More Fun Tidbits

Today Penn and I celebrated Memorial Day by taking a 13-mile bike ride. On our way to the local lake (our destination) we saw a big snake sunning on the bike path! He was a couple of feet long and pretty aggressive for a snake. Rather than just slithering away when we spotted it and hopped off our bikes to get a closer look, it faced us head-on, sticking out its forked tongue to smell us and then arching itself up all cobra-style. It even rattled at us before it finally slunk away into the tall grass! Google image search has informed me that it was probably a northern banded water snake and not something scarier like an actual rattlesnake. Still, it was an exciting wildlife encounter that urban-dwellers like us don't get to have very often (although, now that I think about it, we also saw a fox on a nighttime walk a couple of weeks ago, so it's all National Geographic in our 'hood lately).
On our way home from the local lake we stopped at a restaurant for an enormous order of fajitas and then we popped into our local used book warehouse. This place is HUGE and specializes in antique, rare, and hard-to-find editions, although it also has plenty of standard used-bookstore fare. Today we were just browsing and not looking for anything in particular, but I ended up finding a gem that I had to bring home. The book is called The Fireside Book of Dog Stories and I was initially drawn to it because for some reason it made me think of my grandmother. It seems like the sort of book she would have. I picked it up and looked at the back cover, and here is what it says on the back:

"A Message to America's Dog Owners:
Total war has made it necessary to call to the colors many of the nation's dogs. Thousands of dogs, donated by patriotic men, women and children and trained for special duty with the Armed Forces, are serving on all fronts as well as standing guard against saboteurs at home.
More thousands of dogs are needed. New recruits are being inducted daily at the War Dog Training Centers, rushed into training courses which skill them as sentries, message carriers, airplane spotters, pack-carriers--and other tasks which must remain secret. The Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines depend on the generosity of the dog owners of the United States to keep that stream of recruits at full flood. They depend on those who own no dogs to speed news of this need to every corner of the land.
Most wanted are dogs of the larger breeds--Belgian Shepherds, Boxers, Airedales, German Shepherds, Doberman Pinschers, Dalmatians, German Short Haired Pointers, Collies, Standard Poodles, Eskimos, Siberian Huskies, St. Bernards, Irish Water Spaniels, Labrador Retrievers, and a dozen others. They must be at least a year old, and not more than five. Weight and height requirements vary, according to breed, from 50 pounds to 125 pounds. The animals must be temperamentally suited to military tasks--not gun-shy, not storm-shy. Perfect physical condition is essential.
To register a dog for duty, to learn how to help in the campaign to build up this new unit of the country's military might, communicate at once with the national headquarters of the official dog procurement agency."

Isn't that fascinating?
Then I opened the book to see when it was published and, sure enough, it was published in 1943. The copyright page was also informative:
"About the Appearance of Books in Wartime:
A recent ruling by the War Production Board has curtailed the use of paper by book publishers in 1943. In line with this ruling and in order to conserve materials and manpower, we are co-operating by:
1. Using lighter-weight paper which reduces the bulk of our books substantially.
2. Printing books with smaller margins and with more words to each page. Result: fewer pages per book.
Slimmer and smaller books will save paper and plate metal and labor. We are sure that readers will understand the publishers' desire to co-operate as fully as possible with the objectives of the War Production Board and our government."

I just think it's so interesting and sort of charming in a way, and I had no idea prior to today that paper was rationed during WWII (everything else was, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised) or that dogs were recruited for military service. I notice that basset hounds weren't being recruited though. Gee, I wonder why nobody wanted lazy bumps-on-a-log bassets to serve the USA? Anyway, this book gets a place of honor on my bookshelf, right next to my other novelty book, a guide about basset hound training and grooming written entirely in Russian that I bought in St. Petersburg last year.

I feel like I should tell you something important about my life since all I've been doing lately is sharing minor tidbits, but I don't have much to say. Everything that was broken has been repaired, other than my computer (which is still in the shop). The truck is back from the shop, my phone is almost as good as new. I'm off of my contract for the summer so I don't have any assistantship work to do until late August, but I'm already up to my neck in work on a major summer project I'm doing with some friends and our students (this is separate from my dissertation and wedding planning, two other major ongoing projects that are also keeping me busy). I start teaching a class in July, so I guess I should prep for that eventually. I just put in a proposal to present another conference paper in November, although I'm feeling very ambivalent. I know I need to go for the networking since I haven't done a conference since August, but I really don't want to spend the money to go all the way to said conference across the country a month and a half before the wedding. I finally talked myself into writing and sending the proposal; if I get selected for the conference I'll worry about finding funding and deciding whether or not I actually want to go.
So, yeah. That's the news from here.