For a few hours ago the WordPress theme I am using on Learning from Dogs was changed.
The change is necessary to allow a number of eCommerce features to be added to the blog in connection with me being able to sell my book, both in paperback and eBook formats, directly to you good people.
Plus there’s a real bonus.
This theme is mobile friendly.
In other words, everything on Learning from Dogs will be much, much easier to read on tablets and smartphones.
Finally, if anyone is within reach of Grants Pass then you have a warm welcome to come along on Saturday, December 12th. There will be some specials available to visitors only.
Published on Nov 6, 2015
Another try at a slow motion video of Abbey shaking the water off after a bath
Published on Apr 24, 2014
Stunning, Perfection, Breathtaking – just a few words that describe this 3 minute surfing clip that shows Ian Walsh catching huge waves and making it look effortless.
Well over two million viewings.
Music: Versailles
Warner // Chappell Production Music
Published on Oct 22, 2014
This is a clip from our movie “THE SECRET LIFE OF TREES”.
More on www.homan.pl
Finally, back to slow animal shakes! (And I must acknowledge Mother Nature News for the idea for today’s picture parade.)
Published on Mar 21, 2013
Why do wet furry mammals shake? Si and Sam give some of their favourite animals a shower to uncover the science behind the ‘wet dog shake’. Sam caught up with Andrew Dickerson from Georgia Institute of Technology to find out more about the science… we’ll have the full interview for you soon.
Twenty-one things my dog taught me about being a better man.
June 7, 2010 by Olivier Blanchard
We had to put our golden retriever to sleep this weekend, our friend of fifteen years, our family’s faithful guardian and companion, and one of the kindest, most loyal and giving souls I have ever met. True to her breed, Sasha was courageous, tender and selfless until the end.
I was trying to figure out how to give her a worthy send-off here on The BrandBuilder blog, and settled on some of the things she taught me over the years. Or rather, the things I didn’t realize she had taught me until this past week, much of which I spent caring for her, as she could no longer take care of herself. She and I had some long chats, in our own way, and the old girl was much wiser than I gave her credit for.
Are there business lessons in this list? Yes. There are. But all are deeply human lessons at the core. If being human can make a business better, if it can fuel its soul (or even simply give it one), then yes, let these be business lessons. But don’t ever forget that what makes a business truly great isn’t technology or design or a fancy logo. Those are expressions of something deeper. Something more visceral and powerful and true. What makes a business great, what makes it special, worthy of a connection, worthy of trust and loyalty, admiration and respect, even love, always starts with a beating heart, not a beeping cash register. (One is the cause, and the other one of many effects. Don’t lose sight of that distinction. Horse before cart: Soul drives love. Love drives business.)
It’s so easy to lose sight of what’s important in our lives. And this isn’t me being overly sentimental because I just lost my dog. I mean, yes, sure, okay… But there’s also something to this: That sentimentality, that emotion, these things that make us connect with other souls is at the heart of EVERYTHING this blog has been about these last few years: Business, design, marketing, social media, communications, corporate responsibility, best practices… No company can ever be great unless it can tap into the very essence of what makes us want to connect with each other, and no executive or business manager or cashier can ever truly be great at their jobs unless they also tap into the very thing that makes genuine human connections possible. If ever there was a secret to successfully building a brand, a lovebrand, the kind that people will fight for and whose mark they will tattoo on their bodies, it is this. The rest is merely execution.
If you only walk away with one bit of wisdom from this post, let it be this: You cannot build a better business unless you first become a better human being. Everything that strips you of your humanity, of your empathy, of your ability to connect with others is bad for business. It’s bad practice. It is doomed to fail in the end.
As my good friend John Warner noted yesterday, “If more people were as loyal and loving as dogs the world would be a better place.” (source) And he’s right. How do you become a better human being then? Well, that’s up to you, but if you had asked Sasha, she might have given you a few pointers of her own. Granted, she was never a Fortune 500 C.M.O. She didn’t design the iPad. She didn’t invent the internet or write a book. She never presented at a conference. All she did was hang out with me and Chico. We went on car rides. She watched me work. She lived the simple life of a dog, uncluttered by Twitter followers and Hubspot rankings and the drive to publish and present case studies. She was a dog, and so her perspective is a little different from what you may be used to. At any rate, here are twenty-one she and I discussed at length last week. I hope they will be as valuable to you as they now are to me.
