Ain't Nothin' but a Houndblog

Say No to Pugs

2011-02-14T11:30:00.006-05:00

Hey hopheads: leave your dog out of it. When you're riding that verdant wave, all zonked up on cannabis seeds, your dog may seem like the perfect companion for the journey, zoning out together onto some distant astral plane, where his fur feels like moon-grass and your shoelaces taste ribbons of fettucine boiled by the sun itself. Man's best friend right? Well unfortunately not all pursuits are suitable for a dog to embark upon. It's not the same kind of thing where taking Fido along to the chocolate donut and macadamia nuts buffet will result in a blown-out stomach and a trail of shimmery blood poos all over the rug and up the stairs. A high dog is a happy dog, or so it seems, but it's this kind of happiness that's colored by a loss of some of your control. For as much you guys may seem like pals, getting your dog wild on rhino seeds is going to make him respect you that much less, turning the master-hound relationship into something far less defined. Sure you might share a puff with your boss if offered, but it's always a turning point situation, the two of you lighting up in the parking garage one day and the next you're knowing it's all an act when he tries to hassle you about expense reports. It'll be the same with your dog. He'll start thinking of you as the good-time party master and know he can take a little more, sneak a few more snausages while you're falling asleep on the couch in the afternoon, without you having a thing to say about it. So next time you order a lid from cannabis seeds uk think about the negative precedent you'll be setting if you extend the revelry into the realm of mano-a-dogo.

Movin' Out

2009-09-16T14:26:00.001-04:00

Jesse: Dogs love to move. Maybe it's because dogs love conveyancing at moveme.com and a chance to get their paws all over that is like finding a scrumptious heap of vomit getting all toasty in the sun. The layout is all Picasso blue period without the emaciation which appeals to dogs because their color vision is slanted to the green end of the spectrum and ladies with sweet headsets remind them of their rambunctious youths, little pups rolling around in endless green fields.

But it's not all fun and games. When you need a conveyancing quote you need a conveyancing quote, its like the call of nature in some ways, and its not like you can just stroll down to the 7-11 or your local "We Sell Your Stuff on E-Bay" store to pick one up. Dogs understand this. They don't show it, but that look, the one they give you when you come out of the bathroom and they're just standing their next to the door, a little judgmental, a little wise, it's a real understanding of the demands of conveyancing and market fluctuation and the vagaries of moving in our fast-paced modern world.

But its cheap conveyancing that's important, you know. It's especially key for a dog, whose liquid assets are all expended on fire hydrants and who doesn't ever have much cash on hand. Moving can be hard on a dog. Their love for new experiences is what makes them so appealing in some ways but a lot of it is a front. As pack animals they need to be strong, to back the choices of the leader without question or any kind of obstinance. In nature that would get them nipped in the butt without a second thought. In the domestic world you're the leader of the pack and your dog will follow you wherever you ask him to. But try to keep his feelings in mind and realize that cheap conveyancing makes his dreams a little sweeter as he nods off to sleep in front of the stove.

Dogloo

2009-09-10T17:00:00.003-04:00

Jesse: Did dogs ever really routinely live in dog houses or is this yet another fabricated myth of magical pre-hippie America, like sock-hops or the Fonz? There's no way of knowing for sure but I recently recently found a dogloo abandoned in some dense brush and it was like stumbling upon the ruins of a lost civilization.

Wolves

2009-09-10T13:07:00.003-04:00

Jesse: Maybe science has theorized this already but I feel like dogs are just wolves who thousands of years of coddling and puppy treats have left severely mentally retarded. Which, like child-safety guards on outlets, is probably for the best. Having a wolf for a pet would involve constantly outwitting it as it repeatedly hatched brilliant schemes to eat you while you were sleeping or looking into the fridge or in the bath. Sure, complain the next time Fido wedges his head in the banister, but remember you're only a few IQ points away from him eating you and all of your relatives.

Lisa: A ginger dog is a most wonderful thing; this one in particular is something special, do you see

Dogs Eating Our Blogwork

2009-09-08T09:02:00.004-04:00

The dog-ate-my-homework legend actually started in the 18th century, when certain breeds of dogs were trained by professionals of low moral standing to snatch important papers straight from the hands of their rivals. It worked in a sense, until the victims started training passenger pigeons to steal the papers back from the dogs and London started to look like that scene in The Birds where the birds break through the window of the doggie day-care center. The bobbies had to blow their whistles until everyone got a hold of themselves and the streets were covered in doo. Yes it's an unfortunate anecdote, but it proves that there is some historical validity to the whole thing and kids who used it back in the day weren't as obviously yanking the chain as it may seem to our modern minds. Anyway, to summarize: a dog got into this blog and ate the last four months of posts. What a strange coincidence.

Dogs of War

2009-05-08T16:01:00.004-04:00

Jesse: This guy somehow looks like even more of a dope when you consider him in comparison with the cold efficiency of this two-legged killing machine. You may have to operate the gun yourself but with it you can bring down any number of things: deer, bison, pickup trucks, low-flying helicopters. This dog could maybe kill a rabbit but only after scrambling through the bushes on some madcap Maramaduke-style chase around circles with this pathetic coup de grâce where it slips and crushes the poor creature with its tremendous cornfed ass. Then you're eating hot pockets for dinner while Bongo here looks at you like you've just asked him to find the square root of Kentucky.

and Julius Rosenberg on alto clarinet

2009-05-03T13:04:00.002-04:00

Jesse: You hear about this dame they got on the piano tonight? She's a real dog. Louis B. Mayer over here thinks its a laugh riot.

Babes in the Wood

2009-04-23T12:42:00.001-04:00

Jesse: As the Greek god of juniper, deep-sea fishing and postal deliveries, Actaeon always had some dogs scrambling around underfoot, so when he bursts into this scene with two yappers at his heels its no suprise. But what else is going on here? Are all these thick naked ladies standing in as a gaggle of vernal fertility symbols? Do they represent the spoils of the hunt? Feminine mystique? Nah man those are just some titties.

Dogsong

2009-04-20T12:41:00.005-04:00

Jesse:

Every dog is like a puzzle
every dog has its own charms
so before you put on that muzzle
think of Ol' Yeller back on the farm

(chorus)
YEAH
some dogs are good
some dogs are bad
but all dogs need a helpin' hand
doggs who are rude
dogs who are sad
help make this a better land

I like to think that somewhere a man is sitting at his piano furiously furrowing his brow over the precise lyrics for the next infectious jingle that's going to have us all rushing out to stock up on Puppy Chow or donate our nickels to Pals for Pups or some other vaguely sweet-sounding charity. He can use this one if he wants.

Lisa: Jesse I told you to stay out of my room

Bo

2009-04-16T12:13:00.004-04:00

Jesse: Motherfucker's all "no comment" sniffin nonchalant at that boom and trotting around the grounds like he owns the place (which he does), these reporters scrambling along behind all out of breath trying for an interview. Afternoons spent nosing around the new digs, fetchin' shit, uncovering a secret terrorist cell among the gardening staff and digging up some evidence behind the new herb garden. Obama's like "good boy" with the thousand watt smile and those guys are shipped off to Guantanamo post-haste. There hasn't been a hound this bad in the White House since Rover Eisenhower bit into Kruschev's wingtip and refused to let go.

The Mutt Man

2009-04-15T12:39:00.004-04:00

Jesse: This guy is pretty into dogs but I'm more concerned about where he got that vest and how they managed to shoot this inside of a lung.

Dog Art

2009-04-13T20:37:00.003-04:00

Jesse: Art is cool because its so full of layers and meanings. Like this piece for example, what's the story behind it? Maybe this dude was just out for a nice stroll on the lea behind his estate when out of nowhere this dog bursts through the treeline and fucking bulldozes this stag like Warren Sapp flattening some puny quarterback and the guy was like "awwww shit, ima paint this" Or maybe it's nothing at all like that and the dog is just whispering something delighftully observant in the stag's ear.

Lisa: I've never seen a dog with antlers before but considering the way things are up North where it gets really cold I guess it's not much of a surprise. WHat a fun thing it must be to ride on a sled pulled by man's best friend and it's pretty common knowledge that dogs have very good eyesight which begs the question why does Santa use reindeer when dogs would have a much easier time navigating their way through airspace

New York's Alright (If You Like Milkbones)

2009-04-08T12:33:00.008-04:00

Jesse: Something serious was going on with NYC dogs back in the day. We've all seen The French Connection and know the city was pretty foul around this point but this hardly gets at the sheer amount of fucking biting that must have been going on: with stats like these you probably couldn't get from your apartment to the corner bodega without five daschunds latching on to different sections of your leg. What was behind this? Rabies epidemic? Post-hippie disillusionment? Part of me likes to imagine that dogs are big sticklers for human propriety and the image of so many junkies and deadbeats sleeping half in a garbage can and half on a park bench sent them into a frenzy of civic responsibility.

Lisa: Once on the subway I saw a dog he was wearing a vest and I was so surprised my foot missed the last step and went tumbling to the ground. The only thing I could do at this point of course was get up pet the dog and continue on my way, but as I approached the blond pup a woman that I did not know PLEASE DO NOT PET THE DOG WHILE HE'S WORKING and I decided I didn't even want to go out anymore so I turned around and went home.

MORALITY

2009-04-04T16:51:00.000-04:00

Angel: "Morris you don't really want to eat that birthday cake off the counter. You're a fine animal, not a junkyard cur, please don't behave like one. You don't even like frosting. Remember your dear mother, Morris, remember"

Devil: "Wait a second I'm a cow what am I doing here"

Badder Dogz

2009-04-03T16:46:00.004-04:00

Jesse: The amount of things that have gone wrong here is astounding. If this dog is a laid-back, cigarette-mouthed louche then why is he holding an ax? Is the indecent exposure posture another bad-dog signifier or just a disgusting goof? Then there's the change in tone between the picture and the sidebar caption. Is English not this person's first language? At whom is this message directed? HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO CALL YOU WHEN A PHONE NUMBER IS NOT PROVIDED

Bad Dogz

2009-04-01T08:44:00.001-04:00

Jesse: People talk a lot about prison reform nowadays but like it or not the pound is still out there and it still sucks. When you're a dog you can get picked up for just hanging out on the corner without your ID, to a place where there's no cable TV or weight room or conversion to Islam to take up your time. The only luxury at the pound is that no one stops you from eating bugs. It's basically like Nazi Germany except leaving the house without your papers gets you crammed in a tiny dog-filled cell where mournful howling is the national pastime.

The Internet

2009-03-28T13:48:00.002-04:00

Jesse: This picture will figure prominently in the events of the year 2012, when President Obama has left America for a white woman and the Supreme Court is in the process of declaring the internet unconstitutional. This will be their only piece of evidence.

This is the first post in a series examining the issue of bad behavior in dogs.

He Lost it in a Panting Accident

2009-03-26T16:01:00.002-04:00

Jesse: Like always technology is a double-edged sword. Sure this guy is going to have the time of his life jouncing around merrily on his bouncy new prosthetic leg, looking like the belle of the ball when he leaps 40 feet in the air to cath an errant frisbee. But those amazing carts on which scruffy little amputees wheel around their precious little stumps? You can say goodbye to them forever. Face facts guys the future is a coldly efficient place where cuteness will soon be dismissed as "illogical".

Mangel

2009-03-17T14:41:00.002-04:00

Jesse: Angel or not, that dog is a heartbeat away from eating the cinammon doughnut floating above his head. Three minutes later it will be back on the carpet in a moist pile while he snaps those wings in two trying to connect his head to his ass.

Lisa: Ghosts~

Meat Hound

2009-03-15T22:40:00.002-04:00

Jesse: Slavering meat hounds may not be as intimidating as those angry painted noses with all the teeth but keep in mind that the Japanese have an intense, abiding fear of dogs. This is why the "asian people eat dogs" myth exists. They do eat dogs, not because they want to but because ancient lore instructs that the only way to banish the otherwise immortal spirit of a demon hound (goumou-ryouken kanashimi) is to season it with mirin, ginger and some daikon radish.

