If dogs age seven years for every year a human ages, and if Leap Years occur only every four years, how old would a dog born on Leap Year be?

It turns out that question is not nearly as confusing as it sounds once you work it out on paper.

• A boy or girl born on Feb. 29, 2000 would have aged eight years after celebrating their birthday on Friday but it would only be their second birthday.

• A dog born on March 1, 2000 would have aged 56 dog years by Friday. 

• A dog born on Feb. 29, 2000 would have aged 56 dog years by Friday, but would only have celebrated 14 birthdays.

City editor Aaron Aupperlee called the Barstow Humane Society to verify this logic, and the worker there emphasized that the number of birthdays a dog has doesn’t change its biological age. She said the average dog lives for about 16 human years or about 102 dog years. Leap year dogs live for the same amount of time.

“Trying to cheat to make you younger doesn’t count, even for a dog,” she said.

Jason Smith — Staff Writer

I was working on an article today about the 99 Cents Only store that’s going into the Barstow Shopping Center at the 1300 block of East Main Street. Henry Chu, the corporation’s vice-president of marketing was trying to impress upon me how clean and orderly the company keeps its stores.  He told me that the stores are so clean that German photographer Andreas Gursky took a photo, “99 Cent,” of the company’s store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

The photo sold for $2,256,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2006, then the highest price ever paid for a photo at auction, according to Photo District News Online.

The painting can be seen at the 99 Cents Only Store Web site. 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a nice looking photo. It’s a nice looking store. There’s wide aisles and good lighting. Bright packages. The brightly colored packages of candy make me want to hit the office vending machine (for the fifth time today.) That’s all well and good, I’m just not sure a photo of a discount store is worth more than what I’ll probably make in a lifetime.

Of course, “99 cent” is a deal, pun intended, compared to Gursky’s “99 cent II, Diptych,” sold to an unnamed private collector for $2.48 million in 2006, according to Photo District News Online.

A March 2007 article found at Popphoto.com, theorized that the photos may have been priced higher because they were sold at a contemporary art sale, and not with other photographs. The article cited the Sotheby’s catalogue entry for the photo sale and compared Gursky’s work to Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.

Here’s what the catalogue entry said:

“Andreas Gursky’s powerful large scale photographs have quickly informed the way that we view the ‘the fetishism of our material world’ and have immediately become a part of established artistic vocabulary … Executed on a grand scale, his photographs survey the post-Capitalist landscape, searching for the signifiers which define our daily lives.”

Please don’t ask me what any of that means, I’m going to go read a comic book. Possibly Spiderman or maybe the Green Hornet if I’m feeling uber-sophisticated.

Jason Smith

Desert Dispatch, Staff Writer

A beagle has won the Westminster Kennel club show for the first time in the dog show’s history. Uno, a three-year-old beagle, was named Best in Show Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, according to the Associated Press. 

So a beagle made history. Well, mine just makes a mess.  

Uno, a beagle, won the hound category at the Westminster Kennel Club Show last night and could win Best in Show later tonight (actually, in about 24 minutes. If I’m still writing then, I’ll update you). It’s the first time that a beagle has won its breed competition and the first time since 1939 that a Beagle has even advanced to the final seven.     

So why has one of the country’s most popular dogs, according to the Associated Press, never taken home the bacon (Best in Show)? Well, I believe I can shed a little light on this one.     

Don’t get me wrong here, I love my roommate’s beagle, Bailee, but she is a terror. Bailee prefers toilet paper, couch cushions, shoes and chairs to the toys she leaves around the house. She is always wound up (I credit that to sleeping all day while the house is empty) and just decided a month or so ago to bark at everyone who comes through the door.    

She’s the cutest thing in the world, and certainly at my house, when she’s watching TV with you, sleeping curled up between your legs or chasing after a ball in the backyard, but when she’s nipping at your fork as you try to eat dinner or standing on the table when you come home lapping up a beer she just knocked over, you can understand why the beagle has not faired well at the most prestigious dog show.     

With that said, Bailee is young, and I hope she grows out of it to be just like Uno.
   
Isn’t she cute?    

The Best in Show competition will also bit editor against editor at the Desert Dispatch. Uno of course represents Bailee, my dog, and an Australian shepherd who won the herding category represents Scott Shackford’s dog Zander. Though Zander is only part Aussie.     

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor 

When I registered to vote in California, I decided to check the “decline to state” box hoping it would shield me from partisan pigeon-holing and attacks on my objectivity as a reporter.

So today, when I went to vote, I went as a non-partisan, decline to state voter, and like many Californians, didn’t vote for any candidates when I could have.

Declined to state voters were supposed to be able to vote for Democrat or American Independent Party candidates in Tuesday’s primary. But when I got my ballot, there were no names, just propositions. I asked a poll worker if I had the right one, and I did, the poll worker thought.

I trusted the poll worker and voted. Come to find out later, poll workers across California were ill-trained and mis-informed about how to deal with voters like me.

But Hillary and Barack, don’t get all bent out of shape over this one. I was going to vote for Edwards anyway!

Aaron Aupperlee | City Editor

For Thanksgiving, Betty suggested to John that they just go to Fort Irwin’s dinner. They did, but John also insisted that him and Betty also cook a dinner of their own so they would have leftovers for days after. For Christmas, Betty and John visited some of Robert’s family only a few hours away from Fort Irwin. While they were there, Betty got a call from Robert, and he was able to talk to his mother and sisters for about 15 minutes, which is quite a bit, Betty said.

Betty’s work at the post with families of the 58th kept her busy as well.
“You noticed they were gone, but that wasn’t all you think about,” she said about the soldiers being gone.

John said this deployment has been easier on him than his father’s last deployment in 2003. Most noticeably improved, John said, has been his work in school.