Peaceful Puppy Mill Protest : 
Sunday June 5th in Sayville NY
front of Little Wonders Puppy Emporium
15 Main St. Sayville, New York 11782

•  A puppy mill is a commercial dog-breeding facility that focuses on increasing profit with little overhead cost. The health and welfare of the animals is not a priority. 
•  Female dogs are bred at every opportunity with little to no recovery time between litters. When, after a few years, they are physically depleted to the point that they no longer can reproduce, breeding females are often killed. 
•  Every year in Ameica, it's estimated that 2.11 million puppies are sold that originated from puppy mills, while 3 million are killed in shelters because they are too full and there aren’t enough adoptive homes. 
• Act as a publicist for your local animal shelter to encourage your community to adopt shelter pets. Sign up for Shelter Pet PR! In puppy mills, dogs can spend most of their lives in cramped cages, with no room to play or exercise. 
• Often times, the water and food provided for the puppies is contaminated, crawling with bugs. Puppies can even be malnourished. Puppies in mills are found with bleeding or swollen paws, feet falling through the wire cages, severe tooth decay, ear infections, dehydration, and lesions on their eyes, which often lead to blindness. 
•  In most states, puppy mills are legal. It is important that future pet owners seek rescue dogs from their local shelter or buy pets from a trusted breeder in order to put mills out of business. It is estimated that there are at least 10,000 puppy mills in the U.S. Fewer than 3,000 of these are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 
•  Most puppy mills have no veterinary care, climate control, or protection for the animals from weather (hot, cold, rain, or snow). 
•  With limited or no regulations or enforcement, puppy mills have no cleanup control. This means that dogs can be living in urine and feces for indefinite periods of time.
• For more info: https://www.facebook.com/events/1684583035139183/
• For future protests as well as more info concerning puppy mills please follow Puppy Mill Free Long Island on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/puppymillfreelongisland/

Puppy Mill Protest - Bellmore - December 20th

PUPPY MILL PROTEST

Worldwide Puppies and Kittens 2560 Sunrise Hwy, Bellmore, NY Saturday, December 20th 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM Please forward this email to all who care about animals. On Saturday, December 20th, LION will be hosting educational demonstrations outside of a Nassau County pet dealer to educate the public about why we should adopt, not shop! Many people will buy puppies from Puppy stores which come from Puppy Mills this Christmas. Puppy store/Puppy mill dogs are known to suffer from various illnesses which are not necessarily apparent at the time of purchase. The parents are forced to breed endlessly in horrendous conditions until they can no longer breed and are then gotten rid of. Please join us at the Bellmore Puppy Mill Protest. Worldwide Puppies and Kittens 2560 Sunrise Hwy, Bellmore, NY Saturday, December 20th 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM Please forward this info to anyone interested in Puppy Mill reform in Nassau county and/or print and post anywhere you find this message might be appropriate. Thank you for listening!

Worldwide Puppies and Kittens Protest in Bellmore this Saturday - October 12 from 12:00 - 2:00 PM

Right now, A 740/ S.3753, a bill that would allow local municipalities to regulate pet stores, is sitting on Governor Cuomo's desk just waiting to be signed. This bill has the potential to stop this terrible abuse. Come join us in asking Governor Cuomo to finish what he started and to sign S.3753 on Saturday, October 12 from noon until 2 p.m.! In front of : Worldwide Puppies and Kittens 2560 Sunrise Hwy Bellmore, NY When: Saturday, October 12 2013 12:00 - 2:00 PM Contact: Barbara Dennihy Contact info: bdjd999@aol.com In 2009, Governor Cuomo came out against Worldwide Puppies and Kittens for ripping off the public and selling seriously sick and dying dogs and cats: http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/pet-store-must-repay-for-selling-expensive-sick-puppies-1.1375480 Today, Worldwide Puppies and Kittens is still in business and up to the same cruel antics, ripping off their customers and selling dogs from the Hunte Corporation, the largest dealer of puppy mill dogs in the world. Right now, A 740/ S.3753, a bill that would allow local municipalities to regulate pet stores, is sitting on Governor Cuomo's desk just waiting to be signed. This bill has the potential to stop this terrible abuse. Come join us in asking Governor Cuomo to finish what he started and to sign S.3753 on Saturday, October 12 from noon until 2 p.m.!

Citizen Conn by Michael Chabon for the New Yorker February 13 2012

Citizen Conn by Michael Chabon

This is story about morals and loyalty vs civility and equitable agreements. Two friends bond through their work about fictional planets and characters whose friendship is traded by one for money. The disloyal character, Conn tries to repair his lapse of judgment with what appears a fair financial recompense and public apologies but which only angers Feather due to it’s impersonal unrepentant nature.

