Playing the odds. June 9, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: lottery, lottery tickets, our friend Ben, the cheapest form of hope, why play the lottery
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Our friend Ben was standing in line at our local grocery’s lottery line yesterday when the man in front of me asked for $20 in tickets—20 tickets—for today’s Cash 5 lottery game. Cash 5 has a smaller prize than, say, Powerball or MegaMillions, so presumably the odds of winning are higher. And the prize had crept up from its $125,000 baseline to over a million dollars. Our friend Ben could see why the man was excited.
When my turn came, I asked for a single ticket ($1) for the same Cash 5 game. “Just one?” the cashier asked. “It only takes one,” I answered. “That’s what they say,” said a guy in the next line. “But my wife and I never win anything.”
Well, neither do Silence Dogood and I. At least, not in terms of money. The odds against winning are, after all, astronomical. As our good friend Rudy once pointed out, “You have as much chance of winning as of having Skylab fall on your head.” Our friend Ben was extremely humiliated when someone pointed out that Skylab had actually returned to Earth several decades earlier, highlighting both Rudy’s sarcasm and my own ignorance. Ouch!
So why do we put our (single) dollar down? We try to buy a $1 lottery ticket every day. It’s not hard to do the math: That’s a $365 investment every year for what seems to be no return on investment, a total net loss. But our calculation is somewhat different: We’re investing $365 a year in pure, unadulterated hope.
To put this in perspective, let’s say you buy a coffee or latte or whatever from Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts on your way to work every morning, or grab a Coke or Pepsi from the vending machine or grocery cooler to enjoy with your lunch. More than $1? You betcha. What if you decide to go to the movies once a week with the kids? At $9-plus a ticket (let’s not even think about 3-D or iMAX), plus drinks, popcorn, and candy from the counter vendor, you’re talking about $80-plus for four. A week. Silence and I don’t spend our money on coffee, soda, or first-run movies (if we want to see them, we’ll catch them through Netflix later for $15/month for as many as we can watch). Instead, we spend our $365 a year buying hope.
Our friend Ben thinks of the lottery as the cheapest form of hope. For only a dollar a day, you could win financial freedom for life! What other investment offers this sort of payback? Imagine spending a dollar a day for an elixir that would let you get up every morning thinking, “Today I might have won millions of dollars and never have to worry about anything ever again!” If you could bottle this, you’d make more money than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.
Silence and our friend Ben are not what you’d call morning people, so it takes a lot to get us going in the morning. The promise of the lottery and financial independence really helps get us out of bed in a better frame of mind. And if, as usually happens, we don’t win? There’s always tomorrow. Another day, and hope renewed. It was just a dollar, after all, less than a single 16-ounce Coke. (And, as Silence points out, without the calories!) No disappointment, just eternal hope. We think that’s priceless.
Yes, you’re right if you think we failed to win today’s Cash 5 drawing. Our friend Ben hopes the guy who plumped down $20 on tickets won. But you can bet the prospect brightened our day, and we’re already looking forward to tomorrow.
The tintinnabulation of the bells. June 8, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in pets, wit and wisdom.Tags: bright ideas, housetraining dogs, pet bells, puppy training bells, strings of bells
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Silence Dogood here. I guess our friend Ben and I are really hippies at heart. We love tie-dyed clothes, shiny rainbow-casting crystal drops in our windows, beaded curtains, and pretty much anything bright, colorful, and glittery. Not to mention incense and bells. You know, those strings of brass Indian bells you can find at flea markets and, ahem, uh, tie-dye shops. No, wait, that would be import shops.
Over the years, I’ve amassed quite a collection of these strings of bells, and I’ve hung them over doorknobs all over the house. I initially figured it was extra early-warning insurance in case someone was trying to break in, or, say, OFB or a guest was going in or out of our bathroom. (A bit more subtle than an “occupied” sign, don’t you agree?)
But I quickly discovered a quite different use for the bells, and one that wasn’t thought up by us. If our black German shepherd, Shiloh, wants to go out of the bedroom, she rings the bells on the bedroom door. If she wants to go outside, she rings the bells on the deck door. If our cats want to leave the bedroom, they ring the bedroom-door bells, too. The whole thing is pretty mind-boggling.
Unfortunately, another way you can tell that OFB and I are hippies at heart is that, while we marveled at this development, it never occurred to us to try to turn it into a money-making venture. But this morning, I discovered that it had definitely occurred to somebody, and that our pets weren’t the only smart ones on the block.
