Tanuki's Little Red Riding Hood

I thought this wolf looked like Tanuki.

Rie Yamashina via Internet Weekly.

why music matters.

Howling at the Lunatics

Quoted from: Dane Lovett

Suzanne G.:
If I had one wish in this world dominated by quick, generic and often rather uninspiring digital photography clogging up our precious webspace, it would be to bring Francesca Woodman back to life.

She committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22 by jumping out of a loft window in New York, but for me, her works have only grown in their eroticism and thanatal (I wrote it, therefore it’s a word now!) attraction since.

In other canine news, a dog who was washed overboard and believed drowned has been found four months later - as a castaway on a remote Australian island.

a judgment call on a particularly scary-looking spill

the tears of a Geisha by ~tsuname

Racing Association Covers Up Horses' Deaths:

"It was a judgment call on a particularly scary-looking spill," said John Lee, spokesman for the New York Racing Association.

The NYRA is afraid of the video being used by groups such as PETA for their gain or for television stations that never show horse racing except for spills.

But in this day and age, the video is already out there. You can watch the spill at youtube.com.

Kim Thue via PUS-EYE

Herman Düne - "Show Me The Roof".

Life Sucks and then you Die

(or take a shower and get back to work)
bible of tears by ~shamanski

Tony Immoos via Wagga

So why bother hurting the innocents?


"Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit from Barker Gerard on Vimeo.
via i guess i'm floating...
There were few songs from last year that I could listen to over and over again without getting tired of their sound, fortunately for the joints in my body that like to dance, "Sleepyhead" was one of those tracks. So, naturally, when I received a message this past afternoon about a new video for Passion Pit's smash song I thought, "Hm, nothing new to see here."

Turns out I was surprisingly mistaken! This original video is quite enjoyable - the type of visual stimulus that enhances the song, almost giving it texture. It combines solid editing with that universal urge to dance "Sleepyhead" induces and applies it across cultures and time-spans. Not to mention that dicey synth breakdown flashes images of colorful spinning, an amusing watch for a sleepy Saturday evening.

Good News for Gray Wolves!

PETA: As one of his first orders of business, President Barack Obama has suspended a plan to remove several gray wolf populations from the Endangered Species List. Originally, the Interior Department wanted to remove the wolves from the list, thereby exposing them to harm and slaughter.

In not so PETA-friendly news, we have this bizarre hospital fetish restaurant in Latvia:
via boingboing

これはすごい。色々な物を使い表現された雑貨アート:
VanGogh and Marilyn via t e l e s p h o r e

Well at least Iceland has Björk.
I love this Sugarcubes classic:

A yodel of sorts?

Hurricane Dog was the most intense hurricane in the 1950 Atlantic hurricane season. The fourth named storm of the season, Dog developed on August 30 to the east of Antigua, and after passing through the northern Lesser Antilles turned to the north and intensified into a Category 5 hurricane. Dog reached its peak intensity of 185 mph (295 km/h) over the open Atlantic, and after weakening passed within 200 miles (320 km) of Cape Cod before becoming extratropical on September 12. Hurricane Dog caused extensive damage to the Leeward Islands, and was considered the most severe hurricane on record in Antigua. Many buildings were destroyed or severely damaged on the island, with thousands left homeless just weeks after Hurricane Baker had caused serious damage on the island. In the United States, the hurricane caused moderate coastal damage, including damaging several boats and causing 11 offshore drownings. Strong winds caused widespread power outages across southeastern New England. Damage across its path totaled about $3 million (1950 USD, $25.7 million 2007 USD).

More vintage Sweetness Yodel with a Big Mouth:

As if the Bush Admin hasn't done enough damage: Gray Wolf Removed From Protection

Sad Wolf by ~PaPeRDoLLLL

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- The Bush administration on Wednesday announced plans to remove gray wolves in the western Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountains regions from the federal endangered species list.

But wolves in Wyoming will remain under federal jurisdiction because that state has not done enough to assure their survival, Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett said.

Previous attempts by the federal government to remove wolves in both regions from the endangered list and return management authority to the states have been overruled by courts.

In the northern Rockies, the Fish and Wildlife Service tried to address the courts' concerns by excluding Wyoming, where officials had sought a ''predator zone'' covering almost 90 percent of the state where the animals could be shot on sight. Federal officials said Wyoming law would have to change before wolves there could be taken off the list, and Wyoming Attorney General Bruce Salzburg said Wednesday that it was ''probable'' that the state would challenge the latest federal plan in court.

In the western Great Lakes region, the federal government made no policy changes. The Fish and Wildlife Service disagreed with the judge's ruling and restated its case.

The wolves will be removed from the endangered species list 30 days after the decision is published in the Federal Register, which officials said could happen within the next two weeks. A small population of Mexican Gray wolves in the Southwest was not affected by Wednesday's announcement.

The decision could be reversed by President-elect Barack Obama's administration, said Rowan Gould, acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said the matter would be reviewed but offered no other details.

