot of time with a number of horses who have been spared the slaughter yard, and I can’t name one of them who qualified as “problem children.” The reader responses below the main article are alternately touching and (IMHO) mind-bogglingly unenlightened. The one person who said that old, crippled or unruly horses need to be sold to slaughter is so far from seeing the point of the legislation that I’m not sure they can find it with a map. This legislation prevents kills for food, or sale for foreign kills for food. It does not rule out humane euthanasia with the assistance of a veterinarian in the event that the animal can look forward to no quality of life. (And yes, you do bury them, out in the pasture.) The legistlation does not cast aspersions on other cultures that consume horse meat; it just ensures that the United States won’t be contributing to that particular market, which is as much as we can do.
I never thought I’d be getting behind Willie Nelson on the political spectrum, but this is one case where I feel the man speaks truth. Your mileage may, of course, vary, but in that case, you need to come with me sometime and feed some big fuzzy faces.… Read more

Categories
Home Base Music Spamatozoa

December 4th!

Doctor Who soundtrackThe release date for the Doctor Who soundtrack is December 4th; there are more details here. This will conclude what’s actually been a very good music year for me – for someone who sits out most everything that actually charts these days, I’ve still been picking up a lot of music this year. (Which, by the way, the L.E.O. CD I mentioned a while back is excellent, definitely worth the wait, and even better than the streaming samples would lead one to believe.)
Sorry I’m running late on theLogBook.com site update for this week; this morning I had a killer fever kick in and all of a sudden, if it was attached to my body, it hurt. I wound up taking one of the pain pills I was prescribed on Saturday, thinking “I’ll get up again around 2 o’ clock and finish the update.” Nope, I didn’t get up until it was time to go to work. I still need to ship out recent eBay wins, and a small piece of paper tells me that a shiny round thing containing the elder Mr. Finn’s latest opus has arrived, but these things didn’t get done today. :-/
I got a spam in my e-mail tonight that isn’t even worth joking about; it entreats recipients to join the craze that is currently seeing “two blogs started every second” because they could be “blogging for dollars!” 🙄 I would go into why this isn’t going to work, but then I realized: I wrote that editorial over seven years ago. (In fact, you can see it right here.) At the time, the subject was quick-start web sites to sell more or less generic merchandise, but the same thinking is just as applicable to this situation: now we’re going to run into a bunch of spammy blogs (as if there aren’t already enough of those around, just aggregating feeds from other sources) that have no reason to exist other than that their creators have been misled into thinking they’re going to Get! Rich! Quick! If you’re going to blawg all over the place, do it because you enjoy it. If you can reap some ancillary benefits from it beyond that, cool, but there has to be a reason for it to be there – and a reason for people to want to read it, because after all, they’re the ones who are supposedly supporting you.… Read more