The Goat Justice League advocates and educates on behalf of urban goats, who can be pets and milk producers (or wanderers).  In contrast, the goat above was actually more of a professional, part of a weeding crew cleaning out a construction site in Seattle, according to the photog.  Thanks Courtney!

It’s human nature to personify dogs, to relate to them like they’re people.  They have so many qualities we’d like to see more often.  Their joy is unfettered.  They have a positively inhuman alertness, protectiveness, and devotion (except possibly when the thief has brought steak tartar).  All for pennies a day! We forget they’re a different species, with their own expressions and rituals when they’re not playing Zelig.

Photographer Michael Crouser is doing something remarkable in his new book, Dog Run.  He’s showing us dogs being dogs when they’re not paying attention to humans.  It’s a glimpse into an utterly alien world — beautiful, scary, strange.

(Of course I am a little biased since Michael took the photographs for a book about knitting I co-wrote — check this pretty-as-heck shot out.  Anyway the guy is versatile, and — do I even have to say it? — both our books are so obviously perfect Christmas gifts :)

The American tradition of fine political rhetoric has an eloquent new starlet.  For the full artistic effect, watch all three segments: one, two, three.

[UPDATE! The starlet's performance was so spectacular that the writers of this comedy sketch decided they couldn't do any better by way of satire: they just quoted her verbatim.]

“A strange new shadow land has grown up in America. It’s a world of cinderblock villas and plywood hallways, garish under halogen security bulbs. It clings to the underside of Western towns like Roman catacombs, pushes up funereal fault blocks in urban centers, and festoons suburban freeways with palaces styled after castles and forts…”

Read more about self-storage here. Nice photo by flickr user fabbio.

You know what, dog? You are far more than an opportunistic commensalist to me.

You are ALL RIGHT, you know what I mean? You’re like, the ONLY holiday guest who gets JUST HOW FUNNY that story about the stupid squirrel is.

I promise to give you the whole turkey pan and take you camping again, as soon as we wake up from this trypto.. trypto.. STUFF.

Happy Thanksgiving!
(back with something of substance after the holiday)

“Can I ask you folks a coupla dumb questions?”

I turned around abruptly, and gasoline overflowed from the weedwhacker tank I was filling. “Shit,” I mumbled automatically, flash-imagining the whole field going up in flames. “Yes, sir,” I said, more loudly, to the man coming up the path.

“Why are you all weedwhacking around these trees? Why don’t you just leave this to Mother Nature?” That day we (a watershed restoration crew) were rigging the competition for our underdogs before they became underneaths. We were cutting the tall invasive grass away from young willow, ash, and ninebark seedlings that we had planted, before it could grow as tall as a basketball player and then fall on top of them like a mattress onto a bottle of wine. (Wink wink)

…more

We think of plants as passive. They are alive, but it’s a different kind of alive than animal-alive. But the more you get to know plants, the more you can see how desperately alive they are.

I know blackberry well enough that it can stir up the same emotions in me as any human enemy. …more