ohmidog!

A Tennessee family returned home to find their 10-month-old Siberian husy hanging from a tree last week.

The dog, named Allison, who they left on a 50-foot chain, was found by Juanita Phariss’s 18-year-old daughter, Emily, at their home in Smyrna.

The dog’s chain was wrapped around a tree five times, and she’d apparently been hoisted up, with the chain being attached to the fence, the Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro reported.

 ”I untied her collar to get her down before my younger kids could see her,” said Phariss, wo’s 14-year-old daughter, Amanda, has cystic fibrosis.

“It’s been really hard on her, especially,” Phariss said. “She doesn’t even want anybody mentioning Allison’s name. She made a cross for her grave out back.”

Phariss said the chain disappeared from her yard between the time she called the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office and deputies arrived.

Anyone with information in the case are urged to call the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office at 615-898-7770.

Harbor, an 8-year-old black and tan coonhound who lives in Boulder, Colorado, has been proclaimed by Guinness World Records to have the longest ears of any living dog.

He’s owned by Jennifer Wert, who says as a youngster Harbor had a little trouble walking, often tripping over his ears and falling over himself.

“I’ve had garbage trucks pull over, and the garbage man will get out of the driver’s seat to jump down and pet him,” Wert said. “I don’t even see his ears anymore; most days I forget how oddly long they are. But he’s a phenomenon in the world, and he creates smiles no matter where we are.”

Harbor’s left ear measures 12.25 inches long and his right ear a whopping 13.75, Guinness confirms.

The longest ears ever honor, however, is still held by Tigger, a bloodhound from Illinois who died in 2009.

Harbor will be included in Guinness World Records 2012, a book that will become available in the U.S. on Sept. 15th.

Everyone knows about the six degrees of separation, or at least knows somebody who knows somebody who does.

To put it in its simplest terms — as opposed to the manner of the bubbly graphic above — it’s the theory that you know somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody who is lucky enough to know me.

In this small and growing smaller world, only five people stand between us — usually tall ones who block the view.

While the six degrees of separation may be an accepted algorithm, I have found it holds truer in your big cities — your Tinsel Towns, your Windy Cities, your Big Apples — moreso than in places like the one I’m living now, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

In Winston-Salem, there is only one degree of separation, if even that. More often it seems, there is no degree of separation.

Then again, as you’ll recall, I recently moved into the house where my parents lived when I was born. In doing so — returning to my birthplace after 40-some moves and 57 years of separation — quite possibly I altered the algorithms of my six degrees of separation beyond repair.

In any case, in Winston-Salem, everytime I go out I run into either somebody who knows me (and I only know about three people here, having moved away at age 1), or someone who knows my mother.

That translates into a degree of separation of zero, or one, at the very most two. Take my recently moved-in neighbor here in College Village. Her grandfather lives in the same retirement community as my mother. That same neighbor and the neighbor on my other side went to high school together, then ended up, after attending different colleges, two doors away from each other. The neighbor on my other side has a brother who used to date my neighbor four doors down.

This isn’t a real small town, with a population of about 230,000, but it sure seems that way.

A lot of great brains have wrapped themselves around the six degrees of separation, including actor Kevin Bacon, who some people think invented it. All he did though was come up with a game version, which he has since refocused on philanthropic purposes.

In actuality, the six degrees concept is even older than him.

Mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists alike have long been captivated with the field of “network theory,” which, contrary to what you might think, existed even before Facebook. In 1929, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy published a volume of short stories titled Everything is Different, which included a story called “Chain-Links.” The story investigated and elaborated on his belief that the modern world was shrinking due to the increasing connectedness of human beings.

Since his time that connectivity has increased exponentially. With the advent of telephones, and advances in transportation, the world got smaller yet. And when the Internet came along, the world shrank, shrunk, shrinked a little more, as did correct use of grammar.

Indeed, thanks to the Internet, Facebook and the like, the world has become so small that I sometimes get claustrophobic. There’s a study that shows the degree of separation between two users of social networks such as Twitter averages 3.43, under an optimal algorithm.

