All this kerfluffle about Kristi Noem putting a dog down.
To be honest, I have not read her book. Books by politicos are not my bag, baby. Although I bought a bunch of them early in the century, I have come to realize how much they ultimately bore me and how anachronistic each is after the election it precedes.
I am not even sure that I’ve read the section where she mentioned putting her dog down completely; now, all the Xeroxed outrage just tells us what she said.
But I do remember hearing that the dog attacked the neighbors chickens. And tried to bite its owner. And, the interpretations go, the hotheaded and packing governor of South Dakota pulled a pistol
The original Guardian story does not present the account as it appears in the book, but instead intersperses it with the easily anticipated editorial outrage.
But, you know what? The dog attacked neighbor chickens. The dog tried to bite its owner in a berzerker frenzy. I understand the decision to put the dog down. Especially as she had young children at the time who would also be vulnerable to a berzerker dog.
But it’s run up to election season, so cry “Havoc!” and let slip the stories of Republicans being unkind to dogs somewhere, sometime.
Full disclosure: When my boys were young, neighbors in the new house across the neighbor’s meadow let their pit bulls roam free, and on a couple of occasions they wandered into the back half of Nogglestead. If those dogs had ever, ever posed a threat to my young children at the time, they would have been buried in the copse amongst the cat graves. In the rural areas, they have an abbreviation: SSS. Shoot, shovel, shut up.
So I don’t fault Noem her actions, but she might have been better served remembering the last. Because no matter how authentic and real she might want to be to rural voters, she could certainly not avoid the, erm, dogpile in the media that should have been expected.
To be honest, I don’t know where I got this book. It doesn’t show up in almost twenty years’ worth of Good Book Hunting posts, and it has no distinguishing price marks. So did I pick it up before the turn of the century? Inherit it from my aunt? Who knows? All I know is that it is bound in the light brown Walter J. Black-esque cover used by book clubs that sent you books on subscription in the middle of the 20th century. This is, in face, a Doubleday Crime club selection. Only one book in the cover, though, unlike the three-in-one book club editions of which I have many.
Overweening first paragraph aside, I have taken a couple minutes to hand-sew a couple of items, but not before putting them on my desk and then moving them around over the course of days or weeks before getting to it. I started with a pair of underwear, an expensive pair of Armachillos that I wear for workouts and which I bought, what, five years ago? The seam at the floor split, probably from friction with the floor of my blue jeans. They are in great shape otherwise, so I had them on my desk for a while until I asked my wife for a spool of thread from her sewing kit. I did adequate work, I’d like to think, but after a couple of washings, I noted the seam was splitting again. Was my work faulty? No! The original seam continued to give way beyond the edge of where my repair stopped.
This videocassette is part of a series called The History Makers which came out right before the Internet blew up. I only have one of them, this one, although the Friends of the Library Book Sale is this week, so if I get into a real frenzy on Saturday (half price day), I might pick up others for fifty cents each. But probably not.
I got this book as part of a 
Well, when I said I was done with cartoons 
And my uncle’s Christmas tie lights up for the first time in probably decades.
When I bought this book 
I got this film 
On an evening where my youngest was on an involuntary sabbatical from electronic devices, he joined me for a movie night, and I pulled this videocassette out. Actually, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been going through the Nogglestead to-see library of unrewound videocassettes and popped them in with the television off to let them run to the end and fully rewind. So the Nogglestead to-see library has a lot of videocassettes atop it in unrewound or rewound states, so we’re watching lots of videocassettes these days. Which is good: We have lots of videocassettes to watch. And with the Friends of the Library Spring Book Sale looming, the number is likely to grow.
