WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - This will probably be the first time a dog's memorial service is attended by 300 cats. A schnauzer-Siberian husky mix named Ginny will be eulogized Nov. 19 at the Westchester Cat Show, where she was named Cat of the Year in 1998 for her uncanny skill and bravery in finding and rescuing endangered tabbies.
"It'll be right during the show, with the judging going on and all the cats out there on the floor," said Leslie Masson, a spokeswoman for the Westchester Feline Club, which sponsors the show. "We'll call for quiet, and then a few people will get up on stage and talk about Ginny. Her owner will be there and talk, if he's able to, and some people from her fan club."
Ginny died in August at age 17, after a long career as a one-dog rescue party for cats on Long Island's South Shore. The club says she saved hundreds of cats who were abandoned, injured or in harm's way.
Her owner, Philip Gonzalez of Long Beach, has written two books about Ginny and the cats she found, several of whom moved in with him. Among the best-known rescues is the time Ginny threw herself against a vertical pipe at a construction site to topple it and reveal the kittens trapped inside. She once ignored the cuts on her paws as she dug through a box full of broken glass to find an injured cat inside.
Gonzalez, 55, said Thursday that over the years he has tried to train other dogs to do what Ginny did, but "They just didn't have it."
"I didn't train her," he said. "Ginny was just magical in a way. I adopted her from a shelter, and they said she's never been with cats before. But she just had this knack of knowing when a cat was in trouble."
As he used to do with Ginny, Gonzalez still goes out every night to feed stray cats in the area, with the help of the Ginny Fund, which pays for food, medical care and spaying or neutering.
The cats seem to miss Ginny too, he said.
"They want nothing to do with my other dogs," he said. "They used to come up to Ginny and rub against her, even if I was putting food out."
The memorial service will be followed by this year's Cat of the Year award, which is going to an actual cat — Zoe, an 8-year-old ragdoll from Larchmont who saved her owner from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Other cats of the year have included a cat with a cleft palate who taught herself to hold her feeding tube and a cat who campaigns against rules that prohibit pets in senior housing.
Besides the memorial service, the Cat of the Year award and the best-of-breed judging, the show features a household pet competition, an agility contest for cats and a book signing by Allia Zobel, author of "101 Reasons Why a Cat is Better Than a Man."
In addition, about 80 cats from shelters will be up for adoption.
11/13/2005
Cat Show Plans Memorial Service for Dog
11/11/2005
Veterans Day
Growing up in Canada, I was taught about"remembrance Day, and the sacrifices that were made by Brave Men and Women, to keep us free...We were also Taught this poem and would recite it as a school in assembly....I'm sure some of you know this.
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. Here is the story of the making of that poem:
Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.
As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.
It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:
"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."
One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.
The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.
In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.
A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."
When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:
"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene."
In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.
Where in the WORLD is MATT LAUER
Day 4&5
Well I totally forgot to post this...
Day 4- ShangHai,China, and
Day5- Dubrovnik,Croatia...can you say WHeeeee....:sigh
11/10/2005
Declassified FBI Documents
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released a vast selection of previously classified documents relating to UFOs, their dealings with them, reports of 'Flying Discs' and other strange events. Because of the Freedom of Information Act, it is now possible to download these documents for free from the web and view them at your leisure on your computer.
The documents in question contain letters, reports, articles and correspondences, some of which are somewhat more difficult to read than others. The best way to view them is to simply download them to your computer.
In order to view these files, you will need a copy of the free Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer.
Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader
Perspectives of war hit home in soldiers' stories
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
Thu Nov 10, 7:26 AM ET
War stories are as old as The Iliad, Homer's epic poem about the Greek conquest of Troy more than 2,000 years ago. In honor of Veterans Day Friday, USA TODAY reviews five new books about war, told from the perspective of more recent soldiers.
My War: Killing Time in Iraq
By Colby Buzzell
Putnam, 358 pp., $25.95
At 26, tired of dead-end, slacker jobs, Colby Buzzell joined the Army.
A year later, he was in Iraq as a machine-gunner in Stryker Brigade, whose mission was "to locate, capture and kill all non-compliant forces" in and around Mosul.
He didn't think much of how the White House, Pentagon and media were reporting on the chaos and confusion of "guerrilla warfare, urban-style."
He started a blog, My War, named after a song by the punk band Black Flag.
It attracted a following, which grew after the Army's attempt to shut it down.
The book, like his blog, is cynical but not overtly political.
Buzzell never doubts he's on the side of the good guys, even as he questions whether anyone fully understands the reality of war.
Military recruiters won't be handing My War to prospective soldiers, who would do well to read one grunt's account of what they could be getting into.
For God and Country
By James Yee
PublicAffairs, 240 pp., $24
In 2001, James Yee, a West Point graduate, became one of the first Muslim chaplains in the U.S. Army.
He was later assigned to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where nearly 700 prisoners captured in the war on terrorism were held.
In 2003, he was arrested and jailed for 76 days in solitary confinement on charges of spying and aiding the enemy - charges the Pentagon, to its embarrassment, later dropped.
