O’DonnellWeb

Horse slaughter is in the news again. Back in 2007, Congress, urged on by well meaning but misguided activists, outlawed the 3 remaining horse slaughter plants in the US. These were USDA inspected facilities that killed unwanted horses humanely and exported the meat for human consumption. Back then, I stated that it was a bad decision because all it did was move the slaughter business over the border where the USDA couldn’t regulate it.

Horse slaughter is a complicated issue. Horses occupy a gray area between livestock and pet/companion animal. Obviously, I could never eat horse meat or be party to slaughtering a horse for that purpose. However, I empathize with ranchers and others that need to get some return on an animal that no longer serves it’s intended purpose. I’d be a happy camper if every horse had a proper home on the range, or in a nice barn. However, the facts are many, many horses don’t have that option. A humane death seems like a better fate than starving to death neglected in a field somewhere. The humane death is much more likely if it happens here in the US where we can regulate it.

Also, focusing on slaughter lets the real culprits off the hook. Horse Associations that profit by owners registering their horses encourage indiscriminate breeding. Halter classes in which two year old horses make cash for the owner encourage over breeding in search of the next cash cow, errr horse. And don’t even get me started on the horse racing industry, or the production of Premarin. The real villain here is all the idiots breeding crap horses that will never be fit for anything useful, and thus become very expensive pasture pets, or fodder for the auctions where they become food. Eliminate the over breeding issues and the value of each remaining horse prices it out of the range of the slaughter horses. There will always be people that want to eat horse, and that is fine. But we could eliminate 80% of the problem be reducing the over breeding of horses in the first place.

Like there was any chance that the LA Times could write an article about an iconic 80s tune without me noticing. When I was in high school my metalhead cred required me to hate Journey. Now that I’m older and wiser I can look back and realize that the guys getting lucky with the high school cheerleaders were doing it to Journey, not AC/DC.

Because I’m sure it was just my musical taste and not the Saturday afternoon D&D marathons that hampered my social life in high school.

This looks like a fantastic book. With one at 10th grade age and the other at 8th grade age, the timing on this is perfect for us. Maybe the author will see this and send me an advance copy. After all, how many other home education blogs have been online since 2001?

I furthered my son’s musical education last night by taking him to the Zoso show. He’ll never have the chance to see Zeppelin live. I won’t either. I was just a few years too young to have caught Zeppelin back in the 70s.

The start of the evening was a bit of a farce as my free tickets were not waiting for me at the gate. I had foreseen this possibility and thus printed out the Twitter message from @CelebrateVALive as proof. Unfortunately at the moment I needed that printout, it was still on the printer back home. So we returned home to retrieve it. The lady at the ticket table clearly had no idea what Twitter was and I’m not sure she really believes that I didn’t scam my into the show, but we did make it in. Unfortunately this caused us to miss all but the final song from Limelight, the Rush tribute act that opened the show.

Zoso hit the stage with Rock and Roll, and as advertised, they sounded like Led Zeppelin. There was no reserved seating up front for this show, so we abandoned the lawn chairs and headed for the stage. The lead singer had the Plant act down pat. The guitarist’s stage presence reminded me more of Slash, but then Slash always seemed like he was channeling Jimmy Page so maybe that is just my age showing. I’ve seen a lot more of Slash on stage than Jimmy Page.

In between Rock and Roll to open and Stairway to Heaven to close, they played pretty much every song you would expect, including Moby Dick, during which the lead singer took a break to blow dry his hair back behind the drum kit during the solo. Did Robert Plant blow dry his hair during the show?

The crowd was actually larger than I was expecting, probably pretty close to the same size crowd that was at Gin Blossoms last month (1000-1500 people). A lot of parents with kids there, which was heartening. Given the craptacular state of the current music industry, getting our kids hooked on Led Zeppelin is the least we can do.

My son is a Led Zeppelin fan. I win at parenting

It’s been a while since we featured a ukelele video here. In this case, I can mix in homeschooling too as the kid in this video is an unschooler, and child of official ODonnellWeb chocolatier Kris Bordessa.

My adventures with Blue Cross have been documented here in great detail.

Blue Cross is trying to kill my wife
BCBS is trying to kill my wife - II
More shady operations from BCBS
Still no cure for diabetes
The problem with healthcare in a nutshell

So I’m only more than happy to point you to somebody who took on BCBS, and won!

