And that was even before we found out it only cost $200 to make.
Joshua Svoboda and Nick Dimondi, both in their 20’s, made the ad, called “Underdog,” with an untrained dog. They didn’t know it would even air Sunday night on CBS, according to the Associated Press.
It was one of four ads aired by Doritos maker Frito-Lay, all of which were created by fans, who were competing for $5 million in prize money if the ads ranked highly in commercial roundups.
The ad featured an untrained dog came in second in USA Today’s annual Super Bowl Ad Meter, which ranks ads based on a viewer panel’s response, winning the two ad-makers $600,000. The two, from Cary, N.C., said they planned to use the money to pursue film careers.
They said they wanted to make an ad with a dog because they felt those ads are more popular with consumers.
There are more cats and dogs in the UK than anyone thought.
According to figures in a new study, there are around 10.3 million cats and 10.5 million dogs in the UK, a total of 4 million more than pet food manufacturers had estimated, according to The Guardian.
The report, based on polling, also concludes that cat owners are better educated.
The study is the first published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in 20 years — when there were 6.2 million cats and 6.4 million dogs.
Cats, according to the study, are more likely to live in households with someone with a college degree. A poll of 2,524 households found that 47.2% of those with a cat had at least one person educated to degree level, compared with 38.4% of homes with dogs. We will presume that cat owners did the math.
Last year, the Pet Food Manufacturers Association estimated — not too precisely, as it turns out — the size of the UK domestic cat and dog population at about 8 million each.
The new study, published in the Veterinary Record by Jane Murray, a cats protection lecturer in feline epidemiology at Bristol University, does not take into account strays or those animals in shelters.
A former animal control officer in Hoosick, N.Y., admitted in court last week that he shot and killed stray or loose dogs and buried them in a manure pile on his farm.
Matthew Beck, 46, pleaded guilty to official misconduct, larceny, cruelty to animals and violating environmental regulations.
According to the Albany Times Union, he will spend 10 days confined to home with a monitoring device, two weekends in jail and be placed on three years’ probation.
The case began last spring when a local resident, April Stevens, learned that Beck had picked up her two missing dogs. The dogs never showed up in the local animal shelter, though.
Investigators went to Beck’s farm, dug through his manure pile and discovered several dog carcasses, including two skulls with bullet holes which were determined to have been owned by another resident. Stevens’ dogs were never found but Beck pleaded guilty to the larceny charge in connection to their disappearance, as well as other misdemeanors.
“This is not what we really wanted. We wanted to see him do some real jail time,” said Stevens, who was wearing pictures of her dogs pinned to her shirt. “At least there is some jail time to give him an opportunity to think about what he did.”
Dogs, among all the other things they teach us, show us how to live in the moment — to see the snow as something to be played in as opposed to something to be whined about.
Then again, they don’t have to shovel it.
Part of me, upon confronting two feet of snow, wants to go to sleep in that moment and wake up in a future moment when it has all melted, and then proceed to live in that moment.
Which brings us to this weekend’s momentous snow.
Like most dogs, Ace loves the snow. A good covering of it seems to take years off his age. Snow, for dogs, is a fountain of youth. It brings out their inner child, which, with them, is already pretty close to the surface anyway.
That said, even Ace was briefly flummoxed by 25 inches of it — the most he’s ever seen. When I opened the front door, there was a two-foot wall of snow. He stared at it for a few seconds, then busted through and down the steps.
Even for a big dog like him, the only way to move forward was with a series of bunny-style hops — and, unlike with me, each hop served to invigorate him more. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” his entire body said. With me trudging and him hopping, we worked our way to a plowed road and to the park, where other snow-invigorated canines frolicked with abandon.
Even among more elderly dogs at the park, the snow seemed to have made them young again, bringing more spring to their steps, more sparkle to their eyes. It made me reflect back to my New Year’s resolutions – to look at things, including burdensome ones like two feet of snow, and see the joyous opportunities they present.
