Cold War dog.

During the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F Kennedy wrote to each other regularly. Despite the hostility between their countries, the two men also exchanged presents. One was a dog called Pushinka, whose mother was one of the first dogs to fly into space and return alive.

 

Such courtesy!

Baby and dog

I could not resist putting this picture on my blog.  I was listening to the Today program on BBC Radio4 this morning and so much rubbish was talked about these newly released pictures of the royal baby, I turned the radio off.  They were critising "the amateurish quality of the pictures.  Mr Middleton should not harbour ambitions of becoming a photographer.   Why is the dog in the picture?  Too much sunlight in the background."
Ozzy is in all our family phtographs.  He is very much part of the family. 
Is it not nice to have a natural, non photoshopped snap?
A normal family with a baby and the family dog.
I think they are great and we should have more.

    

Zelda Fitzgerald's dog.

This is Zelda Fitzgerald posing with her dog Fritz in 1922.  He looks like a Malinois, a Belgian Shepherd. 
The Malinois was probably introduced to the US after WWI. During the war in Europe they were brought into military service to act as messengers, scouts, border patrol and Red Cross dogs. 

Royal adoption

Living rough just a few weeks ago, from now on a Jack Russell Terrier named Bluebell will be treated like royalty thanks to her new devoted pet parent, Camilla, The Duchess of Cornwall.

Just four weeks old when she was rescued from a park, Bluebell was partially bald due to a severe skin problem when she arrived at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. The rescue’s clinic cleared the condition, while her emotional wounds healed thanks to the loving attention she received at the renowned rescue organization, which has provided comfort and care to more than 3.1 million canines and cats since its founding in 1860.

Little Bluebell is currently enjoying her first days with her famous family and playing with her new sister Beth, a one-year-old Jack Russell Terrier who was also adopted by the Duchess from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in August 2011.

Beth

Bluebell

Aung San Suu Kyi's dog.

Aung San Suu Kyi with her dog Tai Chi Toe, at her home in Rangoon. Burma's democracy icon and leader of the opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), spent more than 15 years under house arrest in her lakeside home and Insein prison. She was released from her latest sentence in November 2010.

The dog was purchased by her son Kim Aris, who was able to visit his mother for the first time in a decade after her release.
Don't you think it looks a bit like Ozzy?  

All in the mind

Dogs do many things to help people. Physiological measures show that petting a calm and friendly dog actually reduces stress ( reduced muscle tension, more regular breathing and a slower heart rate).  It has been said that people who own dogs are likely to live longer and require less medical attention.  
Dogs can also assist in psychotherapy.  Sigmund Freud felt that dogs had a special sense that allows them to judge a person's character accurately. For this reason his favourite chow-chow, Jo-Fi, attended all of his therapy sessions.  Freud admitted that he often depended upon Jo-Fi for an assessment of the patient's mental state. He also felt that the presence of the dog seemed to have a calming influence on all patients, particularly children.

Cool new editor

Jill Abramson is the newly appointed executive editor of the New York Times, a powerful journalist and investigative reporter both revered and feared by her colleagues and her peers.  She is the first woman ever to run the Times.

She has received a publicity blitz in the last few weeks with a profile in the latest issue of The New Yorker, an interview on CBS News and the release of “Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout”, her new book based on a popular online column which she wrote for The Times from July 2009 to May 2010.  It is her account of the first year with a beautiful but demanding golden retriever, called Scout.  Abramson wrote the book after two major events in her life, the death of her dog Buddy, a West Highland Terrier and a near-fatal accident when she was run over by a lorry near Times Square.  The latter incident required months of rehabilitation.  Also, although she has a high-powered career, she confesses the emptiness after the leaving home of her grown children.  All goods reason to acquire a puppy.

I like what I have read about her especially since she is the person who has the last say as to what is printed on the front page of The New York Times and for being such a pushover where dogs are concerned.

Let's not forget

Edith Cavell was an English nurse, born in Norfolkshire in 1866 and the daughter of a clergyman. In 1907 she established a training school for nurses in Brussels in which hundreds of Belgian and German nurses were trained. In August 1915, during the German occupation of the city under the civil governorship of Baron von der Lancken, Cavell was suddenly arrested and imprisoned. She was charged with having aided English and Belgian young men who had come under her care as a nurse to escape to Holland and to England. Following trial in a military court on October 7th and 8th , she was condemned to be executed. In view of the fact that Cavell had devoted her life to humane service, and that the death penalty had not previously been inflicted for the offense with which she was charged, the American minister to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, endeavoured by all means in his power to prevent her execution. When Whitlock's secretary, Hugh Gibson, on the evening of her execution, sought the offices of the civil governor, Baron von der Lancken and his staff were found attending a disreputable theatre. After first denying, though later admitting, both the sentence and the order of execution, Von der Lancken refused to delay her execution or even to grant permission to telephone the Kaiser on her behalf. When reminded that her murder would rank with the burning of Louvain and the sinking of the Lusitania in stirring the civilized world with horror, Count Harrach, the civil governor's aide, remarked that his only regret was that they did not have "three or four more old English women to shoot." Despite all efforts of the American minister, Cavell was executed at 2 am on October 13th 1915.

After the war in May 1919, Cavell's body was exhumed and returned to England. With great ceremony, she was taken to Westminster Abbey for a memorial service attended by King George V and then was reburied in Norwich. Today a statue stands in her honour at St. Martin's Place near Trafalgar Square. The statue is engraved with a statement made by Cavell to her last English visitor before her execution. It reads: "Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone." A special service is held there every year at the anniversary of her death.

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

Avant-garde writer and culture impresario Gertrude Stein was a solid, heavy presence, monolithic, unladylike. She liked to gossip and a good laugh. She boxed with welterweights for exercise. Alice B. Toklas was a chain smoker with a slight moustache, given to exotic dress, gypsy earrings and manicured nails. They became inseparable after they met in Paris in 1907. Alice cooked, typed manuscripts, fended off the unwanted, did promotions and chatted up the wives and significant others of famous men, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway who found her "frightening". On a lecture tour of American universities in the 1930s, Stein would begin her obscure lectures with the following words: “I am I because my little dog knows me but perhaps he does not and if he did I would not be. ” She insisted, there are two selves: an external "I," whom a pet may recognize as its master and an interior "I" that exists independent of observation. She would conclude that "I am I because my little dog knows me but that does not prove anything about you it only proves something about the dog". Say what?