''President-elect Obama will review all eleventh-hour regulations and will address them once he is president,'' Shapiro said.

''We would hope ... the next administration would not turn around and go a different direction, but of course that certainly is their choice and opportunity,'' Scarlett said.

Scarlett also said that the decision was based on science independently of policy considerations and that it was a watershed moment for a species first listed as endangered in 1974.

''Returning this essential part of our national heritage to so much of our natural landscape ranks among our greatest conservation achievements,'' Scarlett said.

David Mech, a leading wolf expert and senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, supported the assertion that the wolf population had rebounded.

''I'm satisfied, and most wolf biologists I know are satisfied, that wolf populations in both regions have been biologically recovered for the last five years,'' Mech said.

But environmental and animal rights groups, deriding the move as a last-minute effort by the Bush administration to strip protections, promised Wednesday to return to court with another round of lawsuits.

About 1,500 wolves in the Northern Rockies were taken off the list in February 2008. But a federal judge nullified the move in July, saying state management plans could not guarantee their recovery was sustainable.

The northern Rocky Mountain wolf segment includes all of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, the eastern one-third of Washington and Oregon, and a small part of north-central Utah.

Idaho and Montana already have crafted plans for public hunts to keep wolf populations in check. There were no immediate plans for hunts in the western Great Lakes.

''We're the people that have to live with it,'' said Eric Svenson of Reed Point, Mont., where officials said wolves have killed two dozen sheep and goats on the Svenson Ranch.

''Maybe hunting will keep their population in check,'' Svenson said.
Last September, a federal judge sided with animal-rights groups that accused the government of misapplying the law in when it lifted protections for about 4,000 wolves in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2007.

Gray wolves previously were listed as endangered in the lower 48 states, except in Minnesota, where they were listed as threatened.

Wolf kiss by ~jager154

Settsuna the wolf by *Reenigrl

+ Wolf Gods + by =korone

wolf by ~ya-na

In other news, Casey Serin doesn't believe in government bailouts (because his mommy helps him) and police drop theft investigation of 27 valuable koi.

The Mummers' Wolves

Some Good News I Missed in the Gloom & Doom of it All

Wolves by ~Dragonsfire867

A federal wildlife official in Billings said the government planned to retreat for now from its attempt to take gray wolves in the Northern Rockies off the endangered species list. The official, Ed Bangs of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the government in the next week planned to withdraw a rule issued this spring. The rule was based on the assertion that the region’s approximately 1,500 wolves were recovered fully, opening the way for public hunting of wolves to begin this fall in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Those hunts had been in doubt since July, when Judge Donald Molloy of Federal District Court blocked them pending resolution of a lawsuit by environmentalists.
Montana: Gray Wolves May Get Government Reprieve

The only way Wall Street's meltdown doesn't spill over to Main Street is if policymakers begin to pay adequate attention to the people whose wallets really keep the economy going, and who merit more help than the Wall Street tycoons whose carelessness and negligence have put it in such jeopardy.


Wolves by !Lupo-Selvaggio

I would like to post a happy fishnet friday post, but...

First kills of 2008.

Making matters worse Open Season on Wolves in Wyoming starts today: Today, the decision by the Bush administration to remove the Northern Rockies gray wolf from the list of species protected under the Endangered Species Act goes into effect.

Video and details on CNN via Wagga.

It's now OK to shoot gray wolves in the Northern Rockies

Waterwolves by ~skipaway

Apparently a grand total of only 1,500 grey wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming means it is now OK to hunt them.
Grey wolves in the Northern Rockies of the United States have been removed from the endangered species list, the US Department of the Interior has said.
The move follows efforts over the last 13 years to protect the animals and allow their population to grow.
There are now an estimated 1,500 grey wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
They became a protected species in the US after they were nearly hunted to extinction. The removal of protection means they can be hunted again.
Environmental groups have said they will sue the federal government to keep the animal listed.
More

Also:
Bush Administration Announces Plan to Strip Wolves of Endangered Species Protection

Deputy Secretary of the Interior Lynn Scarlett called the wolf recovery program a "remarkable conservation success story," but wolf advocates disagree. They are upset that wolves will once again be hunted, and they say the population levels allowed by the government are not large enough to maintain a viable population.

Idaho officials want to use aerial gunning as seen in this video to kill wolves in their state.

Save America's wolves from the Bush/Cheney Administration.

Tell Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that this rule change is unacceptable.

They Plan to Kill the Gray Wolves in Wyoming!

