Events

A coyote hanging out at Francis Cardinal George's mansion got away from Chicago Animal Control on Monday. Repeatedly: The wild animal played hide-and-seek with police officers and later the Animal Care and Control team for more than five hours. The last three hours were spent chasing the coyote back and forth from baseball fields at Lake Shore Drive and LaSalle Street to the yard of Cardinal Francis George's residence at North Avenue and State Street. The coyote seems to have sought sanctuary recently...

Paws for a moment. Also, I devoured Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this weekend. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I tell you: Soylent Green is people! (I'll wait a discrete interval before writing more about the Potter book. You're on your own about Soylent Green.)

These things are cool. For about $1,000 each, the Shelter Box Trust (Shelter Box USA here) provides shelter to people in disaster areas. They've distributed over 32,000 boxes to half a million people since 2001, including to Indonesia in December 2004 and New Orleans in August 2005. Each is a 49-gallon box containing a tent, ten sleeping bags, cookware, water jugs (sans water) and other neccesities that people need immediately following a disaster.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor dead of night, can keep Parker from playing with a tennis ball: He even brought me the ball, but, you know? Standing out in a raging thunderstorm throwing a soggy ball to a soggy dog just doesn't have a huge appeal to me:

..."none of the above." So says the latest AP/Ipsos poll (PDF; via Talking Points Memo): In a new AP/Ipsos Poll, 25% of Republican respondents say they are either undecided or would prefer someone other than the current field — more than the vote share of any actual candidates listed in the poll. Compare this to the Democratic side, where only 13% of respondents are undecided or prefer none of the above. In the horse-race numbers, Rudy Giuliani leads the GOP side with 21%, followed by Fred Thompson at...

Via security guru Bruce Schneier, an actual, real-world Trojan Horse that gets in...well, almost everywhere.

I'll be participating once more in the Les Turner ALS Foundation's annual Walk4Life, this year on September 8th. You can make donations to my mom's team through CharityWeb. Here's the text of my mom's letter: As you all know, on March 17, 2004, I was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal neuromuscular disease that attacks motor neurons. It makes even the simplest movements of walking, speaking, and gesturing nearly impossible. No one knows its cause; there is no cure. Today, I...

Phooey. My ride Saturday seems to have caused some irritation in either the ligaments or cartilege of my left knee. Not crippling, but kind of painful. So no biking this weekend, and I'll have to postpone my planned 80 km ride to the following weekend. Last year, I couldn't ride the two centuries I'd trained for because of my gallbladder. If I'm out because of my knee this year, I'll be really, really disappointed. And I can't even blame Tonya Harding.

The stuffed vet that Danielle gave Parker a couple weeks ago still lives on—though empty of stuffing and looking a bit haggard: And Parker is live today. Astute viewers will notice a patch of something on his right hip. That's mud from this morning in the park. So tonight, he gets his quarterly bath.

Playing ball at sunset: