This blog feature amusing and heartwarming stories about our late Leonberger dog Bronco, as well as other Leonbergers. It also has a lot of information about the Leonberger breed, the history, care, training, Leonberger organizations, etc. I also wrote a Leonberger book, which I am featuring in the sidebar.
Other topics not necessarily related to Bronco, Leonbergers or dogs.
I typically don’t ask for Guest blogs, but I certainly don’t mind if someone wants to do a guest blog here. It is great to get quality content for free. I just came home from visiting our 8 months old grandson Jack. We had a good time. We went to the zoo, I went fishing with my son, and Jack wrote a blog post which is shown below.
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Please take a look at Smorgasbord Blog Magazine’s post about my super fact #7 “Poverty and child mortality has been sharply reduced worldwide“.
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The focus of this blog is Leonbergers. However, sometimes I post about other things and today I am making a lighthearted post about an English idiom that I find interesting. An idiom that is not used in my native language Swedish. The idiom is “When all is said and done”, and it is used to introduce a conclusion, or the most important fact to remember in a specific situation.
The one minute youTube video below is in regard to a demon possessed toaster. This poor lady is in a truly horrifying and nightmarish situation. The question is. What is the most important fact to remember in this specific situation? By watching the video, you will find out.
Last week I was reading a blog post in which one of the characters ordered Voodoo Rangers IPAs using door dash. I asked the author, John Howell, if you really can order Voodoo Rangers using door dash. He reminded me that his story was a work of fiction. However, I wanted to try whether it was possible to do that, and John encouraged me to try. So, I ordered a 12 pack of Voodoo Ranger Imperial IPA using door dash (which they picked up from a store here in Dallas called Tom Thumb). As it turned out, I got my Voodoo Rangers from door dash. So, when all is said and done, you can order Voodoo Rangers from door dash. Below are a few of photos.
Finally, a 3 minute of ABBA’s somewhat sad song “When all is said and done”. It is a reflection on the end of a relationship.
“I’ll Be Waiting for You at the Rainbow Bridge” is a very heartwarming and touching story about loosing a pet written by Luisa Zambrotta. It really touched my heart and I want you all to read it.
The pictures below were drawn by Naomi Rosenblatt.
Today is my birthday and we are spending it in Baltimore (don’t worry we have people watching house and dog etc.). Our son, his wife and their son Jack (our first grandchild) lives in Baltimore. Jack just turned six months. That is why I have not been very active in the blogosphere lately. Below are a few Leonberger Happy birthday photos.
Today we visited the Cherry Blossom at Fort McHenry National Monument. Fun fact: “The Star-Spangled Banner” was born as a poem written by Francis Scott Key on September 14, 1814, after witnessing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland. Below are some Baltimore photos.
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We just came home from a trip to New Orleans, which is truly a magical city. New Orleans is not very far from Dallas, where we live, and we’ve been to New Orleans several times. However, it was a fun family trip with a theme. The theme we chose for our trip was Magic, including Vampires, Voodoo/Hoodoo, ghosts, pirates and St. Patrick’s Day. We also went on a ghost tour. Below are some photos from the Voodoo Museum, and miscellaneous voodoo, witches, vampire and pirate stores.
Photo Tile with photos from the Voodoo Museum, a Hoodoo Queen, vampire art, pirate, and witch store.
We also ate at a restaurant that has a ghost. The Muriel’s Jackson Square restaurant is allegedly haunted by a ghost that sits in the chair. The ghost is a former owner by name of Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan.
Voodoo is a religion blending African traditions with Catholicism. It is originating from enslaved people in Haiti and Louisiana. It focuses on serving spirits and honoring ancestors and connecting with nature. It is not black magic. However, I admit I’ve made fun of the so called voodoo dolls. Marie Catherine Laveau was one the most prominent practitioners of voodoo. She was born a free woman of color in New Orleans’s French Quarter, Louisiana, on September 10, 1801. We saw her house. Below are photos from the Voodoo Museum.
Photo Tile from the Voodoo Museum
We also did some vampire related things. New Orleans is often called the Transylvania of America. Author’s such as Anne Rice have brought attention to New Orleans and its vampire legends. I read a book with 40 short stories about vampires while we visited New Orleans. The book was Vermillion Highways by David Lee Summers and Lee Clark Zumpe. I will make a post about that book in a couple of days. We visited vampire stores and the famous Vampire Café. See the photos below.