Of course, that is why we are signing on to Facebook, and Twitter, and Linked In, and Genealogy.com and Match.com — to connect.

We humans — like dogs, who do it mostly by peeing — have an insatiable urge to connect. Whether it’s with old friends, dead relatives, new friends, potential business associates or hotties of the opposite sex, we want, and maybe we need, the linkage.

My personal belief is that — with all those websites that link us, at least superficially — we will all become so connected that something is going to short out. Either that, or we will all bore each other to death with details of last night’s dinner and how it was prepared.

What we often fail to realize, amid our quest for connections is that, when it comes to degrees of separation, sometimes more of them is better. Sometimes, having a hermit side to me, I get in a mood where six is not enough, where I would like twelve or fourteen of them instead.

If you’ve been following Travels With Ace, and our dispatches on resettling in North Carolina, you know that, while I’ve somewhat sequestered myself, I’ve also grown interested in reconnecting with my past, and exploring my family tree — both my father’s side and my mother’s.

It was in doing so that I came across the distant (I’m guessing) relative to the left — Zonja Woestendiek.

Zonja Woestendiek is, or was, a German model who was also featured in a series of commercials for Volkswagen called, “Unpimp My Ride.”

Believe it or not, I once owned a Volkswagen — not a beetle, which makes the world seem even smaller, but a van with a pop-up roof, which makes the world seem larger, unless you are driving behind one.

Between exploring family trees and researching degrees of separation, I’ve been marveling at all the small world coincidences I’ve come across, especially in the past week since getting two teeth pulled.

They lived next door to each other, separated only by plaque in what, according to my dentist, was a deteriorating neighborhood.

The pain pills prescribed by the dentist, while blurring some things, have allowed me to focus clearly on others, like the six degrees of separation, and Zonja.

In researching the six degrees of separation, I came across something interesting — something I’m sure I have some connection with as well, given the similarity in names and other eery coincidences.

There is a Flemish television production company named Woestijnvis, that produces a show called “Man Bijt Hon,” or, in English, “Man Bites Dog.”

(My last name is Woestendiek, and, though I’m not biting much of anything these days, I do a dog website.)

The production company gots its name from a wrong answer provided by a contestant on the Flemish version of Wheel of Fortune, called Rad van Fortuin.

(I used to watch Wheel of Fortune all the time, and was very good at it.)

In the game, the following letters were showing: W _ _ S T _ _ N V _ S.

The correct answer would have been “WOESTIJNVOS,” or desert fox. But the contestant answered “WOESTIJNVIS,” or desert fish — humorous, to the Flemish at least, insofar as one rarely finds fish in the desert, or for that matter in dessert.

Anyway — stay with me now — on the show “Man Bijt Hond” there’s a weekly feature called Dossier Costers, in which a recent event of worldwide significance is linked to Gustaaf Costers, an ordinary Flemish citizen, in 6 steps.

I was able to find this episode on YouTube. It’s in a different language but — either because of my European roots or my Vicodin — it made perfect zippety-do-dah sense to me.

Let’s see if it does to you.

Until the last couple of weeks, Dan Rubin was among that minority of Americans who don’t let their pets into bed with them.

That’s right, I said minority, at least according to the American Pet Products Association (APPA), which earlier this year released the results of a survey showing nearly half of dog owners and 62 percent of cat owners share their beds with their pets.

That’s a pretty stunning figure — one that shows not just our increasing  closeness to our pets, but our willingness to proudly admit it, even to  survey-taking strangers inquiring about our bedroom habits.

But back to Dan (which is how his dog Harley is sometimes sleeping nowadays).

Dan is a friend of mine, a former colleague and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who never got into the practice of laying down with dogs, at least not in bed. He’s a dog lover, but he’s also a sleep lover, and the latter is more easily accomplished without a 113-pound dog squirming about, he notes.

