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Friday, May 13, 2011

The Council Has Spoken!!



The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results of these week's contest are inscribed in the Great Kozmic Archives

This week, when America is focused on Osama bin-Laden, it's oddly fitting that this week's winning post, The Abandoned by The Razor dealt with the friendship between dogs and man, something anathema and unfathomable to Muslims like bin-Laden, who consider dogs pariahs and unclean. Here's a slice:
I called out soothingly as I walked towards the shadow huddled against the concrete. It came to my feet. I wasn’t exactly sure what breed it was because I couldn’t see much, but it was a dog and judging by the wagging shadow of a tail I knew that it was happy to see me. I reached underneath it to pick it up, and felt bulges of flesh that shouldn’t have been there. A twinge of panic raced down my spine. Had it been hit already? As I walked back to the car I felt the coat and didn’t feel the sickening stickiness of blood. As I felt her belly and the large orange-sized irregularly shaped lumps on it I knew what it was.

I had grown up around dogs – mostly poodles with the occasional large breed like a collie or setter. For some reason my parents never got the dogs spayed or neutered even though they never bred them. Most lived long, but when they died breast cancer often took the unspayed females. I had been a little boy when I had last felt the outward manifestation of breast cancer in a dog, but the knowledge was there. By the time I got her in the car and held her up to the overhead light I had diagnosed her.

How had she ended up in the middle of that bridge? The bridge is a favorite spot for dumping animals, and her owner didn’t have the guts to take her to a vet or even to put her down “Ol Yeller” style. I suppose they thought they were doing her a favor, but one didn’t need to be psychic to foresee her likely being hit by a car, starving to death or set upon by coyotes.

We have named her Brigette, of course. She is an old beagle with broken teeth and a belly full of cancer. She has suffered such cruelty at the hands of one human being that I don’t quite understand why she wants the company of another, but she does. On walks she is at my feet and does her best to keep up with my pack of rescued misfits. She doesn’t whine. When I come home she stands on the deck to greet me. I swear the dog smiles.

This week's non-Council winner was a wonderful piece by Council alumnus Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest entitled September 10, 2001: "Make no mistake, it's not revenge he's after. It's a reckonin'." It's a must read piece that deals with whom we were on September 10,2001 and what we've become afterwards.

And as Gerard sagely points out, this isn't the end, but the beginning, and the ultimate reckoning is still to come.

Here are this week’s full results:

Council Winners



Non-Council Winners



See you next week!


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