Conn is depicted simply as a concerned citizen (note the title, Citizen Conn) attempting to repay a misdeed to another to another citizen with a check. Unfortunately the very idea of repairing this issue with a check only angers Feather who was so hurt by this personal betrayal he had lost his artistic spark leading to his dismissal.

Making matters worse the comic book stories they shared were about two characters based on themselves, who regardless of differences, always managed to remain friends, maintain loyalty and save each other from danger. In the end the narrator, the rabbi, sums it up when she points out that Conn’s greatest crime is not realizing the nature of his crime in the phrase “our everlasting human cluelessness was his unforgivable sin.”

The Other Place - New Yorker Fiction

The Other Place
By Mary Gaitskill in the New Yorker

In the short story, “The Other Place”, the narrator, observes his own flawed DNA through his young son Douglas whom he believes to have inherited his undesirable traits - speech impediment, a slight tremor and more ominously, a penchant for enjoying violence against woman. He studies Douglas's oddities with concern, fear and an eery personal understanding that pulls him back to his own troubled childhood in search of the wounds which have created a dangerous fascination with pain and destruction. He traces the path that lead from his frustrations at failing to communicate adequately with the girl next door while being burdened with an emotionally turbulent mother pushing him to create an escape in “another place” where he is the oppressor and not the oppressed. He fantasizes about these moments into which he escapes into. Unable to build a romantic relationship nor to leave his oppressive household his pain crescendos and he buys a gun to unleash his unhappiness onto someone else. He does not count on the possibility that the person has more problems then he does, and that she does not cower as he envision she would, but instead refuses to go along with his plans and eventually orders him out of her car. She has forced him out of his “other place” his escape to a more violently empowering self, but now strangely years after he encounters her again in his sons dream he realizes he must be there for his son now.

The Dungeon Master by Sam Lipsyte

New Yorker short story “The Dungeon Master” illustrates the playfully funny yet sometimes seriously dramatic journey from a difficult childhood to a perhaps more complicated adulthood. In this piece the main character bares witness to a troubled friend whom he accompanies with other peers through the imaginative world of Dungeons and Dragons as they struggle with their insecurities by waging imaginary wars and stealing dragon's treasures. The insecure dungeon master consistently overstepping his claims of power and control by bullying both the narrator and his peers through the game forces the narrator to finally rebel and break free of his control.

Having broken away from the unstable group he struggles to find his own identity in the world. These adult struggles provide him with some maturity and enough distance from his former friend to see the issues that plague him. At the end of the story the Dungeon Master asks “No hard feelings?” to which the other puzzles at the stupidity of the comment when he contemplates how difficult feelings really are. It is clear that the Dungeon Master has failed to successfully develop into adulthood by refusing to confront his own feelings namely about his being kicked out of his house and his precarious future living arrangements. The strange question jars the narrator into realizing that his friend has graduated from troubled child to possible future suicide and that his own prospective is perhaps not much brighter.

The Warm Fuzzies by Chris Adrian

The Warm Fuzzies, a short story about finding finding one self through love in the confusing circus of life.

Peabo waltzes into Mollies heavily confining world, dancing to his own beat, untethered by the family's stern judgements and controlling behavior, sauntering strait into her bed.

Molly suffering her extreme family environment with bouts of an cynical alter ego voice finds a momentary escape with Peabo who mesmerizes her by rocking to his own beat remaing serenely impervious to the insanity around him. The family's music stops but he continues to hear own music, create his own verse, making his own rythms and rules so that when the father karate chops his family into silence Peabo not noticing continues happily to groove on. He is not dependent on them to keep his behavior in check or to be happy. He is free.

By the end of the story Molly loses the cynical alter ego voice through which she unwittingly sought independence from her controlling family because she too has learned to be free of them, making her own dance and music long after her family has stopped playing.

The Landlord by Wells Tower

“The Landlord” is a story of astonishingly stubborn passivity in the face of situations which necessitate decision and action. The theme if not common in contemporary literature is relevant as reflection of the complacency that plagues modern culture today.

Lord of the manor, lord of the castle, landlord, alas the narrator is none of these. He is fact tottering towards peasant-hood, having owned 52 properties but which has now precariously dwindled to a mere nineteen by his apparent inaction. These few properties, including the house in which he lives, are also threatened to be seized so that he is forced to envision selling the cottage his parents left him and which he had hoped to retire to.

Enmeshed by his inaction with comically troubled characters that take over his lifeless life as he simply follows the direction they push him sending him to and fro like an empty bag caught in the wind. Berated by his worker, manipulated by his tenants, chastised by his daughter, he accepts everything meekly trudging day by day in the decadent growing squalor which threatens to swallow him while never once rebelling.