Our friend Ben and I get regular e-mail updates from a site called FetchDog (www.fetchdog.com) that sells premium dog products. And sure enough, there in today’s e-mail was an offer for “Puppy Training Bells.” These jingle-bell-type bells are hung in two pairs from a 30-inch-long nylon, leash-like cord that comes in two designs, birds and multi-dots, and fits over the doorknob.
I quote: “Recommended by professional trainers, the Puppy Training Bells hang securely from any doorknob and offer a 95% training success rate. In no time at all, this house training aid will have your dog telling you when nature calls. No more trying to read that puppy body language!”
The bells come with housetraining tips and normally cost $24.95 each, but are currently on sale for just $12! Sigh. Where are our marketing brains, I always wonder when I see something like this.
Oh, well, another day of bankruptcy. But on the plus side, I can say that these bells definitely work. And if you’d rather, you can use strings of Indian bells instead. I can’t swear they’re cheaper—especially at the sale price of the FetchDog version—because it’s been so long since I’ve bought any. But to me, at least, they’re prettier!
‘Til next time,
Silence
A beautiful bad bug. June 7, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, gardening, homesteading, Uncategorized, wit and wisdom.Tags: attracting moths, bad-wing moth, emerald moths, green moths
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After months of battling the hideous, tank-like brown marmorated stink bug here at Hawk’s Haven, the cottage home I share with Silence Dogood in the precise middle of nowhere, PA, our friend Ben was thrilled last night to head to the bedroom and discover a really beautiful bug on our coverlet. It was a gorgeous small green moth, one I had never seen before.
The moth itself was small, about the size of one of the little blue butterflies we see outside in summer. But it looked bigger because of the shape of its wings, which were more oval than triangular, and the way it held them out horizontally when at rest on the coverlet, my hand, or the closet door. Because it obligingly flew up onto my hand, I was able to hold it to the light and get a good look at it. Its slender body was a pale sea green, and while the wings appeared to be the same color, under the light I could see slightly darker emerald green separated by white striations.
The last I saw of the moth, it had left my hand and settled on the closet door for the night. Even Silence was awed by how beautiful it was, and, of course, by the endearing fact that it hadn’t tried to get on her.
This morning, the moth was nowhere in sight, but our friend Ben was determined to ID it and headed for my good friend Google to seek assistance. There, on a helpful site called BugGuide (http://bugguide.net/), my beautiful little green moth was waiting. And there too was the reason this post about a beautiful and harmless little moth is called “A beautiful bad bug.” It’s because this moth, Dyspteris abortivaria, bears the bizarre common name of “Illinois Bad-Wing.”
Why? Its wings looked perfectly good to our friend Ben and Silence, and gorgeous besides. I had to know more. Backtracking a bit on BugGuide, I found the motherlode of info on this little green moth, which apparently is better known simply as “The Bad-Wing,” since its range is throughout Eastern North America from Quebec to Florida and west to Texas and Manitoba. And it’s the only species in its genus in all of North America.
Whew! That explained why an Illinois moth had turned up in a Pennsylvania cottage, but there’s a better reason it was here: Its preferred habitat is near edges and woodlands, and its larval host plants are grapes and Virginia creeper. We have both in abundance here at Hawk’s Haven. (The site noted that adults “likely do not feed,” which sadly means that their lives are probably measured in hours rather than days. No wonder we’d never seen one before.)
Other facts provided by the site (along with plenty of photos) are that the adults fly from mid-April to August, produce two generations a year, and have wingspans of 20-28 millimeters. (Thanks for the U.S.-friendly data, guys; that would be .79-1.1 inches for us metrically-challenged types.)
But what about that wacky name? Oh, yuck. The site provided a full explanation of it, and it’s not pretty, unlike the moth itself. No, the moth doesn’t go around sucking the blood of sleeping stinkbugs (unfortunately), setting fire to cats’ tails, or sending photos of its unmentionables over the internet. It’s completely harmless. Instead, let me quote the awful explanation of how this poor, maligned creature got its name:
“Called ‘The Bad-Wing’ because the small hindwings are difficult to pull into position for pinning. The name of the genus also means bad wing—from the Greek dys (bad, difficult) + pteron (wing). Even the specific epithet abortivaria doesn’t sound good [our friend Ben could not agree more], perhaps suggesting that various attempts or methods of pinning the wings have been aborted.”