Lisa: You know when your eyes are bigger than your stomach and you end up with a hamburger the size of your head? Well I was eating one the other day, it was very hard, and naturally I couldn't finish it because I'm rather small. Anyway, I feel very sad when I do this because things are starving all over the world, and I thought "gee I wish I had a dog right now, he would finish this for me!"

Science

2009-03-12T13:42:00.002-04:00

Jesse: So when you add a spotted dog and a non-spotted dog the result is never a spotted one; everyone knows that. The thing is though, when one of those dogs becomes a racing greyhound and is then stared at with utmost seriousness by his owner outside of the dogtrack, he will feel more comfortable acting as a living ventilator , standing on a platform and staring (in the same way) at a rabbit mounted on a stick, allowing the owner many leisurely afternoons relaxing in his favorite armchair, no longer needing to breathe on his own. Now you see?

Lisa: I don't know what's happening, is that a real rabbit or a stuffed one? I do wish people wouldn't hurt innocent animals just to prove a point.

His and Furs

2009-03-10T10:33:00.003-04:00

Jesse: Yeah divorce is hard for the kids but face it their self esteem was probably not so hot in the first place and at least it gives them an excuse to cling to when they're a forty-eight year old shoe store employee suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, bad credit and crippling depression. Dogs on the other hand have no inherent problems but end up getting sub-divided into these demarcated zones, looking all like 19th century Africa, trying to smile even though getting pet so much in one area makes their fur burn. Shit's tough.

Lisa: I was unaware that dogs have maps but what an interesting thing. Now when I pet a dog I can pretend that I am traveling; there are places I've never been, like West for example, and now I can pet West and what a fine place it is out there! Also the South is nice too, who doesn't love a good belly rub!!! It makes a lot of sense that I live in the Northeast, wagging tails are the most fun of all things dog. You know how humans used to have tails like a long time ago? Well I bet mine was wagging lots and lots way back then.

REAL DIRTLESS GRASS

2009-02-28T09:50:00.006-05:00

Jesse: As far as I can tell this is a raised, grass-covered platform designed for your pet to poop on. It may also double as a raft in flood situations.

Lisa: Some magic is happening.

Doggie Do

2009-02-27T15:29:00.004-05:00

Jesse: Back in the '70s everybody's hair was getting crazy, so when you have a cool customer like Roscoe here you better believe he was on top of this trend, sporting locks that had the ladies sighing and carpet sellers doubting their own principles. Seeing him ride in a convertible must have been like watching a cotton ball dangling in a wind turbine.

Lisa: Oh my goodness do you see the belly on that girl? Great dog (which one?! har har har).

Pipe Dreamz

2009-02-25T08:48:00.003-05:00

Lisa: Oh gosh well this makes me uneasy for several reasons, I'll begin the way the dog's eyes are glowing. In my heart of hearts I realize this is merely a result of the camera's flash but you can't help but get the chills when you see this otherwise adorable baby looking a little mean. I'm having a hard time understanding the goings-on in this photograph; it looks to me like friendship but you really can't be sure.

Jesse: Its tough being a dog for the times when you just need to get away and have a thought to yourself without getting all hassled and petted and rescued from inside a pipe by a hunky beefcake who supplements his rescue hero salary by posing for the covers of romance novels. One day a dog may be able to rest comfortably inside a pipe in peace and until then we'll never be a real democracy will we?

Upright (Everything's Alright)

2009-02-23T22:45:00.004-05:00

Jesse: This is like the Tiny Tim of dogs, hobbling about on pathetic makeshift crutches, unable even to eat his own poop without a sad, protracted struggle.

Lisa: oh you guys i told you dogs are wonderful not just for companionship but also because they can be helpful around the house; i realize that this dog surely is an exceptionally talented fella (some might call him a perfectionist) but his doggy friends at the very least are able to eat things up off the floor and herd the children into another room. some dogs, unable to properly handle a pooper scooper, will go as far as to eat their own poo off the ground. this, of course, is not recommended; however there have been some claims that it keeps their coats shiny.

The Fox and the Houndblog

2009-02-20T09:02:00.002-05:00

Jesse: The UK still has a lingering guilt complex over all those years of fox hunts, so when the old feelings bubble up instead of getting all snot and tears they simply switch over to Lord Beverly Rides Again, a TV programme about a dashing fox aristocrat who drives hounds to market and shames hunters with his clean shoes and impeccable manners. He's a part-time magician who spends most of his time making prejudice disappear.

Lisa: What is it.

Here Boy!

2009-02-18T14:07:00.001-05:00

Lisa: Oh! What a wonderful place to spend an afternoon, these dogs are rather pleased to see their friend did you notice all the beautiful art on the walls? This certainly looks like a nice house do you think the dogs live there or are they visiting, you know what would be a neat invention if there was some gang of dogs that could stop by your house to make you feel better or to play there's something like that at nursing homes but with cats, in my opinion dogs make better companions they eat all the foods you feel guilty about throwing away~

Jesse: After losing his legs in a tragic bowling accident, Garry Ben Shegwin now moves about on a living raft of stitched-together dogs, an arrangement which gives him a full range of mobility as well as speedy access to local sausage vendors.

?

2009-02-16T12:37:00.000-05:00

Lisa: I'm concerned, this dog appears to have a flea or tick problem I hope he's had his shots, I mean it could be the quality of my monitor or the fact that he's just dirty (dogs sometimes have a fun time playing in mud). I'm also concerned about his stomach, it looks like he's eating grass or some kind of green (???) and this is something cats often do when they have a difficult time digesting their food. No, you know what, I can't tell, maybe somebody just forgot to mow the lawn.

Jesse: Actually the answer is (D): none of the above. The fact that this is drawn on construction paper suggests that it is the work of a child, which suggests a tenuous connection to reality, which suggests that ideas about lawns or mud are too concrete, which suggests that yes, this dog is actually made out of ice cream and is melting at a very rapid rate. The green is probably a toppled pile of fondant which suggests that this was actually an ice cream cake.

Hold On, Folks...

2009-02-12T10:52:00.000-05:00

Lisa: Where do police dogs sleep at night?
Jesse: In cages in the basement.

We'll be right back...

Collect 'em All!

2009-01-26T12:32:00.006-05:00

Jesse: Hey kids! Be sure to get your Official Aint Nothin' But a Houndblog Dog Pogs, guaranteed to unclog your brain fog. Pogs and dogs are taking the nation by storm! So round, you can carry them anywhere! Take em on a jog! On a trip to Prague! Glue them to your hedgehog. Flip 'em, skip 'em, dip 'em in your eggnog (don't actually do this, they'll be ruined). Whatever you do, pick up a stack and relive your favorite houndblog moments with some nifty little "dog bites", right on the back! Collect all 16!

Lisa: Oh my gosh what a wonderful way to expand your pog collection, I wasn't allowed to have pogs because my mom didn't want me to choke but these sure are handsome things I wonder if she'll let me get them not to play but to frame in my room, the good news is pogs are usually made of cardboard and if they get in your mouth it's just a matter of time until they dissolve```

Indiana Was the Dog's Name

2009-01-23T09:25:00.006-05:00

Jesse: This dog with his precious skull mask is like the villain from The Temple of Doom, except that instead of tearing out your heart with his bare hands and watching it set on fire, he's just going to melt it. If that's even a dog it might actually be a bag of mail resting on its side.

Lisa: What happened here! I've never seen a dog quite like this before, he sure has a way of looking at you though doesn't he, I guess this is one of those dogs that you always have to be honest with because in his face you can tell he understands mysteries far beyond your own comprehension, do you think he is able to catch balls in that mouth or is he more of frisbee kind of guy

His and Furs

2009-01-21T13:01:00.003-05:00

Jesse: Dammit Henry if you don't stop picking cotton all over the floor I swear to god I'm going to rub you with this miniature ice scraper. This is seriously the last time

Lisa: oh this is such a nice thing, you know when you get fur in your mouth and you're upset because it tastes worse than you would think (considering!), this helps you not get it inside of there, instead it collects it all on the ground, you can use it to stuff things maybe (if we were Native Americans) or to show your dog what he is made of. Sometimes when I'm crying a dog will press against my eyes it dries the tears, then they are gone~

This dog and his amazing, technicolor dream vest

2009-01-19T11:01:00.006-05:00

Jesse: Remember on older televisions when someone would wear a suit with a funky pattern like this and the picture wouldn't be able to handle it so you'd get those weird fuzzy-colored lines dancing all over? What about the rainbow test pattern that would show up really early in the morning? Or the cartoon about telepathic future humans riding heavily equipped dinosaurs into battle. These are things that you will try to explain to your children but find only dead-eyed stares of incomprehension and disinterest. If you think about it, the gap between each generation gets less and less significant. Your grandparents didnt have television, your parents didnt have computers, you didnt have your own tiny superphone with a Jonas Brothers ringtone. Our future kids are bound to be such entitled little pieces of shit that I would consider not having them if it didn't mean I'd have no one to punish.

Lisa: What a nice mother that dog must have for her to knit him such a beautiful sweater. Sometimes when I'm cold I put on layers and layers of shirts until I can't move my arms and I lay down on a blanket on the fl0or and roll around until I'm tangled up, it's a fun game but if my mom isn't home I usually get stuck under the dining room table

My Dogs are Barkin'

2009-01-18T11:57:00.008-05:00

Jesse: Is Peanuts one of those cartoon universes where you have a mixture of anthropomorphic dogs and real ones? Does Snoopy have a gang of four-legged buddies that he runs with or is it all Joe Cools and that Mexican cousin with the weird hat? I dont remember, but cartoons like this are weird because of the confusing mixture of actual animals and people animals so you end up with situations like Arthur where he's an aardvark but also a boy (he doesn't even have an aardvark's nose now after they prettied him up so he's kind of just a non-descript gentle beast) and he has a pet dog that's an actual dog but also a friend who's a dog person. How do the dog people feel about this? Imagine living in a world where we were surrounded by less evolved versions of ourselves (not apes, more like cave men) and even kept those versions as pets. This doesn't bother children at all but you have to figure that they also eat jellybeans that they find between the couch cushions.

Lisa: Jesse I'm afraid I don't understand what the problem is here.

Doggie Vestements

2009-01-16T08:57:00.006-05:00

Jesse: Schwartzman is modeling a vest in this Polaroid which you can barely tell because a fat dog has plopped down in his lap right in front it. Cute. But really, there's something unsettling about this kind of marketing where the ad treats you like that shithead bartender with the gauged ears and the Rites of Spring t-shirt who ignores you as you try to get his attention, all toying with his iPod until you finally force eye contact and he makes a face and saunters over all in a huff. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I would like to be wooed; I want my ads to cavort and dance for me like I'm holding a gun to their abdomen. If I wanted this kind of attitude I'd go hold up an American Apparel.

Lisa: THIS IS A DREAM

2009-01-14T11:36:00.001-05:00

Jesse: CHA'NOTH, ANCIENT GOD OF FIRE AND STONE, KEEPER OF THE ETERNAL FLAME, MASTER OF THE HOUNDS, BEARS AND TALL BEASTS OF THE EARTH AND SEA, IN SLUMBER FAR BENEATH THE CHILL WINDS OF THE NORTHERN FROSTS UNTIL THE LATTER DAYS, NOW AVAILABLE FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY NEEDS.

