What?, he's thinking, I'm being good:

(Via Bruce Schneier.) I'm really not sure what to make of this, or what, actually, they're selling:

I recently started introducing Parker to some new foods that the dog walkers recommended, and what do you know? Parker cleans his bowl of every last kibble. There seems to be a side-effect, however: he's put on more than a kilo since his last weighing on July 4th, up to 26 kg. Back to a strict feeding schedule, dude. Sorry.

A coyote hanging out at Francis Cardinal George's mansion got away from Chicago Animal Control on Monday. Repeatedly:

The wild animal played hide-and-seek with police officers and later the Animal Care and Control team for more than five hours. The last three hours were spent chasing the coyote back and forth from baseball fields at Lake Shore Drive and LaSalle Street to the yard of Cardinal Francis George's residence at North Avenue and State Street.

The coyote seems to have sought sanctuary recently on the mansion's grounds. The nuns at the residence said they were not bothered by the coyote, which they say gets rid of the rabbits that ravage their garden.

Yes, they get rid of rabbits, which have surged in Chicago since West Nile started killing all the crows a few years ago. (Crows eat rabbit kits as hors d'oeuvres.) So why bother the coyote?

"It doesn't make sense," bystander Mahlon Canete said after the coyote whipped past him. "They're chasing him with a van. That was embarrassing."

...

Shortly after the officers abandoned their hunt Monday, the coyote made its way to the middle of the cardinal's yard and lay down for the first time in hours.

Paws for a moment.

Also, I devoured Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this weekend. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I tell you...

These things are cool. For about $1,000 each, the Shelter Box Trust (Shelter Box USA here) provides shelter to people in disaster areas. They've distributed over 32,000 boxes to half a million people since 2001, including to Indonesia in December 2004 and New Orleans in August 2005.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor dead of night, can keep Parker from playing with a tennis ball:

..."none of the above." So says the latest AP/Ipsos poll (PDF; via Talking Points Memo):

In a new AP/Ipsos Poll, 25% of Republican respondents say they are either undecided or would prefer someone other than the current field — more than the vote share of any actual candidates listed in the poll. Compare this to the Democratic side, where only 13% of respondents are undecided or prefer none of the above. In the horse-race numbers, Rudy Giuliani leads the GOP side with 21%, followed by Fred Thompson at 19%, John McCain at 15%, and Mitt Romney at 11%. Among Dems: Hillary Clinton 36%, Barack Obama 20%, Al Gore 15%, and John Edwards 11%.

The poll also shows the "right direction/wrong track" numbers at 26% and 69%, respectively. Fortunately, at maximum, only 553 days and two hours remain in the worst presidency ever.

Via security guru Bruce Schneier, an actual, real-world Trojan Horse that gets in...well, almost everywhere.

I'll be participating once more in the Les Turner ALS Foundation's annual Walk4Life, this year on September 8th. You can make donations to my mom's team through CharityWeb.

Here's the text of my mom's letter...

Phooey. My ride Saturday seems to have caused some irritation in either the ligaments or cartilege of my left knee. Not crippling, but kind of painful. So no biking this weekend, and I'll have to postpone my planned 80 km ride to the following weekend.

Last year, I couldn't ride the two centuries I'd trained for because of my gallbladder. If I'm out because of my knee this year, I'll be really, really disappointed. And I can't even blame Tonya Harding.

The stuffed vet that Danielle gave Parker a couple weeks ago still lives on—though empty of stuffing and looking a bit haggard:

And Parker is live today. Astute viewers will notice a patch of something on his right hip. That's mud from this morning in the park. So tonight, he gets his quarterly bath.

Playing ball at sunset:

The current occupant and his Vice really are the worst pair ever, but achieving such lofty depths took some cunning, perserverence and a shooting incident. I mention this because on this day in 1804, the second-worst VPOTUS ever shot Alexander Hamilton to death—and the latter manifestly did not apologize to the former. (Had Hamilton done so, Cheney would have had another obstacle to slither under in his quest for the "worst ever" title.)

It's hot. Damn hot. Real hot. So yesterday afternoon I only spent about an hour at Tommy's, and made sure Parker had water:

Apparently just having me tell him not to worry causes Parker not to worry. Last night I watched the Evanston fireworks display from Northwestern University's landfill, less than 2 km from the launch site. Whereas the night before Parker nearly went out of his skin because of my neighbors' Roman candles, the official (and very loud) city display didn't distract him from trying to catch fireflies.

Via Bruce Schneier, a former British military bomb-disposal operator offers some thoughts about the clowns who completely failed to bomb anything in the UK last week:

If these guys at the weekend really were anything to do with al-Qaeda, all one can really say is that it looks as though the War on Terror is won. This whole hoo-ha kicked off, remember, with 9/11: an extremely effective attack. Then we had the Bali and Madrid bombings, not by any measure as shocking and bloody but still nasty stuff. Then we had London 7/7, a further significant drop in bodycount but still competently planned and executed (Not too many groups would have been able to mix up that much peroxide-based explosive first try without an own goal).

...

Remember, this country carried on successfully for six years with hundreds—thousands, sometimes—of tons of explosives raining down on it every night for six years, delivered by very competent Germans who often died doing that job. The civilian death toll was around 60,000 according to most sources; the equivalent of 20 9/11s, more than three for every year of the war. Civilisation was not brought down. Germany and Japan withstood even greater violence, and survived it too.

Biking yesterday I hit a new PR for spot speed: 54.0 km/h, beating the old record of 53.4 km/h I set last August 26th. Whee!

Does it seem odd to anyone that a boat from land-locked Switzerland won this year's America's Cup last night?

My brave guard dog is curled up at my feet because of the loud noises outside. He's weathered thunderstorms, my driving, and my best friend's 3-year-old son. Fireworks, too much for him.

I think he's wishing he were Canadian right now.

Long-time readers will know that I rarely post personal news here (and I'm sure some thank me for it), but this one is good: it appears we've sold our condo. In the present real-estate market, that's really good news. It sold about three months faster than I expected (but three months slower than we'd hoped.) So, barring the buyer getting hit by a bus, that's one huge thing we no longer have to fret over.

It's time for the semi-annual update of the Evanston/Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.)

Can anyone identify the species?

Parker hung out with my friends and me at Tommy Nevin's on Sunday to catch the seisiún. One friend brought him a belated birthday present, a squeakie shaped like a vet (complete with "Vet Victim" name tag); Parker had removed half the stuffing and the squeak bladder before we finished our crisps.

Bruce Schneier asks: "Is there a Special Olympics for terrorists going on in the U.K. this week?"