Flow, as defined by Dale McGowan, is when we’re completely in the moment, so intensely focused on the activity at hand that we lose track of time. It’s one of the most deeply satisfying and meaningful states we can enter.

The point of his blog post is that we parents need to help our kids find their flow. Beyond finding that moment though, we have to let them be when they are in it.

This is infinitely easier if your kids aren’t stuck in a soul crushing school all day. Our kids have time to find their flow, and then ride the wave as long as they can. The school bell doesn’t break them out of it. Unnaturally early bedtimes due to 7 AM bus rides to school don’t limit their time and energy. Peer and parent pressure to conform don’t limit our kid’s options. In fact, beyond all the usual reasons for home education, flow may be the best reason of all. Finding flow experiences, and having time to stay with them, probably does more for happiness than just about anything else.

Earlier today I got a new follower notification from Twitter. The Tin Foil Five is now following me. It didn’t scream obvious spam link so I clicked through. It turns out that they are a local metal band. I didn’t know we had any original metal in FredVegas, so that’s cool to know. I’d like to think they somehow picked up on the fact that I do listen to metal and am local. More likely they are following anybody local. Either way is really fine. All local followers get the benefit of the doubt, although I quickly unfollow if it becomes apparent that their primary contribution to the twitter stream will be ads for their business.

Anyway, the band’s Twitter profile smartly links to their Myspace page, so I could check out some tunes. The Myspace page makes reference to their Facebook profile. So now I have a bit of a decision to make. If I want to keep up with the band and maybe catch a show, how best to do that? One assumes they will announce gigs on Twitter. The Facebook page looked like it was being kept up to date. Myspace had the music availability, but the latest blog update there was last year. What if they also had a website at TheTinFoilFive.com? (they don’t btw). In their case, I went with Facebook and became a fan there. And I do plan to catch a show sometime. The Celebrate VA shows have reminded me how much I like live music. (Zoso next week? Anyone? Anyone?)

It all gets very confusing quickly, and points to a bigger problem. I’m already getting the same updates from various friends 3 and 4 times. Somebody posts a picture on Flickr, which they embed in their blog, tweet the link to the picture, which gets picked up by their Facebook page, etc. Services like FriendFeed aim to solve that problem, but very few of my friends are there, and I just prefer my RSS feeds to come from the source. It occurs to me that a band (or really any commercial enterprise) could quickly piss off their fans by over loading them with updates that get repeated across 5 channels. It’s important for a lot of us to be in all those channels, but the web / social media sphere is starting to feel a little like commercial radio with the same content being syndicated over and over! I think I’d like people, bands, and companies to let us know which channel is primary. It’s good to test out everything, but let people know that no matter what, anything important going on will be on your blog, or Facebook page, or where ever. And then update that source when things change.

Of course I’m not exactly eating my own dog food on this one. My life is spread across Facebook, Twitter, and this blog. The blog has become where I place my more drawn out thoughts, like this one. And my links, which are the exact opposite of a drawn out thought. So that makes a lot of sense. However if you just follow my blog you’ll have no idea what I’m doing most days. Twitter is sort of like my watercooler conversation during the day, and Facebook is sort of like happy hour with friends. More detail, but still a concerted effort not to offend anybody. Here on the blog, in your my home, and my rules apply I started with a company lunchroom analogy for Facebook, but it didn’t feel right as I keep Facebook a coworker free zone. In fact, I do the same with Twitter, so the watercooler analogy isn’t quite right there either. Whatever.

What’s my point in all this? I guess think about how you are using all these various channels, and make sure the people important to you (whether they be family, friends, fans, or customers) understand what you are doing so they don’t get lost in the shuffle. And make sure you have a home base, and that we all know where that is.

I got all this from a single Twitter new follower notification. What’s up with that?

New header graphic - reload the page while holding the shift key down if you aren’t seeing it.

The daily bookmarks will no longer create a post every day. They are in the sidebar, and the RSS feed is at the top of the page if you want to subscribe to a feed of whatever I find interesting.

