Beautiful Photograph du Jour

CATCH THE SNOW
By Vinni Bruhn

Random Musings In The Dead Of Winter

NICOLA, JACKSON AND THE DF&C

There has been a hole in our lives for the last 15 years. That is when Licorice, a rescue black Labrador retriever, suffered a fatal rattlesnake bite. We have talked about getting another dog, but travels, jobs and the confined spaces in which we lived conspired to keep that from happening. And I suppose the cats were secretly lobbying for us to remain canine-free.

Then an old friend called the Dear Friend & Conscience from upstate New York on Christmas Day with an unexpected gift: Brother and sister four-and-a-half-year-old chocolate Labs who needed homes because their master was being deployed to Afghanistan.

The situation turned out to be a bit more complicated. Jackson and Nicola had been dumped at the home of the mother of the deployed GI's girlfriend and were basically cage bound, seldom walked and never exercised. The master had no intention of reuniting with them when and if he came home, while the girlfriend's mother was moving from a house with a yard to an apartment.

Jack and Nicky clicked immediately with the DF&C on an exploratory visit, and in mid-January they were introduced to their new home, the DF&C's mountain retreat, a place made in dog heaven that has a large back yard below a woods, the Kittatinny Ridge and the Appalachian Trail. Oh, and a 40,000-acre wildlife refuge across the road.

* * * * *

The snowpack at the mountain retreat is about 18 inches as we slouch toward the last month of winter, and it is a solid 18 inches because many of the storms have begun or ended with sleet and freezing rain. One result, in addition to the back yard and environs being a skating ring, is that when we walk and exercise Jack and Nicky, we zoot along on top of the snowpack and our foot and paw falls are a symphony of notes sounding like broken glass and tinkling wind chimes.

* * * * *

There is nothing more important to dogs than getting exercise. A good diet and loving owners are important, of course, but a dog that cannot run is not a happy dog and sooner or later will become an overweight dog with a shortened life expectancy.

Jack and Nicky took to us immediately. Jack has shown some apprehension when the DF&C isn't around, but both are extremely intelligent, obedient and excellent watchdogs who hear the sound of a car on the driveway long before we do.

And do they love to run! Tearing off on mad sprints, circling back to us and then off again, sometimes mock fighting, leaping and tumbling with a joyousness that we can only hope has exorcised memories of their cage-confined lives of neglect.

* * * * *

One reliable measure of the harshness of a winter is how often I have had to wear my Sorel snow boots, which have high gaiters and felt inserts. The boots are ideal when the going gets tough because they keep me dry in deep snow and the inserts can be swapped out when they become damp from sweaty feet. Well, this has been a Sorel Winter for sure, but not a sweaty feet one with daytime temperatures that often do not reach the freezing mark and nighttime lows at or near zero.

* * * * *

Having been outvoted by the humans on the dog question, we didn't know what to expect from our four cats (all rescues themselves), but their consequent behavior has been a surprise.

The mountain retreat is spacious inside, as well as outside, which has allowed the cats to hang out pretty much where they want. Chin, who is increasingly senile in her old age, sticks to the living room and kitchen. Kimba, Taj and Iggie pretty much have the run of the joint, but in cold weather almost always can be found in the large finished basement not far from Al, the Alaska-brand coal stove that keeps the house toasty and the floors and walls warm even in a winter like this one. Oh, and Iggie sometimes likes to spend the night in the garage where he can guard against mousies and other real and imagined invaders.

Jack and Nicky have upset this apple cart because they usually are confined to the basement and are eating in the garage for the time being, the initial result of which was to exile the heat seekers upstairs.

It took about two weeks, but they have slowly made their way back downstairs, perching on bookshelves that run parallel to the steps where they can bask in Al's warmth. Iggie, always the most sociable of the bunch, has gone further in presenting himself to the dogs while figuratively giving them the finger when he is let into and out of the garage.

* * * * *

There is no doubt in our minds that rescue critters find their rescuers and not the other way around. This makes the saga of Jack and Nicky all the more amazing because, by our count, they passed through at least four owners before being rescued by the DF&C.

There was the owner in whose home or kennel they were born. The owner to whom they were given or sold, someone who obviously worked with them at a tender age, a result of which is their good manners. The owner who is off to Afghanistan. And the owner who is the mother of the girlfriend of the deployed GI.

