Thoughts on a Few Gifts
I got the Looney Tunes/Bugs Bunny stuff, as I hoped. The 4-disc set (56 cartoons), not just the 2-disc set! Blockbuster wanted 80 or 90 bucks for it, but my wife got it at Walmart for just over 50.
Isaac Hayes greatest hits. Of course, the "Theme from Shaft"--which no one else has ever performed or recorded successfully. I haven't heard the whole disc yet (my wife keeps re-playing her Christmas CDs), but "Never Can Say Goodbye" is also very good.
My surprise CD is by Michael Buble (Boo-blay). My wife has seen him on at least one TV show, and I have seen a bit of a special about him. He sounds more or less like a young Frank Sinatra, and he loves doing the "old standards"--not just Sinatra's tunes (on this album he does "Summer Wind" and "Come Fly with Me"), but Peggy Lee ("Fever"), etc. (Other tunes: "The Way You Look Tonight," which keeps getting brought back by the movies; "Moondance" (yes, Van Morrison); "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" (Beegees; Al Green did a great version which featured in a chick flick; "Notting Hill?"); "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" (Queen; words and music by Freddie Mercury)). So he is stretching, and all that--but he sounds like an old-fashioned "standards" dude.
The strange part of the story is this. There is no radio station that will play him. Those that play "oldies" want the "oldie" artists, beginning with Sinatra--not some young guy who has the sound down. Nobody else wants to play him at all. Yet when he appears on TV (often with a heavily female audience), sings a ballad, kisses a host like Katie Couric, sales of his CDs go through the roof.
Buble was kind of "discovered" by the famous Canadian producer, David Foster, performing in lounges and what not. Presumably he could be huge on cruise ships, and he was fairly contented the way he was. But he and Foster kept having this conversation: how to get him to the next level, where he can at least sell some CDs? They approached another business guy (possibly Humberto Gatica, now listed as co-producer) and he told them flatly he had no interest. He now says Buble is unique: he must get on TV in order to sell, but literally every TV appearance has brought a huge increase in sales.
Do radio people no longer know what side their bread is buttered on?
Update: I've actually had kind of a Michael Buble day. My wife rented the movie "Down on Love," and Buble sings on it twice: once for the opening number, and the second time, you guessed it, for the closing one. The closing number is "For Once in My Life," written by Paul Anka, also on the album I now own. (This song was made famous for me by Stevie Wonder, but according to Google Sinatra did it as well).
For comparison, the movie juxtaposes Sinatra singing "Fly Me to the Moon" with a lovely female version. It sounds like Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66 (with Lani Hall singing lead?), but I think the closing credits say it is Astrud Gilberto (better known for working with Antonio (Tom) Jobim and Stan Getz). I guess the obvious thing to say is that Buble lacks something the young Sinatra had; an edge?
As a stocking stuffer, I got a big Annual dog magazine--the kind of thing I can read for hours, with details on different breeds, etc. It struck me again how much the entire dog "business" is driven by breeders selling adorable looking pups. In this case, any breeder who wants to be listed, even in fine print, pays for that; if they want red and bold font, they pay extra; and they can get big display ads for even more money. The magazine carefully says they don't endorse any breeder, or any claims that are made about the health or breeding of puppies.
Breeders make a big deal of saying their dogs are "CKC (Canadian Kennel Club) Registered" (or the equivalent in the States). The magazine says: this is a legal requirement for selling pure-bred pups. If a breeder says there is a choice between an expensive dog with registration, and a cheaper one without, watch out.
But again: CKC registration means very little; there is no system for inspecting kennels, or doing anything to verify any claim that is made by any breeder. (Presumably if they say they are breeding from such and such a champion, this can be checked up to a point; but as to the parents of a specific pup?)
My rant on this would be: this is basically retail--selling animals to a fickle public. A premium has been placed on "cuteness" or photogenic quality for all breeds. (One change in the 19th century was from a great variety of working dogs, many of them quite ugly, to a smaller variety of breeds, many of which still had working qualities, all cute). A Disney movie about dogs literally generates huge demand for a specific breed--although the Beethoven movies, understandably, haven't done much for sales of St. Bernards. Even idiots know it is expensive to feed and house them.
The question: since profits are maximized by making all puppies look as much as possible like some idealized cute picture, do breeders generally tend to do too much in-breeding, reinforcing health problems? Of course the official answer is: only the unscrupulous ones, not the ones who are the salt of the earth, blah blah.
Does anyone really know what goes on? Besides consumer pressure, there is the pressure of the dog shows to ensure that every dog precisely fits a narrow "conformation"--if it doesn't look like that, it can't win, and with no championships you can't charge top dollar for pups, etc.
I picture people out in the country, figuring ways to make money from city people. Breeding dogs is one. The whole exercise of "defining" breeds, establishing the shows, and prettying-up the breeds that were recognized, came about in the 19th century. As I understand it, dog lovers could foresee the possibility of most breeds becoming extinct as the population shifted from rural to urban. At most city people would want smaller house or apartment dogs. So it is a great triumph that there is still so much variety--so many dogs with proven "working" qualities, even if they never get to hunt or herd animals.
But is the corruption of "money from perfect looks, and that means reinforcing health problems" right at the core of the dog business?
Update: I should probably have reminded readers of my personal reason for this rant: our Westie tore a ligament in the summer, and that was a very sad event for me. I had always thought of him as a very sturdy dog. Then the vet who recommended surgery said pure bred dogs probably have smaller and more fragile ligaments than they did 20 or 30 years ago.
One dog book I read (I don't remember which one) said the legs of Dachsunds should be longer--for the sake of the dog's health--and this would be easy to do. Yet breeders don't do it.
Bruce Fogle, in his great breed book, emphasizes that there have been breeding problems in the past: bulldogs with heads so large, many had to be born by Caesarean section, and features such as "short noses, excessive facial folds" and "short, crooked legs." He concludes "Breeding dogs to comply with breed standards that lead to disease or discomfort is inhumane, and such standards should be modified. Today, many breeders are highly knowledgable in the genetics of breeding, and work to reduce the prevalence of known disorders through selective breeding of specimens that do not carry inherited diseases." I wonder if this really covers the many possible issues here.
Anyway, our dog is fine now--acting like a puppy again.
Update: Stephen Budiansky, while not wanting to let dog owners off the hook for improper training, delicately suggests breeders may be breeding for more aggressiveness, of a kind that can be a problem for owners, simply so that dogs will "perform" at dog shows. (See p. 206, for example).
Similarly, websites on dog vision suggest,again very diplomatically or circumspectly, that many dogs have poor eye sight of a kind that goes beyond having sight that is different from human eye sight, i.e. works better at dawn and dusk. This is likely to be an inherited problem. What is more, some breeds are worse off than others. Presumably breeders do not deliberately breed for poor eye sight (although the floppy ears on hounds may have been bred into dogs to keep them from being distracted by sounds); but the point would be that they don't really care whether dogs see well or not, and they keep going back to the same gene pool.
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