Shelter Dogs

A perfect holiday gift for your fellow canine (or canine-lover): Shelter Dogs....portraits of dogs living in American shelters, by photographer Traer Scott.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll bay...you may even bark. A truly moving experience.

Click here for link to Amazon.

Happy Mother's Day

Ahh, I was but a young pup then. I only knew my mother for a short while before I was weaned and went off with my human family.
But I still have fond memories of her feeding me and my brothers and sisters.
As mom always said, "If you drink your milk, you'll grown up to be big and strong
(which wasn't quite true. I drank the most milk and still turned out to be the runt of the litter...Oh well, mothers aren't always right).


And here I am with one of the humans from my new family...the little girl who became my surrogate mother. I love her and wish her a Happy Mother's Day, too.

Monkey Love: a Valentine's Day love story

I now have to take back all those bad things I said about monkeys in one of my previous posts.

Cupid's arrow has struck; and one of my canine brethren has fallen madly, publicly in love with...an orangutan (one of those [cough] 'higher' primates).

So forget for a moment the stories of Romeo & Juliet, Lancelot & Guinevere, Troilus & Cressida and revel instead in this modern-day tale of star-crossed, fur-entangled lovers.

Meet Surya and Roscoe: the monkey and the hound dog [click here.]

(and thanks to Uncle Eli for sending the story)

'Tis the season

I love Christmas. It's always warm and cozy sleeping under our Christmas tree and sometimes, if I'm lucky, I get to eat the crumbs that fall from the countertop while my humans make their annual Christmas cookies.
Come early January, though, I have to say 'goodbye' to my fir-ry friend and wait a whole year before I get to see him again.

Joyeux Noël, everyone!

And Happy New Year!

Snow day

Thanks to Mother Nature, I'm celebrating a wonderful white Christmas this year!

See pictures below of me romping through the snow last Sunday in Central Park.

And after hour or so of invigorating squirrel chasing, I stopped to enjoy some Christmas carolers strolling nearby:

The early winter sunset falling over Bethesda Fountain told me that it was time for me (reluctantly) to head home for the day.

Happy holidays from Skippy and from snowy New York!

Paw-lickin' good

Thanksgiving was a big success at my household, thanks to the scraps I found waiting for me on the table while nobody was looking.
(well...almost nobody)




I also found that, standing in my high-heels (miracle of miracles!!) I can reach the kitchen counter.
Oh bounteous glory! We give thanks for these, thy gifts.



And, of course, all this non-stop, gluttonous activity has to end with a nice long winter nap; lulled to sleep in the company of a good book (or three).

Yankee Doodle Dandy

Yahoo!

The Yankees have won a World Series. The first in my lifetime.

I stayed up late on Wednesday to see my old pal, Mariano Rivera, pitch the final out. After jumping up and down celebrating with everyone else, I was rather tired and ready for a nap. But not before donning my trusty Yankees cap and celebrating with the rest of my New York family and the entire city.

Congratulations to Joe Girardi and the Bronx Bombers who did it....'big city' style.

On to 2010!

Cats...the non-musical

Halloween has come and gone and I still haven’t eaten all my treats.

But... I did have a nice costume. My specially-sized New York Yankees hat; which, came in handy for game 3 of the World Series last Saturday night (go Yankees!). I also got to greet lots of little trick-or-treaters who came to my door (and who—lucky for me—carelessly dropped some of their candy right at my feet. Heh, heh...)

You can see me here, posing with our family pumpkin; completely ruined by the fact that someone carved it in the shape of a cat: man’s worst(!) friend.

An essay: in which shotguns, squirrels and Dr. Joyce Brothers are variously discussed

I am a hunting dog and it's autumn in New York (with a song title in there somewhere).

Hunting dogs are expected to go hunting in the autumn; but this was not to be the case for me, as I recently learned.

A simple matter, really, to hunt in Manhattan: just stroll through Central Park, armed with a trusty Remington 870 Wingmaster, and wait for some ducks or geese to fly overhead. Someone (preferably human, and walking alongside me) shoots said animal and then I catch ‘em; just like my ancestors have done for generations.

“We can’t do that here,” my human tells me, very matter of factly. “I’ll be fined if we shoot ducks in the park.”

I beg him to change his mind, using my best doe-eyed, beseeching, ‘come-hither’ look (q.v.).

The human doesn't budge.

“Besides,” he said, “we could both go to jail.”

WHAT?!!

Me, Skippy...in jail? For shooting ducks??! Hold on a sec.

[fade to courtroom scene... crowds muttering...gavel banging]
I’m innocent, your honor. He’s your trigger man, that human over there.... Never saw him before until just the other day.
He’s the culprit, I tell you. He did it!
I mean, look at him: he’s got DUCK KILLER written all over his face!!
I‘m just an innocent bystander, your honor; and, as you can clearly see (heh, heh), I lack opposable thumbs with which to even hold a gun...your eminence...sir.

Couldnadunnit.

Nope.

Alas, I’m a gun dog left gunless in Manhattan.

The only remaining choice for me now is to hunt the old fashioned way: chasing and catching small ground-dwelling vermin with my bare paws and teeth (God yes, I know....it's disgusting).

With that in mind, I went out to Central Park last weekend and immediately found a whole woodland clearing full of squirrels just waiting to be caught.

Or so I thought.

As soon as I chased one, he ran up a tree.

The next one stood nice and still as I crept up to him and then—just as I was about to catch him—he, too, scampered up a tree trunk. Drats!

And the worst part? As soon as I walked away, every one of those beasts came waltzing back to the ground just to taunt and ridicule me.

“Keep trying,” I said to myself. “You can do it.”

I know that’s true because Dr. Joyce Brothers—that grande dame of self-help gurus; doyenne of do-it-yourself feel-gooders—told me so in the pages of her book: How to Get Whatever You Want Out of Life.

“Yes, Skippy,” she inscribed to me on the front page of my treasured, dog-eared copy: “you can be a successful squirrel hunter, if you try.”
(...I’m not sure where in the book it says anything about squirrel hunting; but that’s neither here nor there).

But I have to confess, Dr. Joyce, on days like this I feel a little like Sisyphus: pushing those rocky squirrels up the sides of those trees, over and over...into eternity.

Lost in translation, or: "Je sprechen un poquito di tutti, Skippy-san"

People of earth, I come in peace and speak your language.

Now thanks to Google's nifty language-translater doohickey—a true marvel of modern mechanics—I can speak to the subjects of my far-flung realm in 34 different languages. Wow!

Just look for the icon on the right-hand side of this page (the one with all the pretty flags), then position your mouse cursor over the individual flag/language of choice...and click.
Presto! (or, as they say in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese: 'Presto!')

A special thanks to Chuck, at blogging.nitecruzr.net, for providing the technical know-how and expertise.

Try it out...and learn how to say "I bark, therefore I am" in 34 foreign languages.

And speaking of Dog Language, we mustn't forget the brilliant, pioneering work done in this field by Gary Larson (he of The Far Side fame).

Gary's most famous discovery to date, of course, being the one illustrated at left.