Labor Day
If you are a US resident I hope you enjoy this panicked and unsuccessful attempt to salvage the Democratic nomination for President by Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President. Having sent in Federal troops and marshals to break the Pullman Strike, Grover thought he could win back support from labor by giving them their own holiday before the bodies of the workers killed by said troops and marshals were cold in the ground, and to preempt the possibility of labor declaring May 1st, the commemoration of the Haymarket affair, a day for labor action. [Zero wasn’t the first Democrat to attack the party’s base. Grover lost the nomination, BTW.]
It is rather unique, as it is the only holiday I’m aware of that was imported from Canada where it’s spelled Labour Day.
When I was young, Labor Day was the last day of summer vacation from school, but now schools start in early August, so it’s just a long weekend filled with annoying drunken boaters clogging up my little street with their trailers.
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School still doesn’t start till after Labor Day here in NY.
ot: sleddog puppycam puppies venturing out of their den RIGHT NOW
The Haymarket “affair” didn’t get its day, but eventually it did get a publisher, Haymarket Books, that offers a rather interesting catalog.
Well, ‘liberal’ New York was always more traditional than the ‘conservative’ South.
It got its day, Steve, but just in the rest of world, not the US.
OT: Looks like puppy Gitmo, Hipparchia. They need some dirt.
Bryan, concrete works better for livestock because you can clean it off with a high power water hose. For example, pigs nowadays are raised indoors on concrete pads that are hosed off a couple times a day to maintain good hygiene (of course, the pig crap then gets washed into open-air septic ponds that smell terrible and have a bad habit of their dams breaking and washing raw pig crap into the watershed, but that’s another issue). The result is healthier pigs (or dogs, in this case) compared to having them stomp around in a mix of dirt and urine and crap all day.
BTW, that was one reason why Preznit GWB’s pig farm always caused hilarity every time I saw a news story about GWB vacationing at his “ranch”. While GWB’s contractors tore down most of the pig barn on the pig farm to make room for the big house that GWB built, the two remaining were so obviously pig barns that I was ROFL every time the news cameras showed them in the background while mentioning GWB’s “ranch” :).
– Badtux the Livestock Penguin
I know it’s easy to keep clean, as I have sluiced out a few dairy barns after milking, but these are puppies, not Holsteins, and need to get dirty and mess around.
Well, when you are afraid of horses, as the Shrubbery was, pigs and poultry are about it.
yeah i was thinking the same things – both that concrete runs are easier to keep clean and that puppies need to get out and run and play on natural surfaces.
I would be concerned about ped injuries, which happens if you train a team on roads. They could at least give them some astroturf or indoor-outdoor carpeting.
Truth be told, I wasn’t allowed to train our puppies because I would let them get away with everything.
Haymarket Books (link in my comment above) offers serious English-language books on labor events and activities, history and practice, from a left perspective. If I had money, I think I’d read some of them. I suspect the chances of my persuading the public library to buy them are about zero. 🙂
Be happy they haven’t done away with the library … yet.
Truth be told, I wasn’t allowed to train our puppies because I would let them get away with everything.
my beagle puppy and i got thrown out of obedience school when i was a kid because i believed in using food rewards for training. still do, but at least now the rest of the dog training world has caught up with me. 😀
thanks for the link to haymarket books, steve!
Yeah, well, ‘good dog’ has limited effect, but dog treats make an impression. If you watch one of the big dog shows, those dogs must gain a great deal of weight during the course of the showing. There is an almost constant hand-feeding going on in the ring.