Twenty-one things my dog taught me about being a better man:
1. Be true to your own nature. There’s no point in faking it. A golden retriever isn’t a chihuahua or a pug or a greyhound, and for good reason. Being comfortable in your own skin is 90% of the trick to rocking out your life. Not everyone is meant to be Rintintin or a seeing-eye dog or an Iditarod racer. It’s okay. Find yourself and embrace your nature. That’s always a great place to start.
2. Be true to the ones you love. Your friends, your family, your tribe, your pack. A life lived for others is a life well-lived. Selfish pursuits aside, ambition often grows hollow when turned inwardly instead of outwardly. It’s one thing to want to be pack leader, but there is just as much value and honor in serving than in leading. When in doubt, see item number one.
3. Never say no to a chance to go on a car ride. When the days grow short, I guarantee you’ll wish you’d have gone on more car rides.
4. Leashes are the enemy. Avoid them at all cost.
5. People are strange. So much potential, yet here they are, doing everything they can to complicate rather than simplify their lives. It’s puzzling.
6. Belly scratches.
7. The end isn’t pretty, but if you can face it with dignity and grace, none of your body’s weaknesses will matter. Your heart, your courage, your spirit is what people will see and remember. This isn’t only applicable in your last days and weeks. It’s applicable every day of your life. Adversity happens. It’s how you deal with it that matters.
8. Forgiveness is easier for dogs than for humans, but humans have opposable thumbs and the ability to speak, so it all balances out in the end.
9. Your bark is your own. No one has one quite like yours. Own it. Love it. Project it.
10. Trust your instincts. They rarely steer you wrong. The feeling in your gut though, that’s probably just something you ate.
11. Just because you’re meant to live on land doesn’t mean you can’t feel at home in water. Play outside the safety zone. Swim in the deep end. Dive in. We’re all designed to do more than the obvious.
12. Play more. The game is irrelevant. Just play. Tip: Exploring is play. Having adventures is play. Finding out what’s behind the next hill is play.
13. Your body growing old doesn’t mean you can’t be a puppy at heart. Actually, the first should have no impact on the latter. If you find that it does, take a step back, regroup, and restart. Always be a puppy at heart.
14. Humans aren’t all bad. But they aren’t all good either. Choose yours wisely.
15. Always keep that 20% wolf in you. If you ever give it up, you’re done. A dog without a little wildness in the blood isn’t a dog. It’s a furry robot. The beauty of a great dog doesn’t lie in its obedience but in its loyalty. Loyalty is a choice. Dogs choose to be dogs and not wolves. That’s what makes them so special.
16. Running full bore across a field in the rain.
17. There are no mysteries. Take cats, for example: Half rat, half badger. Crap in a box. Eat rodents. Where’s the mystery in that? If you look hard enough, you can figure most things out for yourself. The world isn’t as complicated as it sometimes seems.
18. Sometimes, you have to back up your growl with a bite. Go with it. Some people like to test your bark-to-bite ratio. With those “inquisitive” types, a little education goes a long way. As much as it sucks to have to go there, it is sometimes necessary. (It’s what the fangs are for.) Your territory, your space, your safety… They’re worth defending. Make a show of it once, and chances are you’ll never have to teach anyone a lesson again.
19. Being alone is no way to go through life. We’re pack animals. Humans, dogs, same thing. We need others to make all of this worthwhile. As an aside, if we live through others, why not also live for others, even if only a little bit? It isn’t that much of a stretch.
20. When you chase the ball, CHASE the fucking ball. Two reasons: a) It’s a chase. You don’t half-ass a chase. You go all out. It’s what you do. It’s the point. b) You don’t want some other mutt to get to the ball before you and slobber it all up, do you?
21. In the end, you will revisit your adventures, your battles, your chases, your voyages and all the excitement of your life with bemused pride, but it’s the quiet moments with loved ones that your mind will settle on. The comfort of those days when all you did was spend lazy hours with them, your head on their lap, their’s on yours, taking in the afternoon sun and the hundreds of fleeting stories carried like whispers on the breeze, those are the memories that will stay with you to the end and beyond.