Lisa: WHAT

Mighty Mouse

2009-01-13T12:35:00.002-05:00

Jesse: Being a heroic mouse (pink or otherwise) is a tough business, because face it, you can be on the top of your game 364 days a year, disarming mousetraps and brazenly outwitting cats or whatever other shit these little guys do, and all it takes is one slip up, one, and you're being bit in half by a dog with your foot fallen off in your shoe over there in the corner. And the thanks you get? None. No one comes to your funeral because there is no funeral because you are a mouse and ten minutes later the dog throws up your skeleton in his owners shoe. This is an issue that I feel is not fairly covered in television cartoons that glamorize the subject.

Plates of Poo

2009-01-09T22:04:00.003-05:00

Jesse: I don't know what it is about the specifics of the pathetic face he's making but this dog looks like a compulsive shit eater. Also I hate those stupid ears that look like the awful wigs worn by British judges.

Lisa: oh you guys please don't feed your dogs chocolate it's not good for them they would do much better with a can of dog food or a piece of meat, once i knew a dog that liked vegetables but it's my understanding that this is not an every day thing, have you ever met a dog that showed no interest in food i haven't i think that's why they're so relatable

Dogghouse

2009-01-07T02:33:00.001-05:00

Did ya get the dank, did ya get the dank?
Yeah I got the dank, you got the gas in the tank?
V.I.P. status, don't need an apparatus
Cuz the niggas I fuck wit, they all about the cabbage
Down in yellobrick road my destination, the DoggHouse
Toastin Remys, fillin' jimmies, we goin all out
Lookin for the wizard, creepin through the fog
Got some bad ass bitches, headed to the player's ball

Dogman X

2009-01-05T11:30:00.007-05:00

Jesse: It’s got to be tough to be DMX. All this pressure, to act like a tough guy all the time and constantly get arrested and set a terrible example for children. So much that even when you do something entirely ordinary like walking your dog, who just happens to be this 110-pound potentialy rabid monster, around the broken-down streets of the inner-city community where you keep your mansion and happen to pose menacingly while shrouded in a strange mist, this innocent act gets interpreted as even more ghetto posturing; somebody snaps a picture and the thing ends up on the cover of your next album because your manager is this fat douchebag named Claude who lives in a house shaped like an Escalade and can’t accept you for who you really are. Meanwhile all you wanted to do was take off your boots, curl up with American Idol and drink a nice hot tea to soothe your tired voice.

Lisa: ok well this dog looks like a great thing but sometimes i wonder if a dog's owner is tough enough does that make the dog tough as well. i don't think so mainly because dogs are very nice and they all just want to be friends (with each other and with you) and even if they pretend they are rough and tumble in reality it's all just a game and they would prefer a big cuddle and a nap. yesterday i saw a dog but it was across the street so i called hello and it looked at me. dmx is a famous rapper do you think he owns just one dog or many

Up, Up and Away

2008-12-16T14:35:00.001-05:00

Jesse: Remember in the opening credits to Webster how he grabbed that big bunch of balloons and started to float off into the sky? He was a pretty small kid huh.

Lisa: oh yeah that's a high up dog, when they jump into the air they are reaching high to catch things in their mouths like a ball or a stick, other times they are just jumping because it feels nice inside their legs or to feel the wind go through their fur is pleasant, if there was ever a dog that i could ride i would ask it to jump into the air because i've always wanted to know how it felt to fly or to ride on the back of a dog in the air other times dogs jump when they are racing because there are hurdles (they are usually graded on this) and the best is when you're there and you see it in person when they jump`

Dog Slog

2008-12-11T14:34:00.004-05:00

Jesse: You had to know this one was coming. I’m going to try to be brief : Duane (Dog) Chapman is terrible because he not only makes bounty-hunting seem excruciatingly boring , he single-handedly drains it of any vestigial mystique and makes you realize that it’s not a cool profession for crafty tough guys who’ve gone straight but one for badly-groomed dirtbags whose only marked difference from the criminals they politely collect is their dramatically overstated sense of self importance. The entire show is a disaster. His sons (nay, everyone in his family) has painful hair and his wife is the equivlant of Saraghina from 8 1/2 if that movie had taken place in rural Arkansas instead of Italy.

Lisa: No, I don't like this at all. I have buffalo sauce on my hands and I'm very upset.

Mr. Magoo and his Dog Too

2008-12-08T13:44:00.002-05:00

Jesse: On the surface this seems like the stupidest shit imaginable. Mr. Magoo is near-sighted, and guess what? His dog can’t see either. Har har har. But really, approaching the situation from a logical standpoint, what other kind of dog is he going to choose? The fact that Magoo fails to acknowledge his own defective eyes yet chooses a dog with the exact same malady implies that at some level, subconscious or otherwise, Magoo realizes that he can’t see. The old man is operating on an intense level of denial, which elevates the entire series into this really subtly affecting human tragedy. Pair this with the emerging theory that Magoo was a symbol for the silent majority during Vietnam (blind even to the reality of his own blindness, helplessly self-involved even as the world moves invisibly around him, yet with subtly Asian features that suggest a fixed, inherent similarity between the oppressed majorities of two vastly different nations) and maybe its time to critically reevaluate Mr. Magoo as the smartest show to ever air on television.

Lisa: oh gosh

This Old Dog

2008-12-06T09:32:00.005-05:00

Jesse: It may be hard to imagine this in an era of photos of yourself riding Splash Mountain and security cameras and waking up on Saturday morning to find your drunk ass tagged in 319 Facebook pictures but there was once a time when a photograph was a rare and special thing. This is why no one smiles in old pictures, they knew they probably only had one chance at this and no one wanted to risk looking goofy. Also they had really bad teeth. So the next time you get back from vacation and spend 16 hours sorting through the thousands of pictures you took think about how overexposed your face is going to be over the course of your lifetime. By the time you have grandchildren they will be so awash in pictures of you brushing your teeth or giving the camera the finger that all the mystery of your youth will be entirely evaporated and they’ll be sick of you long before the age when that usually happens.

ETA 12/10/08 1:27pm:
Jesse: Lisa say something about the dog

Lisa: This dog is very well behaved -- do you know how hard it is to get a dog to sit still like that? -- and he has Big Plans, you can tell by the suitcase and the little girl's hat (in the old days hats were only worn when going on Big Trips or when meeting Important People). After the photo shoot (going on a Big Trip to meet Important People with your Favorite Dog is, of course, the kind of occasion that calls for a photo shoot -- remember, this is the old days), the little girl mounted and dog and, with the suitcase in his mouth, he carried her off into the sunset.

Raise the Woof

2008-12-03T11:09:00.004-05:00

Jesse: Tim Allen seems like an ok guy to have a burger with and sure, we can probably all agree that Home Improvement was a pretty pleasant diversion most of the time, but this is just inexcusable. The idea of Tim Allen’s eyes planted inside a computer animated dog or even the idea of Tim Allen’s career as a whole cannot prepare you for the outright horror of this picture. This is supposed to be a children’s movie for god’s sake. Nice work Walt Disney Studios in creating a concept so terrifying that the kids who actually saw this film are probably irreparably scarred in some weird, boring way, so much so that in 30 years psychiatrists will probably have named a syndrome behind it.

Lisa: GOODNESS I NEVER NOTICED THE EYES BEFORE
why did they do that
raise the woof what a pun

Art Woof

2008-12-01T12:03:00.004-05:00

Jesse: Shut up Courtney. No matter what Harriet says when she’s nose deep in her eighth mimosa, gushing over your stupid ears while petting you with a pearl-handled poodle comb, you are not a work of art. She’s not even your real mother, you came from a shelter in a weird moment of impassioned guilt where she saw a special on Animal Planet and drove down there all crying with her makeup running down her face and the guy was like “uh” but she slipped him three fifties and here we are. Yes Courtney, a shelter. So get up off that handcrafted 18th century Laurent de Chevalier divan and go stick your nose in some poop like a real dog.

P.S. Nice udders fatso.

Lisa: She's winking, Jesse, which makes me think this dog has an udderstanding (thank you) of irony beyond that of the average hipster. Please be nice.

Two Pictures!

2008-11-28T11:02:00.005-05:00

Jesse: This dog is so fucking classy that he needed two pictures to fully communicate his professionalism and range. Look at that face. There is no doubt in my mind that at his peak during the late fifties/early sixties this dog (let’s call him Snacks Felton) shot three hundred films a year, was given the key to several Midwestern cities and guest-starred on Leave it to Beaver 14 times. This photo shoot lasted approximately three minutes (he knows how to hit his marks) after which he ate the choicest sections of three pounds of top sirloin in the back of a stretch limo and met up with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. at the Copa. Knowing how to play the situation Snacks wasted no time peeing on Sammy's leg, causing Frank to laugh so hard he cracked the table by pounding on it. The owner brought over a delicate Keshi-tsubu bonsai to thank him, which Snacks also ate. Then he polished off 12 Old Fashioned’s, left the table without a wobble in his step and consecutively impregnated six bitches in a private helicopter slowly circling the Chrysler building.

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T08:00:00.002-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving from your friends at Houndblog, who are thankful for an internet where this is only one dog-related Thanksgiving picture besides THIS stomach-churning abomination (seriously, do an image search).

Houndblogs in the Outfield

2008-11-26T10:05:00.005-05:00

Jesse: Possible but ultimately unacceptable directions for an entry written about this picture:

a) Russian trained suicide dog (two hundred pounds of explosives in the paper bag in his mouth) is narrowly prevented from destroying the 1957 World Series = OFFENSIVE
b) During WWII there was a baseball shortage. How did the sport respond? Playing with dogs of course! = UNBELIEVABLE
c) Legendary manager Casey Stengel ate strays he caught on the ballfield during warm-ups = CALLOUS, POTENTIAL LAWSUIT

Obviously none of these work because this picture is idiotic and the only connection between dogs and baseball is the Rapid City Retrievers AA franchise, the ugly-kids-messing-around-in-the-dirt classic The Sandlot and Marge Schott’s giant St. Bernard named Schottzie. If you’re not familiar with Marge Schott she was a horrible old racist woman who owned the Cincinnati Reds in the ’80s and ‘90s, who despite being horrible ended up representing the swan song of that crude, filthy, amazing sensibility that characterized baseball before it was swallowed up by a painfully neat wave of soft pitchers and superstar agents and thirteen dollar hot dog and Budweiser combos. Anyway, this dog laid poops in the outfield and ate children whole and basically did whatever it pleased. Then she made some positive comments about Hitler and was banned from baseball. And just like that we’ve come full circle.

Lisa: Baseball is really nice because everyone is friends, and Shawn Green and Jose Reyes and Chase Utley are all very cute young men. But the cutest and nicest of all is a dog, don't you forget that. This baseball dog won several awards for sportsmanship and friendliness and home runs.

Dog Fancy

2008-11-24T22:58:00.007-05:00

Jesse: Now that the Google behemoth has swallowed up the Life magazine archives and made them available for all the world to see we can have a reminder of the old days when things were simple enough that an animal sitting on a couch was considered newsworthy. This picture probably caused lots of women to chatter for hours on the phone and lots of husbands to respond by locking them in the closet (this was the polite way to punish your wife in the ‘50s). Sure, this dog is cute, but its cuteness is so soullessly presented that you can’t help but envision this anesthetized life of personal handlers and Benzedrine injections and very short walks. Take all those stories you’ve heard about Judy Garland being kept docile on a steady diet of studio-furnished prescription drugs and apply them to this dog, whose life probably ended in a bathtub at the Plaza hotel with a feathery chemise and two pawfuls of Seconal.

Lisa: I still get locked in the closet sometimes but mostly this dog is great!

Rotting Dog

2008-11-21T09:03:00.005-05:00

Jesse: Yeah sure, I'll buy the ‘every dog is cute in its own way’ thing but really, the only way this abomination is cute is by virtue of the pity provoked by its massive, all-consuming ugliness. This dog is so ugly that pregnant women of fragile constitutions miscarry at the sight of him. He is so ugly that his fleas have to wear sunglasses. So ugly that I visited this website for inspiration but none of the jokes seemed harsh enough to describe how ugly this dog was.

