A Dog's Life

Who Said That?

In a review in The Weekly Standard of Robin Waterfield's Athens, A History (link requires subscription), A. E. Stallings says,

Waterfield acknowledges that the ancient Greeks would not have recognized many of the modern virtues ascribed to sport--particularly the Victorian schoolboy virtues expressed in Sir Henry Newbolt's oft-quoted lines For when the One Great Scorer comes / to write against your name / He marks not that you won or lost / But how you played the game.

Now I always thought those oft-quoted lines were by sportswriter Henry Grantland Rice (1880-1954). The sentiment, however, is much like Newbolt, he of the Vitai Lampada of 1897 with the famous concluding line to each verse:

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

A search of Google is no help in resolving who said this. Can some poetry expert help? Mr. Haspel?

News From the Show Scene

My lovely bride and Lacey traveled this weekend to the holy city of St. Charles, Illinois for the Elgin KC shows. On Saturday our girl got Best of Breed and a Group 2 under Barbara Dempsey Alderman, a pity in a way because had Lacey won the Hound Group there was an excellent chance for her to go Best in Show. Mustn't complain, though.

On Sunday she did better, again getting Best of Breed and this time a Group 1, both from Susan St. John Brown. Best in Show went to the Dobe. This was Lacey's seventh Group 1 in 2004 and the 25th of her career. She crossed the 3000 point mark in all-breed competition and passed 15,000 for her illustrious career. Some girl!

Just Wondering

Did John Kerry adopt a nuanced view of the world before or after he said that when U.S. soldiers "... personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks..." they were "...not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command..."?

I think the public has a right to know.

Worst of the Worst

The crack young staff at The Hatemongers Quarterly is running a Stupidest Lyrics in Rock Music History Contest.

The contempt the proprietor of this poor little blog has for rock music is, of course, limitless. To him, virtually any lyrics qualify. To pick out the most abysmal of a bad lot, though, he has only one word to say:

Honey.

Hoosier Time

When traveling to shows in Indiana at this time of year, we have to remember that for the most part the Hoosier State is on Eastern Standard Time and not Eastern Daylight Time, which is one hour ahead.

The narrowness of the state and its agricultural base make the conundrum of time in Indiana an interesting one. From the Standard Time Act of 1917 until after World War II, Indiana was on Central time. Some communities used Daylight Savings time, others did not. In 1949 a bill was introduced to forbid any community to use Daylight Savings time. This caused an uproar in the legislature, with cities opposing the bill and rural districts supporting it. The bill passes after a filibuster, but it has no enforcement powers. Some communities use Daylight Savings time during the summer, others use it year-round, others don't use it at all.

The U.S. Congress made Daylight Savings Time universal in the 1960's but allowed states to exempt themselves provided the entire state did so. The Department of Transportation, into whose laps the time problem was placed, put Indiana on Eastern time, except for some counties near Gary and Evansville, which are on Central time. Congress also amended its Universal Time Act to allow deviations in the use of Daylight Savings Time, at least in the case of Indiana. An informative history can be found here.

We now have the following situation. Most of Indiana (77 counties) is on Eastern Standard Time the year round. Five counties - Dearborn and Ohio (but not Switzerland) near Cincinnati and Clark, Floyd and Harrison near Louisville - are on Eastern time and do observe Daylight Savings Time. Five counties near Gary and another five near Evansville are on Central time and do observe Daylight Savings Time. See the map here.

You got all that? Good. You will be tested later. And take that chewing gum out of your mouth, young man...

News From the Show Scene

Yesterday I accompanied my lovely bride, Lacey and Belle to the holy city of Muncie, Indiana for the Muncie KC show at the Academy of Model Aeronautics, a vast blasted plain with neither trees nor utilites. We took our elderly 22-foot class C RV to provide some cover and a private bathroom. No one wants to step into a porta-potty after it's been used for four days.

A couple of weeks ago we went to the trouble and expense of purchasing a 3500 watt generator to run the air conditioner in the RV for summer shows where the site has no plug-ins. Last year's show was miserably hot and we had the devil's own time keeping the girls cool. Naturally all such shows subsequent to laying out $500 for the generator have enjoyed pleasant temperatures in the low 70's.

