DogWalkBlog

Ok, so I am at my computer, banging away at an idea that has kept me up all night and I hear this noise, like a noisy fan motor. I get up, walk around the room trying to figure out where it is coming from.

It is Snickers (my cat), lying all curled up, fast asleep on a stack of resume papers, just right behind my chair. Apparently the job hunting process in this economy has tuckered her out.

Listen to the purr:

Sound and photo captured with iPhone. Amazing. This photo of Snickers is only one of two that appears on this blog. As everyone knows, all real blogs will contain at least one photo of a cat.

Free will never be a price worth paying.

People want to eat but they don’t want to join the hunt. Newspapers, TV, etc FEED people without them having to get off their butts to get news. Blogs, Internet, etc. require they do something to get news (hunt)

Godin states: “In a world of free, everyone can play.” Just because they can, doesn’t mean they will.

My money is on sloth. Nobody ever went broke betting on sloth. A book review on Amazon may be easier to find, but so are 1,000 opinions on it from readers, all of which are essentially crap. A really good book review in the WSJ or the NYT is reliable and usually done by someone who has the critical eye and the command of language that makes the review worth paying attention to. “I really like this book” is meaningless drivel as are the videos Chris Brogan puts out on book reviews; but they are free! (BTW, I care about what Brogan says about Social Media, but he does not deliver a credible book review. I trust this guy with his hefty English degree more!)

The reason we will need paid contributors in the future is nobody will want to hunt, but we will all demand to be fed. No hunters, no food.

And most of the time, free is the most expensive price you can pay for anything. Free food might be rotten food and rotten food may lead to ….

The Englewood city workers are not part of the painting, but since they usually move at a glacial pace, who would really know? The mural probably should have road construction painted into it as that is the way most of us see Main and Union day to day anyway. That, or an auto accident.

I like simple food, but I don’t think the name of the dish should be any less exotic. One of my favorite meals is plain buttered spaghetti and a seasoned hamburger patty. I call it “Naked spaghetti with skinny meatball.”

Here’s the recipe:
1. Boil water, salt and oil (nothing fancy, just vegetable oil. If you use EVOO, just quit reading. Really, EVOO should only be used for dipping crusty bread. Really. Rachael Ray and I will disagree, but since I’m right, it is a losing argument for her.)

2. Cook spaghetti just a little past al dente. Al dente is undercooked and overrated. Drain thoroughly.

3. Melt 1/2 (or a whole, it’s your heart) stick of butter (not margarine!) in the bottom of the hot spaghetti pot. Sprinkle with parsley. Add the spaghetti back into the pot and toss until the noodles are covered with butter.

4. While the spaghetti is cooking, slowly cook the hamburger patties in a covered frying pan. Do not season yet. Really. Resist the urge to salt as it will just dry out the burgers.

5. Once the hamburger patty is cooked, season with coarse-ground kosher salt, a turn of course-ground black pepper and the McCormick grinder Italian seasoning. Just one turn per patty.

6. Place noodles in a bowl, top with skinny meatball (hamburger) and eat.

7. Feed left-overs to the dogs. You did cook just a little more than you could eat, right?

I’ve taken a few international flights. Ok, a lot of international flights and here is one thing I know. They look at your passport. My current passport gets swiped across a bar code reader which I presume goes to a computer somewhere, checks to make sure my name is not on some “can’t travel” list or whatever. At some point, that transaction is recorded in a database so in the event any CSI agent needs to recreate my whereabouts on a particular day, it can be done. I’m almost sure they can triangulate my cell phone location, get my phone records, etc. And, if that fails, my iPhone can send GPS data attached to my latest tweet.

Homeland Security can track down a mother of four, arrest and proceed to deport her, without passion or prejudice, one month before her daughter graduates from high school, yet they can’t tell if a sitting governor used his passport to travel outside the United States? On the list of all red flags, wouldn’t that bump to the top of the list? Shouldn’t we have known a governor of a state probably has no official business outside the US borders unless he/she is on vacation or a State Department-sponsored junket? It’s like allowing the IT nerd to wander into the C-suite of a company. Just doesn’t belong there.

To not know that a sitting governor had used his passport to travel to Argentina is just someone asleep at the switch.

I watched Joe, Mika and Chris on Morning Joe this morning. In case you missed it, here it is.