* * * * *

The temperature is hovering near zero, but the bone dryness makes it feel warmer as we huddled on the back deck the other night and called out the constellations arrayed in all their glory over our heads.

There are our old friends Orion, Ursa Major and Minor, and zodiacal faves Taurus and Gemini. But we also can see the so-called Winter Triangle as clear as a bell: Impossible-to-miss Betelguese on Orion's left shoulder, Sirius all by its lonesome, and Procyon, part of Canis Minor, which trails Canis Major as one of the two dogs following Orion in Greek mythology.

Kind of like Jack and Nicky.

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

George Shearing (1919-2011)

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Beautiful Photograph du Jour

STAN "THE SOUND" GETZ
By William Claxton
Hat tip to Ordinary Finds

Reflections On The Arab Revolution

The dramatic three-week uprising in Egypt that culminated with the fall of Hosni Mubarak is, taking the most optimistic point of view, the end of the beginning.

Only time will tell if the military will make good on its promise to manage the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the face of the fact that many of the former president's backers aren't going anywhere (think of George Bush being replaced by Dick Cheney, as one pundit noted) and elections will not be held for six long months.

Then there is the matter or whether other Arab nations will be undergo relatively bloodless revolutions. (You can rule out Algeria on that count, and probably Libya, as well. Oh yeah, and Iran.)

But one thing is obvious and kept coming back to me in the week and a half I spend reflecting at the mountain retreat: While the U.S. did much to entrench and enrich Mubarak it did little to precipitate his ouster. Yes, there were back-channel efforts. Yes, the Obama administration turned up the heat as Mubarak prevaricated, stalled and then sicced his thugs on the protesters. But at the end of the day -- or rather last Friday -- it was the extraordinary agglomeration of Egyptians, young and old, poor and professional, religious and not so -- who shook Egypt and the Arab world to its very core.

This is not to sell short President Obama's influence, which was presaged by his speech in Cairo in June 2009 in which he declared that only by moral force and not violence would change come in the Arab world. But to ascribe a larger role is as false as declaring, as some conservative commentators have, that he sold out the protesters.

Then there is the fact that religion and Islam specifically, always of overarching concern to right wingers in the U.S., took a back seat to social justice.

Finally and most importantly, the protesters in Tahrir Square brought more change to the Arab world in three weeks than Al Qaeda has in a decade.

Photo by By Tara Todras-Whitehill/The Associated Press

Anatomy Of A Protest Site

(Click on this image of Tahrir Square to enlarge.)

Courtesy of The Arabist via Newshoggers

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

David Kato Kisule (1965-2011)

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Beautiful Photograph du Jour

THREE FRIENDS PAUSE TO CHAT
ON THE GREAT WALL
By Tim Wu
Hat tip to Woods' Lot

Welcome To The American Police State

The Dear Friend & Conscience was heading back to the mountain retreat from the city and was merging from one highway to another out of a clover leaf interchange when a car entering the highway a few hundred feet ahead accelerated. The DF&C put on her turn signal and began moving to the passing lane to give the other car ample room when a large black car traveling at a high rate of speed suddenly filled her rear view mirror. It was an unmarked Pennsylvania State Police cruiser with, it turned out, a second unmarked cruiser traveling so close on its tail that she didn't see the second cruiser until the trooper in the first cruiser flipped on his red-and-blue dashboard mounted lights and motioned her to pull over.

What had the DF&C done wrong? She was traveling at a safe speed and properly used her turn indicator before changing lanes. What she had done wrong was get in the way of a high-speed game of chicken between two state troopers who were hurtling along nearly bumper to bumper, with emergency lights off, at what the DF&C estimated to be 85-90 miles per hour on a highway where the speed limit is 55.

The two troopers, a man and a woman, approached the driver's side door of the DF&C's SUV. The man launched into a tirade to the effect that he and the other trooper were on their way to an emergency and she could have gotten them killed. The woman trooper stood silent and obviously embarrassed over her colleague's high-decibel tongue lashing, which of course was a bald-faced lie since the troopers certainly would not have stopped to ticket her for a non-infraction if they indeed were hurrying to an emergency.

The DF&C received a citation for "failed (sic) to drive within a single lane and or movement from lane was not made safely," which carries a $110.50 fine but no points on her driver's license, which is blemish free. She will plead not guilty and it's a safe bet that neither trooper will show up in court.

