It is easy to buy a service dog vest on the internet. Numerous
websites offer products such as official harnesses and tags. In some
cases they are sold with a note stating that it is the owner's
responsibility to ensure their animal is properly trained, but there is
no system of enforcement.
Erin, who preferred not to give her full name, lives with her boyfriend and their dog, Bo, in Los Angeles.
She
went online to buy a service vest for her pooch, because she wanted to
avoid the fees charged by airlines for non-service animals - in the
region of $90-$150 (£60-£100) to fly, one-way. Unlike working animals,
they must be restrained in a container for the entire flight.
Erin, who is not disabled, travels everywhere with Bo because she says she can not bear to leave him home alone....
Many travellers are accompanied by their pets because they have special
permission, based on a doctors' letter and an official certificate.
Unlike service dogs, emotional support animals (ESAs) are not required
to have any formal training, but are allowed on board without an
additional fee...
Still, she says, "I know more faux emotional support dogs than real ones."
Reposted from 2015 to add this new development:
After months of deliberation, the Department of Transportation has
released formal guidance regarding animals on planes. The 28-page
document released this month makes it clear that three types of service
animals should be prioritized for travel: cats, dogs and miniature horses...
There are many reasons someone would fly with a miniature horse,
disability experts say. Although a growing number of emotional support
animals have emerged in recent years, in the case of miniature horses,
their function as service animal is primarily physical... The animals are mild-mannered and fast learners, with nearly 360-degree
vision. They may also offer balance support to individuals with physical
disabilities...
True miniature horses, which are not to be confused with ponies, are less than 34 inches in height...
Before going to the gate, Ramouni will ask someone to lead them to the
women’s restroom. “My horse has been trained to go potty in a plastic
bag,” she said. “I would just give her the command to go potty, then I
flush it down the toilet.”..
Airlines have typically put Ramouni and Cali in the bulkhead row, which
has more legroom and no seats in front. Throughout the flight Cali
stands at Ramouni’s feet.
"I was thinking that it's just too easy to get these animals to be service animals," Keller said.
He went to a site called USAServiceDogRegistration.com,
and successfully registered the picture of the beehive as a service
animal. "[I wanted to] bring awareness to the issue that anyone could do
this," Keller said...
A quick web search turns up many service animal registration sites. But
Keller's stunt showed that some of them do very little to verify the
animals they're registering. "They're very silly. They don't mean
anything," said Jaymie Cardin, who trains service dogs at AZ Dog Sports in Scottsdale.
"You can go pay for a registry on one of those web sites, and
basically, you're just paying for a piece of paper and to put a name on a
list."...
Plus, federal law says a service animal
can only be a dog or miniature horse, so, no bees. "The law is pretty
clear that a service animal is an animal that is trained to perform a
specific task related to the disability," said Sey In, an attorney with
the Arizona Center for Disability Law. A service animal doesn't need to be registered anywhere, let alone on a third party website.
Keller
hopes all the buzz around his beehive stunt proves his point about
these registration sites. "It's making people believe all animals are
service animals when they're not," Keller said. "And there's a clear
difference."
"To identify the U.S. cities with the highest and lowest excessive
drinking rates, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the percentage of adults who
report binge or heavy drinking across 381 metro areas. Metro level data
were aggregated from county level data provided by County Health
Rankings & Roadmaps, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University
of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program. All data are as
of the most recent available year. Median household income and poverty
data came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The
number of bars per capita came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Health outcomes, including the number of potential lives lost per
100,000 people due to premature death annually and the percentage of
adults who report fair or poor health were also aggregated from
county-level data obtained from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps."
The embedded image (via) shows the top ten. Six of the next ten were also from Wisconsin. You can also view the driest cities in the United States [think Utah], but the data are arranged in a clickbait fashion.
Video posted at BoingBoing this morning. No answer there (yet) as to why these interconnected circles were created in what appears to be tidal mud flats. Are they weirs? Evaporative catchments for mineral extraction? What???
Location said to be near Isla Aguada (Campeche) in Mexico. Note the immense extent of the structures. The connecting "canals" appear to have been created or enhanced with large earth-moving equipment. Some look fresh, and there are what looks like older ones that have silted in.
