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Nika, Noah. See the devil in Nika’s eyes? She’s ready to rock  roll.

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Our daughter, Megan, came home for a visit recently and brought Nika, the dog she adopted when Nika was 6 weeks old. Nika lived with us for about a year and became quite attached to our golden retriever, Noah, who is a couple of years older that she is. They became inseparable. They played together, ate together, slept curled up next to each other,  chased Frisbes together. Nika became the sister Noah didn’t have. At the dog park, Noah often defended Nika against other larger dogs.

Nika loves everyone – human or animal, she’s your friend. And she had a lot of friends at our dog park. There was Thunder, a 12-year-old grumpy German shepherd mix who cuddled with her, barked at her when she was out of line, licked her when needed loving. There was Cody the trickster huskie, who chased off bigger dogs when she was a puppy and always made sure she had an ally. But Noah is definitely her bro and her protector and Megan is certainly her human.

During the time that Megan worked at her internship at Disney, we would get together once a month or so and Nika would go nuts when she saw Megan and would seem sort of sad and depressed once we all separated again.  One night here at the house, Nika cornered a possum in our backyard and the possum was as freaked out as Nika – hissing, baring its teeth. Noah came to Nika’s rescue and the possum – wisely – took off.

In June, Megan’s internship at Disney ended and Nika moved to Orlando with her. During these past months, we’ve gotten together fairly regularly. Nika and Noah are so overjoyed to see each other that at one reunion, Nika leaped out the passenger window of Megan’s car just to get to Noah.  During their most recent reunion, they headed to the dog park together and Nika reconnected with her buddies there, then she and Noah headed out into the park on their own, commiserating, exploring, connected at the heart.

While they were visiting, I woke in the middle of the night and saw Nika and Noah cuddled together on the quilt where he usually sleeps alone.  All was well. I instantly fell back asleep. They looked like this, but on a quilt:

Dogs remember. They form bonds as intricate and intimate as those among humans. Their emotions are as real to them as our emotions are to us. Yes, I’ve been accused before of anthropomorphizing, but my response to those critics is that there’s no such thing. All animals feel and with dogs, perhaps because of their long history with humans, it’s easier to recognize these emotional connections, these memories.

There’s something here for us humans to keep in mind: if we treated each other as Nika and Noah treat each other,  wouldn’t the world be a better place? We would have each other’s backs, we would remember the early love and the forever love and would give each other space to explore the world independently. We would honor each other’s differences and honor the myriad ways we are the same. We would honor the fact that we have come together in the same space and time. We would grasp the spiritual underpinnings.

I’m telling you, my next political vote will be for an individual who loves and understands dogs.  It won’t be Mitt Romney, who  put his dog Shamus on a roof rack  during a trip to Canada.  Really? A roof rack?? In the U.S, alone, there are nearly 80 million dog owners. Why would a single one of them vote for Romney? If a man can’t treat his dog right, what makes you think he would do right by you?

Years ago, one of the things my dad advised was pretty simple and straightforward, as I look at it in hindsight: You want a quick way to see who someone else actually is? Look at how they treat their family – and their pets. And then look at how they act when money is the bottom line. Those things will tell you what you need to know about that person.

I am buoyed at the dog park. Yeah, I know how that sounds. But it happens to be true. Dogs are genuine,we humans are often anything but. We’re trying, though. We’re learning, we’re evolving. Really, we are.

. With nearly 1,500 posts, it’s possible we posted this before. But this one is a favorite.

Former UFO debunker now says there were two crashes at Roswell…

I don’t think we’ve ever written about Roswell on our blog, even though we’ve put up quite a few UFO-related stories. It’s probably because Roswell is so well known. It’s also a case where many of the long-time UFO researchers say the story has been conflated into something they say it never was – the crash of an alien craft. Meanwhile, if there’s any case that the public knows about, it’s Roswell and there’s widespread belief that something very mysterious happened there.

Now comes Lt. Col. Richard French, a retired air force pilot, who says there was not one crash, but two near Roswell in 1947. He claims the first UFO was hit with an electronic pulse-type weapon. All the controls failed and it crashed. The second crash was that of a similar alien vessel that was on a rescue mission for the first one.

The problem with the story is that the type of weapons described didn’t exist at the time. Or did they, and we didn’t know?

The strange synchro here relates to an MIB story that appeared in Operation Trojan Horse, a 1970 UFO book by John Keel. A woman in Owatonna, Minnesota, who had a UFO experience accompanied by a number of paranormal incidents, was approached by a mysterious stranger, who called himself Major Richard French. He was wearing crisp new clothes, not a uniform. She was told not to talk it to anyone about her experience.

Was it the same person? If so, then French’s story about being a debunker takes on more veracity, and with it the scenario about Roswell.

Yeah, a nerdy chart for art today…but with a purpose.

