Excused Lame

The Dallas Cowboys plunge to ignominious defeat 31-14 at the hands of the New York Giants and are eliminated from playoff competition.  Folks, it doesn’t get any better than this.

A Grand, Grand Overture for orchestra, organ, three vacuum cleaners, electric floor polisher and four rifles by Malcolm Arnold, as performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson.

Merry Christmas from me, Madame and all the Hounds of Soyara:

• Diva (BISS Ch. Soyara’s Beautiful Dreamer)
• Alan (Ch. Soyara’s Singer of Songs)
• Belle (Ch. Soyara’s Southern Belle)
• Sarge (Ch. Soyara’s Ace of Spades)
• Stanley (Soyara’s Gandalf of Dana Dan)
• Smudge (Ch. Soyara’s Smoke and Mirrors)
• Tess (Ch. Soyara’s Cunning Little Vixen)
• Ali (Ch. Soyara’s The Force of Destiny)
• Chance (Soyara’s Against All Odds)
• Dutch (BISS GCh. Soyara’s The Flying Dutchman)
• Ilya (Soyara’s Ilya Murometz)
• Carmen (Ch. Soyara’s Carmen Fantasy)
• Aida (Ch. Soyara’s Celeste Aida)

Plus Talker the Whippet and Fluffy (God, what a name!) the cat.

A picture of 1) me, 2) winning at a dog show.  Little Aida goes Winners Bitch at the Cen-Tex KC show in Alvarado, TX.  The judge is Tim Robbins.

When showing dogs, please remember to dress appropriately.

In the later novels of his “Advise and Consent” series, Allen Drury introduced the character Edward M. “Ted” Jason, an ambitious but shallow Governor of California, lauded to the skies by a fawning and uncritical news media, who is elected President.  A frightening démarche by the Soviets after his inauguration reveals Jason to be a man adrift, devoid of ideas how to deal with it, the few he has being catastrophic to the country.

Our present-day fawning and uncritical news media lauded our current President to the skies based on his reputation for being the smartest guy in the room.  But what’s this reputation based on?  In the words of Victor Davis Hanson:

I am searching for a shred of evidence to substantiate this image of singular intellectual power and known erudition… At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a part-time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator, Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?

The President is a man who rose without trace, going from a do-nothing stint as Harvard Law Review editor to a do-nothing stint as a lecturer at the University of Chicago to a do-nothing state senatorship to a do-nothing term as junior senator from Illinois.  In all that time he never produced anything that would earn him a reputation as a man of ideas or vision.  All he did was get his ticket punched in the right spots.

Even in the highest office in the nation he’s produced little but bad ideas transformed into bad law by Congressional spoilsmen.  He’s never said anything notable or quotable.  Ultimately he’s an empty suit, a Ted Jason made flesh.  Let’s hope that his term isn’t ultimately as damaging.

So, Christopher Hitchens is dead at 62.  Much blubbering from the sinistrosphere about this stout ally of the United States against Islamofascist terror.

Well, as Sam Goldwyn said, include me out from all these breathless encomia.  I had no use whatever for Hitchens in life and refuse to have anything nice to say now that his biochemical processes have ceased and now he’s a decomposing (or incinerated) mass of protoplasm.  For me he was little more than an unrepentant apologist for the USSR, a left-wing Jew-baiter and an anti-religious bigot.  His support of the invasion of Iraq is likely more a consequence of his hating a religion that would refuse him a drink more than any affection for the Anglo-Saxon political order.

I for one won’t miss him in the least.

Well, now that I’ve woken up let me regale you with a few items from the show scene.

Little Aida finished her championship by going Winners Bitch at the Trinity Valley KC show in Dallas under Rita Bell.  She now may be styled Ch. Soyara’s Celeste Aida.  Aida is the third of her litter to finish and is the second one this year after her sister Carmen.

As for her brother Ilya, at the Sunday Conroe KC show Madame’s pain medication was affecting her balance.  As Ilya was entered in Bred-By I was the only other person who could show him.  I did and – a sign of the coming End Times – won the class over competition.  I then handed him to Rudy Ayala for Winners, which Ilya also won.  Rudy was to handle Carmen in Best of Breed, so Ilya was given to Rudy’s wife, Brooke Young, to be shown in Breed.  And at the end, we had a picture taken of Ilya’s Winners Dog win, with Madame holding him.  So in the end Ilya was handled by four different people in the space of about five minutes.

We put entries for Dutch and Carmen for the 2012 Westminster KC show without much confidence that either would get in.  Because of renovations to Madison Square Garden the entry for 2012 has been cut from 2500 to 2000.  To our surprise and delight, both entries were accepted.  This means a solid two months of my taking them out for roadwork and conditioning.

And finally, Madame was elected Region 3 Governor for the Borzoi Club of America.  This is Madame’s second stint of the Board: she previously served as Governor for Region 6 when we lived in Ohio.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

If, in the future, any of you complain about my voice being too loud when I’m stewarding and it upsets your poor little Snookums, my response will be, “I’m sorry your dog has such a bad temperament.  Maybe you shouldn’t be showing it.”

Of course, if you are actually paying attention to what’s going on in the ring, if I see you standing at the ring entrance waiting for your class is about to go in, if you’re ready when it’s time, I won’t raise my voice at all. 

But no, no.  When your class is being called, you’re having a grand old time yakking with your friends.  Or, between the time I gave it to you and the time you should come into the ring, you’ve managed to forget what your armband number is or in what class you’ve entered little Snookums.  Then, if not megaphonically notified, you’d completely miss your class and your $25 entry fee would vanish into the vapor not unlike that inside your head.  Of course, that would be my fault too.