* * * * *

Okay, nobody got hurt, let alone killed, as in the recent case of Rogelio Serrato, who was murdered by a Monterey County, California SWAT mean, his four children left homeless and his family home a charred ruins in a case of mistaken identity not unlike an incident in suburban Washington where police confused the town's mayor with a drug dealer, broke into his home, shot dead his pet dogs and held the mayor, his wife and children at gunpoint. Then there were the two Rutgers University students, one the son of a cop, who had the crap beaten out of them in December in yet another case of mistaken identity.

The reason that these incidents keep occurring over and over, and seemingly with increasing frequency, is because bullies like the trooper who raged at the DF&C, as well as sociopaths and psychopaths, are attracted to police work. Their aberrant behavior is made easier in a post-9/11 climate that has made everyone a suspect.

Don't get me wrong. Police have a tough job and should expect deference. And I have known some damned fine cops in the many years that I worked for big city newspapers.

* * * * *

But the Pennsylvania State Police, in this context, are a special case. As I write in my book, The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder, this force is mired in a seemingly irreparable culture of political favoritism, misogyny, cover-ups and scandal.

When I began researching the book in 2002, the state police were fighting several sexual harassment allegations, one involving a trooper who assaulted a woman in her hospital bed who had attempted suicide. Millions of dollars in settlement money was paid out to the victims. As I finished the book in 2010, the state police were fighting an allegation that a lieutenant was harassed repeatedly after he refused a major's orders to use police computers to snoop on the new beau of the major's estranged wife.

In between, there have been scandals involving inaccurate radar guns that the state police hid rather than corrected, shoddy testing at its crime lab, a successful lawsuit after it bungled the investigation of a trooper accused of molesting two girls, the unprecedented demotion of a captain by two ranks because it was falsely believed that he had leaked an internal memo to a newspaper, and the subsequent dismissal and rehiring of its highest-ranking woman officer for filing an internal-affairs complaint against a captain.

In the case of the four murders discussed at length in The Bottom of the Fox, the investigative work ranged from lackadaisical to unprofessional. And the state police pressed authorities to classify the questionable deaths of several peripheral players as accidents or suicides, which enabled them to walk away from cases that should have gotten intense scrutiny.

All of the victims had a common denominator: They were undesirables according to the state police's crude social calculus. If they had been "somebodies" and met with foul play, it was more likely that their departure from this mortal coil would have been taken seriously. As it was, they were hippies, gays and drug dealers who were not worth breaking a sweat over.

Welcome to The American Police State.

Cartoon du Jour

Barry Deutsch

8th Wonder Of The World Re-Revealed

MORE HERE.
Hat tip to bldblog

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

BE PATIENT
By Shingo Uchiyama

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning tomorrow.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning on Monday.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning on Monday.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning on Monday.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning on Monday.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning on Monday.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning on February 14.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

For a hard earned and well deserved break. Barring major developments which we can do without, we'll resume pissing and moaning on February 14.

May The Farce Be With You

Call me un-American or something, but I'll be will be missing the Stupid Bowl again this year, a decision made easier because there is no teevee at the mountain retreat and a thug by the name of Ben Rothlisberger, who should be spending tomorrow working off a public-service sentence at a soup kitchen and not tripping the Field Turf fantastic in Dallas.

In fact, I can't remember the last Stupid Bowl that I watched, in part a function of my onetime fave Philadelphia Eagles reliably breaking my heart and the Joe Flacco-powered Ravens not having quite put together the combination that will keep them playing into February.

This pretty much leaves the ridiculously overhyped Stupid Bowl commercials as the only attraction, and they seldom fail to disappoint. A marvelous exception here.

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer
(2010)

When The Middle Ground Is Perilous

I've been in a few hot spots as a reporter and photographer over the years, but beyond being shot at a few times (but never hit), the worst was having to contend with teargas canisters and panicky protesters while shooting a massive anti-nukes demonstration on the streets of Tokyo and getting my hand, one of my Nikormat FTs and a 28 millimeter lens crushed. (Yes, I date myself since Nikon stopped making the Nikormat in 1978.)

And so I have boundless respect for what journalists, and photojournalists and camera crew in particularly, are doing on the streets of Cairo.

Photograph by Miguel Medina/AFP-Getty Images

Lena Nyman (1944-2011)

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