Results tagged “l.a. unleashed” from South Bay Pets

This comes from our frenemies at L.A. Unleashed, the Los Angeles Times' vastly inferior pet blog. You should only read this pet blog. Accept no substitutes!

A piano-playing cat named Nora took YouTube by storm a few years ago when her owners, married Philadelphia-based artists Burnell Yow! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of his name) and Betsy Alexander, uploaded a video of her performances to the site.
Yow! and Alexander meant simply to share the video with Alexander's students (she teaches piano in addition to her work in music composition and studio art) and with their niece, who lived across the country.  But word spread quickly among the Internet cat meme community; since the original video was uploaded in early 2007, it's received more than 14 million views.  (A second video, dubbed "The Sequel - Better than the original!" was added a few months later and has garnered another 4 million views.)  
Earlier this year, Lithuanian conductor Mindaugas Piecaitis caught wind of the phenomenon and decided to compose an orchestral piece to frame Nora's piano playing.  The resulting composition, "Catcerto" (Piecaitis' overly precious title, not ours), premiered at the Klaipeda Concert Hall on June 5.  Video of Nora, the "featured soloist," played on a giant screen behind the Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra during the performance.

Thanks to Tony Barboza of the L.A. Times pet blog L.A. Unleashed for linking to my previos post about how to get to the illegal dog beach in Rancho Palos Verdes.

I'm pumping my fist at you Tony in a gesture of blog solidarity!  We pet bloggers need to stick together. We're like the dwarves and elves in the Lord of the Ring movies. We're competitors, but we stand together in the face of a common enemy: namely people who were mad at me for giving directions to the beach. Click here to see them again.

I've been speaking with some local dog beach experts. One of them is Justin Rudd, who was also kind enough to give my post a little boost by mentioning it in his newsletter.

Justin,  helped create the legal dog beach in Long Beach. It took three years for that location to get the OK.

Justin has some advice for people who want to create their own seaside animal oasis: Don't give up. Write letters to the editor, organize with your friends and keep track of which city officials have dogs.

"We tried to create a place where dogs can recreate and people could congregate and socialize."

And if they don't have legal beaches, people will just become scofflaws.

"It's going to happen," Rudd said. "Unless it's a dog that's going to go out and hurt somebody, I don't think it's a big deal. In the scheme of things, it's not a big deal."

There are already people who are trying to organize a South Bay dog beach. Their efforts have not been successful, but, well, we'll write about them later in the week.

UPDATE:

I just got this comment. I wanted to share it with everybody. I'll have more to say about this later -- LOTS more.

Josh Grossberg seems to have an attitude which is to remain immune to how he must have hurt the residents in the private community of this "secret beach". Mr. Grossberg has the mentality that negative publicity is still publicity, and he apparently needs something to make him feel worthy and important. If this is called being an author and a writer, but publishing a blog that destroys private communities by giving the public a new place to go and populate, leave trash, bring their loud untamed children as well as their unruly dogs, then Mr. Grossberg really needs to make an assessment of his career. There are so many others like him, they just aren't as rude as he is for publishing this "secret" news which most people brighter than him already knew about.