what's in a name?

What happens when it's really hot in your apartment and you can't sleep? Then you start looking for goofy things like name generators for your new puppy. Did we mention that we have another Vizsla joining us? Momo and I are taking a roadtrip back up to Widdershins to pick his new running mate, collaborator, and sidekick.

Meg and I have decided that, and assuming we pick a boy (there's a 75% chance of that), that his name will be JÓZSI (pronounced 'YO-zhee'). In the unlikely event that we do pick the little girl, her name will be CSILLA (pronounced 'CHEEL-law'), or simply 'Stella' in everyday life. After picking an old Bulgarian name for Momo, we decided we should probably respect this one's Hungarian origins.

In any case, remembering that Dave had put The Monster Name Decoder on his site, I decided that His Horrific Majesty deserved his own monster name.



Get Your Monster Name

And then I found this relatively nerdy, but still fascinating dog name generator from UVA. If we'd used this, the new pup's name might have been 'Zrēju' or 'Clŏfa.'

Podcasts: on cycling and the state of the world

I just starting subscribing to a couple of new podcasts recently: two for Tour de France coverage, and another for newsy-type stuff.

1) Found this podcast from Bikeradar.com (who just bought out cyclingnews.com). Sorry this link is to the general website... lots of good stuff on it, but to find the actual podcast I'd go through iTunes. Maybe low on actual statistics (ie. who came third or fourth), but actually has interviews. Best part is that the two English guys on it obviously love cycling but aren't either a) Bob Roll or b) Dick Pound.

2) Here's another well-established one: The Fredcast. Definitely slicker (and therefore not quite as fun as the boys at Bikeradar.com), but does actually give you a few more concrete details.

3) I thought I'd try and stay a little more in touch with politics back home in Britain by subscribing to the BBC Radio 4 Today program. The podcast format seems to be largely extended interviews with prominent political figures. My Vizsla may be smarter than a lot of government officials (and certainly more honest that virtually all of them), but John Humphrys does his darndest to keep those elected wombats honest. While it's also obvious that there is a mutual respect between him and whoever he's interviewing, he wasn't letting Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair's former press director) away with anything this morning. If you'd like evidence of why public speaking and debate should be part of any student's education, I'd suggest you listen here. If you already are of the opinion that while Tony Blair may have played lap-dog, this will sadly confirm that he did in fact 'play poodle' to George Bush's sasquatch.

Le Grand Boucle...

Are you ready, race fans? The 94th Tour de France begins tomorrow in London (just to keep us all guessing). Just to keep us guessing, too: the verdict in the Floyd Landis doping hearing was delayed a day, so the world will know the US Anti-Doping Association's verdict concerning last year's 'winner' as the TdF starts.

Did just find this blog-of-note: Trust but Verify... all you could ever want to know about the doping allegations against Floyd. From a quick glance, looks like pretty balanced stuff. As they say "There is a daily roundup of links with specific Landis interest, with brief comment. We avoid bashing, gushing, or gross stupidity. Unless it's funny." Sounds good to me... will need to check in for more detail later.

For a 'wide-open' race (which most commentators seem to think is a bad thing?!), there seems to be a relative consensus on the favorites: Vinokourov and Kloden (Astana), Valverde and Pereiro (Caisse d'Epargne), Sastre and Schleck (CSC), Leipheimer (Discovery), Moreau (AG2r), and Evans (Predictor-Lotto).

I'm going to be uncharacteristically bold and say the top-4 will be: Vinokourov, Kloden, Valverde and Leipheimer. Which means they'll probably all crash in the first week.

Having now been bold I'm going to get myself all fired-up and francophiled by watching Nikita and then hopefully dreaming of Anne Parillaud taking out Dick Pound.

news from Ashgabat

Nice picture by C.J. Chivers of supreme Turkmens past and present in a new International Herald Tribune story. I am especially fond of the hi-volume, helmet haircut seemingly required of all autocrats.

The actual article by Chivers is a little strange -- and while it might be said that it's merely a reflection of Turkmenistan -- there seems to be an assumption that somehow the US occupies some kind of moral high ground as if spreading democracy has it's own value... and getting access to massive natural resources is merely a cool side-effect. Could just be little cynical me, of course.

