- Image by sgetgood via Flickr
This weekend, there was a balloon festival in our sleepy little town. I haven’t done much editing on the photos I took of the balloon glow last night or the balloons cruising over town at 6am this morning, but I have loaded them on Flickr (my back-up server!) if you are interested. There’s also a set Dave took with my camera yesterday morning.
Douglas, my mom and I also went over to the fest part of the event yesterday afternoon. It was a just a few booths and local bands– nothing like the annual balloon festival we’ve gone to in Quechee Vermont a few times — but people were having a good time.
The highlight was a demonstration by two officers from the State Police K9 unit. Our favorite part was the Belgian Malinois bitch subduing a suspect. The other officer puts on a special arm glove, and you can see by the dog’s attitude in the photo series below, she knows exactly what’s up as soon as she sees it. We figured that the dogs also have a clear sense of when they are on demo and can play a little, versus the job.
Her handler told the crowd that once she gets hold of the suspect she won’t let go unless he attacks her. She’s not biting to harm, just to assert control.
Calmly sitting:
Sees the suspect (and the glove):
Gotcha:
And I’m not letting go:
Until my handler says it’s okay (and gives me my toy):
The full set of images is on Flickr.
Now I’m sure you are wondering about TwinkieBook.
I find it amusing how the top 3 social networks keep copying each other and presumably think we are too dumb to notice. As one example, LinkedIn added groups (copying Facebook), recently Facebook added questions (copying LinkedIn), and just this week Twitter began suggesting people to follow (copying both Facebook and LinkedIn although the Twitter implementation looks more like Facebook’s).
So, I joked on Facebook and Twitter that I was thinking about starting a pool to guess the date when we couldn’t tell one from the other. A good friend from college suggested the name TwinkieBook:
How perfect is that! It includes elements from all their names and adds the “twinkie” element– light, insubstantial, artificial. It’s going to be my new category on this blog for the social networks. Especially when they add a new feature that looks suspiciously like a feature from another site.
by Sebastian Faulks, and I just finished two novels in Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series, 