Never give up on your thirst for life, on the beauty subtle moments, and on chasing that ball as hard and fast as your legs and heart will carry you.
Godspeed, Sasha.
Sasha (1995 – 2010) R.I.P.
ooOOoo
Shortly after completing today’s post, I read the following. It seemed appropriate to include it today.
When you talk, you are only repeating what you know,
In view of all that’s been happening these last few weeks, this is perfect!
We are exactly one month away from Christmas Day! Not sure if that’s scary or satisfying. For years, I have always embraced mid-Winter’s Day on December 21st as the bottom of the slope; so to speak. Thus on that basis Christmas Day is satisfying.
Anyway, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in this fine, new country of ours and I was wondering what to write to recognise both the importance, current and historical, for Americans and, at a more parochial level, for yours truly. Because, for sure, at the start of this year I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that by Thanksgiving Day I would have a book available on Amazon!
Then along comes the perfect answer to my pondering as to what to write. A gorgeous post written by Kate Johnston of 4am Writer‘s fame. Even better, Kate giving me permission to republish it in this place. So to all my readers and followers: Happy Thanksgiving.
ooOOoo
The Writers’ Tree
Kate Johnston
There once was a tree where writers could go and put down stories in the thin bark. Over time, the stories began to bleed into each other until the day came when the tree could take no more stories.
image courtesy of wordsareart.wordpress.com
The writers didn’t have any other place to go.
They tried to write in the sand dunes, but the wind just blew the words around into gibberish.
They tried to write in the sky, but the rains came and washed everything away.
They tried to write on the animals and birds but got bitten and clawed for their trouble.
One little girl missed writing too much. Her stories were piling up inside her like rotten apples on the ground, and she needed a place to write them. She went searching. Over the hills and behind some mist that beckoned with gauzy fingers.
She found a secret place where trees grew by the dozens, trees with papery bark that wanted to give stories. She told no one of her discovery, wanting to keep all the trees to herself. She spent day after day writing story after story upon tree after tree.
When she had scribed all her stories, she abandoned the secret place and never returned. She didn’t tell a single soul about the trees that gave stories, for fear that someone wouldn’t like what she wrote, would laugh at her, wouldn’t understand.
But while she was gone, attending to other things like school, friends, growing up and starting a family, her stories began to fade away. With no one to savor them, the tales began to disappear from the trees.
Stories cannot exist without readers. And writers cannot exist without stories.
The girl, now an old woman, returned to the secret place with her grandson, thinking he would appreciate the magic of the stories on the trees. Imagine her devastation when she saw that her words were destroyed, scabbed over by new bark and punctured by holes from insects and birds.
It was plain to the girl, now an old woman, the trees could no longer give to a writer who had stopped writing. She fell to her knees and wept. She couldn’t even start over. It’d been too long since she’d come to the secret place and had forgotten how to write at all.
image courtesy of socialmeems.com
Her grandson scraped away the new growth, traced his finger over the faintest of marks, trying to find the long-lost stories. It was no use, not by himself. He was young and couldn’t yet read.
They went back to the world where they found a baker, a postman, a teacher, an electrician, and a dancer, all of whom could read and longed to write stories. The old woman and her grandson brought their new friends to the secret place to find the lost stories, but still, it was no use.
The stories were gone forever.
It had been too long since the girl, now an old woman, had written them that she couldn’t even remember how they went, or what they were about, or why she wrote them at all.
All she knew was that when she wrote, she’d felt indescribable joy. She’d fooled herself into thinking that was enough. The girl not knowing then as the old woman knows now that you must tend to joy if you want joy to stay.
Together, the friends wrote anew, wrote stories into the bark like paper. They shared their ideas and questions and hopes. They took the time to feel and find meaning in all of the stories. They laughed and cried and debated over worlds they created. They left comments with hearts to show how much each story moved them. They talked about how they couldn’t wait to bring a husband or a mother or a friend to the writers’ trees to show them the stories that grew there.