In case you’ve never seen an old-style insect case and can’t imagine what “pinning” means, in the bad old days, after insects were killed by stuffing them in a jar with a chloroform-laced sponge (these days, apparently nail polish remover or ethyl acetate on cotton balls is the method of choice, though I also found advice for freezing them in canning jars), they were removed and pinned into position on a display board. Butterflies and moths were typically pinned with their wings extended, while beetles could be pinned either way, with their wing-covers closed or open with the wings extended.
Our friend Ben thinks The Bad-Wing moth should sue entomologists for defamation of character. But I digress.
Let’s leave this dismal topic and look on the bright side (in the immortal words of Monty Python). Our friend Ben and Silence were treated to the sight of this gorgeous creature for two reasons.
First, we’re organic gardeners, so we’re not dumping pesticides on our grapes and killing off caterpillars. And second, we know how important it is to wildlife of all types and stripes to encourage landscape diversity. We allow milkweeds and Virginia creeper to grow in our gardens and on our trees and trellises, and we have a grove of pawpaws because we know that, besides providing beauty for us, they provide shelter for birds and food for caterpillars (monarchs in the case of milkweeds, zebra swallowtails in the case of pawpaws) and other creatures (including us in the case of the pawpaws).
Thank you for visiting us, little green moth. You’ve enriched our lives. We hope to see many of your relatives in the not-too-distant future.
Good news for salt lovers. June 5, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: medical findings on salt, rehabilitation of salt, salt, salt is good
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Silence Dogood here. Our friend Ben and I grew up with salt as an essential component of every meal. (Our friend Ben’s family went so far as to set salt shakers before every place setting, so everyone had access to his or her own without having to fight over it or spoil dinner conversation with constant interruptions of “Please pass the salt.”) So it was with great horror that we saw salt vilified in our adulthood, to the point where we were heaped with abuse by friends and colleagues each time we reached for the salt shaker. If we’d been grabbing the whiskey and swigging some down straight from the bottle between bites, people could not have been more critical.
Having grown up in civilized surroundings, where one did not comment on the eating habits of others—at least, not in their presence—OFB and I were at a loss to think why people all seemed to feel free to condemn our choices and habits while we attempted to mind our own business and enjoy our food. You’d have thought we were eating cigarettes.
We grew sick of waiters who stared contemptuously at us when we requested the always-absent salt shaker at restaurants. (I finally got so disgusted I started carrying a picnic-style salt shaker in my purse.)
We grew tired of explaining to our outspoken friends that our blood pressure and cholesterol remained quite low, that we made an effort to find natural, mineral-rich salt (such as RealSalt), and that we found that salt added savor to food, bringing out its inherent flavor rather than disguising it like herbs and spices (including black pepper). Not that I have a bad thing to say about herbs and spices, and of course, I use them constantly, but there’s no question that when you add an herb or spice to food, it changes the flavor, unlike salt, which adds no flavor of its own but simply enhances the inherent flavor of a food.
Anyway, just as we were about to turn homicidal on this issue, a miracle happened: Salt became fashionable. Artisanal salts, of course: grey sea salt harvested off the Breton coast, pink-orange Himalayan salt mined in chunks and slabs. Chefs rediscovered what salt could do for food, and it returned to the table at upscale restaurants. Thanks be to God!
Then, yesterday, we were reading the news when I saw the final vindication. Nutritionists who seem to spend their lives condemning natural foods like eggs, wine, chocolate, and coffee while keeping quiet about adulterants like high-fructose corn syrup and saccharine have been forced to eat their words on so many past pronouncements, and now it looks like they’re going to have to do it with salt. The latest study shows that salt has no effect on blood pressure whatever in people whose blood pressure is normal to begin with.
I quote: “In May, a study published in Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA, the official and most prestigious medical publication in the U.S.] reported that healthy people who consumed the least sodium don’t have any heart-health advantage over those who consume the most.” In case you missed it, that would be any.
Bwaaahahaha!!! Take that, you people who have so vulgarly and blatantly condemned our eating habits to our faces over the years! Perhaps that will teach you a little humility along with better manners. We don’t scream at you for not eating salt; we couldn’t care less if you eat none, a little, or a lot. It’s none of our business. And by the way, what we eat is none of yours. So keep your self-righteousness to yourselves. And please pass the salt.
