Contest winners

At the stroke of midnight, with Rooki Kahoo kept up late for the occasion with a nice juicy bone, we logged on to random.org, a site where you can securely enter any list and have it randomized. The top five subscribers are the winners of pawprinted copies of Roo's book, and the five after that are the runners-up. If the winners don't respond with mailing addresses by the end of Thursday, their copies will go to the runners-up in order on the list.

As you may remember from signing up for email alerts, no names are associated with the emails. So, all I have are email addresses, which I'm sure no one would be too please about my publishing here. So, in order to protect the innocent, here are the first few letters of the five winners and the runners-up in order. I hope your email address starts the way one of these does. If you're on the list, make sure that you check your email, notices already went out, and reply with your mailing address.

Congratulations!

1. cindis
2. Melis
3. barbd
4. nimsg
5. dmcke
6. kellym
7. Linds
8. Mkenn
9. tamar
10. sabal

Roo determined to go over Niagara Falls in a Barrel

"Daddy says you always find a cat in a barrel!" says Roo of her daring plan.

 

Don King has client Mike Tyson explain the facts of life to new stablemate Roo.

In one of the more lucrative contacts made through The Dog in the Clouds web site, promoter Don King has offered Roo one million dollars to launch herself over the Niagara Falls. Roo has agreed. 

When Roo is set adrift on the calm waters a quarter of a mile upstream from the falls, she will at first float placidly towards the edge before joining the world's deadliest torrent to plummet 167 feet to the rocks below. Though others who have attempted this stunt in cast-iron bathyspheres and tanks built to the specifications of submarines have been dashed to pieces that were never recovered, Roo is not sure she will even use the barrel, as she predicts that she will in any event be in the mood for a swim that day. Promoter King notes that he has already hired workmen to emblazon The Amazing Roodini on the barrel (which is more of a little cask similar to the ones St. Bernards wear than a full barrel) in a special script that will not be readable until it achieves a high-speed spiral as it hurtles through the air, should Roo decide to use it. 

In a statement to the press, King said, “I have been trying to find the right dog for this for years. Only a few have even considered it. No one ever stepped up to the challenge the way Roo has. Certainly none whose owners were willing to allow it.”

Roo’s father, Brian Beker, already facing allegations of mismanaging Roo’s trust fund, has been attempting to distance himself from the stunt, claiming that it is not up to him to usurp Roo’s autonomy in this or any other business decision and that he will be vacationing as a guest of the Elite Modeling Agency in Monte Carlo anyway at the planned time of Roo’s death-defying plunge. 

Neither Beker’s office nor Roo have returned calls for comment.

The Roo Controversy

Hi, Everybody - 

I received some angry messages about the video of Roo up on the ledge. One particularly outraged person pointed out how the trend that began when Roo jumped off a cliff could only end by my publishing a snuff video so that I could really cash in.

1. The more time Roo gets to spend off a leash in complicated terrain, the better. Yes, she might get dinged up from time to time. I never knew a dog who lived a life worth living who didn’t. I wouldn’t let her get close to anything man-made that could hurt her, like traffic, my fear of which has her dangling at the end of a leash much more than I like. Nor would I let her near any natural hazard, like riptides, wildcats, snakes, bears or otters, for that matter. When it comes to negotiating terrain, however, I’ll leave it to her. I don’t believe for a second that an arthritic 54-year-old who has had both legs crushed to powder, one arm snapped like the skimpy twig it is, multiple surgeries on one shoulder, countless dislocations of the other, some knocks on the head hard enough to leave static sounding on some of my stations for years, a face full of the scars, broken teeth and bent nose common to fools, that a hobbling, solitary crank filled with too many bits of surgical stainless to count, who was partially paralyzed for two years, who knows what it is to wake up in a hospital bed to a visiting team of orderlies from a cancer ward just stopping by to observe what someone in really bad shape looks like, has the first single thing to tell one of the great born athletes, as all our dogs are and for which they should be looked up to, not screamed at, anything about how to scramble on rocks or run and jump or gauge the feeling of shifting sand between her toes. My deal with Rooki is I won’t tell her how to do any of that, and she won’t critique my impassioned run-on sentences. She’s better at handling gravity gracefully than I ever was. I hope I can always avoid projecting my human fears on her and not aggravate any risky situation with hysteria. In the meantime, Roo’s joy at being allowed to run free and climb high isn’t something I’m interested in limiting any more than necessary.
2. Roo is getting stronger and happier every day. That doesn’t come from having someone freak out at her or jerk her by a leash every time she pokes her nose someplace. To those who ask why I didn’t put the camera down and stand there and yell at her to come down, I ask in reply, why would you?
3. Please don’t send instructions about what to remove from my web site. Anyone who thinks I’m disgraceful for risking Roo’s life for fun and profit is entitled to their opinions and their ‘Nam flashbacks. The entire web site is a labor of love. I’m sorry you think I’m ignominiously risking Roo’s life. The millions in blog income, however, are impossible to resist.

Roo is a hard-luck puppy, and part of that luck is that she did not get the perfect parent. She got me. Lots of things could be better for her, and no one knows that better than I do. But one thing that is about as good as it gets for her is that Roo gets to find out who Roo is and be the dog she might not even have been able to dream about before, a lot. It means some daredeviltry, and my hat’s off to her for it. It means being free in a world where she might get to forget being imprisoned, starved and scared.

Roo gets stuck on a sand ledge in landslide country

Last month, next door to where we're staying on Whidbey Island, one of the bluffs that rise from the beach collapsed. Homes were lost in that landslide, which residents say sounded like close-in thunder. That slide was famous because of the extensive damage and threat to the lives of people living there. But the slides happen all the time in places where there aren't houses at risk. The sandy soil  just isn’t stable. 

Because Roo is doing penance at the end of a leash most of the time to pay her debt to society for her disappearing act the other night, I walk her up this stretch of beach. With the water on one side and the bluffs rising on the other, there’s nowhere for her to go, so I let her run free.

Being Roo, however, she still found a way to risk her pretty little neck. I wonder if a similar pickle might not have accounted for her absence the other night….

Careful using Apple's Map App

Petco by way of Italy, courtesy Apple Maps.

I really love Apple products. But their Maps app has gotten a deservedly terrible reputation. I keep using it because it gives turn-by-turn voiced driving directions, which is handy when you do as much driving around in strange places as the Kahoo and I do. The problem is that they're wrong a lot of the time. 

I needed to get Roo one of the large stuffed hedgehog toys she likes. They're only available at Petco, which is what I entered in the search field. The screenshot from the iPhone shows what happened. Apple Maps would have had us go quite a long way around.