Lacey took Best of Breed yesterday under Skip Thielen, doing his first Borzoi assignment. There was a Basenji specialty which attracted a big entry, a Whippet was flown in from Florida for the weekend and Doug Holloway was there with his nice 15-inch Beagle.

So it was something of a surprise when Eric Liebes gave Lacey a Group 1. Best in Show went to Ginny (Ch. Kaleef's Genuine Risk), handled by the eminent James Moses. Say what you will about Jimmy being able to go BIS with a goat, Ginny is a nice looking dog who never put a foot wrong.

We were entered today but decided not to go. Lacey didn't seem happy yesterday and my lovely bride came home exhausted and with aching feet and shin splints. There's no compelling reason to return either: an unknown provisional judge for breed and a Group judge that gave Lacey Best of Opposite the last time she saw her in the breed ring.

No Truer Words Ever Spoken

A 20th-century observer cited the five priorities of any British heating appliance, in descending order of importance:

1) Safety
2) Economy
3) Ventilation
4) Looks
5) Heat

When I lived in England in the early 1980's I learned from personal experience that this completely accurate.

Burying The Lede

New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's bathetic resignation yesterday, where he said, "I am a gay American," was headlined thusly in two major papers:

"New Jersey Governor Resigns, Disclosing a Gay Affair," New York Times

"N.J. Governor Resigns Over Gay Affair," Washington Post

The state of New Jersey is not some unsophisticated place like, say, Alabama. Having an affair, even a gay affair, isn't a resigning offense. The administration of the immediate former President of these United States also taught us how to reply to sexual harasssment allegations. Mr. McGreevey is a Democrat. How would the headlines read if he was a member of the other major political party?

"McGreevey resigns amid lover-for-hire scandal"
"McGreevey delays resignation for political reasons"
"N.J. Governor, harassed by ethics allegations, resigns"
... and so on.

Then there's this passage in the Post story:

[T]he governor's pained talk of his lifelong denial of his sexuality was riveting for gays who watched the televised news conference. "If you're a member of New Jersey's lesbian and gay community, you didn't watch the governor's speech today with political or legal eyes -- you watched it with personal eyes. We all know how difficult it is to come out as openly gay, whether to family or other loved ones," said Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, a gay advocacy group.

Jim McGreevey: not a sleazeball who hired some totally unqualified person - possibly with a nice ass - as homeland security advisor and got blackmailed for it; not the hack whose top fund raiser has been accused of using prostitutes to hamper a federal investigation; not the calculating pol who's going to linger in office to avoid a special election that might deliver the governorship to the opposition party.

No, it's Jim McGreevey, gay martyr. If some famous professional gay journalist-blogger wasn't being French and taking August off, I'd even break my vows and see what he had to say on the matter.

The Bed You Made

Dahlia Lithwick is standing in as a guest columnist this summer. Even if you don't agree with her, she's a breath of fresh air after the fug of Maureen Dowd twice a week.

Ms. Lithwick's column today contains a good point buried in some Bush bashing: when can the freedom to assemble and petition be limited by considerations of domestic tranquillity? Chuck Simmins also has a very long post with some different conclusions.

Ms. Lithwick starts by calling the "free-speech zones" at the Democratic convention "largely ignored" and "an affront to the spirit of the Constitution." Yes, and it would have been nice to hear more about this at the time, but the assembled press seems to have been too busy guzzling up free food and falling over themselves to ingratiate themselves with the Democrats to notice.

Then there's that term "free-speech zone." Where have I heard that before?... Hmmm... could it have come from the leafy halls of Academe, where the students, faculty and administrators are so endangered by a dissenting - meaning less than Left - view that speech codes are instituted and isolated spaces established where such heresies can be uttered?

Lithwick bashes Bush as well for using the Secret Service to keep protestors away from the President at rallies. Surely someone as intelligent as Ms. Lithwick knows that this practice antedates the Bush administration.

For all that, there's a kernel of sense here, moreso than most columns in the Times. I'm troubled by these restrictions on protest without evidence of actual peril to people or property. Well, let's see to it that such protest have no more and no less visibility to the target as protest of another contentious issue. Let the demonstrators at the Republican convention have exactly the same access as anti-abortion activists do near an abortion clinic.