From the first paragraph is another character with this passive tendency, a tenant who is waiting for life to knock on his door as he sits around reading motivational books from which he quotes to his landlord while accepting his lot of living in one of the most filthiest apartments. The tenant owes three months rent which instead of paying he has the audacity to tell the landlord that a man like himself should wear tailored shirts. The landlord instead of growing understandably angry at being told what to do with his money by this tenant who owes him thirteen hundred dollars and threatening him with eviction allows the conversation to drift casually.

Todd Toole, his employee casually and systematically bombards him with a flow of rude insults which he accepts as his due. His daughter who has moved back home and apparently has the means to help her father does not but instead obliviously humiliates him as a way of expressing herself. Then there is the tenant, Connie, who does not do her part at keeping her apartment pest free but orders the landlord to fumigate which might not be a necessity had she keep her food in a more sanitary manner. She then brazenly takes this moment to explain to him that she legally does not have to pay rent which she declares is her right covered by the constitution. After claiming this absurd idea she foists food on him which he doesn’t want, doesn’t like, but meekly accepts and just as he is about to escape her presence, she makes a date with him which he feels obliged to go on.

Finally at the end of the story, grasping at some initiative much too late, he arrives at Armando’s apartment to find it entirely empty and stripped of all hardware including fridge and stove with only a small note which the tenant had evidently left to himself. The note explains the key to all this complacent thinking, a self deluded dream that no action is required for success.

“Money comes easily and frequently”

The narrator puts the note in his wallet demonstrating his belief in this illogical idea while bringing our attention to a wallet we fear will soon hold nothing but the note if he does not abandon the foolish notion. ♦

An Arranged Marriage by Nell Freudenberger

“An Arranged Marriage” singles out that brief moment in life when children abandon safe hand-holding parental guidance to reach for their freedom to create their own world.

Amina who considers her mother a partner is wrong in this assessment, the mother holds a more powerful influence then a simple partner which implies that decision are shared, which is not the case here where her mother makes the most personal decision for her. Like a child she allows her mother to select her husband by following her strict list of requirements even though she doubts she can find one that will fulfill them all thus risking never marrying and most likely never going to America. Amina then also dutifully submits to her mother a perspective mates shortcomings based on her mothers requirements risking his disqualification. He enjoys Heinkens but "together" mother and daughter decide that he is "still a good man". However if the requirements and the value system being used is that of the mothers, then the judgment that he is “still a good man” is that of her mothers. Her mother is selecting her daughter’s husband.

This control over her daughter is again witnessed by Amin’s desire to put her picture online but patiently succumbing to her mothers refusal even though she knows it is likely to leave her with a smaller pool of perspective husbands to the very few unlikely men who do not care about looks.

Then even as her daughter is in America, her mother attempts to control the wedding while in India via telephone, insisting that she wear a sari though he daughter who has Western taste and who is being married in American to an American would obviously prefer a western styled dress.

Now she is in American and if the marriage was somewhat arranged by her mother’s stipulations of who Amina’s husband she be, Amina now has the freedom to decide what kind of relationship they will have. On just her third night in American deciding to use her newly found freedom she disregards her mothers orders not to have premarital sex and is completely unrepentant the next day when she explains her surprise at waking up next to George and not regretting it.

The phrase in the last paragraph stresses the theme of gaining independence well when Amina says “In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed.” What Amina is describing is in her own country, under her mothers dominance, plans can be precarious because her mother has power to cancel them and Amina must acquiesce. This is also explains why once married she is “dumbfounded” to the point she forgets to kiss her husband during the ceremony by her sudden realization that she does not need her mother and is entirely free to make her own decisions from then on.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/09/06/100906fi_fiction_freudenberger

The Science of Flight by Yiyun Li - New Yorker Fiction

"The Science of Flight" is a touching portrait of a woman whose difficult past has created a desperate fear of intimacy coupled with a conflicting desire to have friends which drives her to invent stories to hide behind, to preserve her few weak relationships through and to dream with.

Zinchen was born out of wedlock to spite her father, kept by her grandmother to spite her daughter while being reproached her existance by all. Forbidden to exist, she secrets her self away into fragments of other peoples memories and assumptions about her to be snagged by the sharp edge debris of her memories.

The title, the study of flight, denotes the manner in which Zichen survives her past to build "a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people’s lives."

The word Flight in the title describes someone soaring, victory, leaving the nest, surpassing difficulty; yet it also has the more troubling meaning of fleeing, "to take flight", to escape. The title uses both positive and negative connotation of the word in that Zichen manages to escape to a better life in a another more prosperous country but she is always trying to escape her past, never landing, never still, never allowing herself to be herself. ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/08/30/100830fi_fiction_li?currentPage=all#ixzz0xYDB4r7b

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