It was a beautiful day in New York yesterday, perfect late August: 85 degrees and sunny, with a slight sea breeze.

I took Little Man to my favorite park in New York: East River Park.  I love it because is in my neighborhood, and it’s rarely crowded so there are a lot of places Little Man can play and roll around in the grass.  The City has been paying a lot of attention to the waterfront of the New Yorkest of rivers, the East River.  The views of Brooklyn from the new esplanade are incredible, and the Williamsburg Bridge stretches over my end of the park.

I used my much-loathed Samsung Memoir cameraphone, which was able to produce a few good shots.

These are all licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution:

My dog Little Man is my best friend and we’ve been through a lot together.  Dogs are incredible, and this one has added a lot of joy to my life.

In January Little Man turned five, and in dog years that makes him 35, which is exactly my age right now. To mark the occasion this month, my friend Billy Name, Andy Warhol’s live-in photographer at The Factory, did some portrait shots at the historic Chelsea Hotel in New York City.

Images with attribution to Billy Name

This is a photo my friend Nate took of Billy photographing:

Billy and me:

Image above licensed Creative Commons 3.0

Little Man, now out of his winter depression, greets Ernesto.  (Creative Commons 3.0)

Scott Lamb did a pretty cool post comparing the blizzards of New York’s past with the most recent.  Evidence that all three of these blizzards have been over-hyped for my city.  Take this shot from the 1899 storm:

Scott used this photo of Little Man from my blizzard post to represent 2010; click on it below to see more blizzard shots through time:

I thought this was one of the most over-hyped blizzards ever.  It’s embarrassing how the city shut down over an average snow storm.  Below are photos–licensed Creative Commons 3.0–of “Snowmageddon 2010″ New York City (yawn) that I took with my Samsung Memoir cameraphone:

Snow plows in the East Village on the corner of 1st Avenue and Houston.

Little Man in front of our building, trying to deal with the snow.

The view overlooking Wall Street.

Looking down toward the street, financial district, Manhattan.

Looking toward City Hall.  The tall skyscraper in the distance is the still under construction 99 Church Street.

Every year as winter approaches, I notice a change in my dog Little Man’s personality. At eight pounds, he is a small guy in a big city and he has known nothing else but this city his whole life. That is, except for travels to my sister’s in New Jersey and our month out in Colorado, New York City to him is nature.

Yet every November to December he begins his winter depression.

Little Man is known in some Wikipedia circles. He has accompanied me on the New York City Wikimedia picnics, and he also illustrates a few articles. You can see him playing fetch on the campus of Colorado College on the article about fetching; he is being cradled by Ingrid Newkirk, the President of PETA, on her wiki biography; overlooking the city skyline on the roof of my apartment with fat activist/Big Beautiful Woman Kira Nerusskaya (photo, right, from a Wikinews interview); on a platform waiting for a train on a subway station article; on the Chihuahua page he is illustrating the aggression for which the breed is stereotyped (the story behind the shot is here); and on animal communication he is demonstrating the desire to protect a bone.

He used to illustrate evolution and selective genetics in this photo of him (and his friend Paco) next to a couple of Great Danes; although the image no longer illustrates artificial selection in English, it still does in Portuguese.

He appeared on the People’s Court in defense of a dog rescue.  Two elderly neighbors have keys to my apartment so that they can take him for company when I’m at work during the day.  He is not yippy, but a brawny little bruiser with swagger and lots of heart.  He is much loved in my neck of the woods.  I last blogged about him when he was in a rivalry with my sister’s dog Riley in Colorado.

At eight pounds, he loves heat almost to an extreme.  No matter how piping hot the fresh-from-the-dryer laundry is, he burrows into it like a mole.  If the radiator is wheezing, he sits on the shelf over it.  Summer makes him happy, but fall makes him…confused.

He sits inside the apartment at the window, and the sun through the pane makes him think it is so warm outside, just like in July.  So he begs and begs and begs.  He becomes restless if I don’t take him out.  I relent, knowing the moment he steps outside the brisk front door of the building, his ears will go down and he’ll immediately sit to show he won’t move until we turn around.

We go through a month of this before it sinks in: no more sunshine and squirrels to chase through the leafy grass.  It’s winter, and it’s cold.

In December, Little Man falls into discontent.  He no longer yearns to go outside, but he stirs.  He doesn’t know what he wants but he knows he is bored in the apartment.  Playing with me only takes an hour.  He wants to see what is happening on the block!  He wants to patrol.  Yet, not in this weather.

So as the snow falls, so does Little Man, staring from his shelf at the window that sits atop the steam radiator warming his stomach through the wood.  Wondering, when will it be comfortable to search for the squirrels through the leaves?

