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Showing posts from September, 2017

So this happens when self-loving idiots flood the internet

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Best friend or side dish.  Facebook investigates.    From Puerto Rico to Saipan, Point Barrow to the Florida Keys, Americans love their dogs.   And increasingly, they love the taste of them.    What once was confined to illicit recipes exchanged over the dark web, or word-of-mouth secret Soho pop-ups focused on dog-based tastings, has now gone mainstream, with Blue Apron including “Glazed Schnauzer” among its latest Amazon offerings, and Guy Fieri, host of the popular foodie series “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”, praising, rather than shunning, restaurants that feature dog meat on the menu.    Yahoo Sports recently posted a ranking of the top five dog breeds according to flavor.   Not surprisingly, this list closely matched the most popular breeds as determined from sales numbers provided by national pet-store chains.        Poodles and poodle mixes sit atop both lists, and some speculate the increased cross-breeding of poodles with other toy dogs is not simply a pract

Zirconia in the Ash Heap

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Hey big boy, wanna walk? Harold Sanborn’s “Path Along Lake Shore – Grand Lake” postcard is not particularly rare.   Over its 20-year shelf life, almost 1000 copies were printed and sold.   The example I own, with a Kodak stamp box, is worth even less (some might deem it worthless) – Not only is it NOT a first edition, among the initial run of 25 produced by Sawyer’s in Portland, it’s closer to a last edition, when the negative was washing out and the hand-lettering on the title beginning to erode. Used postcards, except for “exotics” made of tin, leather or wood, are paper, so are intrinsically worthless anyway, provided the cancelled stamp is not a freak/error, or the message admits you, a celebrity, just offed someone.   But photo-postcards like this one (but not this one) have been accorded the top shelf of worthlessness, and in Colorado, and especially because of Ebay, Sanborns like these (but not this one, although I don’t know, maybe I should list it)

Zen and the Art of Sanitation Operants

On the night before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Memphis, Tennessee, speaking in support of an ongoing garbage collectors’ strike that had taken the city to the brink of chaos. Two African American men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been mangled and killed by a malfunctioning compactor two months earlier, and city officials, especially recently-elected Memphis mayor Henry Loeb, had been purposefully reluctant to address issues of job safety, or of hourly wages so low most sanitation workers were forced to go on welfare. As the current Wikipedia entry does such a poor job of capturing either the spirit or the essence of this sermon, I strongly encourage interested readers to check out the audio or transcript in full, for example, at  http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm (copy and paste in your browser window) By 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., had reached the height of his oratorical skill and p