Category: Musings

Dogs really are smarter!

Fascinating research coming out of Duke University

This Post was stimulated by a link sent to me by Chris Snuggs, who will be joining the author’s team at Learning from Dogs in due course.

The link was to an article published in Time Magazine on September 21st and is available in their online version.

The article is about the extraordinary social skills that have been developed by dogs over the millennia that they have been associated with man. It featured Brain Hare (sort of seems an appropriate name!) Assistant Professor, Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke.

The article is also rather timely as only a few days ago, there was a Post on this Blog about the befriending of a man with a wild wolf, or was it the other way around!

Back to the Time magazine article,

“Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought.”

The Jaguar XK120 Motor Car

You’ll never feel this way about a modern car!

A few weeks ago I attended a 70^th Birthday celebration for a cousin.

70! Hey this chap has been riding bicycles at competition level, and running marathons for many years, so the surprise party was very upbeat, with two bands keeping everybody dancing. Everything from the Shadows to Roy Orbison.

It was a lovely day so I took my old XK120 Roadster, mainly because another cousin was going along, and he had helped rebuild this car 30 years previously. Actually we arrived together. The XK was running beautifully, but my cousin’s Mercedes had burst a water pipe, and the car park was flooded with coloured radiator water. We laughed that it was the new car that had broken down.

What really matters – to you!

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves what is really important.

We went to a funeral last Monday. It was special in that a friend of ours had died and her husband had phoned to tell us.

They had emigrated to Spain 12 years before to become self sufficient in growing their own food, putting on workshops and working with ‘holistic management’ techniques. I have the feeling that it was quite tough as the climate was becoming more and more arid in the mountain area that had moved to.

She had decided to come home to Totnes (Devon, SW England) to die and had obviously planned the whole thing.
The service was lovely and relatives and friends had written poems and the vicar had been briefed on her life which was quite amazing. Born in Africa, boarding school in the UK, rose to be high up in a large company and then had decided with her husband to follow a completely different holistic route to self fulfilment.

The vicar had asked her how she wanted to prepare for her death and he she had answered that she wanted to saviour every moment whilst she was still alive and had asked him to recount this tale at the service.

A man who was being chased by a tiger and had fled up a tree to escape. He looked down to see the tiger pacing up and down, looking longingly up at him. After many hours, the man must have fallen to sleep and awoke as he found himself falling towards the tiger, waiting eagerly below. As he dropped, he noticed a beautiful fruit and grabbed at it focussing intently on every fine detail of it.

After the church service we retired to a nearby woodland where we all took it in turns to carry her wicker coffin up a hill, into the woods and after music and a blessing, we buried her.

It was a truly beautiful day and one that had echoes back through the millennium. It touched me deeply, not because of sadness but about putting things into perspective – what’s important and what isn’t.

By Jon Lavin

Wolf meets Man

An amazing true story of a relationship between a wild wolf and a man.

This is a story of a particular event in the life of Tim Woods told to me by his brother, DR. It revolves around the coming together of a man sleeping rough, with his dog, on Mingus Mountain, and a fully grown female Gray or Grey Wolf. Mingus is in the Black Hills mountain range between Cottonwood and Prescott in Arizona, USA

DR and his brother, Tim, belong to a large family; there are 7 sons and 2 daughters. Tim had a twin brother, Tom, and DR knew from an early age that Tim was different.

As DR explained,

Tim was much more enlightened than the rest of us. I remember that Tim and Tom, as twin brothers, could feel each other in almost a mystical manner. I witnessed Tom grabbing his hand in pain when Tim stuck the point of his knife into his (Tim’s) palm. Stuff like that! Tim just saw more of life than most other people.

The swimming pool, a story and a metaphor.

Most of us have been here but the ‘message’ is worth a ponder.

Last year as a friend and I were about to leave the heat of the United Arab Emirates, he announced that he was going to buy an above ground swimming pool to take back to England. I don’t know where he bought his, but I bought a similar

one which for some reason cost nearly twice as much.

What with one thing and another I never got round to erecting the pool, partly because the children seemed quite happy with the small plastic baby pool that they could jump in and out of.

This year I vowed to get the have the swimming pool up and running.

More on the meaning of integrity: wholeness

Integrity from the perspective of wholeness.

