pet connection

Our Kim Campbell Thornton, as you can see by the previous post, is at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. She’ll be posting vignettes and sending me cell phone images to post for her over the next couple of days as she can. (Congrats on the DWAA win, Kim!)

Allergic as I am to cold, ice and snow (marginally) and crowds (severely), I just haven’t wanted to go for the last  few years. You haven’t felt claustrophia until you’re trapped in the benching area in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, with total human/canine gridlock in the aisles and some obnoxious professional handler trying to push his way through you into a crowd that simply cannot go anywhere because there’s nowhere to go.

Westminster marketing and PR ace David Frei has done an amazing job of making Westminster an even grander, must-see-it canine event than it already was, but since he has also managed to get it completely and utterly sold out since his masterful touch at promoting it, the crowds are too much for me. And since nothing is covered well from the comfort and safety of the press room, I’ll be watching from TV.

But I have a prediction: Uno the beagle will win it.

Not because I’ve been following closely enough to really know this year — with the pet-food recall, the books and more, I just haven’t had the time — but because I want a beagle to win it. That way, my college newspaper pal Anthony Sorci a/k/a “The Source,” now an editor at The Sacramento Bee, won’t e-mail me to complain that a “real dog” never wins.

This one’s for you, Source-Man. Ahhhhh-roooooooo!

New breeds at Westminster this year are the subject of the New York Times’ piece yesterday, which includes a nifty slide show. Check it out. 

And speaking of watching it from afar … don’t forget that the USA Network’s coverage will flip to CNBC tonight from 9-11 p.m. so wrestling can stay in its usual spot. Tuesday night, the entire three-hour Westminster coverage will remain on the USA Network. Set your TiVos accordingly. And somewhere, you know Christopher Guest’s wonderful “Best In Show” is playing as well.  I love that movie.

I’m feeling old department: I was there when the mother of the dog who just won Best of Breed in Rhodesian Ridgebacks was born.  (She was bred by a friend of mine.) Here is that dog  is at Crufts,where she was the first American import ridgeback to win her class, back in 2004.  If I figure/remember this right, the Best of Breed winner’s great-grandfather , Turbo, was also a Westminster Best of Breed. I can remember this, and I can’t remember where I put my keys on any given day. Go figure.

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The young and the snarky:Word of advice to the student journalist… going into an interview with an attitide of “too cool for school” condescension and bemusement and a lack of even cursory research of a subject beforehand does not serve you or your readers. So quit being a twit, child. If you drop the attitude, you might learn something from the people you meet. In fact, learning about other people is the best thing about being a journalist, I can say 25 years after I was the editor of my college paper (most of which have been spent in a newsroom).