Now I feel bad, which is an entirely pointless reaction because the dog does not know he is ugly and even if he did it’s likely that it would not affect him one single iota. The life of a dog is not a beauty contest. Rest assured, this monstrosity is 100% as happy as he’d be if he didn’t look like the Crypt Keeper’s head the moment before it explodes.

Lisa: I have to find a new favorite cookie because Famous Amos isn't doing it for me anymore and Jesse how dare you that dog is very handsome jacobean harpy

Champions

2008-11-19T11:36:00.002-05:00

Jesse: This woman is such a winner that she deserves a personal performance from Kenny Loggins followed by a sit-down dinner at the Outback Steakhouse of her choice. There is this brief lingering doubt that her joy will be too much for the sausage dog that she is spinning in circles around her head but the way things are going it’s obvious that even if she loses grip the dog will float slowly upward in slow motion while everyone looks temporarily horrified before flopping down in a basket full of promotional t-shirts. The Sirius Satellite Radio Every Doggie Is A Star festival only occurs once a year and despite the title only one person/dog team wins the two-year supply of puppy pads.

Topside

2008-11-17T14:15:00.004-05:00

Jesse: Murray works hard so when the weekend rolls around he likes to struggle halfway into his favorite Hawaiian shirt, pop on some cool shades and climb up onto a dresser for some much-needed relaxation. No, of course I’m not kidding. How else would the dog get like that? Am I supposed to believe that some moron would go to the protracted effort of shoddily dressing up his animal and then hoisting him all the way on top of a dresser just to put a picture of it on the internet? Pretty unlikely. Dogs may not have minds but if there's one thing they can handle on their own it's relaxing.

South China Fleas

2008-11-14T17:13:00.004-05:00

Jesse: Life on some of these obscure little South Pacific islands moves at such a slow place that all it takes is a guy in a suit measuring his dog on the beach to get the entire country stirred up. Mr. Kasigara decides that his house is not the appropriate location for such an event as the measurement of his favorite dog and so puts on his finest and marches down to the beach where he is followed by two thousand small black boys named Thomas in brightly colored golf shirts. Soon the fishermen draw their boats in early and goats are being roasted and people are dancing and the young boys take in all the details in preparation for the day when they can tell their grandchildren of the time when the man in the purple suit discovered that the span of his dog’s back was 27 inches.

Lots of Dogs

2008-11-07T16:44:00.004-05:00

Jesse: "It's very important when you consider even pet security issues with dogs as there are lots and the paws, often covered in mud and sometimes other types of dirt, rear their heads and come into the house through small doors meant for them, backwards maybe with their tails swishing, the kitchens of local families under the tables without washing first and places where germs can be a danger, where—where do they go?"

(Yes this is a picture of Sarah Palin telling Alaskan viewers about lots of dogs)

Lisa: Sometimes when I'm alone in my house and I start to get worried that nobody is ever coming home again I pretend I am a newscaster and as you can probably guess all of the news stories I tell are about dogs in some way or another. Yesterday, for example, I discussed a town on the top of a mountain that recently elected a dog as its mayor. He doesn't have to wear a suit to work!

And it looks like the knife is going through his head

2008-10-31T10:05:00.002-04:00

Jesse: This dog is so unamused by the fact that he has a knife through his head that his costume transcends "dog with a knife through his head" and becomes "dog unaumsed by the fact that he has a knife through his head."

Lisa: I was France Gall for Halloween. Nobody knew what my costume was.

House of Dogs

2008-10-27T23:50:00.008-04:00

Jesse: The cast of Animal Planet’s new reality series Dog House, where six different dogs from comfortably disparate backgrounds experience the pains and joys of relationships that go beyond communally pissing on a sleeping vagrant. From left to right: Duke, whose tendency to eat other dogs tails is likely to cause tension, Honeydew, a French poodle who grew up on a melon plantation, Twinkle and Stardust, twin huskies with a shared fear of Roone Arledge, Clementine, a spoiled corgi owned by one of Dubai’s five-richest hot dog barons, and Steak Knife, the edgy loner whose explosive temper threatens to disrupt everything (on the first episode he pees in the ornamental marble fountain that feeds into their water bowls ).

Police Cuteality

2008-10-22T16:47:00.003-04:00

Jesse: Yeah it seems precious to dress up your dog in a little police babushka suit until you realize the egregious behavior of NYPD sanctioned dogcatchers in past decades. In 1976 alone 676 good dogs were wrongfully imprisoned in laughably small cages facing out the tiny back window of paddywagons. Roughly two thirds were reported to have made excruciatingly sad faces. Even without that, this thing looks like he just launched from an ejector seat and is now pathetically dangling from a palm tree by his parachute. Use a little foresight next time guy or better yet stop damming up your dog’s head follicles altogether (it causes baldness).

Lisa: PATROLLING THE CITY

The Son of Dog

2008-10-20T10:40:00.002-04:00

Jesse: The thing that makes this offensive is not the casting of our Lord and Savior as a scruffy hound but the suggestion that a canine version of the Last Supper would be comprised of dog bones and tennis balls. No, I’m not suggesting there should be rib-eye steaks and gravy water (we’ve all seen The Last Crusade), but to make this much effort and then ruin the depiction by tossing in the most obvious, boring tropes of doggiedom is shameful. If you’re going to limit this to casual stereotyping at least give them a dish of water and some beggin’ strips.

ugh

2008-10-17T23:06:00.005-04:00

Jesse: This is the dog equivalent of that abysmal couple you see in the grocery store at 3 am trying to smuggle out as much cookie dough as they can possibly fit in the pockets of their Insane Clown Posse hooded sweatshirts. They probably have matching misspelled tattoos with counter-culture themes and live in a basement apartment with posters on the ceiling and the sight of them makes you almost sure that love is actually a devious plot hatched by Satan to bring people like this together.

Lisa: Jesse that's not true these dogs are great you want to know why because all dogs are great

ETA 12/15/08 9:22pm:
Lisa: oh my gosh the tongue

Underdogs

2008-10-15T13:38:00.004-04:00

Jesse: People in the post-Lassie era expect way too much from dog superheroes. Well newsflash: Lassie wasn’t even a dog, he was two small apes in a carefully stitched suit directed by a complex system of electric shocks. Also that was a television show. These guys names are the Atomic Hound and Pooch Watkins (no, neither one is a sidekick, stop it) and they do the kind of stuff - licking up especially bad stains on the pavement, snatching banana peels from the paths of old ladies – that you assume is being handled by garbagemen. They’re not even federally subsidized. So next time you see some dogs like this flying around at an extremely low altitude give them a wave; they may be the only thing preventing you from experiencing a shoe sole spackled with chewing gum.

Lisa: This is significant because one dog is black and one dog is white and TOGETHER they fight crime.

Dog Hat

2008-09-25T15:18:00.002-04:00

Jesse: Fuck the ASPCA. FUCK PETA. Fuck the United Dogwalkers of America. The Bark Panthers is the only canine related association not made up of trust-fund maniacs with pet issues and people who cry at the end of movies about talking animals. This is their official hat and when you wear it you are saying "yes, I support the idea of an initiative to allow zoning for multiple story dog houses in residential neighborhoods"

Lisa: OH LOOK~

Knights of the Hound Table

2008-09-11T16:26:00.002-04:00

Lisa: This is like an armadillo dog. I did a project in third grade about armadillos. This dog has gotten in with the wrong crowd, I think.

Jesse: "Father," the boy said, "is it true you post so many pictures of costumes dogs because you realize there's nothing left to say about the animals themselves?
"Who told you that?" Jesse asked, putting down the yellow legal pad, where he had sketched out a picture of a dog dressed as George Washington kissing a dog dressed as Martha Washington.
The boy troubled him. He played for long hours in an empty sandbox and wore Eric Clapton t-shirts.
"No one," he said, "as your imaginary son I function as a conduit for your doubts and fears, reflecting them back as they appear in your mind through my small size and important status."
"Hmm." Jesse said. The boy's eyes shone brightly. "Can we just play this direct and you tell me what else I'm afraid of?"
"Horses. Public speaking. You worry people notice your toes are too long." There was a pause, the boy picked up a small globe and considered it, twirling the world round and picking a place with his finger. "They do," he said.
"Damn," Jesse replied, putting down the pad and staring at the screen.

Huckleberry Hound, the page read has died

I think we all can admit to having a dream or two about dining with the charismatic dog Wishbone after his near-perfect execution in his role as Don Quixote of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Unfortunately, scoring a date with this top dog is almost as hard actually getting yourself to sit down and read any of the stupid books featured in his self-titled series. So, we look to the substantially less famous dogs of Sark such as the one featured above. Prior to the tree-hugging reforms of 2008, all native dogs that inhabited the feudal island were bred from the only sterile female dog under the care of The Seigneur of Sark. Once the dogs reached a mature age, they were to be knighted and fit for a personal suit of plated armor. Then the doglords were allotted their own land and serfs to rule and protect.

Eats:
Fire Roasted Lark
stuffed with bread crumbs soaked in milk and crushed juniper berries

Beverage:
Homemade Caudell
(wine thickened with eggs)

Please make sure you don't substitute with any "new world" ingredients as this may baffle or even frighten your guest. Also if you want to make your Sark dog feel more at home, try spitting or sprinkling a little dirt into your Homemade Caudell.

Boozehounds

2008-09-10T23:17:00.005-04:00

Jesse: Your dog's great-great-grandfather was drunk all the time. He beat his dog wife and sent his children to work in a grist mill while he swilled bathtub gin and bet on the horses. It wasn't just him either. Back in the day all dogs were totally out of control, so much so that people kept them more as prisoners than pets. Why? I have no idea. I do know that gangs of roving dogs and unemployed dockworkers would often engage in fisticuffs for hours on end, with crowds of young boys gathering to cheer on whichever side struck their fancy. If you're interested in the subject read Dreiser's An American Tragedy, a searing look at a young widow and how her kind-hearted attempts to reform a pair of rough-and-tumble dog toughs drags her closer and closer to an eventual doom.

Anyway, this is a cartoon short from the period which tries to assuage the fears of the day by portraying the drunken dog as a soft, clumsy buffoon. A Mickey Mouse like figure finds the dog passed out on his front steps. The dog follows him begging for change, and to escape the problem the mouse engages in a series of tricks at the dog's expense, convincing him that he's invisible, that his hat is made of steak and finally, that he's won a free cross-Atlantic trip on a deluxe steamer (the Boozitania). It's actually a boxcar headed for Missoula, Montana. The dog realizes this too late and ends up howling mournfully as the train chugs out of town, leaving the mouse to doff his cap and do a little jig, glad to be free of the houndly menace.

Lisa: This is not dogs, is it?

Blue is the Color of my True Dog's Hair

2008-09-08T13:38:00.001-04:00

Lisa: Oh my goodness what a color for a dog! It's neat because I heard on the news once that blue is America's favorite color. How appropriate, then, for a dog to be blue! I'm not really sure how the color blue is made. Also I heard (not on the news) that blue eyes are blue because they lack pigment like the sky. Maybe that is how this dog got his color. It's a mutation! Funny how a mutation can be so cool, huh? I think my favorite part of this dog is that his tongue is blue, I wonder if when he licks you there's blue!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jesse: Artists in Holland love their country's kleur honden, because the dogs' color changes corresponding to the overall state of their emotions, which sets up a great motif system for really deeply suggestive painting as well as a fun event where passels of the dogs are taught to run together to form a tremendous, wriggling Dutch flag all the way down the Kalverstraat. No, the whole thing is not so simple as a mood ring where a dog will magically change color before your eyes and don't get the idea that because this dog is blue it means that he's sad; nature doesn't conform to our pathetic rules regarding color theory.