Having recently begun to contribute to this blog, I’d like to add my perspective on the meaning of “integrity”. In an earlier post, Paul referred to a meaning which relates to honesty and to adherence to a moral and ethical code or principles; this is generally accepted and commonly applied.

However the dictionary definitions also list additional meanings. The free dictionary definition, that Paul referred to, includes:

the quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness

Another online definition, at dictionary.com, agrees and includes:

the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished

It seems to me that this is probably a deeper issue which underpins the more generally used meaning. Read more on these two meanings

Now you see it, now you don’t!

Bermeja (Mexican Gulf) – anyone seen my island?

There’s a wonderful story in last week-end’s The Sunday Times, a British newspaper, written by Matthew Campbell concerning the loss of an important island that has been used previously to define the limits of Mexico’s maritime

border (read oil!). Here’s an extract:

The mystery has come to haunt Mexico as unrelentingly as one of its beloved soap operas: where is Bermeja, an island off the Yucatan coast that appears to have vanished without trace?

The disappearance of Bermeja is no laughing matter – it would allow Mexico to extend its maritime border some 55 miles further north, helping it to fight off what it sees as American encroachment on its claims to potentially vast oil reserves in the Mexican Gulf.

Jimena – reflections

It’s the little things that seem to stick

This is the first time in my life where a major natural disaster has happened around me, so to speak. Now some 2 days later, here are some reflections. The small stories have so much more power to affect one.

That knowing that hundreds of homes here in San Carlos and in nearby Guaymas have been flooded out doesn’t have such a powerful affect as seeing an individual’s possessions spread out in the sun.

People of all sorts and backgrounds love to spread rumours. There seems to be a human need to be the spreader of new information, even if it is far from correct. Just about anything that one wanted to know, or even more importantly needed to know, had to be very carefully sieved. Better to find out yourself because the chances are that whomsoever is saying this or that has got their facts wrong. Amazingly, some of the worst gossip was coming from people who weren’t even in the area!

That knowing that we had 28 inches of rain fall wasn’t as powerful as seeing our neighbour’s swimming pool fill up from

empty!

The electricity workers were marvellous. They came in from far and wide and worked all the daylight hours available. It made me realise that, ultimately, we don’t accord sufficient money and status to the guys who keep the electricity flowing and too much status and money to those that have jobs that would cease instantly in a world without electricity, clean water and public sewerage systems.

The small acts of generosity were powerfully touching! Charlie and Tracy had a large leg of lamb that wasn’t going to keep without a functioning freezer. So they cooked it up and invited three other couples to share it. Thanks guys!

Within hours of the rain ceasing on the 3rd (Thursday) and people started venturing out and about, either to find provisions or just to stare open-mouthed at the effect of Nature, some poor sod had his car catch fire. You really had to feel sorry for him – this was not a great time!

And on a very personal note, Jean worked with me in mopping up rain water from 2am on Wednesday 2nd (the height of the storm) and still managed to serve a beautiful hot meal of tasty baked chicken legs in the evening. She is a special lady.

By Paul Handover

M’mmmm – Let me think about this!

The pluses and minuses of skydiving.

This looks great. Cameraman is Paul Lewis.

And here’s that Paul Lewis again. Having a really, really lucky day!

Funny, there is a saying amongst us (amateur) pilots. Why would anyone want to throw themselves out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane!

Exactly!

By Paul Handover

UK Postcode TDCU 1ZZ

Where the capital city is called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas

My great buddy of 30 years, Dan, Californian born and bred, recently emailed me saying that he had spent a fascinating hour reading the website of Tristan da Cunha. Most British people will have some odd recollection about this very remote community living in the South Atlantic because the islands are part of the United Kingdom. TDCU 1ZZ is, in fact, the UK postcode for Tristan da Cunha.

This is not a place which has a habit of making main-stream news! Indeed, one could not imagine a more distant part of the planet. Well you won’t imagine a more distant place. Tristan da Cunha is the most remotely inhabited archipelago on Planet Earth. Indeed, only one island, Tristan, is inhabited and, according to the website there are just 264 British citizens there today.

Earlier it was mentioned that most British will have some vague recollection of Tristan. More likely, that will be those British who were born before, say, 1950.

Why?

Continue reading “UK Postcode TDCU 1ZZ” →

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