Those guitar-playing birds we showed you yesterday were pretty cool, but they were just the opening act for Nora, the Piano Cat, shown here in a performance last year with the Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra in Lithuania.
The “CATcerto” was the project of Lithuanian conductor, composer and artist Mindaugas Piecaitis.
Nora, a rescued cat whose piano skills have been widely featured on the Internet, appeared live, via a video hookup.
For more information on the performance, visit catcerto.com.
If you would like to adopt a rescued cat and teach her to play piano, might I suggest Miley, whose musical talents are as yet untapped. (Piano not included.)
French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways.
For his installation in The Curve in London, Boursier-Mougenot created a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.
To understand this video clip you need the following background: New Orleans Saints fans are known to chant “Who Dat” in support of their football team.
Otherwise, the humans would just appear to be a bunch of fools, which of course they still kinda do even with that background knowledge.
Be that as it may, these particular fans have chosen to let a beagle lead them in the cheer — the ownership of which has become a matter of dispute.
The full chant is “Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints? Who Dat? Who Dat?”
The NFL is claiming it owns the phrase “Who Dat,” and has issued cease-and-desist orders against New Orleans vendors who sell Saints memorabilia with the wording.
New Orleans fans, the Wall Street Journal has reported, are outraged by the claim, contending the NFL never cared about the chant when the football team was losing, or after it was ousted from its home stadium in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, finishing the season 3-13.
“The Saints actually win something and go to the Super Bowl, and the NFL sees a way they can make a penny,” complained Dan Frazier, general manager of local sports-talk radio station 690 WIST.
“Who dat,” locals say, was part of the local lingo well before it became the rallying cry at Saints games.
The Journal article says St. Augustine High School, an all-boys Catholic school in the city, started the chant in 1972 at its own football games. “Who dat talking about beating them Knights? Nobody! Nobody!”
The saying went on to become the rallying cry for the Saints, and, in the 1980s, New Orleans singer Aaron Neville made a video, singing “who dat” alongside team members.
But now, according to the NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, “If ‘who dat’ is used in a manner to refer to Saints football, then the Saints own the rights.”
Under that reasoning, I guess the Philadelphia Eagles, and therefore the NFL, own the rights to, and any profits from, dogfighting, as well.
OK, so maybe it was slightly more dramatic than my rescue of Miley, the cat living under a nail-filled stairway next to a south Baltimore bar, who — unlike the dog who floated at least 75 miles on an ice floe out to sea — is, by the way, still looking for a good home.
Baltic, the dog who floated down Poland’s Vistula River and into the Baltic Sea, has a new owner — the seaman who rescued him.
Wojciech Pelczarski of the Sea Fisheries Institute in Gdynia said the decision was made after the dog rejected six people who had claimed to be his original owner, NPR reported.
He suspected the would-be owners were merely trying to be part of the media attention surrounding the dog’s rescue.
Pelczarski, whose institute co-owns the research ship “Baltica” that rescued the dog, says Baltic — as he has been nicknamed — is sociable, affectionate and was getting his first bath since his icy ordeal because his fur was still salty.
The dog’s new master is Adam Buczynski, who pulled him to safety from an ice sheet in the Baltic Sea last week.
Buczynski and other crew members spotted the dog Jan. 25 floating at least 15 miles from land, shivering and precariously perched on an ice floe. The crew lowered a pontoon to the water and Buczynski, the ship mechanic, managed to grab the dog and pull him to safety.
“He was very lucky,” Pelczarski said. “If the vessel had passed him at night, no one would have spotted him.”
Baltic was first seen two days earlier on the Vistula River, 60 miles inland, drifting on ice past the city of Grudziadz, where local firefighters tried but failed to save him.
(Photos: Top, Baltic on ice, by Ryszard Moroz/Associated Press /IMGW; bottom, Baltic with Buczynski, by Krzysztof Mystkowski /Associated Press
What do some Westminster show dogs have in common with some drug dealers’ attack dogs?