Scientists have studied this for years and confirmed that in this case blue is actually suited more to an overall feeling of near-contentedness, like the one you get when you're all sprawled out on the hammock after a nice meal and everything is perfect until you remember that if you're not dead fifty years from now you'll be entirely hideous and cranky. Dogs feel this way a lot because they'll be perfectly and completely happy until they realize that they need to eat a shoe. As far as other colors go, green is the stinging disappointment/insufficiency feeling of a botched first date. Yellow is the "christmas feeling" (you know what I mean). Red is like finding money in your jacket.

So you can see why people love these things. Dutch housewives display them like flowers in the spring and the government gets involved by posting a battalion of trained hounds on the roof of the capital building to communicate the feelings of the state on current international affairs.

Speaker of the Dog House

2008-09-03T14:35:00.010-04:00

Jesse: Whoever would have thought that with all the Kennedys have done as a family the finest thing they'd produce would be a children's book cover? Yeah Jack was a charmer and JFK Jr. was kind of on Seinfeld once but here Ted's face is so charmingly tomato-like and the dog's glee so perfectly distilled that you really can't beat this.

Sadly, this is not one of those cool children's books where you get to see a fully illustrated cross-section of the White House or pictures of apes and turtles in three-piece suits filibustering from the DC phone book. Nope, My Senator and Me is another right-wing attempt to preemptively slushify the minds of our youth with brightly colored flag drawings and commentary on your gay uncle's un-American attitudes. Now that you know this you can understand what is up with Ted's face in that picture, looking all like a mushy glob of mashed potato that someone etched a face onto.

Worst of all is the way they shamelessly pander to the kids by constantly putting the dog in harm's way, with Ted driving drunk and sinking the car in a lake on three different occasions. During the course of one day this helpless, freedom-loving pooch is dragged around on his leash by the maniacal Senator Kennedy, forced to watch as he collects taxes, seizes farmland from low-income Midwestern families and dangerously expands the size of our national government, using a scary glowing machine in the secret subterranean lair of his Martha's Vineyard boathouse.

Lisa: I've only ever read two books about dogs. The first was Old Yeller (look how sad!) by Fred Gipson. Now I don't know if you know, but that was not a good book for dogs. Dogs do so much for their humans and what do we do for them? We cower from wolves! And it's mean because then our dogs don't like water anymore! Naturally I was a bit shaken by this experience, but I decided to go ahead and give dog books another try. This time I read Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, and that didn't end well for poor Old Dan (a dog!): a mountain lion made his insides come outside! I was so, so upset but there was nothing I could do because I was supposed to be asleep. Not even the fern could make me feel better. So for the record, I have absolutely no interest in reading My Senator and Me, and surely the happiness that this poor dog exhibits on the cover will be snatched from him soon.

ETA 9/08/08 1:27pm:
Lisa: Didn't Ted Kennedy have a bad cold recently?

Oh, How Interesting!

2008-09-01T04:06:00.001-04:00

Jesse: Lotus Dog is what happens when a van full of ravers plunges off a cliff and is accidentally reincarnated all at once. The kind of image he projects is the antithesis of actual cool but he's so sure with it, all slithering movements and fuzzy Kangol hats, calling girls baby like he's Jimi Hendrix in a pair of UFO pants, that the face he makes when he finds out you're not into Italian house actually makes you feel insignificant. You see him at Burning man talking acid freakouts back down to earth and intensely dancing all alone on some alkali flats and he does that thing where he makes total eye contact with you from thirty yards away and it just freezes your blood. While other dogs spend their afternoons treating their balls like melting ice cream cones Lotus Dog is making cameo appearances in mescaline-induced nightmares, issuing veiled pronouncements on the future of the grain industry.

Lisa: I used to think a Lotus was a kind of bug but as it turns out it's a flower. That's awesome because I really don't like bugs and flowers are okay but dogs are really just the best things out there. Locusts. Locusts is what I was thinking of.

He Limits His Sweets

2008-08-21T13:31:00.005-04:00

Lisa: One time? I met a dog that was nice and small. Usually small dogs are not as nice as big dogs but this time it was different. This dog? was nice and I liked him and he liked me so we sat on a couch. We were friends! We ate churros but he did not like cinnamon and sugar so his churro was plain. That was okay. I was wearing my sequined jeans and a heather gray shirt. See? That's me behind my friend the dog. This is at his house. That was when I was still a virgin, you can tell by my outfit (and weight).

Jesse: Most outsiders think it's the bigger breeds that run everything in the dog world but that idea is way off. Think about it. Is the president of the United States some musclebound lunkhead with arms that look like over-microwaved sausages? Who runs Studio 54? Is it Roscoe with the ankle pants and the Sequoia sized neck? No, he's the bouncer. The guys in charge are former indoor kids with underactive thyroids who have better things to do than treat their bodies like classic cars.

That's why this dog is running things in his neck of the woods, smoking a Cigarsage (cigars for dogs that actually taste like sausages, talking on the speakerphone with the manager of one of the three dealerships that he owns. This dog has it all figured out. He's loud. He's ballsy. He knows that lounging around in the nude is the true big dog's way of saying "yeah I'm so rich I can't even decide which monogrammed jogging suit to put on."

Sock Dog

2008-08-20T10:31:00.009-04:00

Lisa: I'll be honest: I'm not entirely clear on why they're training this dog to steal that lady's sock, but I guess I don't really care. Look at him! He is a blond dog. Oh you know what? I guess he's being trained to help disabled people take their clothes off. That's very nice. I bet it's more than just a job for him, I bet he goes to bed feeling satisfied and content and wakes up excited to start another day! Honestly, this looks like such a great dog that it's probably not even about the money. I bet he just uses each paycheck to buy the necessities and then gives the rest away to charity. Or like, at Christmas, when the retarded person tries to tip him for another great year of hard work, the dog is probably like "no, no, I can't. I insist. I do this because I love it" but then the retarded person is like "NO" and stomps his foot and is like "You mean so much to me, dogfriend!" (this is how I get when people refuse my tips) and so the dog is finally like "Okay, okay" but then he goes to the supermarket and buys a Christmas Ham and lots of cookies and delicious Christmas treats with his tip money and comes back and says "What I really would like is to spend Christmas with you" and they eat together and that is the best tip of all.

If your dog just came home from a long, grueling day at his/her job sucking the soupy socks off the feet of too many awkward-shaped people wearing the color orange, you're probably staring into the depths of your refrigerator wondering why you don't tearfully end your pal's agony by means of shotgun and take the painful first step into manhood. Unfortunately, your dog is probably thinking "Yo, what's for dinner? I am always hungry." When pairing with a dog like this you're going to need something with kick and you're going to need something quick:

Eats:
Spicy Jalapeno Chicken Taquitos

Beverage:
Honkers Ale, Goose Island Brewing Company

Flavor bomb the taste of tootsies off the tongue with Taquitos and return your canine to the wilderness with earthy notes of dried peach, black tea, muddy hay and citrus peach.

This is a Tough Dog

2008-08-19T10:23:00.003-04:00

Lisa: This is a tough cool dog, look at his face! His name is Remy and he does not like to be pet because when he was a young dog a girl pet him too hard because she loved him so much so he was like "please stop doing that" and she was like "Remy my dog!" and he was like "PLEASE STOP" and she went "but I love you so much" and he moved away because he couldn't live the way he wanted to.

Now he lives on his own and does not like when people treat him like a dog, he prefers to be respected. I respect him because he's so awesome and neat and I love him very much, he sticks his tongue out and makes puns a lot it's really funny. He has a better sense of humor than most other people.

Jesse: Keaton went through a lot coming up on the streets of St. Louis - an addiction to PetMeds, deadbeat owners who made him eat pizza boxes, six months living inside a gift basket - and now he doesn't like to be touched. So what? How is it fair that now that he's finally got his life back on track he should still have to take the "bad dog" treatment from some antibacterial swilling soccer mom after he recoils from the touch of her runtish child and its ice creamy fingers. Why is he the weirdo when you're the one stooping over to run your hands over a small animal's back? This is not a rummage sale and you are not assessing antique foot stools.

While we're on this what's up with the whole double standard where a dog who doesn't want to be pet is a prude but a dog who likes getting pet too much is desperate? Why are all magazines about dogs so intent on promoting that ghastly all ribs look that no one but a starving Romanian junkyard whelp could ever hope to maintain. Isn't the idea of a kennel kind of like leaving your child in prison while you go away on vacation? I think with a woman and a colored fellow running for office this is finally the time to sit down indian-style on some comfortable mats and approach these issues as a nation.

He Ruffs in Colors

2008-08-07T09:09:00.002-04:00

Jesse: Ugh. Hasn't this baby boomer set done enough damage by slackening the fabric of our society into some "do what you feel!" colored Lycra without continuing to shit on us with their watered down psychedelic legacy of ad nauseum nostalgia and reunion tours and crappy artwork spackled with this god-awful "wow man, I can feel the colors" aesthetic. Being part of the generation that thinks they invented sexuality and drug use is not enough for you to coast through life on a lingering fume of bad hair and good vibes. Grow up and paint something serious. Some realistically shaded fruit or two guys in well-cut suits admiring a fancy urn. Something your parents can appreciate so they can stop having to explain to their friends that you "were one of those hippies."

Lisa: I want to press my finger on his tongue, he seems like he would like that. I want to see how it feels. There's something strange about this dog, like maybe it's a different kind of dog dressed up in a costume, or even a person pretending to be a dog but he does not look like a normal regular dog. That's okay because I like him anyway, I think he's a very nice man.

Born to Run Away with a Beware of Dog Sign In Your Mouth

2008-08-06T11:24:00.006-04:00

Jesse: When it comes to making a convincing argument most dogs are about as effective as a protestor holding a God Hates Fags sign with two stenciled-on guys sucking face in a lake of crayon fire. They make eyes and pant and whimper but even when you can figure out what they're saying it's so not worth all the effort that you'd like to hold their noise in their ridiculous point just so they'll learn a lesson. It's like some ten-year-old kid who tries to prove he's responsible by driving to the mall for his mom's birthday present but instead ends up with a Subaru halfway through the Mandee's display window, crying his eyes out in a toppled pile of fuchsia-colored bath puffs.

Here, the dog is trying to say "I am safe, I am trustworthy, you can place your baby on the ground near me without worry." He's so fed up as being portrayed as dangerous by this damning black and red sign that he steals it and tries to run away with his problem, and while you can see the rationale behind an act like this what he doesn't realize is he's only making things worse.

Because of course anyone's first thought when they see something like this is "oh shit that dog is so dangerous he has the sign attached to his face," and even if you don't think that there's really no way to look kindly on this kind of stunt, which no dog who wasn't worth some kind of bewaring would pull. So he ends up in a six-mile-per hour chase with four sheriff's deputies on mountain bikes while your own dog is trying to use his nose to convince you that heading over to the dog run during a hailstorm is a prize-winning idea and its all so typical its like you've just finished your eighth straight episode of Law and Order.

A Very Special Houndblog

2008-08-05T16:10:00.002-04:00

Jesse: Back when your grandparents were just kids in the Midwest seeing each other on Saturday nights they had this dog. His name was Marty and your grandfather picked him up from a local farmer with a litter of fifteen, surprising your grandmother by walking over to her place with the dog inside his hat and pretending he didn't hear its barking. They played with it nearly all day and after dinner drove into town where he ducked down in the seat so it looked like the dog was driving. It was a pretty funny sight and people talked about it for weeks.

Over time Marty did that thing where by being with a family for so long an animal surmounts its beastly qualities and absorbs these little grains of humanity, granting it a strange wisdom that you can sense whenever it sits in a rocking chair and looks you carefully in the eyes. Marty was liked this; he watched the kids while they played in the yard and came along on family vacations.