Until that time arrives again–if it arrives again, he frets–he cloisters in caves of blankets.

Last week I wrote about how my dog Little Man, who I brought out to Colorado from New York City, was being pursued by sister’s slightly-disabled adopted dog Riley, who wants to be his friend.  Little Man wanted nothing to do with him; however, the two have come to a detente, and now that 7 pound Little Man knows that 35 pound Riley will not make him a snack, he seems to enjoy the attention.

However, Riley’s snout is about as long as Little Man’s body, and Little Man wants that thing nowhere near his butt.  Here’s Riley trying to get a sniff, with LM hightailing it out of there.

But Little Man can always escape Riley’s snout by scrambling through his mouse hole and into my room.

Yesterday morning former model and downtown lounge chanteuse Lisa Levy (of Psychotherapy Live! ), Little Man and I were on The People’s Court.  I thought to bring my camera to do photography for Wikipedia, but then decided against it.  I assumed that the use of any recording devices and cameras is verboten.  That doesn’t usually stop me from trying, but I also had Little Man with me and I didn’t want to worry about him, expensive camera equipment and my part on the this reality television show.

The Case – Claire Lieb vs. Waggytail Rescue

Waggytail Rescue is a Chihuahua rescue organization that I fostered and adopted dogs through.  It’s run by one of my best friends, Holly DeRito, who is well known in New York City dog circles for tireless and selfless dedication to saving dogs.  The dogs Waggytail takes in–mostly Chihuahua mixes–are rescued from kill shelters.  There is a flat $250 adoption fee that is a donation.  Waggytail barely makes ends meet. They often cover gargantuan medical bills to get animals to a point where they are healthy and can be adopted.  One 14 pound dog I fostered had been raped anally by a man.  Kill shelters don’t take care of these kinds of medical bills; they just kill the dog.

The dogs are traumatized if not by abuse, then certainly by the experience at the shelter, which reeks of death and sounds of anguish to a dog. When a person adopts a dog, it is not a commercial transaction.  Most people get this.

Claire Lieb adopted Waggytail dog Chiquita, and signed an adoption agreement with short, easy to understand representations.  One stipulated she was making a donation, not buying a dog.  A dog rescue is a place people go to find a pet that somebody else hurt, didn’t love or irretrievably lost.  Ms. Lieb and Chiquita didn’t work out, so two weeks later Ms. Lieb returned the dog.  Waggytail offered to help find a new dog, but Ms. Lieb apparently discovered a “free” dog through a friend and so she wanted her donation back.  Waggytail refused; Ms. Lieb sued.

The People’s Court scene

Ms. Lieb was a sight to behold.  I would not have been surprised if she didn’t make it through the night.  Her ill-fitting wig was gray and bulbous, like a hair hat.  The crackling sparkle of the polyester was jarringly juxtaposed atop a face so chaotically caked with make-up that it didn’t look as if Ms. Lieb applied it, but instead fell face-first into it.  The woman she was accompanied with, though, wore none and had the figure of a hockey player.

The most fascinating part of this Anthropology project was her eye-make up.  Large swathes both under and over each eye, as if she had taken 1960′s robin’s egg blue eye shadow on the her index finger and thumb and then rubbed at her eyes to smash the make-up into her face.  At one point when she looked up quickly, angered, she resembled a celestial baglady raccoon.

Ms. Lieb was also not the only Lady of the People’s Court with an ill-fitting wig. It was a great discovery:  People still wear wigs!   It was awesome!

Lisa Levy, who is heavily involved in Waggytail, had Holly’s Power of Attorney and represented our side.  Little Man was there as a Waggytail dog on behalf of Chiquita (the dog Claire Lieb did not want).  I was a witness, but there was no need to call me to testify about the adoption process.  It was an open-and-shut case:  you can’t expect to receive a charitable donation back.  A dog rescue is not a commercial enterprise.

The one dramatic episode in our case was that we didn’t have the signed adoption agreement that she signed – it was at Holly’s mother’s house in Pennsylvania where she stored Waggytail records last month, not thinking she would need any of them urgently.  So Judge Marilyn Milian was angry about that.  She even called a recess!

When we went back, I told Lisa we have to give them some more theater.  “Give them some crazy” and “think Ricki Lake” and “nobody’s watching daytime TV”.  It’s supposed to be entertainment as well as arbitration.  So Lisa went back and started bang-bang-banging her hand on the podium when she spoke with an emotionally shaky voice!  It was excellent.  Judge Marilyn told her to “take it down a notch.”  It was great.

People in the audience were asking whether Little Man is available for adoption.  And the bailiff, Douglas Macintosh was really hot.