Photo Tile from Vampire Café.
I should say that we did other things as well. We visited the aquarium, rainforest, and insectarium, which is quite impressive. We celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day, and we made a couple of visits to the famous Pat O’Brien’s Pub. We all had a good time.
Today is the second time I participate in Linda Hill’s streams of consciousness. To read about the rules and participate click here. Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “review.” The first thing that came to my mind was the review wars on Amazon.
I’ve written several hundred reviews on Amazon, for software, computers, electronics, consumer products, movies and books. I was an Amazon Vine Voice for many years. Amazon Vine Voice is a program where Amazon reviewers receive free products from vendors in exchange for unbiased reviews. You must be invited by Amazon. However, as I was offered fewer expensive items, I got annoyed and I quit. My thinking was basically, if I don’t get a free TV or computer, I am not writing any reviews. I kind of regret that now. Free products are still free products.
There were and still are a lot of shady reviews and shady reviewer behavior on Amazon. This sometimes led to fights. I remember one prominent reviewer, Harriet Klausner. She was the #1 ranked reviewer on Amazon.com for many years and she held the #1 spot in the Amazon reviewer hall of fame at the time of her death. If you spent any significant time on Amazon as a reviewer, you know who Harriet Klausner is. I did a quick search for her as I was writing this, and I found the Wikipedia link for Harriet Klausner.
Harriet Klausner wrote 30,000+ book reviews in a relatively short time. I counted 20,000 reviews in just a few years. She loved every book and every book was intriguing to her. Almost every book was five stars. Then some people started accusing her of not really reading that many books, or for being biased. I admit I also had my doubts that someone could read thousands of books per year. Some people came to her defense while others claimed she was a fake. We may never know the truth, but the negativity spread.
People started accusing each other of faking reviews and fights broke out. Reviewer gangs were formed. They went around clicking the unhelpful button on other people’s reviews. One reviewer could get 3 helpful clicks the day after he published a review and then get 1,000 unhelpful clicks the day after. This affected the reviewer’s standing in the ranks. People were trying to improve their rankings, which back then were published next to the reviewers name, and fights broke out over the ranks. Amazon mostly put a stop to this by changing how the rank was calculated, hiding the reviewer rank well, and eventually removing the unhelpful button, as it was so widely misused.
Reviewer rank was a major cause for the Review Wars but the actions that Amazon took greatly improved the situation. However, there is still some really shady stuff happening on Amazon. For example, people writing negative reviews for books they have not read. In this case it is not reviewer rank that is the cause. People slam books they have not read because they don’t like the author, or they don’t like the topic. Sometimes, inauthentic reviewers can slam a book just because it is written by an independent author.
Topics like evolution, climate science, vaccines, religion and politics, offend some people and attract dishonest reviewers. Even a simple fact that is widely accepted by experts/scientists in the field can enrage some people. For that reason, books on these topics can get a lot of negative reviews from people who never bought the book, or if they did, they never gave the book a chance. This is often obvious to those among us who actually read the book.
Another related phenomenon are commentors who attack or argue with reviewers who have left a positive review for a book. This happened to me. I wrote a five star review for a climate science book I really liked, and this guy started leaving comments on my review in which he attacked the book and the author. He did not attack me, not directly, but he said disparaging things about the author. What was behind all this was that the author had sued a couple of people for one million dollars for defamation and people associated with the defendants attacked the author and the people who wrote positive reviews for the book (using fake names of course). Reading a bit about what was going on I found out that it was possible that I was arguing with one of the defendants, a Fox News host by the name of Mark Steyn.
Note: The author of the book in question won the one million dollar lawsuit in 2024 but the amount was reduced by a judge in 2025. I can add I ended up sitting next to Mark Steyn on a flight from Marseille to London. I was going to ask him if he had paid the one million dollars, but I said nothing. I moved next to my wife (empty seat) and another Fox News anchor took my seat.
Speaking about reviews, a piece of music that popped up in my head as I was writing this post is Naturträne (Nature’s Tear) a German PunkOpera song by Nina Hagen. Naturträne describes a woman who appears to be distraught over natural degradation (rattling exhaust pipes / Auspuffrohre knattern) and a lost love and her crushed soul. My high school German is rusty. You can say it is a very poetic but dark review of her life. For those who don’t know who Nina Hagen is, she is a former East German Opera singer, actress and musical artist who sings in the Punk-Opera genre and is known for her theatrical style.