But veterinary medicine back then wasn't what it is today and by the time he was ten or so Marty's legs started to go. He'd spent so much time scampering around that it was unsettling to see him lying all folded on a pile of rags all day long and he took on this new silence, never barking when a car pulled up or someone opened the oven door, because he was so embarrassed at not being able to help out like he always had. One day in the early winter he fell down half the basement stairs and sometime after being carried up wrapped in a blanket by your grandfather limped off into the forest and never came back.

And of course you didn't know a thing about this until your grandmother's funeral when by the coffin theres this picture of him sitting on her lap at the beach, and you suddenly realize that the sheer volume of your grandparents lives was so much more than you had ever imagined. That they had secrets and shared moments and things between them that you'd never even know about let alone understand.

Your grandfather sat still with his hands clenching and unclenching on the pew in front of him and would only say that his name was Marty and he was "a good dog, a very good dog." He doesn't tell you this but every so often he has this dream where he's on the back steps of the old house and Marty comes back out of the forest just like he did so many times before. The dog comes over and rests his head in his lap for a second and the two of them walk side by side in the forest with the moonlight splashed out on the path ahead of them.

Lisa: Holy god this looks just like the kind of dog I want to be friends with!

Glimpsing

2008-07-29T15:14:00.002-04:00

Jesse: This is a rare original by David Markham, a Welsh hobbyist who at this point in time is basically THE cutting edge of the whittling world (a little wood-cutting humor). He produces some mind-bending stuff, and while it still feels a little icky to call it fine art this dude is this close to being considered the Picasso of carving sad little sailing ships that remind you of your dead uncle.

The key to his success is the way he broaches these heavy topics that no one else will touches in a way you'd never even think of. It's one existential nightmare after another, and staring at an exhibition of his work you start to feel like you're reading Dostoevsky at home alone on Christmas Eve while your weird old neighbor stands in his driveway for hours with a snow shovel. For example, this one is Santa Claus glimpsing the folly of his own spectacular pursuit for eternal jolliness in the hollow, mirroring eyes of his dog. Other notable works include "Glimpsing Defeat", "Young Child with Deflated Volleyball" (2001) and "Glimpsing Your Own Irrefutable Mortality in your Golden Spoon-Winning Chili Cook-off Entry."

Lisa: I made this at my art class in college, I was like "I very much like dogs and I also really like Christmas because it is practically my birthday" so then I carved this out of a tree and presented it for my dissertation, the thesis is "dogs and Santa have a lot in common" and I was right. I got an A- and I was asked to show my work at a dog convention. True story.

Pugs

2008-07-28T14:54:00.003-04:00

Jesse: Ok, enough with the pugs. It's bad enough that they look fetal insects magnified to an unnecessary size, but then the breathing problems, the leaking anuses, the anxious bundle of fidgety complexes they must have. It's pitiful and genuinely sad that there has to be an animal equivalent of your grandfather with the 3,600 health problems that everyone is secretly praying will just go peacefully in his sleep. And now this poor thing has to wear a basketball suit, as if it wasn't embarrassing enough for him to go through life as the squished equivalent of a real dog, all because of the idiotic whim of some 17th century Austrian princess who begged PaPa for a dog small enough to fit on her hat. These things are a laundy list of why craft breeding was (and still is) to dogs what European colonialism was to the rest of the world. Can't we just leave these god forsaken animals alone and let them play in a field or something.

Lisa: This is making me very upset. I'm too small to play basketball and this dog is even smaller than me probably.

Ghost Dog

2008-07-26T01:12:00.008-04:00

Jesse: Ghost dogs are always furious because their very ghostliness deprives them of all the good things about being a dog. They bite a balloon and it keeps on floating or run right through a car while chasing after it and while ghost humans soon settle into a final mournful resentment, with sorrow-wracked looks through dirty windows and residencies in ramshackle old houses, the dogs just keep getting angrier and angrier. They run all night to get out the rage but being ghosts they don't actually cover any distance (there's a kind of reset function on spirits that keeps them locked in a certain area) and being dogs they cannot understand this spatial transference and so get more and more confused and pissed off.

This is why when you find yourself on the moors near Swansea on a particularly foggy St. Andrew's eve you end up pursued by three or four consecutive ghost dogs and collapse all out of breath at a local pub, sitting there wondering which government agency you can call to complain, listening to the locals saying "Ay, that poor Trevor was a right good 'ound 'e was" when they hear your story. But try to have a little understanding. And if you see a hound ghost just let him chase you, keeping enough of a pace that he won't catch up but will at least feel like he accomplished something, because that's basically the only thing these poor guys have left.

Lisa: Jesse, I don't think you should do that if you're chased by a ghost dog because ghosts can kill you.

Take a Bite out of Crime

2008-07-24T16:47:00.008-04:00

Jesse: Sure, this picture is disturbing- so much so that seeing it you instinctively reach out to cover the eyes of the child you never planned to have - and why would you ever suspect that you're being had by one of the oldest tricks in the book? Yes, I'm sorry to be the one to break this but the old gun to the pet's head move is a con, and in 99% of cases the main perpetrator is the dog. He hates your rights and is envious of your amazing hands so he exploits one of his biggest assets - vulnerability - to get back at you. So you consent to a search and the dog whimpers a bit to keep your sympathy roused and you walk off none the wiser that your constitutional rights have just been traded in for the perverse pleasure of some sick pooch with a grudge against your entire species.

Even worse, for most of these dogs this isn't a one-time thing, they get off on this shit and pull it every chance they get, at circuses and kids birthday parties, just generally trying to be as upsetting as possible. Take this guy for example. He learned that little face (its good, clearly a pro) from years on the carnival circuit, trailing from town to town behind those things like some diseased tail, grifting families and young children for small bills with a drifter named Smiling Phil who he would beat mercilessly with a thick-bristled push broom and force to sleep in a cage as a twisted form of undeserved revenge. He's a real tough customer who puts a notch in his collar for every kid that he bites, the kind of dog Scruff Mcgruff would love to get in his hands and shove up against a brick wall. And yeah, it's always tough to see a dog turned so completely into a hardened menance like this but in a case like this maybe we'd all be better off if the trigger was pulled.

Lisa: My goodness.

Fran Barkington

2008-07-22T13:56:00.002-04:00

Jesse: So if you watch ESPN 4 during weekday afternoons at all you already know all about it, but this dog has practically become a national hero for his winning performance in the Dog-lympics, where insignificance rises to such a deafening level that it becomes important again. You may be wondering how a dog who looks (and yes, smells) like a Vienna sausage wins at anything; don't worry, there's a good answer. You see, the Dog-lympics make no sense. They're run by this fat asshole named Vernon Smiley who wears tweed jackets all the time and has a really amateurish beard and talks incessantly about the "nouveau politique of canine athleticism." Vernon has these ideas stuck in his head about total dog equality and representation so one of each breed is selected for the games, which kind of sucks because the same kinds of dogs win every year and it's no fun to watch them arrogantly beating up on the little guys. This, however, has created a tradition of laziness among the abler breeds that allowed this guy to somehow eke by.

Yes, Fran Barkington, the underdog (trust me the announcers have a field day with this one), took the silver in the dog biathlon (chasing a thing while smiling), overcoming a pile of adversity so huge that Purina is starting a new ad campaign where he plays a spin on the Pied Piper, running along down a suburban street with such focus that he accumulates a rag-tag bunch of fat and out-of-shape dogs and there's this great shot of a mail man fleeing in terror before they end up on top of a hill with a rainbow and a gospel choir and trees swaying in the breeze. "Walking on Sunshine" is playing in the background and they all prance around without a care because they've just learned the importance of fitness.

Lisa: I can't read his expression. That concerns me.

Pettable Arrangements

2008-07-21T11:46:00.005-04:00

Jesse: Imagine a service where when you've had a hard day at the office and you come home to this house that looks like a bomb hit it - where your son has carved all these little potato men and left peels all over the floor and the TV is blasting with no one watching and your husband is locked in the bedroom obsessing over what he thinks may be moles on his back - when you hear the sound of doorbell and brace yourself for the next stressful thing (drunken neighbor with a rake looking for his cat or kid selling seeds), but instead it's puppies. A basket of puppies. Delivered to your door.

These puppies are named Giuseppe and Titus and Lourde Anthony (you know because they have adorable little tags around their necks); they bark the theme to Happy Days in three-part harmony and are housebroken in such a charmingly modern fashion that your whole family is amazed (I won't ruin the surprise).

And it gets better. In two or three days when the novelty begins to wear off and they slowly evolve from manifestations of the ideal of cuteness to real little dogs with real smells and annoying habits (they're always under your feet when you're trying to cook) a twinkling little bell rings and they all dash off in a row to a waiting van where they are whisked back to the magic factory from whence they came. You get to keep the basket. In fact you're about to put it up on the mantle because it's so handsome when your son discovers there's a false bottom filled with Lindt chocolate truffels, scented bath oils, little bags of Turkish coffee and the new digital version of Guess Who?, which sets the stage for the best family game night of all time.

Yeah. So if anyone wants to throw down a little seed money to get this idea off the ground shoot me an e-mail and we'll hash it out over Thai or something.

Lisa: Holy. Fucking. Shit.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Woofer

2008-07-19T13:34:00.002-04:00

Jesse: You rarely see any pictures of dogs in cars beyond the hackneyed head-out-the-window-not-a-care-in-the-world shot, and of course that shit is as reductive as a teen movie montage where an entire road trip is distilled down to 45 seconds of laughter and truck stops and a little dot jouncing along a map, without all the leg cramps and the screaming at your friend while he pees into yet another water bottle instead of just waiting for you to pull over. In reality the dog basks in the wind for about two minutes before his throat starts filling with flies and his eyes dry out. Dogs do not have tear ducts and are not allowed to use Visine, so imagine how that feels.

Basically, car trips are hard for dogs. Their paws are not appropriate for playing travel-size Parcheesi and when you put on the radio all they hear is discordant noise because their ears are not developed enough to understand Bob Marley lyrics. It's something that no one thinks about. This photo is not so well composed but maybe get some black and white film and a dusky horizon where the animal's dolor is crystallized by the encroaching darkness and we could have a Pulitzer on our hands.

Lisa: I would date a dog if I didn't have to have sex with it.

Fancy Beasts

2008-07-18T15:42:00.006-04:00

Jesse: You know you're dealing with a snooty crowd when even the camel, whose skin is undoubtedly crawling with a rogues gallery of disgusting parasites, has his nose turned up. Then there's the dog equivalent of those shithead cats from the Fancy Feast commercials who won't touch anything not prepared by their personal chef but then get tricked into eating crappy canned food because their taste is based on nothing more than this ridiculous expectation of what quality looks like and you know they'd eat their own poop if it was whipped into a terrine and drizzled with a garlic aioili reduction.

Don't be fooled by the fact that they are walking in the desert, these dogs are wearing custom booties to protect their feet from sand damage and transparent Hermes imperméables with silk chiffon eye guards. The one on top is complaining that his tail hairs will get frizzy if they come within 4 inches of the ground and the hawk has never left that guy's shoulder except to pull some fey twirling manuever that lasts less than 10 seconds and then he drops back in an exaggeratedly exhausted huff and sighs "oh Master Roderick this heat is simply dreaaadful." I don't know where these guys are going but it's probably somewhere with a lot of pillows.

Lisa: Animals! Drawings! Animals!

SKIING DOGS?!

2008-07-17T12:40:00.002-04:00

Jesse: So you see this little madman on the slopes at Killington while you're fiddling around on a green circle, tearing down the wrong side of the mountain on his board, parting rows of skiers like waves of grain and at first you mistake him for a deformed little man having an episode. But as he gets closer it becomes clear that this is in fact a dog so radical that he has Lenny Kravitz on his speed dial. He's pulling 540 tail rolls while simultaneously chugging a Sobe (he doesn't even have hands!) and the stuffed shirts are falling over backwards and getting crossed up and screaming at him to slow down but he doesn't even hear it because has "Voodoo Child" blasting so loud from his headphones that the authorities have been forced to put out an avalanche warning.

