English Pug and French Poodle

The English Pug and the French Poodle 

These bronze statues can be seen in the square across from the Notre Dame Basilica (Place D'Armes). It is a play on the French/English dichotomy or dispute that goes on in Quebec. The Pug and the Poodle are trying to reach each other, while the owners are steadfastly looking away in an attitude of not wanting anything to do with each other. The people are being foolish in their attitude.The sculptures were created by Montreal artist Marc-André J. Fortier and were erected in 2013.

The English Pug depicts a tall, slender man dressed in a suit and wearing a bow tie. He is wearing an eye and nose mask while carrying a Pug in his arms. The Pug and the French Poodle are looking at each other across the plaza while the owners are looking in opposite directions.

Elegantly dressed and hidden behind masks, a man carries his English pug and a woman her French poodle. Satirical diptych questioning the roles that we play in the uncertainty of contemporary society, this duo also symbolizes the strained relationship that may exist between Francophones and Anglophones in Montreal, often for absurd reasons. 

A plaque at the base of the statue is inscribed: "The English Pug and the French Poodle ou/or "Le caniche français et le carlin anglais" Artiste: Marc A. J. Fortier. Fonderie: Atelier du Bronze.

French Poodle. Photo by Elena.

English Pug. Photo by Elena.

Arctica and Antarctica

Travel to Arctique and Antarctica

The Ultimate Alaskan Journey

Chances are you'll only go once, so you won't see it all. Here Grant Sims, the former editor of Alaska Magazine and author of Leaving Alaska, picks some destinations not to be missed:

Brooks Range: Fly to Bettles, above the Arctic Circle. Much of Alaska is too soggy to hike during the peak travel months of May through September, so the best overland trips combine hiking with rafting or canoeing. The sunny, southern Brooks Range offers gentle terrain and rivers that are tamer than many in other parts of the state.

Kachemak Bay: Hike in the Kenai Mountains, fish in the bay's abundant waters, and birdwatch. The Cook Inlet has the second highest tide in the world. Stay at the beautiful Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge, which features the usual stunning views and not-so-usual, delicious gourmet food.

Prince William Sound: The area has entirely recovered from the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. Spend your days touring the sound in a sailboat, whale watching, hiking through old-growth coast rain forests and sea kayaking in glacial bays and fjords. Rent a trip with Alaska Wilderness Sailing Safari Outfitters.

Northern landscape. Photo by Elena.

Exploring the Last Frontiers

Walk on glaciers, see the penguins – and don't forget a heavy sweater

The earth's polar caps are seemingly forbidding expanses of uncharted, pristine land. But there is a way to drink in their icy beauty without suffering the indignities of dog-sledding or snowshoeing: Take a cruise.

Operators now run tours to both poles, ususally hiring a naturalist to come along to help tourists identify the myriad wildlife the poles have to offer. Days are spent zooming between glaciers on motorized rubber “Zodiac” rafts observing hundreds of species of birds, penguins (south), polar bears (north), whales, dolphins, and seals. Evenings tend to be devoted to lectures.

The weather isn't as bad as you might think, especially at the South Pole. Ron Naveen, editor of  a newsletter about Antarctica and a frequent visitor, says he wears just a heavy sweater most of the summer. Some adventurous travelers have even taken an invigorating, if brief, plunge into the icy waters. But Naveen notes, that the weather is extremely unpredictable and tends to be stormy.

Only specially designed ships make the hourney. Antarctic travel requires extremely heavy boats with ice-breaking capacities. These boats require many tons of motor fuel. This is both expensive and, unfurtunately, bad for the environment.

The empahsis  in polar cruises is more on ruggedness than luxury. The cost, nonetheless, remains high – up to 10,000 for a one-week journey. The growing number of visitors to Antarctica is both a good and a bad thing. Antarctica is an extremely fragile ecosystem. It is very difficult to vist the are with little or no impact. On the other hand, the more people that see the place, the more people that will want to help protect it.

Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are

A guide to Africa's best game-watching

Most of us know Africa from the movies. In the famous Born Free, the film about Joy Adamson, her husband and their lion Elsa, spawned a whole generation lion lovers. In the 1980s, there was Out of Africa and Gorillas in the Mist, romantic and beautiful depictions of African bush and gorillas, respectively. No doubt, Hollywood is at least partly responsible for the heightened craze for safaris. The enormous growth in the tourist industry in Africa, however, has not been without consequence. Many large game parks and reserves are so crowded that were there are animals, there are lines. Others have fared worse. Crowds, for example, have driven elephants out of the Masai Mara reserve in Kenya. But wild Africa survives; it's still possible to witness the activity of herds of wildebeest, elephant, and zebra there, and prides of ions still roam, searching for their nightly kill.

Here is a very succinct animal-by-animal guide to the best game watching in Africa:

Cheetah

Where they live?: Usually found in low density in sub-Saharan savannas and arid zones where suitable prey occurs.

Best places to see them: Masai Mara Nature Reserve and Amboseli National Par, Kenya. Etosha National Park and private game ranches in Namibia, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.

Active time: The most diurnal cat, usually rests during the heat of the day.

Chimpanzee

Where they live?: In rain forests, savanna woodlands, montane forests (a kind of mountain forest) from Guinea, north of the Congo River through central Africa to Tanzania. Pygmy chimpanzees live in the rain forest south to the Congo River.

Best places to see them: Gombe National Park, Mahale Mountains National Park, Tanzania. Kibale Forest, Uganda.

Active time: Generally spend about half the day feeding, with a midday siesta.

Elephant

Where they live? Used to live everywhere south of the Sahara that had enough water and trees, but over three-quarters of the population were destroyed in the last two decades by ivory poachers. The survivors live mostly in protected parks.

Best places to see them: Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve, Botswana. Etosha National Park, Namibia. Kruger National Park, South Africa. Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. The Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya is popular, but few elephants remain.

Active time: Feeds 16 hours a day and sleeps 4 to 5 hours. Bathes daily, but can abstain several days if no water is available.

A monkey. Photo by Elena.

Gazelle

Variétés : The Grant's gazelle is large with pale-to-dark tan coloring and white underparts. The Thomson's gazelle is smaller, with cinnamon coloring, a rump patch smaller than a Grant's, and bold, black side stripes and facial markings.

Where they live?: The Somali-Masai Arid Zone, from southern Sudan and Ethiopia to northern Tanzania, and from the Kenya coast to Lake Victoria (Grant's). Somali-Masai arid zone and adjacent northern savanna, from northern Tanzania to northern Kenya, with an isolated population in Sudan (Thomson's).

Best places to see them : Amboseli National Park, Masai Mara National Reserve, Meru National Park, Nairobi National Park, Samburu-Isiolo National Reserve, Shaba National Reserve, Sibiloi National Park and Tsavo National Park, Kenya; Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Serengeti National Park and Tarangire National Park, Tanzania (Grant's). Amboseli National Park, Masai Mara National Park, Nairobi National Park and Nakura National Park, Kenya; Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti National Park and Tarangire National Park, Tanzania (Thomson's)/

Active time: Day and night, peak activity generally early in the day, though.

Giraffe

Where they live?: Used to be found wherever trees occurred throughout the arid and dry-savanna zones  south of the Sahara. Eliminated from most of the West African (Senegal) and southern Kalakhari range (South Africa and southern Botswana) but are still fairly common, even outside wildlife preserves.

Best places to see them: Too numerous to mention; most approachable along roads in popular national parks.

Active time: Fefmales spend just over half the day grazing, males slightly less. Night is spent resting, especially during the darkest hours.

Gorilla

Varieties: The mountain gorilla has a long and silky coat, while the western or eastern gorilla has a shorter, sparser coat.

Where they live?: Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the lowland rain forest of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon (western lowland); eastern Zaire, and the adjacent highland areas near Rwanda border and isolated pockets of rain forests (eastern lowland). Also Rwanda, Uganda and Zaire (mountain).

Best places to see them: Eastern Zaire, especially Kahuzu-Biega National Park and Virunga National Park.

Active time: The average group of gorillas spends a little under a third of the day feeding, a little under a third traveling, and a little over a third resting, mainly at midday.

Hippopotamus

Where they live? Used to be found everywhere, south of the Sahara where adequate water and grazing conditions occurred. Now largely confined to protected areas, but still survive in many major rivers and swamps. 

Best places to see them: Almost any park or reserve with sizable lakes or rivers bordered by grasseland.

Active time : Hippos walk from 2 to 6 miles during their nightly forage. After five hours of intensive grazing, they return to water beds before dawn to spend the day digesting and socializing.

A leopard walking. Photo by Elena.

Lion

Where they live?: Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, except in deserts and rain forests.

Best places to see them: Most major National Parks and Game Reserves have them, but the best places are the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the Serengeti National Park, both in Tanzania.

Active time: Lions spend nearly 20 hours a day “reserving energy”, and hunt most actively early and late at night, carrying over a couple of hours into daybreak. Lions become active any time day or night, hungry or gorged, if easy prey presents itself.

Rhinoceros

Varieties: Black and white.

Where they live?: Formerly widespread in the northern and southern savanna, Sahel, Somali-Masai, and southwest arid zones. Human population growth and poaching (rhino horns are valued as an aphrodisiac in Asian and Arab countries) have led to a steady decline. Now endangered everywhere, including Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Best places to see them: Nairobi National Park, Solio Ranch Game Reserve, Kenya; Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. (Other good possibilities include Kruger National Park and Nhuhluwe Game Reserve, South Africa; Gonarezhou National Park and Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe).

Active time: The rhino is most active early and late in the day, but also moves and feeds at night. Least active during the hottest hours.

Zebra

Varieties: The Grevy's zebra has a distinct pattern of narrow stripes with a bullseye on the rump and wider stripes on the neck and chest. The mountain zebra is distinguished by large ears and a distinctive gridiron pattern on the rump. The plain's zebra is smaller than the Grevy's.

Where they live?: Restricted to the Somali arid zone of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya. The only substantial population (several thousand) lives in Kenya's norther frontier district (Grevy's). Cape mountain zebras inhabit the southwestern and southern Cape Province in South Africa. Hartmann's race, another subspecies of the mountains zebra, are found in southern Angola and Namibia (mountain). Southeastern Sudan to Sout Africa and west to Angola, in Somali-Masai arid zone (plains).

Best places to see them: Meru Sibiloi National Park and Samburu-Isiolo National Reserve, Kenya (Grevy's). Mountain Zebra National Park, South Africa (mountain). Too numerous to list but Etosha National Park, Namibia, and Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, are some places where one can get very close (plains).

Active time: Active both day and night. Zebras graze an hour or so at a time at night. In early morning, the begin treks of up to 10 miles before settling again for the night.

School Age, Schoole Daze

School Age, Schoole Daze

When to start kindergarten is an increasingly complicated question

For many parents, there is no clear-cut answer to the question of when to start a child in school. Instead, the issue of whether a child is “ready” or not becomes tangled with questions about the merits of preschools, kindergarten transition programs, and the meaning of the battery of tests that children are typically expected to take today.

Many parents are “redshirting” their children by delaying their entry into kindergarten or first grade on the theory that their offspring are not yet ready for the classroom. More the 20 percent of six-, seven-, and eight-year-old children are estimated to be behind other children their age in school, according to a study by Edith McArthur of the National Center for Education Statistics and Suzanne Bianchi of the Bureau of the Census.

Such trends, mostly the result of readiness decisions by parents and educational institutions, have led many states to raise the age by which they require a child to begin school, so that on the whole children start their kindergarten and first grade experience at later ages today. In the vast majority of states, children must be five years old before they enter kindergarten; when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, that age was four years, nine months – a significant difference at that stage in life.

The cut-off dates for determining enrolment eligibility have also been pushed back to the beginning of the school year, forcing younger children who would turn that age during the school year to delay enrolling for another year.

Very often in tracked schools, if you ask too many questions, you risk getting knocked down to the next level (Anne Wheelock, educational analyst and author of Crossing the Tracks). Photo by Elena

Thirty years ago, kindergarten children who would turn the appropriate age by February of thet school year were allowed to enroll for the full school year; even as recently as 1979 only nine states required the age for kindergarten and first grade to be met before the beginning of October. Today, most states have moved the cut-off date back to September.

”While 15 years ago it was considered appropriate to send a child to school at as early an age as possible, now the philosophy recommends waiting until a child is mature enough for academic work,” according to researchers McArthur and Bianchi. But such a decision can often be quixotic, for many kindergarten and pre-school programs have responded to the trend toward making first grade more academic by becoming more academic themselves.

In conclusion: The Kindergarten Countdown... When your child starts school may differ greatly, depending on the state in which you live. But just because a state allows a child to start kindergarten at age five, this need not mean your child must start then. Most states don't make school compulsory until a child turns six or even seven, and it is increasingly common for children to delay kindergarten until age six.

The Firm-Foundation Theory

The Firm-Foundation Theory

All investments return are dependent to certain and varying degrees, on future events. That’s what makes the fascination investing. It’s a gamble whose success depends on the ability to predict the future. Traditionally, the pros in the investment community have used one of two approaches to assent valuation: the “firm-foundation theory” or the “castle-in-the-air theory”. Millions have been gained and lost in these two categories. Understanding them is a prerequisite for keeping you safe from serious blunders. During the 1970s, a third theory, born in Academia and named “the new investment technology” became popular in the Wall Street.

The firm-foundation theory argues that each investment instrument, be it a piece of real state or a common stock, has a firm anchor of something called “intrinsic value”, which can be determined by careful analysis of present conditions and future prospects.

When market prices fall below or rise above this firm foundation intrinsic value, a buying or selling opportunity arises, because this fluctuation will eventually be corrected – or so the theory goes. Investing then becomes a dull but straightforward matter of comparing something’s actual price with its firm foundation of value.

It is difficult to ascribe to any one individual the credit for originating the firm-foundation theory. S. Eliot Guild is often given this distinction, but the classic development of the technique and particularity of the nuances associated with it was worked out by John B. Williams.

In his Theory of Investment Values, Williams presented an actual formula for determining the intrinsic value of stock. Williams based his approach on dividend income. In a fiendishly clever attempt to keep things from being simple, he introduced the concept of “discounting” into the process. Discounting basically involves looking at income backwards. Rather than seeing how much money you will have next year (say $1,03 if you put $1 in a saving bank at 3 % interest), you look at money expected in the future and see how much less it is currently worth (thus, next year’s $1 is worth today only 97 cents, which could be invested at 3% to produce one dollar at that time).

The firm-foundation theory. Photo by Elena

Williams was actually serious about this. He went on to argue that the intrinsic value of a stock was equal to the present (or discounted) value of all its future dividends. Investors were advised to “discount” the value of moneys received later. Because so few people understood it, the term caught on and “discounting” now enjoys popular usage among investment people. It received a further boost under the aegis of Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, a distinguished economist and investor.

The logic of the firm-foundation theory is quite respectable and can be illustrated best with common stocks. The theory stresses that a stock’s value ought to be based on the stream of earnings a firm will be able to distribute in the future in the form of dividends. It stands to reason that the greater the present dividends and their rate of increase, the greater the value of the stock. Thus differences in growth rates are a major factor in stock valuation. And now the slippery little factor of future expectations sneaks in. Security analysts must estimate not only long-term growth rates but also how long an extraordinary growth can be maintained.  When the market gets overly enthusiastic about how far in the future growth can continue, it is popularly held on Wall Street that “stocks are discounting not only the future but perhaps even the hereafter”. The point is that the firm-foundation theory relies on some tricky forecasts of the extent and duration of future growth. The foundation of intrinsic value may thus be less dependable than is claimed.

The firm-foundation theory is not confined to economists alone. Thanks to a very influential book, Grahan and Dodd’s Security Analysts, a whole generation of Wall Street security was converted to the fold. Sound investment management, the practicing analysts learned, simply consisted of buying securities whose prices were temporarily below intrinsic value and selling ones whose prices were temporarily too high. It was that easy. Of course, instructions for determining intrinsic value were furnished and any analyst worth his salt could calculate it with just a few taps of the calculator or personal computer.

Bibliography:

Burton G. Malkiel. A Random Walk Down Wall Street, including a life-cycle guide to personal investing. First edition, 1973, by W.W. Norton and company, Inc.