Happy Birthday, Sophia!

Birthday Happies Sophia!!

Coburn’s Chief Of Staff On Keeping Kids Away From Porn: ‘All Pornography Is Homosexual Pornography’

Oops. Who's going to tell Larry Flynt he's doing it wrong?

Happy birthday, Sophia! I hope the whole day is zebra print and pink satin!

Happy Birthday, Sophia!

Oy -- I just got a call that was a contact-of-a-contact, and I didn't realize for a while that she thought she was interviewing me. Right then! Totally unclear and confusing!

The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind

Take for instance the kiss a dog gives you when you come home. It looks like love, but it could also be hunger. Wolves also lick one another's mouths, particularly when one wolf returns to the pack. They can use their sense of taste and smell to see if the returnee has caught some prey on its journey. If it did, the licking often prompts it to vomit up some of that kill for the other members of the pack to share. The kiss dogs give us probably evolved from this inspection. "If we happened to spit up whatever we just ate," says Horowitz, "I don't think our dogs would be upset at all."

Horowitz and other scientists are now running experiments to determine what a behavior, like a kiss, really means. In some cases, their research suggests that our pets are manipulating us rather than welling up with human-like feeling. "They could be the ultimate charlatans," says Hauser.

We've all seen guilty dogs slinking away with lowered tails, for example. Horowitz wondered if they behave this way because they truly recognize they've done something wrong, so she devised an experiment. First she observed how dogs behaved when they did something they weren't supposed to do and were scolded by their owners. Then she tricked the owners into believing the dogs had misbehaved when they hadn't. When the humans scolded the dogs, the dogs were just as likely to look guilty, even though they were innocent of any misbehavior. What's at play here, she concluded, is not some inner sense of right and wrong but a learned ability to act submissive when an owner gets angry. "It's a white-flag response," Horowitz says.

While this kind of manipulation may be unsettling to us, it reveals how carefully dogs pay attention to humans and learn from what they observe. That same attentiveness also gives dogs--or at least certain dogs--a skill with words that seems eerily human.

Lots more science of doggies at the link....

whereas cats do something wrong, stare at you, get scolded, continue to stare at you. none of this act sorry stuff.

His interlocutor is Pat Fagan, of Heritage, who once described using contraception as turning heterosexual sex gay.

Contraception makes sex gay? How does that even work? Perhaps Mr. Fagan should explain how his obsession with gay sex makes him straight.

oh, I nominate shrift to attend their next panel.