The girl, now an old woman, watched her friends’ stories blossom and grow with each reader that visited the writers’ trees. She saw the joy on her friends’ faces, saw how the joy stayed because they kept doing the one thing they loved: writing.
She wondered if she dared try again, to bring a story to life here, even though she’d failed so miserably in the past.
Image courtesy of Paul W. Koester Photography
Her friends walked the old woman to a new tree. If you love it so, they said, if writing brings you joy, they said, then write you must and never give up, they said.
The old woman took to the tree and wrote.
Her stories live on.
Happy Writersgiving!
ooOOoo
Perfect!
Dear readers: I am going to take a break for one day, so my next post will be on Friday. You all have a wonderful time wherever you are in the world.
This is no conundrum: a direct contrast to yesterday.
The benefits of having a dog or two (or nine) are boundless and have been documented for thousands of years. Indeed, a quick web search revealed that Alexander Pope, the 18th-century English poet, is the attributed author of the quote, “Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
Nevertheless, it was still a joy to come across the documentary film Dogs On The Inside.
Filmed in a Massachusetts prison, DOGS ON THE INSIDE follows the birth of a relationship between abandoned rescue dogs and prison inmates as they work together toward a second chance at a better life. Giving a voice to a forgotten dog and a forgotten man, the film is a life-affirming testament to the power of second chances.
The film was released in February 2014, and here is the trailer.
In general, it seems to have gathered good reviews with this one from Amazon being typical of what I have seen.
I had tears in my eyes during several segments of this film. Such a lovely connection between the rescue workers and the dogs. Then, the inmates and the dogs. And, finally, the photos of their forever homes and families. Bravo to all at Don’t Throw Us Away. People like you, who work to save and rehab these animals, are amazing.
You are also recommended to read the review that is on the Ecorazzi website. Here’s a flavour of that review:
Two parties neglected and forgotten become the powerful emotional center of an uplifting new documentary, Dogs on the Inside.
We’re taken to Massachusetts, where there exists a unique, mutually-beneficial rehabilitation program that finds rescue dogs paired with prison inmates.
This documentary, from directors Brean Cunningham and Douglas Seirup, follows a handful of inmates at a correctional facility involved in Don’t Throw Us Away, a program that partners them with neglected dogs. For the animal, benefits include exercise, attention, and care while shelters remain crowded. For the prisoners, they have a chance to form connections and work towards parole.
It’s fascinating throughout watching both sides – scared dogs and (emotionally) guarded inmates – warm to one another, seemingly leaving their past behind.
That’s at the heart of this illuminating, heartwarming film: second chances. Early on, it’s easy to see the parallels between these two groups – with the comparisons handled tactfully throughout a film that never strays from its simple, honest goal. Dogs never preaches or calls for political or social change; it more so asks the viewer to be willing to forgive and welcome in those which have been cast aside. When an inmate says, ‘they come from a bad life, they haven’t seen love in while,’ he isn’t necessarily talking just about the dog.
Let me close with this heart-stirring photograph that was included in the above review.
So much to learn from our precious, gorgeous dogs!
Consequently, writing a blog post for today wasn’t high on my list of things to do.
So this is to offer my thanks to everyone who sent me greetings; it was wonderful to hear from so many friends, old and new.
Thus my post today is to share three items that came from family back in England.
First, my mother, who is still teaching piano and oboe at the age of 95, sent me this:
Secondly, my son, Alex, and his long-term partner, Lisa, sent me this in an card chosen from the Friends of the Earth selection:
(All dog owners know, I’m sure, that dogs must never eat chocolate.)
Lastly, my grandson, Morten, who despite being just five-years-old, is already a dab hand with an iPhone and sent me the following picture of himself with Dad in the background:
Finally, my love and gratitude to Jeannie for making me feel special yesterday, as she has done every day since we first met.
Communicating with written words may be older than we can possibly imagine. Yet, despite the very modern world of digital communications, the power of communicating with written words is probably more widespread than ever before. Let’s just dip into the world of blogging, or more accurately put, let’s dip into the world of WordPress blogging. The quickest of web searches revealed that:
74.6 Million Sites Depend on WordPress
Yep, you read that right. 74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol’ WordPress. That’s one site per person in Turkey.