We hear it over and over again. Obama is a socialist. He’s redistributing the wealth. So after four years, how’s that redistribution working out?

Ah, well, actually wealth has continued to be redistributed upward. More and more middle class people are falling out of the middle class as the rich become richer and richer. Imagine being so rich that you could put $300 million into a political campaign to get one of your fellow fat cats into power.

Why would a person do something like that? The simple answer: fear. It seems conservatives are hard-wired for fear. Here are a few headlines:

Conservatives Big on Fear, Brain Study Finds | Psychology Today

Obama ‘fear’ drives social conservatives

Study: Conservatives have larger ‘fear center’ in brain 

Conservatives fear the future, so they’re lying about the Chevy Volt

Sociopaths Prey on Conservative’s Fears — Tea Party for the Crazy

It goes on and on. Story after story. Even blogging conservatives say it’s true. Here’s one.

“FEAR: I’ll agree that conservatives think through fear. I prefer to call it cautious. It’s not the party who does it to us, we are all like this. Is that bad? We’re hard-wired differently Rob, in the brain…it’s not something we choose necessarily. Liberals just drift along expecting everything’s gonna be alright, caution to the wind. Then when bad things happen who do they run to save their sorry behinds?”

In spite of admitting to the fear factor, it still comes down to liberals being wimps, needing conservatives to bail them out. I must have my liberal blinders on too tightly, because I don’t see that as anything near reality. Maybe she’s thinking of Bush starting two wars after 9-11. That really worked out.

So when the conservative mind-set see charts like the one above, they are not put at ease. It just means the liberals – those people with conscience, empathy, and compassion for the poor and the most vulnerable in society- are going to take it all away. Yet, conservatives tend to claim the high ground on morality. How does that work? It seems their compassion ends at the point of birth and they dismiss nearly half of the U.S population as moochers.

If you want to see how well the super wealthy have done over the past three decades, take a look here.

– Rob

When was the last time you were in a record store? It even sounds sort of strange, doesn’t it?  Have you been into a video store recently?  In our area, there isn’t a record store in sight, but there’s still a small Blockbuster a few miles from the house. We rarely use it because we subscribe to Netflix which, for a reasonable price, mails a couple of DVDs a month right to our house.

Wikipedia has an extensive list of retailers who have gone bust recently, some who couldn’t make it because of the faltering economy, others who were overcome by developing technology.  Will bookstores follow suit and go the way of the Dodo bird?

When Borders Books went belly up last year, it followed in the tracks of some of my favorite stores –  Circuit City, Linens N Things, and Hollywood Video. Borders was a 40-year-old chain that popularized the big bookstore concept, and when it went bust, it left a lot of publishers holding the bag and ultimately left one main player in the bookstore chain game: Barnes and Noble.  For writers, this means that if your book doesn’t get picked up by B&N – there’s only so much space shelf, after all – it impacts your sales.

Recently, there was an interesting story about a 70-year-old writer, Kate Alcott, who wrote a novel called The Dressmaker.  The book was submitted to publishers by her agent,  and was rejected about a dozen times, with references to the less than stellar sales of her previous book, which Bookscan dutifully reported.   This outfit, Bookscan,  is no writer’s friend. Because of Alcott’s Bookscan stats, her agent suggested submitting The Dressmaker to publishers under a pseudonym.  And because the pseudonymous author had no Bookscan history, no sales history, it sold for  high five figures.

For quite a while, Alcott kept up the pretense with her publisher about her fake name, her fake life; her editor thought she was the fictional writer Alcott had created. Eventually, of course, the truth came out, it usually does, and friends who have read the novel love it.

My point here, I think, is that writing, which is usually associated with the arts, is big business. It’s Capitalism with some a giant C. The publishing industry, bookstores, and movie spinoffs on novels: they all begin with writers. Writers are the storytellers, the ones who used to be the oral historians, the ones who sat around campfires  in the stone age, who performed for royalty during the Renaissance,  who sit in front of computers now.

Yet, writers are often the last to know what’s going on. What’s the print run for my current book? Why is my cover awful? What’s the publisher doing for my book?  What do I need to do? The exception here is simple: the bestsellers that makes the NY Times list.  You know their names, they don’t change much: King, Koontz, Roberts, Collins, Rowling… A roll call of the rich, the famous, and the best storytellers around.  But all of them started at the bottom.

I can’t imagine a world without physical bookstores, can’t imagine not walking into such a place and smelling the books, touching them, picking them up.  But I think the day is coming and that it’s coming fast, when bookstores become extinct.  Just as record stores are a memory for me now, I suspect bookstores will be such a memory not so far into the future. Maybe only libraries will have actual physical books. Digital books save a lot of trees,  you get them instantly. And more and more people are buying Kindle, Nooks, iPads, and bookstores and publishers are scrambling to catch up to…well, whatever this is.

Paradigm shift, anyone?