This blog has amazing readership. I suspect someone will know or can research the answer.
Solved within three hours! (answer in Rocky's comment)
Addendum: Here's an interesting screencap I made from the map of the Democratic Republic of the Congo linked in jschmidt's comment:
Fascinating. There must be more information somewhere...
Addendum: Found some relevant information in a video about mangrove restoration in Thailand (relevant part at the 7:40-8:40 segment or so). Apparently those drainage channels are dug by hand with shovels.
Enjoyable even when you haven't seen the movies, which are listed (with time citations) here. As always, I recommend clicking the fullscreen icon for best viewing.
Reposted from earlier this week to add an even better (IMHO) mashup:
Excerpts from an absolutely fascinating report in the New York Times:
Three months after his bone marrow transplant, Chris Long of Reno, Nev.,
learned that the DNA in his blood had changed. It had all been replaced
by the DNA of his donor, a German man he had exchanged just a handful
of messages with...
But four years after his lifesaving procedure, it was not only Mr.
Long’s blood that was affected. Swabs of his lips and cheeks contained
his DNA — but also that of his donor. Even more surprising to Mr. Long
and other colleagues at the crime lab, all of the DNA in his semen
belonged to his donor. “I thought that it was pretty incredible that I
can disappear and someone else can appear,” he said...
Mr. Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person
with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing
creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts.
Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical
procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA
shows up — beyond blood — has rarely been studied with criminal
applications in mind...
He
added that patients also sometimes ask him what it means for a man to
have a woman’s chromosomes in their bloodstream or vice versa. “It
doesn’t matter,” he said.
But for a forensic scientist, it’s a different story. The assumption among criminal investigators as theygather
DNA evidence from a crime scene is that each victim and each
perpetrator leaves behind a single identifying code — not two...
In 2004, investigators in Alaska uploaded a DNA profile extracted from
semen to a criminal DNA database. It matched a potential suspect. But
there was a problem: The man had been in prison at the time of the
assault. It turned out that he had received a bone marrow transplant.
The donor, his brother, was eventually convicted...
In 2008, he was trying to identify the victim of a traffic accident for
the National Forensic Service in Seoul, South Korea. Blood showed that
the individual was female. But the body appeared to be male, which was
confirmed by DNA in a kidney, but not in the spleen or the lung, which
contained male and female DNA. Eventually, he figured out that the
victim had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.
Via the Europe subreddit, where I found this observation:
"Parts of the historic old city of Gdańsk, which had suffered large-scale
destruction during the war, were rebuilt during the 1950s and 1960s.
The reconstruction was not tied to the city's pre-war appearance, but
instead was politically motivated as a means of culturally cleansing and
destroying all traces of German influence from the
city. Any traces of German tradition were ignored,
suppressed, or regarded as "Prussian barbarism" only worthy of
demolition, while Flemish/Dutch, Italian and French influences
were used to replace the historically accurate Germanic architecture
which the city was built upon since the 14th century."
And btw, why is it called a citySCAPE?
Abstracted from landscape, the suffix representing Middle Dutch -schap (“-ship”), from Old Dutch -skap (“-ship”), from Proto-Germanic *-skapiz (“-ship”), from *skapaz (“shape, form”). Cognate with Modern Dutch -schap (“-ship”), German -schaft (“-ship”), Swedish -skap (“-ship”), Old English -sceap, -scipe (“-ship”).
It’s
time to get serious about a major redesign of life. Thirty years were
added to average life expectancy in the 20th century, and rather than
imagine the scores of ways we could use these years to improve quality
of life, we tacked them all on at the end. Only old age got longer.
As
a result, most people are anxious about the prospect of living for a
century. Asked about aspirations for living to 100, typical responses
are “I hope I don’t outlive my money” or “I hope I don’t get dementia.”..
Long lives are not the problem. The problem is living in cultures designed for lives half as long as the ones we have.
Retirements
that span four decades are unattainable for most individuals and
governments; education that ends in the early 20s is ill-suited for
longer working lives; and social norms that dictate intergenerational
responsibilities between parents and young children fail to address
families that include four or five living generations...
