Category Archives: news

Horsing around

Talk about plans going awry…

A Hawaiian hospital has restated its rules on pets after a man took a horse up in a lift in a bid to cheer up a sick relative with his favourite steed.

Man and beast were stopped by security guards only after reaching the third floor, after apparently passing through the lobby unchallenged.

That’s not actually the part of the story that made it interesting to me, this is:

The patient was allowed to see them but it turned out to be the wrong horse.

Can you imagine? You go to all the trouble to take a [tag]horse[/tag] to a [tag]hospital[/tag] and then you take the wrong horse?

I’m all about taking animals to visit people who’re sick (provided they want to be visited by critters, of course). This reminded me of a program where, instead of dogs, they took exotic trained animals to nursing homes to visit with the residents. One of these animals was an adorable miniature horse. Do the therapeutic benefits of animal companionship outweighed the potential psychological damage of walking a very tiny horse past dementia patients? It was a very successful program so it must have been okay, but you still have to wonder…

Because the actual politics of the stadium weren't infuriating enough…

We ultimately decided not to go to any Spring Training games, so I wasn’t going to bother to even mention baseball here. I’ve got March Madness, I don’t have time for baseball! But then I opened today’s Washington Post and saw this: “[tag]Nationals[/tag] Offer Parking for Disabled – With Nearby Lots in High Demand, Details on Handicapped Spaces Are Scarce”

I’d heard there was a handicapped parking kerfluffle going on. The Post is reporting that the rather vague options the stadium offers include: parking five blocks away and taking a shuttle, paying a premium for a handicapped space ($35), or, if one has the luxury of being driven around by someone else, being dropped off.

I don’t yet see any details at all posted on the Nationals website.

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba

Interesting piece in the New York Times last week about the ways that [tag]Cuban[/tag] citizens work around [tag]Cuba[/tag]’s governmental restrictions on the Internet:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.

Not that long ago I stumbled across an interesting Cuban blog, Generacion Y, which is mentioned in the article:

Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

(There’s an English version of the site, but the translation is rather awkward).

Muskrat Queens

On the front page of today’s Washington Post there was a picture of a young woman in formal attire and the full-on Beauty Queen hair and makeup. She had a dead [tag]muskrat[/tag] slung over her shoulder.

Thus did we learn a great deal from an article titled “Fur Flies at Beauty Pageant (But It’s Not What You Think) – In [tag]Eastern Shore[/tag]’s Muskrat Country, Contestants Keep Two Traditions Alive”. Until this morning I wasn’t even aware of the [tag]Miss Outdoors[/tag] pageant.

“It’s not weird,” Phillips said. “You can be graceful and beautiful and well-poised and skin a muskrat.”

Although we learned that (muskrat) “…carcasses are sometimes stewed with liberal amounts of sage,” I’m too lazy to meatblog this one.