‘Til next time,
Silence
Tell me why: Commodore June 4, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: commodore, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etymology, Matthew Perry, meaning of commodore, seafaring terms, US Navy
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For whatever reason, our friend Ben woke up this morning thinking about Commodore Perry. And it occurred to me that I had no idea where the word “Commodore” came from or even what it meant.
Now, this is far from the first nautically-related term that’s bemused our friend Ben. (What the heck’s a bo’sun, anyway?!) But it’s such a great word—sort of a three-way cross between commander, Komodo dragon, and the Emperor Commodus—that I just had to look it up and find out more about it.
Sheesh. Wouldn’t you know, it turns out to be an exclusively American naval title? The descent of the word is unclear, but Webster’s New World Collegiate Dictionary takes its probable origins back to the Old French comander via the Dutch kommandeur.
And what does it mean? Quoting the dictionary: “1 U.S. Navy a) [Historical] an officer ranking above a captain but below a rear admiral: the rank was abolished in 1899 but temporarily restored in WWII b) an officer, with the rank of captain, commanding two or more small ships, as destroyers 2 the president of a yacht club 3 the senior captain of a merchant fleet”
Clearly needing a refresher on the only two Commodores I’d ever heard of, Commodore Perry and Commodore Vanderbilt, our friend Ben turned to my good friend, Google. Who were these guys, anyway?
Our friend Ben decided to investigate Cornelius Vanderbilt first, since Vanderbilt University plays such a big role in the life of my hometown Nashville, and I took advanced French and poetry courses there while I was in high school across the street. (Aced ‘em, too. but I digress.)
Turns out that Vanderbilt, unlike Perry, was never in the Navy. Instead, he was a shipping magnate who built his enormous fortune running ferries in the Long Island and Staten Island areas and ocean-going steamships to facilitate the Gold Rush (and later railroad, real estate, and other business ventures). According to Wikipedia: “It was in the 1830s when he was first referred to as ‘commodore’, then the highest rank in the United States Navy. A common nickname for important steamboat entrepreneurs, it stuck to Vanderbilt alone by the end of the 1840s.”
And Commodore Perry, the cause of this adventure? Again, quoting Wikipedia: “Matthew Calbraith Perry (April 10, 1794-March 4, 1858) was the Commodore of the U.S. Navy who compelled the opening of Japan to the West with the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854.” That makes him an exact contemporary of Commodore Vanderbilt (May 27, 1794-January 4, 1877). Both men were born only six years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, and were true children of the American Revolution, though only Vanderbilt lived to see the new nation torn apart and reforged by the Civil War.
Well. Another day, another mystery resolved. And in case you’re wondering, “bo’sun” (also “bosun,” “bo’s'n”) is the phonetic spelling of “boatswain,” “a ship’s warrant officer or petty officer in charge of the deck crew, the rigging, anchors, boats, etc.” Which is to say, it’s still pronounced “bosun” even when spelled “boatswain.” I guess I’ll never understand nautical thinking.
Ben Picks Ten: Jimmy Buffett songs. June 3, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: best Jimmy Buffett songs, Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Buffett songs
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Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood came to be Jimmy Buffett appreciators rather late. For most of our lives, we’d have been the folks he gently mocks in the title of his album “Jimmy Buffett’s Greatest Hit,” since we of course knew “Margaritaville,” but had no idea he’d ever done anything before or after. Then we met our good friends Norman and Dolores, longtime Parrotheads (as Buffett fans are known), and discovered an entire body of work we’d had no clue existed.
Silence and I certainly appreciate the happy-go-lucky, carefree, island-time Margaritaville mentality that endears Jimmy Buffett and his music to his bazillion overworked, overstressed, cold-climate fans. Who wouldn’t want to dream of a carefree Caribbean existence while working 65-hour weeks and freezing in an endless winter? But as we’ve discovered, there’s a lot more to Jimmy Buffett’s music than “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”
So herewith are our friend Ben’s top ten (plus, of course, one) picks as to Jimmy Buffett’s all-time greatest songs (so far):
When the Coast Is Clear. This just has to rank as one of the all-time greatest songs. It’s a clear-eyed take on getting back to who you really are, and it’s wonderfully singable, too. What more could you ask of any song?
The Coast of Marseilles. Okay, so maybe coasts are figuring a bit too prominently in my early choices, but this mournful look at love and loss is my second-favorite Buffett song. Listen, and then dare to disagree.
