At the Sunlight Café...

... find a bright, warm spot.

At the Sun Dog Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

(And if you need to do some shopping, please consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

"A panhandler outside Grand Central Terminal says he rakes in up to $200 an hour from kind-hearted New Yorkers."

It might be the dog and it might be the location (Grand Central):

“People are more generous because I have a dog, 100 percent. They throw me a dollar and say, ‘That’s for the dog,’ ’’ Andersen said...

Another beggar, working the northeast corner of West 35th Street and Seventh Avenue near Penn Station, said that just like everything else in the city, it’s all about location for vagrants. “There are other spots where people get hundred-dollar bills. I could go over to Fifth Avenue and make $150 before lunch.... But I don’t want to deal with the hassle,’’ he said. “There’s people that bully you to get out of the good spots.’’

By the way, the headline uses the word "bum"...



... which we were just talking about in connection with Halloween costumes. I'd said that circa 1960 the go-to costumes were "bum and gypsy." I used the word "bum" (and "gypsy") because those were the words back then, not that I hadn't moved on to more respectful terminology. I got some (comic) pushback in the comments: "Hey, hey, hey, I'm gonna need a trigger warning if you're gonna use words like bum and gypsy."

The Post is using the word "bum" to rile readers, but I think "bum" is the wrong would for a person who is engaged in remunerative labor. You may disapprove of his money-making scheme, but he's not a bum. He's a beggar. But if you think "beggar" is too mean, I would call him a Provider of Charity Opportunities.

Or is "bum" the best word? The verb "to bum" can mean to beg, as in "He looked so immaculately frightful/As he bummed a cigarette/Then he went off sniffing drainpipes/And reciting the alphabet...."

"A Massachusetts barber was awarded $100,000 after a commission found he was wrongly fired — for being blind."

So begins a Daily News article about Joel Nixon, "The Blind Barber," who is legally blind, but not — at least not yet — entirely blind.

He lost his job at Tony's Barber Shop in 2012, after his boss Tony Morales noticed Nixon's condition. He had tripped over a customer's legs, and later tripped over a chair... Morales said Nixon wasn't fired because he was legally blind, but because he wasn't qualified. He said Nixon wasn't carrying his weight and was an unlicensed barber.

Elsewhere in the Daily News: Man Bites Dog.

David Etzel, 36, attacked his mother's shih tzu Cujo in April, after getting drunk and teasing the 10-pound pup....

I'm leaving out gory details. What kind of mother names her little dog Cujo?

Dogs protecting penguins from foxes.

On Middle Island, in Australia:

Maremma dogs are self-reliant; they can be left to defend a patch of land for long periods of time with a supply of food and water that they know not to wolf down right away. During the summer, when foxes pose the greatest danger to Middle Island’s penguins because of tidal patterns that form sandbars, the dogs can stay on the island for several days in a row, watching over the birds from a raised walkway.

Training them for the job involves introducing them to the penguin’s distinct odor. “Penguins don’t smell particularly nice,” said Peter Abbott, manager of tourism services for the Warrnambool City Council. “They look cute and cuddly, but they smell like dead fish.” Gradually, the dogs are taught to treat the penguins like any other kind of livestock, to be defended and not harmed....

"Standoff in Boulder, Colo.: Prairie dogs hold Buddhist college at bay."

Headline in the L.A. Times.

"If you replaced the 'dog' in prairie dog with 'rat,' would they elicit the same emotion?...I wonder," asked Bill Rigler, spokesman for Naropa University, in what the L.A. Times suggests is sort of kind of a Zen koan.

For years, Naropa has battled some 150 persistent prairie dogs over 2.5 acres of prime real estate on its Nalanda campus.... The struggle is especially poignant in this famously liberal college town, where Buddhists and prairie dogs occupy exalted positions within the local ecosystem....

"We bought this land in 2004 to expand on and the first prairie dogs showed up two years later," Rigler said.

The Buddhists got there first, and — on Buddhist principles — did nothing. The doing of nothing was a nice ecosystem for the "dogs" (which I originally typo'd "gods"):

The industrious rodents swiftly built a prairie dog town of some 200 burrows extending from the campus parking lot to busy Arapahoe Avenue to almost the front door. Plans to expand classroom space stalled, and in 2011, Naropa began searching for ways to relocate the animals.

Four years and $100,000 later, little has changed. Trapping and moving the rodents is easy enough; finding someone who wants them is not. 

I think a lot of people who set "have a heart" traps would be surprised to know that it's illegal to move the animals elsewhere and just set them free, without permission. (And I hope you won't hate me — have a heart! — for burdening you with the knowledge of which you were once free. Who can free you from the trap that is knowledge? Even with the door left open — you're free to seek to believe what is not true — you find it hard to scamper out and run wild in the landscape/parking lot that's just inches away.)

The Buddhists seemed to have decided to kill the "dogs" — I typo'd "gods" again! — inciting protest. On Facebook: "Mommy, I heard that Naropa University is going to have all of us killed" and:



As Rigler put it, quoted in the above-linked L.A. Times article:

"All of sudden it was, 'The Buddhists want to kill the prairie dogs,' but we had no intention of killing them," said Rigler, who isn't a Buddhist. "The very act of applying for a [lethal control] permit triggers an open comment period, which gives everyone the opportunity to say, 'I have a site for relocation,' or put forward other ideas."

This sounds like the doctrine of double effect. Your desire or intention is not to kill the animals... but they may end up dead as you pursue what you do want and intend. The college wants to relocate the prairie dogs and the threat of killing them is a way to get somebody to step up and accept them onto their property. Another way to think of it is like this:



It's a threat. Let us use your land or we'll kill these "dogs."
Click for more »

"I feel like Louie’s always just kinda like that."

"Anytime I go to touch Chris, he’s like, no, I want to be pet."

"Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs..."

Remove the myostatin gene....

And then what happens?

"A 7-year-old Australian boy miraculously survived an attack by an aggressive kangaroo using a defense method... 'the kangaroo roll.'"

"'You put your hands around your neck and you roll up in a ball'.... The boy proceeded to put his face down and scream for help."

Miraculously? How dangerous are kangaroos? Here's a Slate article from 2012 (after 3 kangaroos escaped from a zoo in Germany):

Although the last recorded death came in 1936, there have been several kangaroo attacks in Australia in recent years, some resulting in serious injuries.... The best defense is to keep a safe distance and try to create a barrier between yourself and the beast. Even holding up a large tree branch can be helpful. If the kangaroo approaches, turn your body sideways, exposing a narrow profile to the animal and protecting your face and organs. Raise your hands and lean your head away from the animal to minimize the chances of being scratched across the face by the kangaroo’s nasty claws. Retreat, but do not turn your back and run. A kangaroo can easily chase you down, kicking as it hops.

At the internal link, 2 of the stories show kangaroos attempting to drown somebody's dog:

November 2009... 49 Year old Chris Rickard was walking around his property together with his dog, a blue heeler named Rocky. They stumbled upon a sleeping kangaroo, who woke up and tried to get away, chased by the dog Rocky. The kangaroo them jumped in to the water and the dog followed. In a self defence move typical for kangaroos the kangaroo grabbed the dog with its front paws and held it under water to drown it....

July 2004...  Christine Canham was walking her four golden retrievers around Dunlop Ponds in Canberra's northern suburbs when her dog, Summer, had a run-in with a kangaroo who then held him under water and drowned him. Drought conditions have made the kangaroos change their usual behaviour and become active in daytime and fiercely defend water sources and feed patches....