Month: October 2007

In this blog’s very first post, I warned about the provisions in rescue group contracts that you signed to take a pet from them:

When my wife and I wanted to adopt a rescue dog, we had a hound visit our house, mainly to see if it wanted to eat our cats. The rescue volunteer provided a packet of information about dogs and a contract we would have to sign to take possession of the pooch. The contract included house inspections at will of the rescue group. It could also take the dog back at any time if it found our conditions “unsuitable, which includes but not limited to…” a non-exclusive litany. If we lost the dog; we’d pay the rescue group a thousand dollars, even if we “lost” the dog ten years hence when it died and we did not notify the rescue group in 1 (one) week.

Obviously, Ellen DeGeneres is not an avid MfBJNer:

Ellen DeGeneres is in the doghouse with a pet rescue agency after giving a pooch away to her hairdresser because it didn’t get along with her cats.

The talk show hostess and her partner Portia de Rossi adopted Iggy, a Brussels Griffon mix, on Sept. 20. But when things didn’t work out, DeGeneres gave the dog to her hairdresser.

In doing so, DeGeneres violated an agreement with the Mutts and Moms dog rescue agency by not informing them of the handoff.

When the agency called DeGeneres to ask about Iggy, she said she found another home for the dog. The agency sent a representative to the hairdresser’s home Sunday and took the dog away.

The entertainment industry takes note:

DeGeneres went public about the situation Monday while taping an episode of her show to air Tuesday. She admitted she didn’t read all the paperwork involving the adoption.

Ellen DeGeneres does not read her contracts.

Stunning finding reported in Reader’s Digest:

A February report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that taking antioxidant vitamins actually increased a person’s risk of dying by up to 16 percent.

. . . .

But in 47 randomized trials involving almost 181,000 adults, researchers found that taking vitamins A, beta carotene and E, alone or in combination, actually increased a person’s risk of dying by up to 16 percent.

Personally, I find my odds daunting, but at least they’re not 116% chance of dying.

Cop who fell on the job sues family of baby who almost drowned:

In January, 1-year-old Joey Cosmillo wandered into the backyard and fell into the family pool. When his mother hauled him out, he wasn’t breathing. Rescuers were able to bring him back to life, but he suffered severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk or even swallow.

Now, his family faces another burden: One of the rescuers, Casselberry police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn, is suing, alleging the family left a puddle of water on the floor that afternoon, causing her to slip and fall.

Twit.

Man, I love the anthropological-style essays about hipsters who move to suburbia and report their shocking findings!

The second morning after I moved into my first officially “owned” home, I woke up to find my somewhat decrepit mailbox bashed in by vandals.

I was rattled. As an Asian, I thought perhaps the bashing was meant as a kind of message to me: You are not wanted here – or something to that effect.

Home ownership was, to me, a strange thing. You’d think it would give you a sense of belonging, of security. But for me it was a foray into territory that as a woman, and half Chinese, seemed off-limits, even though I was born here.

It didn’t help that my new next-door neighbor flew the flag in his front yard well past the Fourth of July and, I would discover, straight into winter.

I live in Santa Cruz, so my initial reading on the mailbox bashing seemed improbable. Still, I was shaken. The neighborhood was suburban style, and filled with a lot of folks of retirement age who had lived in the city since before it had become “progressive” – since before anyone had heard of the word at all.

Later on that day, as I was strolling along my block, I noticed that almost every one of my neighbors also had their mailboxes bashed in – except for those who had taken time to hand paint their mailboxes with flowers or hummingbirds, or who had added accessories to make their mailboxes into caricatures of cats or frogs or sharks or what have you. I mused that at least it was nice of the (I supposed) teenagers with the baseball bat to grant some forbearance for attempts at mailbox aesthetics.

She’s lucky she moved to suburbia in California, because let me tell you, if that half-Chinese woman had moved onto my block, I would probably have not even noticed. Dramatically!

And she could have reported how the people in this tribe walk their children, fly flags with strange foreign emblems (giant green and gold Gs), and refuse to mow their lawns religiously.

Somewhere, somehow, hipsters are all caught by surprise by the revelation that people who live in homes instead of condos, lofts, or urban apartments are people, too!

Given how easily the power has gone out over the last year or so, you would think that residents would agitate for the local power company to do something. Actually, you’re right. A series of “show trials” where the power company officials had to do some ‘splainin before the elected officials and their hangers-on, the press.

And when the company, AmerenUE wants to do something, what does it get? You bet! Residents agitating that AmerenUE is doing something:

Pam Schnebelen realizes that AmerenUE officials are going to have a tough time deciding on a route to build miles of transmission lines through Jefferson County.

But, they better not come through the LaBarque Creek watershed area in northwestern Jefferson County, she said.

“They are not going to build in this watershed,” Schnebelen said. “They’ll have to take any landowner to court to get an easement, because they can’t compensate in dollars for the environmental impact involved.”

Schnebelen, 57, Judy Browne-D’Amico and Bob Coffing, 68, all members of the LaBarque Creek Watershed Landowners Committee, recently invited the Journal to see the LaBarque Creek watershed area. The area includes private property as well as public lands and is located off Route FF near the St. Louis County line. It covers about 13 square miles.

Why can’t private industry use the same magic that the government uses to be all things to all voters?