• How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming | A Grist Special Series | Grist -

I’ve been using Yahoo Zimbra Desktop as my email client on my work laptop for about two weeks. I’m impressed. I hate Outlook with a passion, and can’t use Thunderbird for work because I need to be able to send email in 10 pt Verdana (don’t ask). Zimbra passes the first test, I can specify a specific font and size as default. Beyond that, it has a bunch of other cool features.

It’s free as in speech and free as in beer. That is always a good thing. If you use it with a Yahoo or Gmail account, it syncs your calendar and contacts with the desktop. It provides the Gmail like conversation view in a desktop client. When used with the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is gives businesses a viable alternative to Exchange. I’m using it with Exchange. Luckily my employer allows me IMAP access to the Exchange server.

If you are a right minded individual that hates Outlook, and you can get to your email via POP or IMAP, Zimbra is worth looking into.

Last week I got the bright idea that I’m tired of paying $200 to board the dogs for 4 days every time we want to take a short weekend trip. We have a large fenced yard, and they are after all, dogs. It would be cheaper to leave them in the yard and pay a neighbor or pet sitter to come buy morning and evening to check on the dogs and feed them. So I checked Craigslist for dog houses. (You did realize that FredVegas has hit the big time with its own Craigslist subdomain, right?)

Anyway, I was too late on a couple of Dog Igloos, and there was one large, home built dog house available at a yard sale last weekend. So I swung buy the yard sale on Sunday and encountered the oddest yard sale ever. They had left everything out Friday night when we got a torrential downpour. So there were piles of clothes on blue tarps, all soaking wet. There was a convertible Camero with the rear window pane missing. (not sure if it was for sale though). There was wet furniture spread all over the yard. There was all kinds of junk piled in the back yard. The front door was open, and in fact I think the front door itself was for sale. I hollered “hello” but nobody answered. The gate to the yard was either open or missing, so I stepped around some old lumber and maybe some tires too, and took a look. There was a nice looking golden retriever in a kennel, with a decent enough looking dog house. However, it dawned on me that if I bought the dog house (assuming I could find anybody to pay) that I would be leaving the poor dog stuck in the kennel with no shelter.

I couldn’t do that. So I left. It also occurred to me that based on the condition of everything else I saw, these people may not be the most diligent about flea and tick control, and I probably didn’t want that dog house in my truck or my yard. The dog appeared healthy, so I didn’t see any reason to call animal control. Somebody may have bought the dog house later that day, but it would have bothered me knowing I made life worse for the dog. Michelle had a 10% off coupon for Tractor Supply so we ended up buying a large dog house there for $20 less than Petco wanted for the same house.

Last night was our first experiment in leaving the dogs out all night. Other than me needing to go out at 1:30 AM and retrieve the beagle-dachshund that was baying non-stop at something, it was ok, better than I expected actually. They were quiet the rest of the night after that.

Now I need to find a pet sitter. I have a couple of good leads via Twitter, but first I need to check around to see if a neighborhood kid wants to do it.

A reader supplied this link. The post, written by the Superintendent of Schools for Dinwiddie County, Virginia, exhibits the usual myopic viewpoint of somebody so ingrained in the system that they simply can not see the truth around them.

The commenters at the original post have already covered all the rebuttals, so there is no need for me to repeat it all here. IMHO, anybody that uses the S-word argument is not worthy of debating. There is no quicker ways to show you haven’t done any research beyond reading an USA Today article than to try to make a serious argument that socialization of kids in public schools is beneficial and/or superior to that of a mainstream homeschooler.

Pictures:

Fred First’s 2nd book, What We Hold In Our Hands, reads much like how I imagine a conversation with him over an iced tea would proceed. A wide range of topics, all approached with a naturalist’s eye and the gentle yet wry humor of a southern gentleman. Fred has a level of contentment with his life that I’m still searching for, and the lessons learned from his stories will help me get there. Fred “gets” more out of his remote 40 acres in the VA mountains than many of us do in the hustle and bustle of the big city. The lesson here is to slow down, smell the roses, turn over the rocks in the creek with your kids, look up at the birds in the sky, and appreciate the wonder that is life on this small insignificant planet, even if your suburban back yard is as close as you normally get to the wilds of nature.

I also found some striking similarities between Fred and Brad Warner. However, connecting the dots between Fred and a punk rocker Buddhist monk will take a post all of its own, if I can ever actually get it down to words.

Support your fellow Virginia blogger, buy the book!