She was able to make it to West Germany, and the song below was performed at Rock Palats in 1978. If you don’t know who Nina Hagen is (Europeans will know who it is) you are in for a shock. She depicts a distraught and crazy woman very well. However, it is bizarre but authentic.
Do you like Punk-Opera?
Sorry, that’s the question that popped up in my head right now.
I am sorry that I have not been very active in the blogosphere lately. We had a special visit from our five months old grandson Jack. Our son Jacob, his wife Ashley and baby Jack came to visit us last Thursday and they left Monday night and during that time I mostly ignored the blogosphere but now I am back. With this post I thought I would display a few baby photos. First there are a few photos from our visit to Baltimore to see baby Jacka couple of months ago and then the rest of the photos were taken during their visit to us here in Dallas, which took place during the last few days.
It was a challenging few days for our mini-Australian Shepherd Rollo. Dogs being jealous of a baby is a very real thing. I’ve read that dogs don’t see us the same as a pack of dogs but something better than a pack, care takers and family. They typically prefer their human family over a pack of dogs. They understand the difference between dogs and people. Rollo does not really try to be a pack leader, but he cherishes his position as the baby in the family, and suddenly here comes a human baby out of nowhere.
The human baby gets lots of attention, he sits in a stroller just like Rollo sometimes did in the past, people use a baby voice when they talk to the human baby, like they do with him, and on top of it I called baby Jack, Rollo, instead of Jack several times. I can add that I recently also mixed up the cats Charlee and Chaplin on another blog. Rollo felt that things were taken from him and he growled at the baby a couple of times.
So, what we did was to pay a lot of attention to Rollo, making sure we did not exclude him, and we gave him treats every time he was in the same room as the baby. It turned out that this worked very well. This was something our daughter had looked up. Well, now when Jack has gone back to Baltimore, Rollo is back to being the supreme baby of the family, or the King of Texas if you will. Below are a couple of photos of Rollo in his new cap or coat, Dr. Pooper, a sort of advertisement for a Texas soda called Dr. Pepper. It was just for fun and he did not mind.
With this post I just wanted to highlight my other blog superfactful. The purpose of that blog is to find facts that are important and true with very high certainty and yet disputed by many amongst the public (but not scientists/experts), surprising to many, and perhaps shocking. Imagine telling a medieval peasant who believes that Earth is flat like a pancake that it is closely spherical. That Earth is not flat like a pancake is true with a very high certainty (BTW nothing outside of logic and math is absolutely 100%), it is kind of important, and would probably be surprising to him. Maybe he’ll call it BS, but that is the point.
I call these kinds of facts SUPER FACTS, and I am the super fact hunter. I am trying to make the blog fun and educational. I use reputable sources to back up my claims that I hope will shock many without resorting to clickbait. It is not an academic blog, but I am linking to thousands of academic sources. Below I am listing my five last super facts. To see the full post, you have to click on the links.
Superfact 87: Wind energy is a clean, renewable, and sustainable power source that produces no atmospheric emissions or water pollution during operation. Manufacturing and installation have a small carbon footprint that is much smaller than the carbon footprint of the fossil fuels they potentially replace.
Super fact 86 : Early humans, early homo sapiens, lived at the same time as many other human species including Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo naledi, Homo luzonensis. Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, and maybe other species as well.
Super fact 85 : Scientists recognized that whales descended from land animals already in the 19th century. However, it was not until the 1980’s that intermediate fossils for whale evolution were found. In addition, molecular and genetic / DNA studies showed that Hippopotamus and whales were closely related. Until then the evolution of whales was a bit of a mystery and creationists frequently mocked the lack of intermediate fossils for whale evolution.
Super fact 84 : Modern birds are classified as part of the clade Dinosauria. They are direct descendants of small, feathered maniraptoran dinosaurs that survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. Maniraptoran dinosaurs in turn are a major subgroup of coelurosaurian theropod dinosaurs. In other words, birds are avian dinosaurs.
Super fact 83 : Everyone experiences false memories. They are a normal part of how human memory works and are very common. There are also false memories that are shared among large groups of people and that are often socially reinforced. This is called the Mandela effect.
Click here to visit my list of super facts
Feel free to check out my other blog if you haven’t yet done so
Leonberger Life 