They’ve been debarked.
The surgical procedure, which critics label outdated and inhumane, has been around for decades, but continues to fall out of favor, especially among younger veterinarians and animal-rights advocates, the New York Times reported this week.
There are no reliable figures on how many dogs have had their vocal cords cut, but veterinarians and other animal experts say that dogs with no bark can be found in private homes, on the show-dog circuit, and even on the turf of drug dealers, who are said to prefer their attack dogs silent.
David Frei, the longtime co-host of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, acknowledged that some show dogs have the operation. “There is no question we have some debarked dogs among our entries,” he said.
Many veterinarians refuse to do the surgery on ethical grounds, and some states have banned it, except for therapeutic reasons, including New Jersey. Similar legislation is pending in Massachusetts.
In the surgery, vets anesthetize the dog before cutting its vocal cords, either through the mouth or through an incision in the larynx. Dogs generally recover quickly, veterinarians say, and while they usually can still make sounds, their barks become muffled and raspy.
But Dr. Gary W. Ellison, of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida, said the procedure can lead to complications, such as excess scar tissue building up in the throat of dogs, making it difficult to breathe.
Ellison said the procedure is no longer taught at the University of Florida’s veterinary school.
Banfield, the Pet Hospital, with more than 750 veterinary practices across the country, formally banned the surgery last summer.
“Debarking is not a medically necessary procedure,” said Jeffrey S. Klausner, the hospital’s senior vice president and chief medical officer. “We think it’s not humane to the dogs to put them through the surgery and the pain. We just do not think that it should be performed.”
The American Veterinary Medical Association recommends that the surgery only be done “after behavioral modification efforts to correct excessive vocalization have failed.”
Darned if it isn’t February already — time for procrastinators like myself to get a 2010 calendar.
Allow me to suggest one that doesn’t feature my work — Pinups for Pitbulls.
When Pinups for Pitbulls issued a call for submissions for its annual calendar last year, I answered — vaguely entertaining the notion that I, too, could have a career in photographing beautiful women, or at least have my photo make the calendar.
First, I recruited friend Carey Hughes and her pit bull Bimini to serve as my models. The challenge: to loosely recreate, with a pit bull, the vintage pin-up poster to the left, called “Up to Par.”
Carey enlisted her sister Kelly to serve as fashion advisor and hair and make-up person. Kelly was also to be the skirt-blower-upper, using a battery operated leaf blower I bought from Home Depot for the occassion to poof up her sister’s skirt and ensure our photos showed the requisite amount of leg.
On the day of the shoot, Kelly had another commitment, and Carey’s mom, Jeanne, ended up replacing her as the skirt-blower-upper — and doing a fine job, I might add.
We all met at Carroll Park Golf Course in Baltimore, where officials let us take over an unused hole. Not surprisingly, we drew a few a gawkers.
Both Carey and Bimini proved remarkably patient — though he wasn’t too thrilled with the golf cap he was initially sporting.
I sent the best of my shots into Pinups for Pitbulls, where we’d end up in the pile of those that didn’t make the cut. You can look at some of the other contenders not chosen here.
The calendar, in its fourth year, highlights stories and images of 12 pit bull-owning women and their dogs. Sales from the 2009 calendar raised almost $20,000 for pit bull rescues across the nation, double the amount raised in 2008.
Pinups for Pitbulls, a non-profit organization, works to educate the public about pit bulls, remove the stigma associated with the breed and save the lives of abused and abandoned pit bulls throughout the United States.
The video below highlights the organization in more detail.
Meanwhile, if you need a slightly used battery-powered leaf blower, contact me.
The dog’s new master is Adam Buczynski, who pulled him to safety from an ice sheet in the Baltic Sea last week.
Both Carey and Bimini proved remarkably patient — though he wasn’t too thrilled with the golf cap he was initially sporting.