And maybe Berdykmukhammedov has seen a bunch of Scorsese films, or maybe C.J. Chivers deserves the credit for writing his story like one. But this brought a smile to my face: 'In April, he [Berdykmukhammedov] fired the country's senior law enforcement officer on national television. "I have a whole file with evidence against you," he said. "I could dishonor you like a dog."'

All I have to say is: "My Vizsla is smarter than your government official."

reader feedback

Our friend Emily said she'd read the Regal Vizsla to-date and loved it, but there was too much dog and not enough ballet. I have no idea what this means, but in an effort to accomodate Emily, here's a few words from Donald McCaig's Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men:

"Any athlete, dog or man, must master the flowing gestalt of things, must comprehend physical meaning, must be slightly ahead of the action. Amateurs think of a sheepdog trial as static geometry: a pattern of invisible straight lines the sheep must traverse. That's mistaking the choreography for the ballet." (p.51)

Charles Fergus uses the phrase "this state of excited equilibrium" (p. 16) to describe a similar kind of synchronicity and anticipation when it comes to hunters, gamebirds, and bird-dogs. For him, that balletic balance is 'the upland equation.'

There will be no pictures of Vizslas in tutus. But I hope this makes you even happier, Emily.

semantics: chicks or poults?

So, at work today, Ed asked me if young grouse were really called 'poults' or if that was just baby pheasants and turkeys? Good question.

I think the short answer is that it's not technically, ie. lexicologically, wrong to call them poults, but recent convention has been to call young grouse chicks instead.

For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines poults as: "The young of the domestic fowl, a chicken; also of the turkey, pheasant, guinea-fowl, and various game birds." The second cited usage of poult from c.1440 is given as: "Pulte, yonge hen, gallinella"; the 1863 citation specifically mentions "Ptarmigan poults, hardly fledged." Ptarmigan, like grouse, belong to the order Galliformes. It could be assumed, therefore, that calling young grouse 'poults' is not out of spirit with the early use of the word.

However, few of the relatively modern sporting writers use anything other than 'chicks' to describe young grouse. I just looked in my books by Norris, Knight, Woolner, and Furtman... none of them use poult. I don't have time to scan all my George Bird Evans books and don't (yet) have a copy of Gardiner Bump's magnum opus on the life-cycle of grouse. But I'm feeling pretty good about correcting myself.

I'm posting the bibliography here because half of the books haven't been reprinted:

a) Charles Norris, Eastern Upland Shooting, with Special Reference to Bird Dogs and their Handling, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1946;
b) John Alden Knight, Ruffed Grouse, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947;
c) Frank Woolner, Grouse and Grouse Hunting, New York: Crown, 1970;
d) Michael Furtman, Ruffed Grouse: Woodland Drummer, Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1999.

so much excitement...

So much has been going on in the last few days...

We went over to a friend of Meg's house in Queens on Saturday for a little BBQ with friends and family... and to celebrate their dog's 14th birthday! Happy Birthday, Pandora! Seeing as Pandora is a little advanced in age, Momo decided to get rambunctious with their neighbour's dog, Lucy... for pretty much the entire time. To be fair, Lucy was the prime instigator.

Then on Sunday afternoon, Momo and I went for a little roadtrip back up to our favorite gamebird farm in western MA. After a luxurious night at the Motel 6 in Brattleboro, we got there nice and early. What a nice day! Compared to the last time we were there when the temperature hardly changed all morning and the breeze was virtually non-existent, it warmed up a nice 15degsF while we were there, the humidity only dropped slightly, and the breeze was fairly constant. What a difference for Momo's sniffer. There was a lot more ground cover than the last time which helped to keep the chukar feel hidden so there was a lot less running on their part. While he still had his moments of clumsiness and bumped four birds, Momo threw some nice shapes to show me birds on the ground. All in all, we claimed seven birds, he bumped four, and I missed two.

One of the highlights wasn't the chukar he found, but the turkey(!) and more excitingly, the ruffed grouse hen and six poults. Now maybe they've been juicing up the grouse in the Connecticut River Valley, but that hen bird was huge compared to the midgets we've found in Sterling Forest in NY. Anyways, hopefully that's a good sign for coming years and that after several low years, the grouse population is on the rebound.

Momo was certainly tired -- and slept pretty much all the way home. Now we're going to watch the Academy Award-nominated Mongolian film Cave of the Yellow Dog.