It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere. Who wouldn’t love this working man’s anthem? Our friend Ben has no clue if it was actually penned by Jimmy or his partner in performance, Alan Jackson. But whoever wrote it, it nails the working experience like nothing else.
Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On. As fans of Eckhart Tolle, Silence and I love this musical reminder to “be here now.”
A Pirate Looks at Forty. This is my favorite of Jimmy’s many storytelling songs. Jimmy’s a wonderful teller of tales, and this one appeals to the inner pirate in all of us.
Margaritaville. Can’t leave this out, no matter how cliched it’s become. It’s a great sing-along song that’s defined the ultimate fantasy lifestyle for at least one generation.
Desperation Samba (aka Halloween in Tijuana). The driving beat and sense of danger bring to mind my musical hero, Mark Knopfler. Fortunately, Jimmy appreciates Mark, too, as we’ll see. Talk about a pulse-pounding, singable song!
Incommunicado. There’s no bravado, false or otherwise, in this song about going invisible, through choice or otherwise.
Whoop de Doo. We love Mark Knopfler’s own version of his bitter but oh-so-true song about recovering from lost love. And we love that Jimmy invited Mark to play on his version—we’d know that distinctive guitar style anywhere. If you’ve ever loved and lost, this one’s a must-sing-along.
Weather with You. This song first struck our friend Ben as a bit weird, but it grew on me, and once it did, I couldn’t shake it. See what you think!
And the bonus:
Stars Fell on Alabama. Jimmy’s voice is no match for Ella Fitzgerald’s, but his personalized take on this old standard is irresistible. We love his tributes to Montgomery (where my sister lives) and Birmingham (where Silence has cousins). It almost makes me forgive him for dissing Nashville, our hometown, in “Volcano.”
So, now you have my ten (plus one). What have I forgotten? Let me know!
Ben Picks Ten: Cartoon strips. June 2, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: best cartoon strips, best cartoons, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, George Booth, Get Fuzzy, great cartoons, Maxine, The Far Side
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Our friend Ben has always loved good cartoons. Silence Dogood (who contributed her picks to this list) and I prefer witty, funny, well-drawn strips, but will forgive primitive drawing (think Dilbert) if the humor is right.
Great cartoons offer life lessons through laughter, taking on topics that we all deal with but most of us aren’t willing to talk about, such as age, overweight, and failure in a society that demands eternal youth, thinness, and success. And, as we’ll see, the cartoon characters who are coping with these issues often triumph, not by going on “The Biggest Loser” or seeing a plastic surgeon but by using their wits to puncture their denigrators’ pretensions.
Without more ado, our all-time cartoon faves:
Calvin and Hobbes. This one had it all: Brilliant drawing and true wit. From the strip’s name through its conceit of the little boy with the stuffed tiger toy who comes to life when no one’s looking to the sick snowman cartoons, it was lovable but never PC. Thank you, Bill Watterson. We miss you so.
The Far Side. As an armchair archaeologist, anthropologist, paleontologist, and real-life naturalist, how could our friend Ben resist this science nerd’s delight? Gary Larson’s witty cartoons almost always hit the nail on the head, and in a single panel, which is a very difficult feat. Think of the one with the two bears in the hunter’s sights, with one bear pointing to the other one, and you’ve got it. We miss this one, too.
Dilbert. Bless Scott Adams for creating the ultimate worker bees’ (as one of my own bosses famously dismissed the employees who actually created the products that made millions in bonuses for him) revenge. We may love the clueless Pointy-Haired Boss and the wily Dogbert more than the nerdy Dilbert, but Dilbert’s comments are always spot-on, and based on the real-life experiences of our fellow drones trying to remain sane in cubicles across the country while dealing with bosses with 1/4 their IQ. Dilbert speaks to our corporate culture like nothing else, and does it so well that there’s never even been an attempt at competition. Thanks, Scott!
Maxine. Who doesn’t love Maxine, the wisecracking, foulmouthed old lady who doesn’t suffer fools at all and tells it exactly like it is? Cranky and hysterical, she’ll give the finger to old age and to anyone who tries to dismiss elders in a youth-based culture that encourages Baby Boomers to try to look like their grandchildren. Go Maxine go! When we grow up, we want to be just like you. And if you thought Maxine was just a figure on a Hallmark card, she actually has her own strip. Sadly, our local paper doesn’t carry it, but you can view it on her website.
