Captain Carrots

    There have been a number of rather famous or infamous captains down through the years. There have been songs, stories and books written about them. A few come readily to mind. Good ol' Captain Bligh from the book Mutiny on the Bounty. He was a real captain and there really was a Bounty, it wasn't just a story someone made up. He served under the famous English captain, James Cook, who was credited with discovering the Hawaiian Islands. Of course the islands had been previously discovered by the natives who lived there.They just didn't blab about it- probably didn't want all the trouble that outsiders would bring; understandably so. Captain Bligh was quite a knowledgeable man. After the mutiny he and a  handful of his followers traveled some 3618 nautical miles across the open Pacific Ocean in a twenty foot boat. That in itself is quite a feat, but when you consider that a nautical mile is 2000 yards,6,000 feet versus a land mile at 5280, it's even more remarkable. Though he was a very capable man, his temperament made him very unpopular with his crew, hence the mutiny.  Bligh is a name associated with another unpopular captain, Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who ran the tanker, Exxon Valdez aground in Prince William Sound on Bligh Reef on March 24, 1989. Up here in Alaska, we heard about that in the news for the better part of a year. It was pretty tragic. In researching some information for this post, for some reason I thought of the book Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling. I discovered that the name for the book was taken from a line in a ballad written about an English Captain, Mary Ambree, who participated in liberating the Belgium city of Ghent. I never knew that there were any female captains in the English navy. The first line of the ballad reads in part: When captains courageous whom death could not daunt... I guess I'm going to have to get the book and read it. I'll certainly have to read up on Captain Mary Ambree. However, there is little brave or courageous about our beloved dog, Rigby, AKA Captain Carrots. As I've mentioned in previous posts, he insists on having sliced bananas in the morning if we partake, and most definitely will not eat his cereal unless we put milk on it. Whenever we are preparing a salad he goes ballistic at the sight of peppers- green, red, yellow, orange, he loves them all, plus the lettuce, tomato, cucumber- whatever. For the longest time we were in the habit of giving him cheese. We finally decided that it probably wasn't that good for him, so we switched to carrots instead. Much healthier, and quite a bit less expensive, and frankly, he loves them. I got on a site called Care 2, and discovered that carrots have quite a few benefits. According to them, carrots slow down the aging process, they promote healthier skin, help prevent infection and heart disease, they cleanse the body, protect teeth and gums, reduce the risk of cancer and of course something that your mother may have told you, they are good for your eyes. They are full of vitamin A, which is transformed in the retina
to rhodopsin, a purple pigment necessary for night vision. Holy cats, who knew? It sounds like a person could pretty much live on a diet of carrots. I know one gal here in town who ate massive quantities of carrots back when I was managing the L. Kane store. Almost every day she was in buying a bag. One day she came in and we didn't have any fresh ones, she'd bought them all, so she purchased a can of carrots. It was at that time that I noticed that her skin had  a fairly yellowish tint.  I thought perhaps she was a little jaundiced. We found out later that her massive intake of carotene was actually coloring her skin. As it stands right now, we're going through about two bags of those baby carrots every week. I'm not sure what to expect, but if in the future I find that we have the worlds only orange Dachshund, I'll be sure to post some pictures.