Gratuitous Dog Picture

(Photo by Christina Freitag)

A motion shot of Lacey in the Best in Show competition at the Grand River KC show.

Motion shots are not easy to do and rarely come out well, despite being heavily used in advertising. Frequently they show something that ought not to be seen, such as overreaching or lack of balance.

In this picture, I think Lacey is ever so slightly out of phase: her right rear foot and left front foot are not perfectly symmetric and her right rear foot and right front foot cross over a hair too much. On the other hand, the photo does show excellent extension and fluid motion. Everyone we've shown the picture to, including judges, rave over it. I'm not completly satisfied myself. We report, you decide.

Another War Hero

The rumbling controversy over the nature of Senator Kerry's service in Vietnam evoked one comment that caught my eye: that the Senator's service may have had a degree of political calculation.

As to what Senator Kerry has made in this campaign of his service I will have more to say later. But in this post let's look at another decorated war hero, Lieutenant Commander Lyndon B. Johnson USNR.

In 1941, Representative Johnson was running in a tight special election race for the Senate seat open due to the death of Morris Sheppard. His opponent, Governor W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel was an isolationist. Johnson, in tight with FDR, positioned himself as the "preparedness" candidate, pledging "If the day ever comes when my vote must be cast to send your boy to the trenches - that day Lyndon Johnson will leave his Senate seat to go with him."

It was a crowd-pleasing line, but Johnson narrowly lost when he failed to steal as many votes as O'Daniel, a mistake he would not make seven years later. Then on December 7th, Johnson was forced to make a decision about his career.

Now someone like the immediate former President of these United States would have said that his pledge only applied if he was in the Senate. In that unsophisticated day and age, such sophistry would have cut no ice with the voters of Johnson's district and he enlisted.

He was already a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve, so the "trenches" were out. Johnson's fellow member of the Naval Affairs Committee, Warren Magnuson, also a Lieutenant Commander, also enlisted and requested combat duty. He went off to a carrier and got shot at by the Japs for five months.

Meanwhile, Johnson slogged it out on the West Coast, "inspecting" naval facilities and having snappy uniforms made for himself while angling for an appointment in the Department of the Navy. The perils Johnson faced in Los Angeles and Sun Valley, Idaho did not escape the attention of his political enemies, who pointedly suggested that if Johnson wasn't going overseas he might return to Washington and resume his seat.

Advised by his backers to get himself out to a combat zone, Johnson - a physical coward of the first water - flew to Australia as an "observer" of the war effort. MacArthur was not unaware of the connection between Johnson and Roosevelt and treated his visitor with kid gloves.

Johnson flew to a primitive airbase in New Guinea and their wangled his way on board a bombing mission on Lae, even though as a Navy officer he had no place in an Army Air Force mission.

Bumped off his plane due to a call of nature, Johnson seated himself on another B-26. The bombers came under attack by Zeros and Johnson's plane was hit by bullets. Johnson by all accounts was calm and collected during the few minutes of combat, though he took no part. The plane Johnson originally intended to fly in was shot down with the loss of all personnel.

Making his way back to Australia the next day, Johnson eventually got to Melbourne and MacArthur's headquarters. Listening to Johnson's report, MacArthur awarded him the Silver Star, the Army's third highest decoration (the crew of the plane received no medals). On July 9, 1942, President Roosevelt ordered all federal officeholders to return to Congress. Johnson did not resign his seat to remain in the Navy.

Johnson was at first reluctant to accept the decoration MacArthur bestowed on him. He wrestled with his conscience and won. Purchasing a Silver Star at an Army-Navy store in Washington, he had it ceremoniously pinned on his lapel... several times at various rallies.

Johnson's story about his combat experience - all 13 minutes of it - became increasingly embellished. He was "Raider" Johnson who had lost 25 or 38 or 40 pounds because of dengue fever contracted while living with American boys in the jungles of New Guinea. He was bombed and strafed during his two and a half or more months in the war zone. He was too tall for a parachute, so he always gave his away. And he became increasingly incredulous that he didn't receive some greater decoration for his valor.