Around 50% of this figure (close to 37 million) is hosted on the free WordPress.com.
Or try this amazing fact:
6 New WordPress.com Posts Every Second
That’s right. Every second, close to 6 (the actual figure is 5.7) new posts are published on WordPress.com blogs. That averages out to 342 posts per minute. Just above 20,000 per day. And a grand total of 7.49 million annually.
If you are wondering what brought on this rash of discovery, it was me wanting to find a way of introducing a talk that was recently given by Junot Díaz. Wikipedia explains that:
Junot Díaz (born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz’s work is the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.
Junot Díaz
Recently, the Big Think blog had an article by Díaz that I wanted to share with you dear readers of Learning from Dogs. For it struck me as a wonderful reminder of the power of writing and, especially, the power of writing fiction.
For reasons that I don’t understand the video in that Big Think piece is longer than the version that is on YouTube. So, watch the YouTube version coming up now, and if you want more then click the link just below that YouTube insertion.
Literature, explains Pulitzer-winning writer Junot Díaz, is the closest that we’ve come to telepathy. It’s through literature that we educate our souls by transporting ourselves into some other character’s mind. It builds empathy. It allows for new perspectives. It triggers provocation in all the best ways. Novels aren’t as popular a medium today as something like Twitter, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still hugely important.
The summary posted above was taken from the Big Think site, and if you go there you can read more, and watch the full 4-minute version of the video.
Finally, this coming Sunday is the 1st November, and November is the month for National Novel Writing Month. Whether or not you wonder if you have a full novel inside you, even if you have the slightest curiousity, pop over to the NaNoWriMo website and get involved!
There was an item on the BBC News website that I saw over the weekend that prompted me to do a YouTube search for the film clip. This is what I read on the BBC website:
Until the 1970s, it was impossible to travel around Canada’s Yellowknife region in the winter if you weren’t travelling by dogsled.
Even though transportation options have increased, sled dogs are still prized and prominent in this Arctic region.
Matt Danzico of BBC Pop Up was invited to visit with some sled dogs during the team’s trip to Canada.
Film by Matt Danzico.
Unsurprisingly, that BBC video wasn’t available on YouTube. But I did find this:
Tonight (Friday): A 30 percent chance of rain after 11pm. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 53. West wind around 6 mph becoming calm after midnight.
Saturday: Rain before 11am, then showers likely after 11am. High near 71. Calm wind becoming west southwest around 5 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New precipitation amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch possible.
Saturday Night: A 20 percent chance of showers before 11pm. Partly cloudy, with a low around 50. West wind around 6 mph becoming calm in the evening.
As the crow flies, here in Merlin we are a tad over 10 miles to the North-West of the centre of Grants Pass. So we are holding our breath that we receive a decent wetting over this coming weekend.
All of which creates a wonderful lead-in to a recent item published over on Mother Nature News, that I am delighted to share with you.
Bath time may not be a pup’s favorite activity, but if these comical “Wet Dog”‘ portraits are any indication, there may be a silver lining to this necessary evil.
The dog lover behind this endearing series is Sophie Gamand, a New York-based photographer who regularly focuses her lens on canines to examine the relationship they have with humans.
“Wet Dog is a series of dogs captured at the groomer during their least favorite activity: Bath time,” Gamand writes on her website. “I chose this activity because it is a very unnatural one for the dogs, yet it is a direct consequence of their cohabitation with humans.”
Seeing our best friends in such a vulnerable state can be comical and heart-wrenching — especially because canine facial expressions possess an uncanny resemblance to our own.
Gamand began photographing soggy doggies a while back, but after some of the images went viral, she felt compelled to put together a complete “Wet Dog” photo book.
(Photo: Sophie Gamand)
The comical coffee table book, which is now available for purchase, is filled with 120 photos of these soaked doggies — each sporting his own unique post-bath expression.
Continue below for a look at just a few of the images featured in the book.
Benji (Photo: Sophie Gamand)Marnie (Photo: Sophie Gamand)Wanda (Photo: Sophie Gamand)
Learning from Dogs 