Gentle Lead

It's the closest thing to miraculous I have ever experienced in the world of dog training.

Walking Media' Girl's dog has always been a chore rather than a pleasure. The dog walked the person rather than the other way around. Even a choke color failed to get the dog to walk in a reasonable manner.

And then.... Motivated Mom and I overheard another dog owner raving about a product called a Gentle Lead.

Motivated Mom hurried off to the pet store, bought a Gentle Lead, strapped it on the dog, and....wala ... the dog strolled along at a leisurely pace right off the bat.

If you're a dog owner who struggles with the canine on the other end of leash, you HAVE to get one of these things!

Guts and Outages

My apologies for my unexpected absence from the blog-o-sphere, I've been busy watching caterpillars crawl.

Okay - not really.

When I'm working out of my base at the northern end of the state, I'm at the mercy of an internet provider whose service is even less reliable than a broken clock.

While the provider will remain nameless, their non-FIOS service was knocked out by severe storms over the weekend. Their commitment to servicing non-FIOS customers being what it is, I expect I'll be able to access the internet "up north" somewhere around the middle of August.

But back to caterpillars. I promised to share their unique form of locomotion. It's been coined the gut thrust.

Now mind you, this discovery came only after scientists received a grant to build tiny caterpillar treadmills which were placed in front of state-of-the art x-ray equipment. All of this because, since caterpillars have no bones or muscles, scientists were dying to know how the caterpillar manages to get around.

After days of trying to figure out how to motivate a caterpillar to use a treadmill, the big discovery occurred.

The little critter actually coils its gut up into a ball at the back end of his body - then "throws" its gut toward the front. The gut thrust drives the caterpillar forward.

I shudder to think about it. We've all had those "burps" that turn out to be a little juicer than expected. Imagine dealing with that every time we needed to put one foot in front of the other.

I know. I know. Right about now you're wishing I had that same unreliable internet provider at my southern base of operations.

Eyes, Weights, and Catepillars

There are evenings when my eyelids feel made of some material a hundred times the weight of lead. On those evenings the effort I put into keeping my eyes open seems no less than the effort I would expend in attempting to hold a barbell loaded with two hundred pounds of weight over my head.

Tonight is one such night and my struggle to remain focused led me to think of a news story I heard on the radio the other day. It seems a researcher has been studying the locomotive abilities of caterpillars and discovered the insects use a method of locomotion heretofore never dreamed of.

I remember thinking that dreaming is exactly what I would be doing if I had to spend hours, days, and months watching caterpillars crawl.

And with dreaming now seeming so inviting a subject, I will head off to do just that.

You will have to remind me on another night to share the earth shattering discovery of just how a caterpillar moves.

Hidden Hall

I had to look twice to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me.

I was sitting at a traffic light in the center of a small Delaware town. The road I was on was not one I traveled frequently so while waiting for the light to change I was taking in the scenery. Houses, old but well maintained, stood shoulder to shoulder on my right. Diagonally across the intersection was a water tower tall enough to have served as a NASA observatory, and directly beneath the water tower was the town hall.

And that's when I did the double take. Because while the facade of the town hall was one and a half stories high and a quarter of a block long, the town hall itself was - a storage shed?

Sure enough. The front of the town hall was a sham.

I started thinking about documentaries I had seen about the making of western movies. Those documentaries had revealed the buildings along the Main Streets in the cinema desert towns were nothing but front walls propped up by angled bracing.

The true town hall I had just discovered hiding behind the false facade was a squat building little bigger than the storage sheds in some of my neighbor's yards. I felt sorry for the one or two folks (because surely there wasn't room for more than two desks) who sat in the shed cooled by a single air conditioner dangling out of the single true window.

The traffic light turned green and I continued on my way - but not before wondering if those carefully maintained homes I had been appreciating were anything more than a movie set.

Text Board

Busy schedule right now so I thought I'd share an effective message I spotted recently.

The message - big and bold on a billboard advertisement for a local health care facility read simply:

Texting and Driving?

C U in our E R

If It's Real, Get Out of the Water

There are some photographs that just command your attention.

Such was the case for me today when I saw the picture on the MSN web page of a supposed 40 ton whale apparently crash landing on a private yacht.

I use the words supposed and apparently because nowadays I can never be sure if a picture displayed on the internet is legit or photoshopped.

Once I got past my initial whoaa reaction I started wondering how it was that a photographer on some other vessel just happened to have his camera focused on the subject yacht at the exact moment that the whale breached the water.

But such chance opportunities do sometimes occur and if this truly was an incredible encounter then it goes to support my opinion that while it's great to sit at the water's edge, I want no part of being on board anything smaller than an aircraft carrier once the water beneath me is deep enough for a 40 ton (or even quarter ton) creature to be swimming around.

Original Weather Channel

My sister and I were recently reminiscing about the "original" weather channel. I guess it came up in conversation because this is beach season. And it was at the beach - Ocean City, NJ to be precise- that we had our first exposure to round-the-clock weather information.

The weather info came via a series of weather instruments housed in beautifully polished brass cases - like something you might have expected to see on the bridge of a ship. The gauges provided temperature, humidity (it was up to the watcher to figure out the heat index), barometric pressure, wind direction, and wind speed.

All of these gauges, along with a clock, were mounted on a wall. The television camera of a public information station slowly panned from one gauge to the next and back again.

Somehow we found this fascinating, or perhaps more accurately mesmerizing, and we watched the gauges slide by in cycle after cycle as though expecting some previously hidden weather truth would be revealed.