This video of laboratory research dogs being introduced to the outside world is absolutely heartbreaking. In a good way, like Free Willy.  I clutched my 2 dogs and bawled my eyes out watching it.

These poor beagles had spent their entire lives in small cages.  Never smelled fresh air, never felt the warm sun on their backs, never felt grass under their paws, never ran free in a big open field.  Never felt the love and comfort of a good snuggle.

The rescue volunteers brought the dogs to a park and opened their cages, and the dogs just sat there looking apprehensive.  They weren’t sure what to do.  It’s like watching a learned helplessness experiment.  They don’t have any concept of escape because it’s never been an option.  Seeing that just broke my heart. Eventually one of them took a tentative step out of his cage and started sniffing the grass.  The others slowly came out too.  They all looked a bit unsteady on their legs.

When they were back in the van, there’s a shot of one of the beagles snuggling with one of the volunteers.  It’s the most beautiful thing; the look on his little face…he’s just in absolute bliss to finally have some much-needed affection.

As a doggie momma, I can’t imagine someone keeping dogs captive in little cages to test cosmetics, drugs, and household products on them.  So cruel and completely unnecessary.  No dog should have to go through that.  This video is a good reminder to seek out cruelty free products.

But really…why is this shit legal?

I’ve been neglecting this blog for ages.  So I’m trying to dust it off, reorganize things a little, and migrate it from wordpress.com to wordpress.org.

Via Jezebel

In this video, Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha makes like silly string and rocks out with her dad to the Jungle Book song “I wanna be like you.”  They are so totally adorable together, and are clearly having a blast.  Watching this video was definitely a happy way to end the day.

It reminds me of me and my dad a lot.  He and I are both completely silly people, both music lovers, and we’ll frequently break into comedic warbling or scattered dance routines when we’re blasting the tunes together.  Silliness: definitely one of the most awesome and underrated foundations of friendship.

I was thinking too how special it is that she’ll always have this video to watch even after he’s passed on.  Is that morbid?  Well, whatever.  I don’t think my family has any home videos, but recently I’ve started to capture small snippets of the things people do that so completely define them or just really make me smile.  Like my stepmother’s infectious laugh, or seeing her and my dad clowning around together and giggling; or one of my grandmother’s unintentionally hilarious lectures with the wagging pointed finger, where we all end up laughing.  I guess I’m just thinking more about mortality, and realizing how important it is to pull together some of those scraps of life into hard-copy memories.

Here’s a description of ChangeCamp from the site:

ChangeCamp is an event format, an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.

A ChangeCamp event is a participatory and web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and media creators to answer one question:

“How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”

ChangeCamp addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and government. We seek to create connections, knowledge, tools and policies that drive transparency, civic engagement and democratic empowerment.

All that to say, there were a whole lot of enthusiastic and tech-savvy people gathered together to imagine new ways of doing things.  It was hard to get out of bed so early on a Saturday, but definitely worth it!

Image via Flickr

Famous last words from my last post re. spring cleaning:

We’re chipping away at it a little every day, and I know that by the end of our holiday we’ll be living in a clean, serene and organized space.

HA!  Well, the universe certainly didn’t have that in store for us.  We did make some great progress on our spring cleaning in the first few days of our holiday, but eventually life caught up with us.  I got clobbered with a nasty migraine for a couple of days, and later my stepmum ended up going to the ER with appendicitis and having emergency surgery.  Yikes!  (She’s recovering very well, by the way.  Phew!)  Needless to say, some things are higher priority in life than re-alphabetizing the spice drawer.

But we did actually manage to relax a little too.  My partner and I spent his birthday luxuriating at Le Nordik, an outdoor spa in Quebec, followed by a wonderful lunch at a great little vegetarian place, Le Cafe Soupe ‘Herbe.  Absolutely wonderful.  I also had a fun day hanging out with my mom, and went to see a totally sweet movie – Bedtime Story – with my volunteer match (part of a group I volunteer with).  And hey, the weather wasn’t half bad.  So all in all, I think it was a pretty good week off.

Now our challenge is to keep hacking away at the spring cleaning now that we’re back to our busy work schedules.  The apartment is totally nutty with sorting boxes blanketing the living room floor, not to mention the plant re-potting station set up in the middle of the kitchen floor.  The half-way mess is driving me even more crazy than the initial mess!  Hopefully we can blast the rest of it on the weekend.

Saw this on the news today and nearly keeled over laughing.  From BBC News:

An 18-year-old has secretly painted a 60ft drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents’ £1million mansion in Berkshire. It was there for a year before his parents found out. They say he’ll have to scrub it off when he gets back from travelling.

You know you’re rich and spoiled when you can paint a giant penis on your parents’ mansion and they don’t kill you when they find out…”oh yes, the giant phallus, we’ll have him fix it when he returns from his travels…”

I know, another video, but I couldn’t help myself!  This is a really well-done parody of Britney’s “womanizer” vid.  Maybe I’m just biased, hitched as I am to a headset-wearing, WoW playing, chewbacca action figure owning, Star Trek and Star Wars reference spouting, super awesome nerdy man

I’m going to see this documentary tomorrow night. It looks pretty interesting – check out this hilarious excerpt. The only thing more entertaining than the space-travel story is that it’s told by a middle-aged guy that looks like a mild-mannered duck conservationist.

This film is on a double-bill with another documentary, “Grass,” about the history of the US government’s war on marijuana. So it should be an interesting and educational night (this all counts as thesis research, right?…)