A couple of weeks ago, Harley, his  five-year-old bouvier des Flandres, had leg surgery, Dan explained in his Monday column. And his vet declared stairs off limits for eight weeks.

That meant lonely nights for Harley, who — though not allowed in bed — was accustomed to at least sleeping on the same floor as his family.

Dan’s wife, Mimi, wasn’t about to let that happen. She announced she would sleep downstairs with Harley. Dan, like a dog, followed.

They moved all the furniture out of the TV room and replaced it with a futon mattress, then made a sleeping area for Harley, adjacent to it, topped with his favorite blanket.

But the first night, Dan found Harley on his pillow. A few nights later, Harley settled down on Mimi’s pillow, and they decided there was room for all three, kind of, even with the huge plastic cone Harley has to wear around his neck:

” … He has to wear one of those plastic lamp shades – at the vet’s they called it an Elizabethan collar. It’s about the size of a satellite dish, and he knocks about in the dark with the grace of a rutting Triceratops.”

Harley had surgery for a ruptured cranial cruciate ligament. It involved  planing the tibia and making a mechanical adjustment so his bones hinge without requiring the support of the damaged ligament, Dan explained.

With Dan’s man cave temporarily converted into a man/wife/dog cave, Dan says he has had to make sacrifices:

“…We can’t watch baseball in bed because Harley likes to rush the screen every time he sees a pitcher go into his windup. Best I can tell, he thinks they’ve got his ball.”

We wish Harley a full and speedy recovery. And we sincerely hope Dan doesn’t give him fleas.

Photo: Courtesy of Dan Rubin

Blue

A Washington D.C. resident says one of several police officers chasing a man on a bicycle shot her dog twice without provocation.

Blue, a three-year-old male pit bull, was shot  in the shoulder and hip.

“This is wrong. This is animal cruelty, this is excessive”, his owner, Tiffany Reynolds, told ABC7.

Last week’s shooting comes nearly a year after a pit bull mix was pushed or thrown into a stairwell by a D.C. police officer trying to break up an altercation between dogs during a street festival. The officer said the dog was charging toward him when he fatally shot him.

Parrot

That dog, named Parrot, was being fostered while awaiting adoption through Lucky Dog Animal Rescue.

In last week’s incident, Reynolds said an officer came up an alley, near the 900 Block of Crittenden Street, NW. His gun was drawn, and he told her to grab her dog, who wasn’t on a leash.

She said she was reaching for her dog when the officer fired what neighbors say was five shots: “As I’m grabbing him,” she said. “The officer could’ve shot me. I’m grabbing toward toward the dog and he’s shooting my dog.”

Thursday night, an police spokesman confirmed that an officer did fire his weapon, that a dog was shot, and that an internal investigation is underway.

Blue ran off, and was discovered by a neighbor several blocks away. He was treated at an animal clinic and is expected to survive.

Reynolds was issued a citation and faces a $100 fine for not having her dog on a leash.

Investigators say someone tried to burn 14 pit bulls to death in Alabama.

The dogs were found chained in Jefferson County, with a series of fires burning around them. Sheriff’s officials suspect they were part of a dogfighting operation.

Eight individual fires surrounded the dogs when firefighters arrived, according to Alabama’s 13 News.

Investigators found a treadmill of the type used by dogfighters to force dogs to train.

The dogs were all saved and taken to the Birmingham-Jefferson County shelter.

Glendale, California, has joined the list of cities voting to ban the retail sale of commercially bred dogs and cats in pet stores.

The Glendale City Council unanimously approved the ordinance in August. It goes into effect later this month, but store owners have a year to come into compliance.

According to Examiner.com in Los Angeles, those pushing for the ordinance included Christy Schilling, a Glendale resident instrumental in helping to convert Glendale’s Pet Rush from selling puppy mill dogs to only offering rescued dogs for adoption, and Lindsay Reeves, a member of the local group Citizens Against Puppy Mills, which conducts pet store demonstrations and public outreach.

