Tag: ek Holiday

How To Win the Westminster Dog Show

Step 1: Find a poodle. Step 2: Get a big-money backer.

By Josh Dean, Slate

Posted Friday, Feb. 10, 2012, at 7:15 AM ET

I had a theory that people backed dogs for the same reason they owned racehorses-for the luster this association provides. Scott says that’s not the case. And he would know. He also owns racehorses. “Racehorses are much less personal, for one thing,” he said, and I think he means that you can’t cuddle up on the couch with a Thoroughbred. “The second thing is, racehorses make money. You do not make money by showing dogs. It’s nothing about making money. It’s all about spending money. You do it for other reasons.”

…

All told, Scott says the range of campaigning a dog over a year varies: “You’re dealing with $100,000 to half a million.” Some people, of course, campaign multiple dogs.

…

Once you have a conversation with Ron Scott, you start to wonder if a regular person, with a great dog, could ever have a chance at competing for show wins. Hastings, the handler and trainer who knows as much about dog shows as any human, could recall just a few recent dogs that did well despite lacking a wealthy backer. She remembered a Yorkie, owned by a family that wasn’t rich, and shown by their daughter, that won Westminster.

I looked it up. That was in 1978, when Higgins became the first and still only Yorkie to win at Madison Square Garden. Handled by Marlene Lutovsky, Higgins’s care was indeed a family affair. Marlene’s mother Barbara reported that she was the one who got up every morning at 5 a.m. “to clean his teeth, brush and oil his coat, change the wrappers and give him clean booties.”

If you have someone like Ron Scott behind you, it means that you don’t have to rise before dawn, let alone brush your dog’s teeth. But more important than that, having a backer allows potential champions to be trained by the best professional handlers and to be advertised in all the major show dog magazines-week in and week out, for however long it takes.

He also has an arrangement with a Japanese puppy mill to get his mutts free for a year or three to train and show AND they also kick in hundreds of pages of advertising.  No kidding, read the piece.

Kinda sucks the charm right out of it eh?  Just like Formula One.

In more news-

Tired of Sad Ads, Kennel Show Takes ‘Dog With a Smile’ Tack

By SARAH MASLIN NIR, The New York Times

Published: February 11, 2012

Prancing purebreds and pound puppies do not mix, or at least they will not during the televised broadcasts of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show this year, after the club cut ties with Pedigree, a longtime sponsor, in part because of Pedigree’s commercials featuring sad-eyed mutts up for adoption.

“We want people to think of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show as a celebration of the dogs in our lives,” said David Frei, the club’s director of communications and the host of the show for over two decades. The Pedigree advertisements, showing quaking and abused homeless pets, are in stark contrast to the coddled and cosseted animals that strut around Madison Square Garden during the two-day show, which begins on Monday.

…

“Show me an ad with a dog with a smile; don’t try to shame me,” Mr. Frei told The A.P. The kennel club had expressed its concerns to Pedigree, he said, adding, “We told them that, and they ignored us.”

Some Sites with a less scrooge-like attitude-

• Official
• Wikipedia
• the company of dogs by pfiore8

I have mixed feelings.  I kinda miss visiting my doggie friend who has the best behaved medium size dog I’ve had the pleasure to meet, but he is enthusiastic and playful and easily distracted.  I like dogs for the most part because they’re loyal and dependable and easily trained once you understand them.

I’m too undiscipled be a good trainer, besides I’m very indulgent.

Unconditional love comes with high maintainance though.  They don’t amuse themselves very well and pine for you when you’re away.  Cats do the same but are more subtle about it.  They’re there to train their people.

For me watching Westminster is annual tradition going back to my misspent youth when my brewing buddy and I would call up the cable company starting weeks before in a dedicated campaign to harass them into carring it.  Worked a couple of times.

Tonight I don’t have good results on finding a streaming site.  There is a live Canadian feed because of tape delay on Animal Planet (from here and here).  Good luck with that, couldn’t begin to tell you how to construct a proxy for it.  On Cable coverage is split between USA 8 – 9 (bumped for Monday Night RAW) and CNBC 9 – 11.  CNBC will rebroadcast it in its entirety from midnight to 2 am, USA from 8 – 11 am tomorrow.

I haven’t found a current list of all the contenders either and sometimes I don’t get the names of each dog.  I think I remember that they take each breed alphabetically in the list and that’s how the pretty tables below are arranged.

Puppy pictures are encouraged, directions here.

No complaining or explaining, we’ll get right to my prediction.  Giants win because they have defense and the Patsies don’t.

Other opinions

• NFL Talkboard: Super Bowl 2012
• The predictions from the Guardian’s team
• NYT’s Mike Tanier’s preview
• How the teams line up

Ads

• Ten Superbowl Ads To Watch For During The Big Game

Because it’s the American way!

In fact Super Bowl Ads are lengthening to tell a 60 second story that they can chop up and reinforce after the game.

• Preview of this year’s Super Bowl ads
• Super Bowl 2012: the new TV ads
• Rate them

Louise Ciccone

Super Bowl XLVI: Madonna’s dream halftime-show set

Tris McCall/The Star-Ledger

Published: Friday, February 03, 2012, 7:00 AM

There it is. No need for frippery or distraction, no room for collaboration or audience participation. Madonna has never been about those things and it would be awkward for her to start now. Instead, she could re-establish herself as a star who can control the party, wherever it may be. Even if it happens to be at the Super Bowl.

You know, back when I started doing this in 2009, Puppy Bowl was hardly the cultural phenomenon it has grown into today.

Puppy Bowl VIII preps: Game day analysis for fans and fantasy players

By Kerri Lendo, Austin Culture Map

02.04.12, 09:00 am

Football’s biggest event of the year is almost upon us. Puppy Bowl VIII airs this Sunday at 3 p.m. ET/PT on Animal Planet. Saying this year’s bowl is going to be huge would be an understatement after last year’s incredible final seconds.