Lisa: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Jesse I love dogs I love skiing and oh my god it's small look I want to ski with this dog!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's mine my dog yes yes it's mine please let go

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

2008-07-16T18:06:00.002-04:00

Lisa: These dogs OH! these dogs! They're my friends! I love them, we like to play tennis and we run and we play soccer and we go play hoop and i love them! They are so wonderful and amazing they are the nicest people they say the funniest things i have fur in my mouth i keep getting fur in my mouth.

Jesse: This is why I'm against dog cloning. Not for ethical or moral reasons but for the simple fact that when a dog gets it in his or her mind to do something, be it pee on a certain object or run off with the exact part of the newspaper you were saving to show your wife, the urge presents itself so strongly that it becomes permanently imprinted on the beast's DNA. So when you have fourteen versions of John Q. Ruffs instead of one the result is fourteen dogs, scattered about the world as they may be, all at once experiencing the cross-continental yearnings of late-period Forrest Gump so that they can reach this one spot and do this one pointless thing. Thus begins this It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World style journey with the dogs pulling their owners by the leash, the humans following for some reason (you have to give this one a little leeway) a wacky cross-country race involving biplanes and pickup trucks and souped up tractors, and finally a crushing (although not for the dogs) denouement where the owners are left commisserating and eating Roy Rogers takeout in an empty lot in Grand Island, Nebraska while their dogs go to town, stirring up the biggest dust cloud you have ever seen.

What the hell?

2008-07-13T16:27:00.002-04:00

Lisa: This looks like a mean dog, clearly someone did something to make him upset the question is WHY? Why would someone be mean to a dog/friend, why would someone make a friend sad like this? The men in the background want to shoot him which is NOT NICE AT ALL! this dog is so nice but nobody understands his feelings, but he's a very nice dog/friend, really! I bet what happened is he found a litter of orphaned kittens and he said "these babies need a friend" and was being their FRIEND/dog but the men saw him and said "oh no a dog is hurting the baby cats!" but he was not it's a stigma that is attached to dogs and it's not a fair one because they are so nice. so the man chased the dog and hurt his feelings and then apparently he ate some vanilla ice cream because what is that around his MOUTH.

Jesse: Remember that episode of Wishbone about "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and how it had this weird meta tinge becaue he was a magical dog that everyone thought was normal investigating what turned out to be a normal dog that everyone thought was magical? Now that you've read a little Marx you can't help but see the whole thing as an over-complicated allegory for the capitalist system's survival being based on the proletariat's unwitting cannibalization of its own power but when you were ten this mostly flew over your head so afterward you just felt like you had a stomach ache and sat up in your room wheeling a matchbox car slowly in a circle for hours.

So another fun thing is swallowed by that upsetting anti-nostalgia you experience in early adulthood where you reread Fight Club and you hate it and realize the Muppet Show is kind of stupid. You're with your little cousin watching PBS reruns and you get excited when this comes on but you can't stop thinking about that that disturbing advertising conceit where a cartoon potato chip is happily eating another potato chip (or even worse, a pig eating pork rinds) and Jewish kapos during the Holocaust and you feel like you're reading that probably-extremely-depressing novel by Edward P. Jones about black slave owners in the American south when you just wanted to watch a nice show about a dog who likes to read so you tell your cousin that the Easter Bunny has prostate cancer and cancel your Amazon pre-order on that set of Arthur DVDs

April 27, 2004

2008-07-12T11:35:00.005-04:00

Lisa: Clearly April 27th 2004 was a Big Day for these dogs. I'm curious about the events that transpired and if it's an annual celebration or just a one time thing. Was it a wedding? Maybe it's a graduation. My dad and I took a similar picture when I graduated from college. Does this event have anything to do with birds or birdhouses? Perhaps they put on a play; that would explain the congratulatory flowers and the fact that they're posed with a confidence normally reserved for thespians. I think that must be it, they're actors and they just put on a stage version of the 1955 blockbuster, Trial.

Jesse: The thing with dogs is that by now we're so used to viewing them as objects that we totally neglect the idea that they have any kind of inner life, which is doubly harmful because on the one hand you have St. Bernards trapped like fairy tale princesses in cramped 28th floor apartments and on the other you get the almost-as-bad backlash where fussy owners turn their pets lives into a revolting carousel of play-dates and monogrammed bowls and therapy sessions where 30-second bark samples are modulated through a little machine and Rover ends up prescribed a regimen of doggie tai chi to "let his soul breathe".

Following in this tradition of ignorance England's parliament decided on April 27, 2004 to legalize dog marriages. This might have been a landmark moment for the species but they were kind of distracted by the strange smell of pickled herring wafting across the Thames, which provoked a frenzy of snouts poking out of cracked windows all over London. Nevertheless thousands of dogs were married in mass ceremonies all over the country and at first things seemed to be going pretty well, with tons of money being made off of dual leashes with heart patterns and commemorative painted plates like this one. But within a few weeks dog-on-dog bitings shot up 403% and the pubs were crawling with depressed collies trying to drink away their newfound sorrows. The whole country started to feel like a much sadder version of that dogs playing poker painting and people started to realize that their dogs didn't really find this whole thing as cute as they did. Thankfully with the rise in popularity of cat speed dating this whole thing was mostly forgotten and the marriages kind of fizzled out naturally.

Monsters

2008-07-11T09:20:00.005-04:00

Jesse: They may not talk about it in "I Love the '90s" but if you were around you remember that feeling of malaise around the early middle of the decade when we realized we were living in the same time period that "The Jetsons" was set but our lives were still pretty drab overall and plagued with fusty tiny-screened computers and particle board and grunge music.

Now roughly fifteen years in the future our world is swimming with more technology than we know what to do with and that whole phase would seem pretty embarassing if it wasn't already so embarassing on its own. But really, who cares that you were wearing colors with the words "hot" and "electric" prefacing them when we what basically amounts to a pop-tart sized square that can do everything and yes, huge robotic dogs to distract us. Not only does Michael Vick look like even more of a monster but we can sleep soundly with the knowledge that our very own children will be able to remote-control still larger canine behemoths with thundering footsteps that rock the foundations of our houses and power-down noises pulled straight from a Saturday morning cartoon.

Lisa: hehhhh

What Breeds!

2008-07-10T12:27:00.003-04:00

Lisa: I'm not entirely sure what kind of dog that is but look at his little claws it's like he's some sort of adorable monster. The dog on the left reminds me for some reason of Rowlf from the Muppet Babies, now that I think about it, it's kind of like the little dog is playing an INVISIBLE PIANO and Rowlf is like "WOAH dude that's not how you do it" and the little dog is like "what the fuck do you know about music rowlf, you're just a dog" and he's like "man i am NOT just a dog i'm a musician and a muppet and a friend" and the little dog ignores him and just continues to tickle the invisible ivories

Jesse: What is it about disparate animal pairings that gets people so worked up? Kittens and ducklings, puppies and goats, baby ostriches and water buffalo, all grand slams in the arena of cuteness. Any adolescent boyfriend worth his salt knows that the puppies and kittens calendar (with the bonus puppy/kitten/three downy chicks combination for July), with the two natural enemies all a'romp together in fields of clover and intensely examining a fascinating boot, is going to score much more than double the points of either puppies or kittens alone.

It might be the evocation of that perfect sense of pre-lapsarian, first-half-of-The Fox and the Hound-type innocence or the suggestion that harmony can be achieved despite overwhelming difference or maybe its just like an Oreo where two things that are solid enough on their own reach new horizons of fantastic when joined together. We may never really know because science has better things to do and when you try to pontificate on the cuteness algorithm of a scruffy dog mothering a scrawny little marsupial everyone is like "shhhh, look, they're asleep" and they are, on a pile of folded laundry under a Christmas tree.

ETA 7/18/08 @ 10:37am:
Lisa: OH MY GOD IS THAT NOT A DOG WHAT IS IT

You Know This is Hanging in a Foyer Somewhere

2008-07-09T13:06:00.008-04:00

Lisa: It's kind of like the dog is the only one who realizes how fucking stupid this is. Where are they, Sears? First of all, the kid is dressed like a fucking idiot for chrissake. Is it Christmas? No, I'm seriously asking you, is it fucking Christmas? Because only then is it okay to wear red and green together, otherwise you look fucking festive for no reason. Also, I used to have jeans like those and they're really goddamn stupid. It's like they're jeans and sweatpants in one, with an elastic waistband and everything. Finally, the shoes -- oh hell, the shoes. If it is Christmas, why the fuck is he wearing dirty white sneakers? Who the hell would put their son in dirty white sneakers on Christmas? If you want my opinion, the only good thing about this portrait is the dog, and he knows it. Dogs are not seasonal, they go with everything, and they're always in style. Unlike this fucking train wreck of a kid.

Jesse: This dog has the tortured yet saintly countenance of a 14th century Christian martyr. This boy is carefree and joyful and cannot yet grasp the concept of death. Together they star in a dramatic Russian television series called молодой парень, печальная собака (This Darling Child and his Sorrowful Hound) where the little kid repeatedly toddles into mildly dangerous situations and the dog has to save him again and again with his wearied face appearing in extreme closeup like the exact representation of an entire nation's troubles. It may seem to us like a Lassie retread but the whole thing as this amazing cinematic quality and a sense of gravitas that you don't find on American television. Take for example this one scene where the boy tumbling is in slow-motion down a snowy hillside toward the biggest mud puddle you've ever seen with THIS music playing and the dog senses it and is rushing through a crowded town square with the snow coming down and flashbacks to his mother being taken away in the Black Maria (there's still a lot of guilt in this country about the overzealousness of Soviet dog catchers) and there are repeated cuts to the boy's father chopping wood and his mother preparing a roast and then there's this amazing long shot from a helicopter or something where they draw all the way back and you can see the dog rushing down the hill and the early evening shadows are framed amazingly against the path of the boy's descent and you're like "wait a second what am i watching"

Buhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

2008-07-08T11:11:00.008-04:00

Lisa: A smiling dog is like therapy to me. This dog is so soft and happy looking I want to press my face up against hers and, I don't know, bite it? I want to bite it. Softly, like that thing a dog does when he wants to see what you're made of so he just like grabs your arm really gently in his mouth and just holds it for a minute, like "okay, well I guess you're made of human" but he dosn't let go right away because he loves you so much. You know? That's what I want to do to her. I want to hold her snout in my mouth and see what she's made of. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh god ohhh

Jesse: Like those little red laughing Buddha figurines they sell in Chinatown this dog is an iconic representation of a basically intangible thing. He should be modeled into life-sized pillows and distributed to disadvantaged children so they can know what it feels like to be loved by a cloud.

This is a Large Dog

2008-07-07T12:18:00.004-04:00

Lisa: IF I COULD HAVE ANY DOG ANY DOG IN THE WORLD THIS WOULD BE IT. While I have an average-sized interest in average-sized dogs I have an above average-sized interest in above average-sized dogs THIS DOG IS A GIANT! DO YOU SEE! I am below-average sized if I had this dog I could ride him I could save money this dog would give me rides it would be a fun day! I don't like that man who is he. Is it maybe a cow!

Jesse: Notice first the look on this guy's face, which is wavering at that exact point where he realizes he's lost control of the situation. You know this clown and his antics, how he traps you into inviting him to your party and gets "buzzed" as quickly as possible off his "patented" cocktail of Passion Fruit Smirnoff and Cherry Limeade so he can immediately devote himself to his role as self-appointed party ambassador, obnoxiously pushing people to do shots, making jokes about your refrigerator magnets, putting a lampshade on his head in the most painfully self-conscious way possible where he has three or four false starts because not enough people are looking and you're just mentally blacklisting everyone who cracks a smile. But here he has hubristically bitten off more than he can chew and the gods respond by flattening him with his own cow-hound dance partner. You cannot dance with a dog of this size. A tall woman is hard enough to manage and she's not even slobbering in your hair or struggling with the fact that she's not meant to be on two legs and has the center of gravity of an Ikea bookshelf.