Reeves attended a council meeting with her dog Eliza, a Yorkshire terrier that spent 8 years as a breeding dog in a Missouri puppy mill before being rescued two years ago.

A pleasant outing with her dogs turned into a nightmare for a Washington woman when both of her dogs jumped into a concrete-sided canal and were swept up in its current.

Noya Deats regularly walked her dogs, Fawn and Nia,  along the Roza Canal, which is marked with signs warning people not to enter it, due to its sometimes swift current and steep and slippery sides.

Last Wednesday, the dogs decided to jump in, according to the Yakima Herald-Republic – only to find they couldn’t get out.

As the dogs were being swept downstream, Deats ran alongside, trying to keep up with them while calling her husband, Matt.

Matt arrived after she had run — and the dogs had drifted — about two miles. He found a ladder leading into the canal, climbed down it and attempted to grab one of the dogs, but missed her as she floated by.

A Yakima County Sheriff’s deputy arrived and attempted to lasso the dogs with a rope, but without success. As the dogs were swept along the canal, Fawn, a Labrador mix, seemed able to keep her head above water, but Nia, an Australian shepherd mix, was struggling, Matt said.

Things were looking hopeless when, about three miles from where the dog entered the canal, a 54-year-old farmworker, hearing the commotion, approached, watched the deputy struggle to rope the dogs, then asked for the lasso.

Jesus Villanueva, who speaks only Spanish, roped one dog on his first try and pulled it to safety; on the second try, he snagged the other.

“I was amazed,” Noya Deats said. “He just kind of came out of nowhere. It was amazing how fast he lassoed them.”

Villanueva said he learned to lasso at a cattle ranch in Jalisco, Mexico, but it had been 30 years since he had roped anything.

Photo: Noya and Matt Deats hold onto their dogs, Fawn, right, and Nia as Jesus Villanueva, right, looks on. By Andy Sawyer / Associated Press

One of Ace’s biggest fans — though she has never met him — sent us a gift this week, and it arrived just in time for my birthday.

It came in a huge box that, when we found it on our doorstep, got us both curious. I lugged it into the house, assuming it was for me, and Ace sniffed while I searched for scissors. I opened it up and pulled out what was inside, causing foam peanuts to spill everywhere.

Ace, determining the foam peanuts weren’t edible and finding them a little intimidating went into the next room — until I was done removing the contents and cleaning up the peanuts.

“Hey,” I hollered. “It’s for you.”

He came back in, sniffed some more, and took a look at the pictures on the sides. They were of him. It was a custom made feeding station, decorated with photos of some of our favorite moments on the road.

It was from Sue Kottwitz in Missouri, a loyal reader of Travels with Ace, who advertises her company, For Love of a Dog, on ohmidog! She and her husband, Gary, had built and decorated it — not just an incredibly thoughtful gift, but a much-needed one.

I’d bought Ace, after he started experiencing back problems, a plastic feeding station — but even though it was for big dogs, it wasn’t really elevated enough for a dog of his stature. And of course I wrote about it.

Sue took note, ordered me by email to take his measurements, and asked me for a list of my favorite moments during the 25,000 miles of traveling across America Ace and I recently completed. Then she notified me something was coming my way.

The feeder has huge photos of Ace on both sides, and the front is decorated with photos of some of those favorite moments — meeting Mel, a former Michael Vick dog, in Dallas; watching the sun rise on Cadillac Mountain in Maine; visiting Rolling Dog Ranch in New Hampshire and Dog Mountain in Vermont; volunteering at Best Friends in Utah; paying our respects at John Steinbeck’s grave. And of course, kudzu dogs.

Now, everytime Ace is fed, which is twice a day, I, who still sometimes hunger to be back on the road, get to relive the trip. Ace — more interested of course in what’s in the feeder than on it — gets to eat comfortably.

Thanks, Sue and Gary, for a gift that feeds us both.

Why dogs dancing the conga?

Because it’s my birthday.

I got an e-card that featured this video.

It made me smile. Hope it does you, too.