Get Fuzzy. We love this strip, and are so jealous that OFB’s father gets it every day in Nashville when we only get it on Sundays here. We feel that it’s the real inheritor of “Calvin and Hobbes,” wonderfully drawn and full of rich and sometimes sick humor as the snaggle-toothed conservative cat tries to undermine his deshevelled, liberal owner, fight off an army of ferrets, put something over on the good-hearted but usually clueless dog, and launch endless get-rich-quick schemes. Screamingly funny. Most of the time. Bless you, Darby Conley.
For Better or Worse. We applaud Lynn Johnston’s well-drawn strip for actually aging her characters rather than freezing them in time. And we enjoy the true-to-life situations she drew with such sympathy and humor. No high drama, no exaggeration. Lynn realized that real life was actually funny enough. We’re sorry she’s no longer cartooning, but are grateful that our paper has chosen to re-run the strip from the beginning.
Zits. Ugh, what a title! Silence actually tries not to look at it when reading the strip. But the strip itself is great, portraying contemporary teen life and the disconnect (as well as the deep bond) between parents and their teenaged kids. Hugely funny and very well drawn. Choosing to portray the parents as a frumpy, droopy-breasted woman and her balding, obese husband took a lot of courage, in our opinion. Kudos!
Shoe. The adventures and misadventures of a cigar-chomping crow and his minion, a frumpy owl, at a newspaper were bound to appeal to me and Silence, editors and writers as we are. But the humor really takes a backseat to the drawing, which is marvelous. Too bad we don’t get it in our local paper! But Jeff MacNelly’s work is delightful; we miss it.
Pickles. This strip got picked up by our paper rather late in the game, so we have no idea why it was called “Pickles.” But it’s wonderfully drawn and focuses on an older couple with deep but gentle humor. It’s the dark horse in the cartoon race, but we enjoy it very much.
Dennis the Menace. Dennis did for parents of young kids what “Zits” has now done for parents of teenaged kids. Dennis was always up to something, and his parents had their hands full trying to cope, yet Hank Ketcham kept it funny. We wish it was still carried by our paper, and can only hope that Dennis and his essential badness is still going on somewhere.
And the bonus:
Cathy. We have huge respect for Cathy Guisewite for depicting her cartoon lead Cathy’s endless struggles to lose weight. This was not the sole focus of the strip, which, like so many others, has been dropped from our paper so we have no clue whether it’s still being written or has been “retired.” Romance, work, and dealing with aging parents, plus the ludicrous nature of contemporary fashion and other concerns of a twentysomething woman featured as often in the strip. But making Cathy a character who’s always on the verge of being plus-sized took a lot of courage, and showing that she was still able to find love and succeed at work has doubtless encouraged many young women who struggle with this issue.
We’d like to give honorable mention to two other strips, “Luann” and “Henry.” Like “Zits,” “Luann” deals with teens and their parents, and does it well. She didn’t creep into our top ten because she’s not as well drawn and not as real as “Zits,” but she’s always a fun read. We like her a lot. Thank you, Greg Evans!
“Henry” strikes us—possibly erroneously—as a strip that dates back to the Great Depression, the era that gave the world “Nancy,” ”Blondie,” “Orphan Annie,” “Popeye,” and “Pogo.” Henry was a bald kid who never spoke, an extremely eccentric concept in pre-chemotherapy days. But the strip carried a gentle humor that reminds us of “Pickles.” Nothing riotous, nothing screamingly funny, just a simple pleasure to read. “Henry” had legs, too—it was in our papers growing up, historic as it seemed even then. We don’t know what ever happened to it; perhaps it finally went gently into that good night. But we enjoyed it.
Our friend Ben must end this post with a nod to my all-time favorite cartoonist, George Booth. Booth was a magazine cartoonist who drew single-panel cartoons for The New Yorker, not someone who syndicated in newspapers and appeared daily. But his deranged-looking characters and their equally deranged-looking pets are surely the funniest cartoons ever created, and the ones that, in the end, most truly capture the human experience. Thank you, Mr. Booth, for enriching my life.