Of course, the kitty halftime show is back with twenty of the country’s top kitten cheerleaders taking the stage. The Piggy Pep Squad will make their debut along with Meep the bird who will be live tweeting all the action. Plus, most importantly, the nation’s top puppy athletes will be vying for the championship in Animal Planet Stadium.

As for getting the ball to the end zone, that’s hardly the point.

• Your Starting Line Up
• Top Ten Moments
• Puppy Bowl Video
• Your Picture Archive

Streaming Video is purportedly here, but you can’t trust Google.

Even Pravda (or is it Isvestia?  There is no news in truth and no truth in news.) has finally gotten hip.  ESPN too from whom we learn the Bissell Kitty Halftime Show has been little more than an afterthought up until now.

Of course for Phineas and Ferb fans there is only one canonical chronicle of Meap–

Had it with the hype?  The Hypnotoad has hours of counter-programming goodness.  Instant scheduling gratification at Zap2it.

“Television is a vast wasteland”

Special mention to actual Football on Faux, Manchester United at Chelsea at 10:30 am.  This edition covers from noon to midnight.

Customarily I’d be live blogging commentary for you, but this year I happen to be visiting with a friend who doesn’t have TV.

Still there are features of interest you might wish to remark on.

This year’s Rose Parade is on the 2nd instead of New Year’s Day because the NFL is such an 800 pound gorilla that nothing interferes with pre-playoff Sunday in which I have but a passing interest (heh).  I find that remarkable and as I have no idea who won or lost yesterday you may choose to surprise me with the results.

The parade itself is not without features of interest-

122nd Rose Parade to kick off with pomp, pageantry and political protest by Occupiers

By Associated Press, The Washington Post

Monday, January 2, 4:02 AM

Police, parade and city officials have held numerous meetings with the organizers of Occupy the Rose Parade to ensure that protesters keep to the end of the two-hour long procession, where spectators and other groups who want to make political statements regularly tag along.

Several hundred activists are expected to turn out to carry a 70-foot wide octopus puppet that symbolizes the far-reaching influence of corporations, a giant U.S. Constitution, a “Goldie Sachs” wheel of fortune, as well as banners, placards and drums.

It is expected to get at least moderate media coverage on a market closed Monday.  I doubt very much they will qualify for any of the trophies unless they have an equestrian unit or cover their floats with flowers.

The regular hoopla starts at 11 am (ET) on NBC and ABC.  KTLA is supposed to have a live feed here.  This year they will have 16 Marching Bands and 22 Equestrian Units in addition to 44 flower covered Floats.

Hope you had a safe and happy celebration.  This is an Open Thread (but aren’t they all?).

Update:

• Occupy’s Rose Parade Octopus Floats Down the Street Tomorrow!
  
  Lisa Derrick, Firedog Lake
  
  Sunday January 1, 2012 10:57 am

• Occupy the Rose Parade: Working Through the Next Stage of the Occupy Movement
  
  By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
  
  Monday January 2, 2012 6:30 am

Marley was dead: to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.  Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.  Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind!  I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.  I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.  But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for.  You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead?  Of course he did. How could it be otherwise?  Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years.  Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.  And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from.  There is no doubt that Marley was dead.  This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.  If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot — say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance — literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley.  The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley.  Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.  No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him.  No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.  Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.  The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.  They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you?  When will you come to see me?”  No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.  Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

But what did Scrooge care?  It was the very thing he liked.  To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

Once upon a time — of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve — old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.  It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.  The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already — it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air.  The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.  To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.  Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.  But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.  Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

…

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge’s nephew out, had let two other people in.  They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge’s office.  They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.

“Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,” said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list.  “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?”

“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied.  “He died seven years ago, this very night.”

“We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner,” said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits.  At the ominous word “liberality,” Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time.  Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.  “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.  “And the Union workhouses?”  demanded Scrooge.  “Are they still in operation?”  “They are.  Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”  “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.  “Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh!  I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge.  “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink and means of warmth.  We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.  What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge.  “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.  I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.  I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”  “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.  Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.”  “But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.  “It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned.  “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.  Mine occupies me constantly.  Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

It’s tough out there in the tranches, what can I say?  Derivative debentures flying right and, well, more right.

No place for foxhole atheists that’s for sure.

That’s for dang sure.

Happy end of the fiscal 4th Quarter.

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

Hoopies for those that care, movies and marathons.  Minor distractions from the important business of unwrapping presents and eating.

More to come but this will have to do for now.  Harvested until 6 pm, updated until 10 am.  Now good until 6 pm.  Dinner and presents, mostly good until 8 pm.

Yay, another USB 3.0 Drive converter.  Now for a hub.  Only an extra hour, but I’ll try and do better.  Fully harvested, good until 10 pm.  Done.

It’s time for public service again and like membership in my club this counts under most court rulings (we’re also considered a halfway station for rehabilitation and socialization).

You know the drill, it’s eksmas eve and you need something to keep you awake as you finish your last minute wrapping and wrestling with directions in Swedish or Mandarin (love their fish and/or oranges).

And TV sucks.  None of your usual choices at the usual times.

Well Zap2it and your humble dysfunctional Television addict has you covered and smothered below the fold.

This edition covers the 12 hours from 6 pm to 6 am.

A holiday tradition at my house, I enjoy them any time of year.

Cranberry Canes are basically a stuffed yeast bread roll up, like a Cinnamon Roll.  It’s the presentation of twisting the prepared strips and putting a crook at one end that gives them their distinctive appearance.  There are 3 basic elements-

Dough:

Filling:

Frosting:

Preparation: