The Rip Van Wrinkler, XXV, Issue 1, February 2021
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2021 1973
1951 Freeze frame from first few minutes of The African Queen. 1938
The piece was printed in "Kennel Review" in March 1938 and reports that the first Basenjis arrived in the US five months prior. As is well documented, Mrs Rogers' venture was short-lived. Of her three UK Blean imports, the two bitches, Basashi and Rougie, died without issue within a year, but thankfully the African-bred male Bakuma, although re-homed, resurfaced a number of years later as Phemister's Bois and went on to become a very important sire in the establishment of the breed in the US. He sired the first American champion. This is a wonderful piece of breed history. Thanks to Glen Dymock! Leaf says, "Wear a mask". Mark your calendars! Stay tuned, as we figure out our possibilities, and there is more vaccine,
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The contents of The Rip Van Wrinkler do not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors, or the membership. The RVW Club is affiliated with the BCOA The Rip Van Wrinkle Basenji Club & Wrinkler ONLINE: www.rvwbasenjiclub.org As the Tail Turns: Adventures with a Roomba. Gilda watching our newest version of the Roomba. It is recently cleaned from an adventure as below. Ours was only a tiny adventure, but a chore to clean. It didn't travel far "dirty". Chris O'Rear - A sign that the shelter in place/stay home orders have been going on too long. I am running Roomba to do a little clean up before we open presents and make a new mess. Some puppy stole the perimeter monitor while I am on the computer. I saw Spot (Roomba) roll on by and come into the kitchen instead of working in the front room. On the other hand: by The Pooptastrophist Why, friends, that's because our Roomba runs at 1:30am every night, while we sleep. And it found the poop. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening. If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I'm about to tell you. It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids' toy boxes. If it's near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding - like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop. Then, when your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you'll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you'll walk into the living room. And you'll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you'll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything's okay. Like it's proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly. So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn't just on your hands - it's smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that "whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss" noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. More on that later. Oh, and you're not just using profanity - you're inventing new types of profanity. You're saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug - the rug that started it all - the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she'll ask if you tried to clean it first. Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails. The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn't work. Because you heard the "whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss" noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending a week researching how to fix this damn $400 Roomba without spending $400 again - including refurb units, new motherboards, and new batteries - you finally decide to call the place where you bought it. That place called Hammacher Schlemmer. They have a funny name, but they have an awesome warranty. They claim it's for life, and it's for any reason. So I called them and told the truth. My Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III. So, mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer. If you're buying anything expensive, and they sell it, I recommend buying it from them. And remember - don't let your Roomba run over dog poop.
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