Would you die for your dog? June 1, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in pets, wit and wisdom.Tags: heroic sacrifice, Pamela Boyko
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Silence Dogood here. Would you die for your dog? In my case, the answer is absolutely. If I came home from running errands in town to discover that fiends had broken into my home and were hurting my beloved black German shepherd, Pioneer Hawk’s Haven Shiloh von Shiloh Special, I would grab the pepper spray, I would grab a baseball bat, I would grab whatever came to hand and spring into the fray, doing whatever I could to protect an innocent soul I loved. I would rather die than think I had run off or stayed my hand while someone hurt my Shiloh. Would I do the same if robbers broke in and tried to harm me instead? I honestly have no idea.
What if I came home to find the house on fire? Every few years, there’s a story in our paper about someone who succumbs to smoke inhalation in a heartfelt but doomed attempt to save a beloved pet from a house fire. Would they be better off just throwing the door open and calling their dog, as proved so effective in “Independence Day”? Or is this the stuff of fiction, not of fact?
These are the sorts of moral issues I wrestle with at night while our friend Ben snores peacefully by my side. (So far, I’ve refrained from taking it out on him that his conscience is apparently untroubled by such issues.) But why am I bringing this up now? It’s because of a tragedy that happened last week here in the generally peaceful Lehigh Valley.
Let’s just say we’ve had a tremendously rainy spring so far here in scenic PA. The ground has been repeatedly saturated, planting has been seriously set back, farmers are hurting. Though not as dramatic as the tornadoes in, say, Joplin, nearby Carbon County has been hit with twisters and baseball-sized hail. All of which is to say that the local rivers, including our major river, the Lehigh River, have been running very high and wild.
Such was the case this past Wednesday when Pamela Boyko was babysitting her granddaughter. Pamela, 53, lived her life with a gusto Jimmy Buffett might have envied, despite the crippling effects of pulmonary disease and fibromyalgia. A hippie to the end, she wore flowing skirts and tons of jewelry. Generous to a fault, she was growing her hair very long so she could cut it off to donate to a friend about to lose her own hair to chemotherapy. She adored her four children, her partner, and her grandchildren. And she adored her dogs.
Pamela was watching her granddaughter when the kid slipped away and let her two dogs out of their fenced enclosure. The dogs made for the Lehigh River, swollen with recent rains. Convinced that, without her intervention, they would drown, Pamela Boyko raced for a flimsy canoe and took off after them. Tragically, some pigs had stolen the family’s heavier craft a few weeks before, so the fragile canoe was the only conveyance left. Pamela Boyko never thought twice. Her dogs returned, but she didn’t. A fisherman found her body in the river on Sunday and called the authorities.
How likely is it that someone would willingly give their life for their dogs? Very, in my own experience. My father’s beloved Springer spaniel Rufus developed epilepsy as he got older. One bitterly cold March night, Rufus had an epileptic fit, distressing my father, who loved him as I love Shiloh, no end. After apparently recovering from the fit, Rufus asked to go outside. My father opened the back door, only to see, to his horror, the still disoriented Rufus lurch over to the 8-foot-deep swimming pool—my mother had rejected the idea of a “shallow end” when the pool was built , much less a ladder, in favor of a “natural look”—and fall in.
Without even thinking, my father (by now a widower who lived alone) rushed to the pool and plunged in, ultimately managing to push the 75-pound, struggling Rufus up and over the side. But unfortunately, the pool was only filled to about 5 feet, leaving the edge far above the water level. And at that point, my father realized that he had exhausted his strength after the half-hour struggle to get Rufus up and over in the bitter cold, and there was no way he could haul himself out of the freezing water and over the edge onto dry ground. Contemplating his abbreviated future, he understood that he could only remain upright in the freezing pool for so long before losing consciousness and going under.
Using the wits God gave him, my father started calling for help. And despite the late hour and isolated surroundings, God answered him, in the form of two German shepherds who heard his cries and started barking, causing their owner to step outside and then race to the rescue. In his case, there was a happy ending.
Pamela Boyko wasn’t so lucky. The happy hippie who loved her family, partner, friends, and pets, who looked on the bright side and generously gave of herself, transcending her physical infirmities, drowned as she tried to prevent that fate from overcoming her beloved dogs. None of us will be able to enjoy or appreciate her joyful nature now. Thank God her dogs will never know what they caused, but I hope the guys who stole the family boat have a few second thoughts about the consequences of their actions.
Thinking it all through, would you let your dogs run off if you were in Pamela Boyko’s place, hoping that they’d survive the swollen river and come back? Or, like her, would you die for your dog? I know I would; I guess it runs in the family.
‘Til next time,
Silence