• Philadelphia, 5 – Buffalo, 2
• Vancouver, 2 – Chicago, 1
• Montreal, 2 – Boston, 1

It was time last week to upgrade or cellphones.  My lovely bride was sick and tired of her old phone losing its battery power within a day or when she tried doing anything with it, coupled with Verizon’s unwillingness to do anything about it save at an exorbitant cost.  She also wanted better internet capability for when she is on the road.

We went to Costco and decided on a Droid X for each of us with the data plan.  I’ve been rather skeptical of smartphones up to now, associating them with hipsters, urban moderns and boneless teenagers.  Now that I have it, I find I love the thing and for a surprising reason.

Last year I bought my lovely bride a Nook so she could read at the doctor’s office or on the road at shows.  She also has her AKC standards stored on it so she can take it in the ring for consultation while judging.  Fine for her, but I didn’t much like the appearance of the type on the screen and so developed something of a prejudice against e-books in general.

What I found with e-books on the Droid – whether with the Kindle, Nook or Aldiko apps – was that the background was bright, the text easy to read – much easier and more comfortable than on a desktop or laptop screen – and turning pages and going to and fro in the book was very easy.  Stop the app, use the phone for something else, return to the book and I’m at the same page as when I stopped.

Delightful!  Many of the books I’m interested in or have always wanted to have are either in the public domain or are available at much lower cost than a physical copy:  for example, I can buy the Harvard Classics for $0.99 a volume.  Project Gutenberg has tons of stuff, all free and they have an app for browsing and downloading.

So now I’m busy downloading and enjoying some of the books I’ve wanted or always liked.  Right now I’m reading (more or less at the same time):  The Count of Monte Cristo, Hadrian the Seventh and The Good Soldier.

To Austin this weekend for the Austin KC shows, held at the Travis County Exposition Center.  This features a large covered arena where all the rings, vendors and grooming was held.  We walked through a door and were amazed to see quite a bit of grooming space on the opposite side of the arena from where most of the set-ups were.  We immediately found out why there were so few people in that area:  a thick layer of loose gravelly sand was put down there.  After three or four steps, my shoes had filled up with the stuff, giving me a clue as to what the Marines went through landing on Iwo Jima (without all the shelling and machine guns, of course).

Ilya played the fool on Saturday and went Reserve.  He settled down enough on Sunday to go Winners Dog for his first point.  Brother Dutch got spooked in the ring on Saturday, showed badly and went Best of Opposite Sex.  On Sunday he looked superb, moving out with confidence and going… Best of Opposite Sex.  Somewhat disappointing, of course, but his awards were good enough for his last two Grand Champion points:  he may now be styled GCh. Soyara’s The Flying Dutchman.

The 2011 Borzoi Club of America National Specialty was held last week in Lawrence, Kansas.  To spare as much of my lovely bride’s vacation time as possible, on Tuesday I drove Dutch and Ilya up there, a 13 hour drive through north Texas (including Dallas, which, judging by the billboards, must be the strip club capital of America), Oklahoma and southeastern Kansas.  My lovely bride flew up to nearby Kansas City on Wednesday and I flew home that afternoon.

Entering Kansas on I-35, I was greeted not by the usual state welcome center, where I could stretch my legs, go to the bathroom and get the boys exercised, but instead by a toll booth for the Kansas Turnpike.  Not that the toll for the 200 miles I traveled on it was excessive, but still…

I passed through the Flint Hills of southeastern Kansas, an interesting transit.  Not only did I not see any towns, there was no sign of anything anywhere.  No houses, no roads, no trees, not even cattle grazing, just grasslands (occasionally burnt) and the odd nodding donkey of an oil well head.

Ilya thoroughly misbehaved (in a playful way) in Novice class and placed fourth out of four.  He and Dutch redeemed themselves in Brace class by really putting on a show for the judge and audience, moving and standing as one and being named Best Brace in Show.  Not the kind of performance that I would have expected from their practice sessions!

In Best of Breed competition, Dutch, despite being one of the youngest specials in the lineup, surprised the dickens out of us by garnering an Award of Merit.  My lovely bride said he performed wonderfully and got rave reviews from the peanut gallery.  The Beeg Boy is still a year or so from real maturity; right now he’s a little underweight and out of coat and condition.  I think next year he’ll be a real brick if we can develop a real show personality for him.

Ilkka writes:

The case of the Koran-burning pastor Terry Jones nicely, uh, illuminates the principle first pointed out by Jussi Halla-aho, that the relationship between Western progressives and Muslims is disturbingly similar to that of a dysfunctional family with the elephant in the room that one of the family members is a violent alcoholic. The rest of this family walks on eggshells trying not to provoke him to rage and violence, and in fact blames each other for any violent outbursts.

It’s an interesting analogy.  Why, the excuses almost write themselves!  “He’s only like this when he gets tired” (“Not all Muslims are terrorists”) , “He’s really a good provider” (“Our Western civilization owes so much to Islam”), “I probably said something to set him off” (“You said something to set them off”).

I’m somewhat mystified as to why Western progressives – humanists and secularists all! – are so eager to succor and defend radical Islamism, its terrorist acts, its theocratic reach and its hostility to gays and women.  Perhaps with Communism a dead letter and the socialist experiment in peril, the tranzis, the tenured, the tax-eaters and the trash need a new weapon in their war on the West.  The enemy of their enemy is their friend.

The peril for them is that come the day their erstwhile allies will now become their nemesis.  “We’ve hired Hitler!” Franz von Papen crowed on January 30, 1933, thinking that his old guard would serve as a check on any dictatorial tendencies.  A year later in the “Night of the Long Knives” Papen had to flee for his life.  Other allies like Hugenberg and Duesterberg were ousted when Hitler consolidated his power.  And that’s the good scenario.  Are our progressive Goodthinkers destined to be the Schleichers, the Zinovievs, the Bukharins and the Molas of the New Day?