Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, July 18, 2010

Joel Armstrong, The Duck Man of Spokane

By John Ballard



A feel-good post for Sunday, brought to you by The Telegraph (UK) and You Tube. The video is from last year. This has been going on now for three years.







To the mother duck, positioning her nest 15 feet above street level must have seemed like an ideal way of protecting her brood from predators.


The only problem was how to get the ducklings back to the (very hard) ground and on to water in one piece once they were hatched.


Enter Joel Armstrong, a bank official also known as 'Duck Man'. With skills an England goalkeeper could only dream of, Mr Armstrong caught all five ducklings in quick succession as they tumbled from their nest high above the concrete pavement.


Saved from injury and possible death, the ducklings were placed on the ground next to mum and then guided by Mr Armstrong the quarter of a mile through busy traffic to the nearest river.


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Mr Armstrong, a father-of-two who admits to better than average hand-eye co-ordination, has had practice at duckling-catching, having performed his heroics twice before in 2008 and again last year.


He's not sure if it's the same duck laying eggs each time, admitting: "They all look the same."


To date he has caught 26 ducklings in three years. And no, he hasn't dropped one yet.


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