Huricane Akara Turbofire 03.04.2003 to 03.27.2017

Tubey, around 3 months old

This is Tubey's Human posting. I'm sad that I have to post this inevitable post to let his readers know that Tubey has passed away Monday, a week ago (March 27, 2017). He was 14 years old and was my beloved canine friend for more than a quarter of my life. Obviously I will miss him and am still sad, but one of the benefits of the World of Turbo blog is that I can look back on his adventures, both real and fictional.

I stopped actively blogging when I started actively Facebooking. But I did allow Tubey to have a presence there. He declared himself to be Missouri's U.S. Congressional Representative for the fictitious 14th district after his unsuccessful bid to become President of the United States.

Speaking of Tubey's Presidential campaign of 2008, I tried to keep human politics out of his posts as much as possible, but his announcement that he was running was based on the one that Hillary Clinton used that year. When I decided that Tubey would be running for president, I wanted him to "visit" every state before his party's convention. Obviously, I couldn't take time out for being a human who had a job to drive my dog to 50 states just to photograph him, so I learned how to use Photoshop and Tubey e-visited many sites in each state; some of which had been suggested by other dogs and their humans who visited the website.

One of the most complicated blog posts that appeared on World of Turbo was the Great Debate held prior to the election on November 1, 2008. It was a unique post because I had to help of many humans and their animals, and (well) a couple vacuum cleaners. Kathryn Miles was a huge help as the moderator. She got questions from the panelists (a dog, a cat, a goat, & a vacuum cleaner) and sent them to me and Tubey (and my vacuum cleaner to answer). After that, I translated the entire debate into vacuum language. I've said that you don't have to be crazy to have a dog blog, but that I think you do to have a blogging vacuum cleaner. (I do think that if Tubey had run for President in 2016, it's possible that people could have thought I was doing a parody of Donald Trump, but Tubey came first.)

From the "Convention." with Khyra, his running mate.

Speaking of blogging dogs, I owe a huge amount of gratitude to Greg and Brooke Lee, who were the founders and maintainers of a website called Dogs With Blogs. For many years it was the best website to find the names and websites of dogs who had blogs all over the world. If it wasn't from the
Lee's and DWB's, I would have a lot fewer Facebook "friends." Most of use DWBers have never met each other in person, but anytime we have found out about one of the dogs and sometimes their humans having passed away, we would be as sad as if any actual friend had died. It is something that is hard to explain to people who had not had that experience.

A 14 year old napping Turbo.

Tubey in reality was a very affectionate dog. He probably wasn't as crabby as he came off in his blog posts, but I did base "his" writing style on his real personality. He often would yell at the other dogs...especially Meepie and Lex. And sometimes he would stomp his foot when yelling. I don't remember if I ever actually gave him any bacon. But he did occasionally end up with cheese that I may have dropped. His favorite human snacks were banana chips and salsa.

I appreciate all of the readers of World of Turbo and all of the comments that have been posted to the blog. It really does mean the world to me.