I think the only thing that will bring clarity to this health care issue is full disclosure by everyone who goes on television against health care. All they need do it fill in this simple questionnaire and the answers will be shown on a crawler under their name as they speak.

- Who is your health insurance company?
- Who is paying for your policy?
- What is your annual contribution?
- What is your annual deductible?
- Can this policy be revoked due to a particular illness or accident?

That is it. Just five simple questions that don’t have very long answers, so they could easily scroll as the person is talking. Then, the viewer can determine a person’s credibility with the subject matter. As I suspect, Joe and Mika will both have policies paid for by NBC, their annual contributions will be far less than the annual salary of a 40hr work week minimum wage job, deductibles be almost nothing, if anything and the policy couldn’t be revoked as long as they are employed by NBC.

Just guessing. Until pundits agree to disclose the answers to these five basic questions, I’m not trusting any of them.

I think he should just call her “sir.”

If General Walsh was being disrespectful or using the term “ma’am” in a sarcastic or condescending tone, then Sen. Boxer would have had the right to chide him like this in a public forum. If this really bothered her, the mature thing to do would perhaps pull him aside privately during a break and ask that he not call her ma’am in a public space.

Gen. Walsh understands chain of command, which is why he complied immediately, even to a silly, immature request. Kudos to him. Sen. Boxer, not so much.

Any thoughts from vets out there?

I had been thinking a lot about this lately as more and more people in the Social Media space poke at me for not being authentic. If I blog as my dog, Rufus, I can’t possibly be authentic. Why am I hiding?

I am not hiding, but rather being optimistically cautious. Seth Simonds just published a blog post on Trent Reznor and the backlash of trolls. Previously, Reznor had PR people and handlers to “manage” his public image. But, as he found out, the more he decided to tweet out as himself, the more Internet trolls lashed onto that “authenticity” and used it as a weapon against him. My guess is as more and more celebrities are shafted by Social Media tools, they will recoil back behind the safety of handlers. That is not a bad thing; just a symptom of our culture.

When I first started blogging several years ago, I thought that DogWalkBlog would be a look at life and culture through the eyes of a dog, if a dog could talk. But, that got stale pretty quickly. You can only blog out your puppy potty habits so many times before it all starts looking like poop. And, I have a big mouth and a need to bark often about a lot of other things.

Along the way, though, I figured out that if I stood behind a dog and moved his lips, I could say just about anything I wanted and almost nobody would be offended. After all, you are going to get in an argument with a dog? Really?

The other thing I discovered is people let their guard down around dogs. Once they pet you and interact with your dog, it is kinda hard to back away from the person holding the leash. So, Rufus has become my surrogate handshake when you would have only seen an opinionated, somewhat arrogant jerk. Rufus allows me to engage you in a conversation you may have been unwilling to start without him. And, I hope we both are the better for it.

As I was putting this post to bed and hitting the publish button, Kevin Phoenix sent this tweet:

Rufus, I like your blog clean and entertaining – but I’m not quite sure where its going. Can you ask your alter ego, please?

Which crystalizes my final reason to blog as a dog. People need direction and focus. They need to be building toward something. They need goals and purpose. Dogs, on the other hand, just need to exist, wag their tails when they feel happy, sniff around what makes them curious and crap whenever they need to or something needs to be crapped on. If I blogged as a person (which I do, but that is another tail altogether, typo intended) I would need a topic, a pigeon-hole to tidy and keep on task. But, if you’re a dog, you are free to focus on following the path in earnest one day and taking time out to chase a ball around the yard the next.

Make sense? I sure hope not.

I never thought I would be saying these words in the same sentence, but “Thank you, Sarah Palin for not going gentle into that good night.” I hope you continue to rage against the dying of your political career.

Why? Because without your endless visage on every cable news channel, how else would my pitbull friends be inspired to create such wonders as the t-shirt here, available for sale at CafePress.com How else would I be inspired to organize the very first “Pee Party” to be held everywhere on April 15, 2010?

Keep on talking, keep being silly. I figure for the next 3 years and 219 days you will probably give me more comedic material than I could ever hope to enjoy in a lifetime!

Charlie’s new toy. Indestructible Jolly Ball from Tractor Supply. If you have a big dog, you need this toy.

I made someone laugh on Twitter today and felt pretty good about it. I was having a rotten day, but 140 characters later, I’m feeling alright.

Here is the reply. You gotta work to find the original tweet