My wife has wanted a dog for as long as I’ve known her, and now that we actually own a house it was only a matter of time: “Lady” is a two year-old (we think) Staffordshire Terrier mix, rescued from an animal shelter that was hours away from putting her down; the shelter says she was a stray, but we find that hard to believe given her temperament — this dog has been indoors and around people all her life.

The shelter she came from was in eastern Washington state, so we suspect she may be one of several dozen dogs that were forced out of Moses Lake, WA after the city council passed an ordinance requiring pit bull1 owners to carry hundreds of thousands of dollars in liability insurance.

1. The American Staffordshire Terrier is a “bully” breed and is often lumped in with the pit bull as a dangerous breed; Lady is about as dangerous as a children’s plush toy, unless you’re the rug in our dining room. [↩]

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who as an ex-Navy SEAL is one of the few politicians in America with first-hand knowledge of waterboarding:

You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Via Kevin Drum comes this report of once-habitable Pacific islands that aren’t anymore:

The evacuation of the Carteret Islands have begun. This morning I stood on black volcanic sand, pressed up right against the jungle, and watched a small white boat powered by a single outboard engine run in against the shore. On board were five men from the Islands, the fathers of five families, who have come to finish building houses and gardens already begun in a cleared patch of jungle at Tinputz, on the east coast of Bougainville. When these homes are ready the five will return to the Carterets, to fetch their wives and children back. Life, they hope, will be better for them here. On the Carterets, king tides have washed away their crops and rising sea levels poisoned those that remain with salt. The people have been forced to move.

As I recall there are parts of Australia which were once suitable for farming, but as irrigation drew down the subterranean water table, the sea came in to take its place — killing the crops with salt.

As John Gruber analyzes the latest iPhone rumors, I’ll build on his description of a “new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone” with some baseless speculation:

I think the iPhone Lite will simplify the iPhone’s overly complex one-button interface — it’ll have no buttons, and no microphone or speaker. It will require the use of a headset, and Apple will introduce a new Bluetooth headset with volume controls to accompany it.

Take an iPhone, remove the button on the front, the internal speaker, the microphone, the volume controls and maybe the camera, and you’re left with a device about the size of a credit card and the thickness of the new iPod Shuffle. The most popular carrying case doubles as a bifold wallet.