Blog Posts by Sarah D. Bunting

Pumpkin, wearing a pink sling on her injured paw, gets ready to attack a toy. Photo courtesy of Plattsburgh Press-Republican / Gabe Dickens.Talk about hair-raising: Pumpkin the kitten used up at least three of her nine lives last month, when she traveled 100 miles' worth of bumpy upstate-NY roads wedged between the bumper and the front end of a Jeep. But after nearly a full day trapped in the chassis and some understandable injuries, Pumpkin got a much-deserved happy ending – the Jeep's owner, Stacey Pulsifer, decided to adopt the kitten.

How did Pumpkin end up on this involuntary road trip? Pulsifer doesn't know how Pumpkin got into this predicament, but she does know where. "I saw her on my porch on a Friday evening after work," Pulsifer tells Yahoo! Shine Pets. The next day, a Saturday, Pulsifer was on the road for her friend Kellie Briquer's wedding, driving from Plattsburgh, NY to Elizabethtown, to Peru, and then back home. She had no idea she had a tiny feline baby on board until she stopped at a McDonald's drive-through for coffee, where she thought heard meowing. She then drove home and inspected the car for

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Three football bites to get your day started right:

It's go time for Colts rookie QB Andrew Luck, who's probably facing as much scrutiny as one Peyton Manning did when he first took the field for the same franchise lo these many years ago. Shutdown Corner's Doug Farrar talked with Luck about the faster linebackers in the pros, great coaching, and how he plans to lead NFL veterans in his first year.

And what can we expect from every other franchise this year? Well, it's the internet; even knitting blogs are rolling out Week 1 predictions. We like this photo essay on the NFL's own website, which prognosticates that the Broncos will have a tough opening six weeks; Ray Rice will contend for league MVP; and the Pats' easy schedule could spell complacency (and mediocrity) for the perennial powerhouses.

On a down note, Y! Sports expert Dan Wetzel's commentary on Terrell Owens's sad financial straits says the league should build in protections for players who may not realize their advisors Read More »from NFL regular season starts today: Breakfast Trey

Angela is a three-time Olympic medalist, World Champion, and leader of the U.S. Women's Hockey Team. See how Angela trained to prepare for her fourth Olympic Winter Games.Last year, EA Sports's "NHL 12" game let gamers create a female hockey player in the "Be A Pro" fantasy mode. You could barely tell the difference, apparently, because under the equipment, everyone looks pretty much the same – and within the game, player ratings started at the same point as the men and built from there based on merit, not gender.

This year's version, in the interests of what Kotaku's Owen Good calls "inviting women who are hockey fans to its product," has signed up actual women's-hockey stars – Canadian Hayley Wickenheiser, and the U.S. national team's Angela Ruggiero – to appear in the game. The "NHL 13" "Legends" mode puts past hockey superstars on the ice of the present day; that's where players will find Wickenheiser and Ruggiero, who have both earned Olympic gold in the sport. But Good points out that, as "the first two real-life female athletes to appear in a video game simulation of an all-male professional team sport," they're hard to rate on the men's game's

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Taking care of an aging pet isn't just about dealing with arthritis, heart murmurs, or other symptoms we see in geriatric cats and dogs. Sometimes, it's about recognizing a loss of cognitive function. Experts have a name for it – "cognitive dysfunction syndrome" – but we know it better as senility or dementia, and pets can suffer from it just as humans can.

It's a growing problem among our beloved pets – or maybe it just seems that way, since with better nutrition and vet care and more informed owners, Tigger and Rex can expect to live longer than previous generations. That's great…but as pet life expectancies go up, so might diagnoses of "Dog'sheimer's disease."

Prepare for retirement -- in your 20s

If your pet is over 15 years old (considered "extreme old age"), you'll probably see at least one symptom of CDS. Writing for the Los Alamitos Patch, Kim Campbell Thornton suggests using the acronym DISH to spot the symptoms for yourself:

Disorientation. Your pet stares at walls; can't get Read More »from Senility in senior pets: signs and solutions

“For athletes, the Olympics are the ultimate test of their worth" - Mary Lou Retton (First American gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal.)So much for the Wheaties box. A new study out of Syracuse has found that female athletes aren't as likely as their male counterparts to find jobs as brand spokespeople – and that when American companies do use sportswomen as spokespeople, they don't use them correctly.

Co-authored by Rick Burton, professor of sport management at Syracuse University's Falk College, and John Antil and Matthew Robinson of the University Delaware's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, the study shows that despite women athletes' awesome showing at the London Olympics, their achievements may not translate to lucrative brand contracts off the field.

Using athletes to boost branding is a time-honored technique going back to the late 19th century; tobacco companies upped sales with baseball cards, and starting in the 1910s, stars like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb hawked products like soap, cereal, and Girl Scout cookies. Americans quickly got used to seeing sports stars selling them flour and underpants

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Grabbing a quick bite to go on today's Lunch Trey:

Kim Clijsters, who mounted one of the great post-mat-leave comebacks in sports history, has begun her retirement following yesterday's tight loss to Laura Robson of England. Clijsters was disappointed that her last major bid ended so quickly, but said of 4-year-old daughter Jada, "I think she's going to be excited to kind of have her mom around more, on a more regular kind of basis.''

Erin DiMeglio is having slightly better luck -- she's a QB for her high-school football team, and she's getting some snaps even though she's the third-stringer at the position. The coach, Doug Gatewood, implied that DiMeglio's not the first young woman he's had try out for the team; she's just the first who's really good: "I had a girl try out at wide receiver that couldn't make it through practice and I had a kicker that really couldn't make a field goal, so I didn't keep them. Erin can actually do what we ask of her...she completes the passes I ask,

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Melanie Oudin plays blindfolded against Ellen Degeneres during the 2010 U.S. Open -- but blind kids need some mods to make the game fit. Photo Getty Images.This is very cool: a group of high-school camp counselors came up with a way for sightless kids to play tennis. Fifteen tennis players from Snohomish (WA) High School came up with new equipment, and modifications to current gear and rules, including a larger foam "tennis" ball with a rattle in it; an on-court machine that chirps, orienting blind players to the direction the ball should go; lower nets; and letting the ball bounce a few times instead of just once.

Gabrielle Wilson, a varsity tennis player, got a $500 grant from the Snohomish County Sight and Hearing Foundation last year in order to put on a summer camp as her senior project. The camp is now run by high-schooler Amy Stevens. Stevens says that the focus is as much on the kids having fun and improving as on tennis. (What sounds the MOST fun to us is crafting the specialty tennis ball the camp uses: you cut a big foam-rubber ball in half, insert a ping-pong ball full of BBs, and put it back together with fabric tape.)

Y!

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Crashing into your lunch hour with three sports stories…it's Lunch Trey!

The unfortunate theme emerging from last night's MLB coverage: collisions. First up, a home-plate collision between Pirate 2B Josh Harrison and Cardinal catcher Yadier Molina. Molina left the game with "what was later diagnosed as upper back, shoulder and neck strains" after Harrison gave new meaning to the term "bang-bang play." Molina held on to get the out despite 1) a short-hopped throw from Carlos Beltran and 2) basically getting run over by a train. The play looked clean, although it was incredibly hard (and hard to watch), but that didn't stop the Cardinals from retaliating; Harrison got plunked, and both benches got warned.

Every time there's a hit like this, it prompts a debate about whether running "through" the catcher to score a run should be outlawed. (It was even under discussion for a couple of innings in the Mets booth last night.) The injury to Buster Posey last season, the infamous mugging of Roy

Read More »from Collisions, hairdon'ts, and Paralympians: Lunch Trey