Yee's poignant account of what he describes as an attack on his faith and patriotism is disturbing even if it ultimately raises more questions than it answers.
Beyond the legal issues are questions about religious bias in the military.
Yee writes that Islam "affected nearly every aspect of life at Guantanamo," but the few attempts by U.S. soldiers to understand were discouraged.
He writes that one MP was ordered by superiors to "stop trying to learn Arabic. You're here to guard them, not talk to them."
Forever a Soldier
Edited by Tom Wiener
National Geographic, 337 pp., $26
In the past five years, more than 35,000 veterans, fresh from Iraq and as far back as World War I, have contributed their individual stories to the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project (www.loc .gov/vets).
Tom Wiener, the project's historian, has culled those archives for a representative sample of 37 interviews. It's an uneven collection, but the best live up to the book's subtitle, Unforgettable Stories of Wartime Service.
Wiener notes that every veteran in the book, except one, "survived his or her individual war. How they did so demonstrates the way we do rise above cruelty to a better place. It is perhaps the finest lesson any war can teach us."
Also out in paperback this week: an earlier collection from the archives: Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the Front Lines (National Geographic, $16.95).
An Instinct for War
By Roger Spiller
Harvard, 403 pp., $29.95
Imagine a military historian who can travel in time to past and future wars.
That's what Roger Spiller, who taught at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., does in his imaginative collection of 13 short stories.
They stretch from ancient China to a 21st-century war "so terrible it was beyond naming."
Spiller is a former aide to the Army's chief of staff and a consultant to Ken Burns' forthcoming documentary on World War II.
He writes, "Some of this actually happened and some of it didn't, but all of it is as true as I can make it."
His mostly first-person stories deal with Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs, what Civil War Gen. George McClellan tried to borrow from Napoleon and an investigation of a Japanese general after World War II.
Spiller's stories can be read as parables. They neither celebrate nor condemn war but raise fundamental questions faced by soldiers and civilians.
Flying Through Midnight
By John T. Halliday
Scribner, 416 pp., $27.50
When President Nixon assured the country in 1970 that no U.S. soldiers were fighting in Laos, John Halliday was doing exactly that - flying what seemed like nightly suicide missions.
A naive 24-year-old Air Force lieutenant colonel, he entered a bizarre, secret world of special ops, flying creaky C-123 cargo planes in complete darkness, dropping flares to mark enemy targets.
His writing is often breathless, but so is the action he describes, including a dramatic landing on an unlighted airstrip to save his crew.
The book is as much about confronting the past as describing it.
A final chapter deals with Halliday's long struggle to get the book written and published.
A week before Halliday's father died in 1997, he took his son to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, which Halliday had avoided.
The father waved his arm at the 58,000 names on the wall and urged his son, "Write it for them."
He did.
'Lost' Loses Another Main Character
NEW YORK - It would seem to be lights out for Shannon on "Lost." The spoiled Daddy's girl was apparently killed off Wednesday night as the ABC thriller made good on its promise to eliminate one of its characters.
Hyped by the network as the episode that "people will be talking about all year long," it had indeed spurred lots of chatter even before it aired. Despite mighty efforts by the series' producers to keep secret the victim's identity beforehand, bloggers and other "Lost" sleuths seized on Shannon Rutherford weeks ago as the castaway most likely to be "lost forever."
Even so, the episode put forward another possible candidate: fellow refugee Sawyer ( Josh Holloway). Feverish and weakened from a bullet wound, he fell into unconsciousness during a grueling hike through the jungle interior.
It seemed he was a goner. Or just a red herring? At last sighting, he was being carried on a makeshift stretcher by others in his party. His condition seemed grave. "Lost" can be a tease.
But by all indications short of a death certificate, the bell tolled for Shannon. Pushing through the thick jungle growth in frantic pursuit of Walt ( Malcolm David Kelley), the vanished child whose image keeps haunting her, Shannon was mistaken for one of the demonic Others and shot by trigger-happy Ana Lucia ( Michelle Rodriguez).
Wounded and bloody, Shannon collapsed into the arms of Sayid ( Naveen Andrews), who had just professed his love for her — and told her that, by golly, he had seen Walt's vision, too.
It was just another day on the uncharted tropical island where Shannon and dozens more airline passengers crashed last fall — at the same time launching "Lost" into a hit.
Played by Maggie Grace, Shannon had been depicted as a sexy brat whose checkered past included seducing her stepbrother Boone Carlyle, a fellow island refugee until his death last season in a freak accident. Shannon was left reeling by that loss.
On Wednesday's episode, Boone (played by Ian Somerhalder) made a guest appearance in a flashback. He was seen comforting teenage Shannon upon the sudden death of her father, after which her stepmother rudely cut off her funds.
Then trust-fund Boone betrayed Shannon when he announced that Mom had offered him a well-paying job.
No wonder Shannon wrestled with abandonment issues.
"I know when we get out of here, you're just gonna leave me," she tearfully told Sayid moments before she was shot.