We agreed that longevity demands rethinking of all stages of life, not
just old age. To thrive in an age of rapid knowledge transfer, children
not only need reading, math and computer literacy, but they also need to
learn to think creatively and not hold on to “facts” too tightly.
They’ll need to find joy in unlearning and relearning. Teens could take
breaks from high school and take internships in workplaces that intrigue
them. Education wouldn’t end in youth but rather be ever-present and
take many forms outside of classrooms, from micro-degrees to traveling
the world...
Financing longevity requires major rethinking. Rather than saving
ever-larger pots of money for the end of life, we could pool risks in
new ways.
No answers at the link, but some thought-provoking observations. It's too late for me. Save yourself.
Before my elderly mother developed dementia, she lived for 25 years in an apartment complex for active seniors. Among the amenities available was a "crafts" room typically used by a group of ladies creating quilts. Before and after the winter holiday season however, the tables and shelves were used to recycle Christmas cards.
There are two images embedded above. The top one is a scan of the back and front of a recycled card; the one below shows the inside. Immediately apparent is the absence of any commercial greeting or any manufacturer's name, because the cards were created by cutting the front from a used card and gluing it to a piece of medium-weight construction paper. Blank envelopes were purchased commercially using proceeds from the sale of the recycled cards (IIRC, about 10-25c per card).
I always viewed this as a beautiful win-win-win situation. Residents of the facility reluctant to dispose of family cards as waste were not shy about offering them a second life. The residents were generally on fixed incomes (most of which was used to afford living there) so they benefited from having inexpensive cards to purchase, and the blank inside not only avoided the mindless drivel often printed there, but also allowed users more space to write meaningful messages to family and friends. And finally the activity of creating cards and selling them was an inducement for solitary elderly people to get out of their units and interact with other residents.
Very few videos on the web cause me to literally "laugh out loud." This one did. With a hat tip for the via to Miss Cellania at Neatorama.
Addendum: I just reviewed some of TYWKIWDBI's statistics and found that this video I posted back in 2011 has had the most views of all 16,000+ posts on the blog. So I think it's worth a repost...
(2012 post): I'm surprised I haven't blogged this subject before, because it's a truly remarkable series of movies, but today I happened across a comment that 56 Up will soon be released. For those unfamiliar with the movies, here is the Wikipedia entry:
The Up Series is a series of documentary films produced by Granada Television that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. The documentary has had seven episodes spanning 49 years (one episode every seven years) and the documentary has been broadcast on both ITV and BBC... The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child's social class predetermines their future...
The premise of the film was taken from the Jesuit motto "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man", which is based on a quotation by Ignatius Loyola...
The series has received extraordinary praise over the years, the epitome of which may be Roger Ebert's comments that it is "an inspired, even noble, use of the film medium", that the films "penetrate to the central mystery of life", and that the series is among his top ten films of all time. Attempts have been made to repeat the series with subjects in the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and South Africa. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, 28 Up was placed 26th. The series has also been satirised; The Simpsons' 2007 episode "Springfield Up" is narrated by an Apted-like filmmaker who depicts the past and current lives of a group of Springfield residents he has revisited every eight years.
I have found the films individually to be of varying quality; when I first viewed Seven Up, I rated it 2+ (scale 0-4), but by the time I got to 49 Up, I rated it 3.5. One difficulty with viewing the series in a short period of time is that they were designed to be viewed 7 years apart, so each one spends significant time reviewing the past history of each character, which makes viewing a bit tedious if you've just seen the other movies.
56 Up is expected to have its broadcast premier (presumably on BBC or ITV) in mid-May. If you are a newbie and are interested, I would suggest getting Seven Up and perhaps one of the others (maybe 49 Up) from the library to view as background material.
If you've watched the series, feel free to offer your own thoughts in the Comments.
Update: Reposted from last month to add a link to a Telegraph photo gallery showing the participants in the movie series, as for example shown here:
1. Neil Hughes
District councillor
In 1964 he was an enchanting Liverpool boy who wanted to be an astronaut.
Tragically, in 28 Up Neil was found homeless and in a bad mental state. Yet
he surprised viewers when he reappeared as a Liberal Democrat councillor in
Hackney in 42 Up. In a heart-rending twist, Bruce Balden, another Up
participant, had helped Neil on his road to recovery.