Wolf 34 by ~ForsakeWolf

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.
The so-called delisting is scheduled to begin in late March, almost five years later than federal wildlife managers first proposed, mainly because of human tussles here in Wyoming over the politics of managing the wolves.
Now changes during that time are likely to make the transition even more complicated. As the federal government and the State of Wyoming sparred in court over whether Wyoming’s hard-edged management plan was really a recipe for wolf eradication, as some critics said, the wolf population soared. (The reworked plan was approved by the federal government in November.)
During that period, many parts of the human West were changing, too. Where unsentimental rancher attitudes — that wolves were unwelcome predators, threatening the cattle economy — once prevailed, thousands of newcomers have moved in, buying up homesteads as rural retreats, especially near Yellowstone National Park, where the wolves began their recovery in 1995 and from which they have spread far and wide.
The result is that there are far more wolves to manage today than there once would have been five years ago — which could mean, biologist say, more killing of wolves just to keep the population in check. And that blood-letting might not be quite as popular as it once was.
“If they’d delisted when the numbers were smaller, the states would have been seen as heroes and good managers,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. “Now people will say they’re murderers.”
Wolves are intelligent, adaptable, highly mobile in staking out new territory, and capable of rapid reproduction rates if food sources are good and humans with rifles or poison are kept in check by government gridlock — and that is precisely what happened.
From the 41 animals that were released inside Yellowstone from 1995 to 1997, mostly from Canada, the population grew to 650 wolves in 2002 and more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York State and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.
Human head counts have also climbed in the same turf. From 1995 to 2005, a 25-county area, in three states, that centers on Yellowstone grew by 12 percent, to about 691,000 people, according to a report earlier this year by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana. That compares to a 6 percent growth rate for Wyoming as a whole in that period, 7.5 percent for all of Montana, and 19 percent for Idaho. The wolf population has grown faster in Idaho than any place else in the region, doubling to about 800 in the past four years.

The director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Terry Cleveland, said changes in economics and attitude were creating a profound wrinkle in the outlook for human-wolf relations. Mr. Cleveland, a 39-year-veteran with the department, said that many newcomers, who are more interested in breath-taking vistas than the price of feed-grain and calves, do not see wolves the way older residents do.
In the public comment period for Wyoming’s wolf plan, sizable majorities of residents in the counties near Yellowstone expressed opposition. Teton County, around Jackson Hole, led the way, with more than 95 percent of negative comment about the plan, according an analysis by the state. Many respondents feared that the plan would lead to more killing of wolves than necessary.
Wolf by ~Faceless-Fantasy

“It used to be, ‘Yeah, we live near wild animals,’ now it’s like, ‘Gosh, we need to manage them, and it’s the job of the state to do that,’ ” said Meg Daly, a writer in Jackson, who submitted a comment opposing the wolf plan and recently spoke to a reporter by telephone. Ms. Daly said she had lived in Wyoming as a child and moved back last year.
Many new land owners around Yellowstone have also barred the hunting of animals like elk on their property, sometimes, in a single pen stroke, closing off thousands of acres that Wyoming hunters had used for decades. Mr. Cleveland said he expected that those same “no trespassing” signs would be up and in force, creating de facto wolf sanctuaries, when wolf hunters or state wildlife managers started coming around this year. But the trend of land enclosure, Mr. Cleveland said, is probably not in the wolf’s long-term interest.
“As large ranches become less economically viable, the alternative is 40-acre subdivisions,” he said, “and that is not compatible with any kind of wildlife.”
Some advocates of wolf protection say that for all the talk of moderation and the nods to a changing ethos, old attitudes will take over once the gray wolf is delisted.
“I think it’s going to be open season,” said Suzanne Stone, a wolf specialist at Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group.
Ms. Stone said she thought the changes that led to federal approval of Wyoming’s wolf plan were mostly cosmetic.
Ms. Stone and others are concerned that the plan grants Wyoming something that no other state in the Yellowstone region received: the right to kill wolves at any time by any means across most of the state.
In the northwest corner near Yellowstone and in Idaho and Montana, wolves will be classified as trophy game animals and may be killed only in strictly controlled numbers by licensed hunters. In the 80 percent of Wyoming outside the Yellowstone area, however, wolves will be labeled predators, with no limits and no permits required to kill them.
Sleepy Wolf by ~Leona

The state has pledged to maintain at least 15 breeding pairs, or about 150 animals, in a five-county region around the park. The state now has about 362 wolves, according to the most recent estimates in late September.
That formulation sounds just about right to Chip Clouse.
“I support no wolves on private land, and right now we have wolves running rampant,” said Mr. Clouse, a rancher and a former outfitter in Cody, just east of Yellowstone, who has lived in Wyoming for 37 years. “They brought the wolves in for people to see on the public lands, in the park, and what has happened is that they have grown so many packs that they’re now impeding on people who are just trying to live and make a living on their own property.”
gray wolf by ~lee13hayess

Joel DiPaola, a chef at a Jackson ski resort who arrived in Wyoming from Connecticut in the early 1990s, just before the wolves, said he thought much of the huffing and puffing about the animals was emotional and would make little difference.
“As the state was dragging its feet, the wolves were breeding and expanding,” Mr. DiPaola said. “It’s now going to be almost impossible to get rid of them even if they try. Once they seem to get a foothold and have a refuge in the parks, they’re here.”
A Divide as Wolves Rebound in a Changing West