"I will never leave you," he said.
His devotion seemed to be a "Lost" cause.
Words from the Dark One
Poe's Theorem of Evolution:
"Medical science, technology, and 'civilization' have supplanted
natural selection such that now we have people in positions of
authority and/or responsibility who are so stupid that a mere two
hundred years ago they would have been eaten by something whilst on
their way to the outhouse."
Security Guard Fired for Seeing Ghosts
DES MOINES, Iowa - A judge ruled that a former security guard who was fired for seeing ghosts cannot be denied unemployment benefits.
According to a court ruling released this week, the former guard's allegation of apparitions does not constitute misconduct.
The issue started on Sept. 11, when Wade Gallegos alerted his supervisor at Neighborhood Patrol of Urbandale that ghosts were haunting a neighborhood he was guarding.
The supervisor arrived at the scene, where Gallegos showed him where the ghosts were still apparently standing.
The supervisor claimed he saw nothing and fired Gallegos five hours later.
The company found no signs of drug use or alcohol.
Neighborhood Patrol challenged Gallegos' application for unemployment benefits, arguing he was guilty of misconduct.
"Such beliefs do render the claimant unfit to act as a security guard," Judge G. Ken Renegar ruled. "The employer cannot have security guards who see ghosts and apparitions and inform the employer, and then the employer sends out the patrol cars."
However, the judge ruled, seeing ghosts is not the type of misconduct that can disqualify Gallegos from receiving benefits.
___
A Funny
Over breakfast one morning, a woman said to her husband,
"I bet you don't know what day this is."
"Of course I do," he indignantly answered, going out the
door on his way to the office.
At 10 a.m., the doorbell rang, and when the woman opened
the door, she was handed a box containing a dozen long-stemmed
red roses. At 1 p.m., a foil-wrapped, two pound box of her
favorite chocolates arrived. Later, a boutique delivered
a designer dress. The woman couldn't wait for her husband
to come home. "First the flowers, then the candy, and then
the dress!" she exclaimed.
"I've never spent a more wonderful Groundhog Day in my whole life
11/09/2005
Gingerbread House Time of year:)
I made one last year and I'm going to make one this year, and it is going to be COOL.....
Of course it is for the children...NOT...
It must be perfect...
Go away Mummum's busy, no stop it ,
put that down it's for the windows, BUPPPP!!!
I bought a small kit to make the house it turned into a multi-day obsession..
But it was cool, I'll try to find the pic of it...
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire....
After having seen the commercial for this movie well over a dozen dozen times,
My Five year old has informed me that he wants Santa to give him this movie for Christmas...
Be cause it looks cool ,
and makes him happy ...
and makes his eyes dance??????
ROFLMAO
note to self: take Bup to the Eye Doctor.....?
Pandas 'Married'
BANGKOK, Thailand - Thousands of people in Thailand came to the wedding party Wednesday, but the nuptial bliss belonged to a pair of animals: the country's only two resident giant pandas.
As Chuang Chuang and his female partner, Lin Hui, have become adults and begin to mate, Thai officials decided it was time for the couple to make it official.
Thais dressed in panda and other animal costumes marched and played music in a traditional Thai wedding procession to northern Thailand's Chiang Mai Zoo, where the pandas live.
The guests witnessed a Chinese tea ceremony and a feast of cake — a four-layer ice sculpture filled with fruits that pandas typically eat, said a zoo spokeswoman, Rossukhon Chuicomwong.
The pandas' living quarters were decorated with a large, festive red ribbon and a carved dragon decoration.
Thailand rented Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui from China for $250,000 in October 2003 for 10 years.
The pandas are expected to generate millions of dollars in revenues from Thai and foreign tourists during their stay.
Oak Island up for sale
It may look like a fixer-upper at first glance, but what is buried beneath scrubby little Oak Island might just make its estimated $7 million price tag worth the investment. Oak Island, in Nova Scotia, is famous for its Money Pit, a mystery that has endured two centuries, claimed six lives and swallowed up millions in life savings. The Pit was discovered in 1795 by a local boy named Daniel McGinnis who, spotting an unusual clearing in the earth under one of the island's oak trees, was prompted to start digging. The discovery of layered planks, mysterious stone slabs, and mats made of coconut fibers descending deep into the ground turned his casual afternoon dig into an all-out excavation. Investors and thrill-seekers would eventually jump in and continue the work, kicking off one of the world's longest running treasure hunts. What appears to be a complex flooding trap has thwarted efforts to reach the bottom of the Money Pit ever since.
Some think the pit was purposely flooded with seawater, via a series of artificial swamps and tunnels, to hide its contents. Through the murk, drill borings and shafts dug by the island's series of owners have detected what seem to be cement vaulting, wooden chests, and scraps of parchment paper. Radiocarbon dating of these artifacts is consistent: whoever constructed the shaft likely did so sometime in the 16th Century. Speculation about the contents of Oak Island's Money Pit range from the treasure of the Knight's Templar to Shakespeare's original manuscripts.
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