As regular readers know, Baxter the Wonder Dog is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. The video below gives some facts about the breed. Although they originated in England in the 1600s, at the end of World War II, there were only six such dogs and all the current dogs are descendants from them.

One problem of having such a narrow population bottleneck is that any genetic problem in one or more of the original group would be propagated to large numbers of dogs. It is known that the breed suffers from a congenital mitral valve heart defect that makes their life spans shorter than for comparable small dogs. Reputable breeders, like the person from whom we got Baxter, are trying to get rid of that trait. We get him checked regularly and so far he does not show any symptoms so we are keeping our fingers crossed.

This video captures perfectly why they are so lovable and Baxter has all those qualities.
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I recently linked to a video of a woman who did the limbo under a car. Now comes along another incredible limbo feat. It is by a five-year old girl (I believe in India) so she is far smaller and naturally more supple than an adult. But what is incredible here is not just the height that she went under but also the distance she covered while doing so on roller skates. She also did it bending forwards rather than the more conventional backwards.
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Via Heather Johanssen I came across this video of a woman who has acne, a skin condition that can create physical scars and even deeper emotional ones. She had posted images of herself on social media with and without makeup. The video shows her transition and the comments that she received. It seems like she just can’t win.
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The second annual one-day conference on Humanism at Work sponsored by the Foundation Beyond Belief will held on July 25, 2015 in Boston, MA. The program is designed to help identify more and better ways for humanists to put their nontheistic compassionate beliefs to work for the betterment on the world. You can get more details here.

The July 2015 issue Harper’s magazine compiled from newspaper accounts some of the bizarre things done by passengers on planes since 2010 that required either the removal of the disruptive passengers or the rerouting of planes in order to make a quick landing. Here’s their list.
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We talk about the poor and rich and middle class and can even classify people into those categories based on metrics such as income and wealth. But if we ask people directly to describe themselves, my guess is that fewer than we expect will describe themselves as currently being poor. This is because the subjective and objective interpretations of the word are quite different.
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I was reading about the large number of baseball pitchers who suffer serious elbow injuries that require something popularly known as Tommy John surgery so named after a famous pitcher. Something known as the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow gets frayed, stretched, or torn during the pitching motion and has to be replaced. These injuries, along with rotator cuff injuries, can occur in even young children playing in Little League games.
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We live in an era of fear of all manner of dangers, many of them highly exaggerated. This extends to many parents not allowing their children out of their sight. I have been interested in the so-called ‘Free-Range Kids’ movement, where parents are encouraged to give their children more freedom to roam the neighborhood and not have adults hovering over them all the time.
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There is a national exam taken by all students in British high schools known as the GCSE exam and apparently one recent problem has caused an uproar because it stumped most students. Here it is:
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