So here you can enjoy this moment where he mentally says "whoaaa boy, steady" and the no, it's ok really smile flashes like a star twinkle before his knees sort of buckle and he gives one or two strained grunts and topples over on his back for this monster to drag its skee-ball sized testicles over his stupid Budnik-looking face and practical hat.

Friendship!

2008-07-06T13:32:00.003-04:00

Lisa: I wonder what happened to this dog here it's like his wolfdog friend is like "man don't sit too close i don't want anyone to think i know you" and the fuzzy dog thing is like "but dude i can't even SEE this thing is around my neck man" and wolfdog says to him "yeah man you look like an IDIOT you totally shouldn'ta fuckin attacked that bird dude" and fuzzy dog goes "fuck you man this whole thing is all your fault" and wolfdog goes "shut the fuck up man" and fuzzy small thing's all "you got me into this the least you can do is act like a fucking FRIEND" and wolfdog's like "shut up shut up shut upppp" and fuzzydog's like "man this sucks i can't even see a fucking thing"

Jesse: Summer is here and that means its time for lemonade and strolling and for your two dogs to pose serenely on the front lawn like they're the subject of an Andrew Wyeth painting or a family photo circa 1907, the bigger one with his vacuous, pupil-less eyes and the collar attachment that says "My name is LARS and someone at 493 MAPLEVIEW TERRACE loves me" and that bizarre sense of impending doom (the eyes again) that sends up chill up your spine when you wake up in the middle of the night and see him watching you from the foot of the bed. Then there's Terrence who still gets a kick out of wearing that Elizabethan collar even though its been six months since the operation and you throw it away at least once a week but each time he digs it out and stuffs his little head back inside, running around the house like an inverted lampshade, getting stuck as he tries to squeeze under the armchair and then plopping down in the grass like he's using the thing for suntanning purposes. God bless these furred beasts.

What Wonderful Dogs!

2008-07-05T17:07:00.008-04:00

Lisa: What's cool about these dogs is the fact that they're a team, you can tell that just by looking at them. As a general rule I'm against animals wearing clothes (it just doesn't make any sense for Chrissake), although I know if I actually owned a dog I would probably dress him up as often as possible. These costumes in particular are a great investment because they can be used in a number of different ways and for a number of different occasions: Halloween, trips to Germany, beer parties, fairy-tale themed events, role-playing, the theatre, historical reenactments, disguises, birthday parties, intimidation purposes, celebrations of almost any kind, Myspace, graduation, photo shoots, cheering up, day camp, mail, inspiration, the beach, small things, gifting and re-gifting, barking, friendship, dogs, babies, eeeeeeeeeeee.

Jesse: In cases like this my first reaction is obviously to blame the human - for every wiener-dog suffocating in a horrid snowflake-pattern sweater there's an equally tragic owner doing the same in the stifling pit their lives have obviously become - but here I feel like the dogs themselves are responsible and for some reason the idea of blame doesn't even begin to enter into the equation. I love this. It may stand against everything I believe in but I've found myself staring at this picture for nigh upon ten minutes and it's having the strangest soothing effect; I think this is what drowning is supposed to feel like.

Maybe its just the little details here and the way they join together to create something that is the opposite of the sum of its parts. The bug-like eyes that in the wrong situation would be borderline horrifying (imagine these things crawling out from underneath a trailer covered in mud) which work with the costumes to create the kind of cute normally reserved for ugly children and old men. The way their paws are almost touching but not quite (love). Mostly it's the idea that these two weird dogs have somehow convinced me that they share a loving, healthy relationship, with three kids away at obedience school (i don't know, that's the only dog metaphor for college I can think of. Shut up) and the kind of lifestyle where they can wake up in the morning and decide on a whim to dress up for the local Bavarian festival and their costumes just end up matching without any sort of planning.

Happy Independence Day

2008-07-04T12:37:00.004-04:00

Lisa: Here in America there are two kinds of dogs: Dogs that are proud of their country, and dogs that don't give a shit because they think they have no fucking responsibilities. We all have responsibilities! When you wake up in the morning you should say to yourself, "I am an American. I live in a free country! I am lucky to live here, I'm lucky to have been born here, and I'm going to make the most of all the resources that are available to me." I'm talking guns here, folks. We have the fucking right to bear arms and the only people who seem to care are those that are equally interested in fucking their sister. NOT COOL DUDES. We could shoot shit up. We could shoot each other. We could shoot people that aren't American, or people that are American but don't share our values. We could shoot dogs if we wanted (please don't). We could shoot things that rhyme with dogs, like frogs or logs or pogs (except I'm under the impression that some pogs are worth quite a bit of money nowadays so it's really important that we assess our collections first). Why? Because this is fucking America and we are free! I feel like nobody's with me on this. Nobody except this dog. Check out the heat he's packing. It's like he fucking KNOWS what he's DOING when he walks into a room.

Jesse: The worst thing about extremist groups is the way they pick on the weak-minded and physically defective so you end up with situations like this, where this poor little creature, who's spent his whole life being trampled underfoot at dog runs and sniffing the backs of the other guys knees ends up at a weekend retreat with some dickhead in a flannel-shirt and high-waisted Levis named Brother Glenn who preaches about the dissolute natures of the larger breeds and cats secretly running the ASPCA and how the doggie-door to heaven is only 14 inches high. He's feeling good, running free and breathing the mountain air with a knockwurst-looking pug who can barely move and a mutt that someone abandoned in the dog food section at Wal-Mart and he actually starts to believe this shit because this is the first time in his life that he feels like someone is really speaking to him.

Before you know it he's outfitted head to toe for the coming race war, carrying a pistol that he can't even shoot correctly and barking a farewell message to his family about how his soul is ready to ascend the peaks of Mount Zion propelled by the unclean blood of the Great Dane into a video camera that isn't even turned on.

Holy Hell Just Look at this Dog

2008-07-03T10:11:00.007-04:00

Lisa: When I was little I had this fear that my toys came alive when I was asleep or out of the room. This was long before Toy Story even came out, although I think it's worth noting that when it did I couldn't sleep for weeks. I was similarly suspicious of my pet bird, a Cockatiel named Robin that I got for Christmas when I was six. I thought he was a genius -- I mean, he kind of was -- but I thought he understood English perfectly and behaved like a totally normal person when my back was turned, and that his whole "bird" shtick was just a cover for, I don't know, the government? These days my paranoia manifests itself in other ways, or at least it did until I saw this picture. WHAT THE FUCK! I mean, HOLY FUCK! "Oh look I've got a little dog oh cool he's acting like a dog that's kind of neat he's all on the ground and shit like dogs should be oh hold on I'll be right back" and the second I turn around he climbs up a fucking BAMBOO SHOOT? IS HE INSANE? Where the fuck did he find a fucking bamboo shoot anyway? No, seriously, I'm done here.

Jesse: It seems cheap to go the Asian route with the presence of the bamboo shoot and the slightly askew eyes, but this guy is so firmly established on a Zen-level plane of serene inner peace that he's only a few inches of chin whisker away from being matte-framed on some stoner dude's wall between the 10 Iroquois Commandments and a black-light poster of Jesus with dreads.

It's especially impressive considering how other dogs seem set to drift through life in this half-drugged Cheech & Chong mode where they treat every bug they see like a fascinating little smidgen worthy of three hundred sniffs. Meanwhile this guy has climbed a plant and is smiling at you like he's about to recommend the book that will change your life. It's actually kind of embarrassing. You can imagine that the rest of his species is spending their day forgetting where they buried half a muddy tube sock while he's locked away in a tiny workshop figuring out a way to make his thumbs opposable.

Dogs are fun!

2008-07-02T16:22:00.004-04:00

Lisa: One of the most fun things about dogs is they like to play it's neat because they're so much fun you like them? they turn the most regular normal things into fun games like this dog here he sees a rope that's attached to things that are in the ground and he says "now this to me looks like a game, who's in?" but nobody's in since he's probably more fun than anybody else in the world and his imagination is so beautiful that he's the only one that's able to see the fun in everything it's a curse really but like one of those beautiful curses like how the elephant man was so gross looking but he was like a really nice guy and beautiful on the inside and had so much inner strength and things but anyway so this dog is like "shit man this looks like a rad game" and he fucking bites on the rope and it turns out he's RIGHT the game is pretty much the most awesome thing he's ever played and if i were there i would just sit down on the ground and watch him and be glad that he's not the elephant man because if he was i would like him much less

Jesse: Remember that scene in White Fang when White Fang is forced to fight that other dog and you can tell by his initial reticence that he doesn't want to have to do this again because he's tired of that wild life and having to bite the shit out of canines he knows are his brothers just to prove a point so he gives that look that's like "cmon guy we don't have to do this" but the other dog has no use for it and he's on White Fang with his teeth and White Fang holds back for a second more until its too much and he just tears into this fucking dog and its about as horrifying as you can get with a PG rating, but you know he had no choice so you can respect it and at the last moment when that dog's throat is exposed White Fang pulls back and gives him that look so he knows he wasn't worth it and the guys who bet on the other dog throw down their hats and walk out of the place just shaking their heads? That was awesome.

A Bit of History

2008-07-01T12:06:00.007-04:00

Lisa: Okay, so everyone's familiar with Darwin and all of his big ideas, but what most people don't know is his theory on dogs.

Charles Darwin was just 22 years old when he set foot upon a ship called the Beagle during the winter of 1831. It was upon this ship that he wrote two of his most famous papers, "Dogs: Truly Man's Best Friend and Probably the Best Animals in the Entire World" and "I've Never Loved Any Woman as Much as I Love Dogs, Do You Think I Am Gay or are Dogs Just Really That Great?" In these papers, he speculated that dogs are the most evolved creatures on earth (I would have to agree), and that thousands of years ago existed a race of dogs so advanced that we have yet to discover the secrets to their technologies.

One of the many things that supported his theory was this dog painting. You may notice that the subject has opposable thumbs, which explains how he was able to dress himself in such complicated attire (complicated especially in comparison to the sweaters and t-shirts you may find on dogs of today). Also significant is the fact that the painter (who was also suspected to be a dog) was able to paint inside the lines, unlike my friends' dogs who can't even hold paintbrushes.

The cause for their extinction has not yet been determined; however, Darwin popularized two schools of thought. The first is that a great war broke out and left all but few dogs dead -- which, I suppose, is possible except for the fact that all dogs are best friends with each other, so why would they fight? The second (and more scientifically ground) theory is that this race of dogs is still thriving, they're all just really really really good hiders.

Jesse: If you think this kind of sick dog-man motif sprung whole from the twisted mind of that guy who takes terrifying photos of those gray dogs posing in painter's hats and overalls with human hands then you're wrong. Back in the 1800s people were painting dogs heads coming out of everything: vases, decorative Greek-Revival porticos, the chimneys of small cottages. It was a terrible fad and while nowadays you'd have the geniuses at Best Week Ever taking the air out of the whole thing by Friday evening people in the 19th century were much too polite and so this went on for nearly 80 years. There was even a 60-foot scene of the Battle of Waterloo at the Winter Palace in Petersburg that was painted over with dogs heads on all the soldiers and which, according to rumor, precipitated through its sheer awfulness the early death of Tsarina Anna Ivanovna from tuberculosis at age 14 (seriously).

Things had thankfully slowed down by the late 1930s when in a move that seems pulled from the latest Indiana Jones flick the Nazis began rounding up any paintings of this kind and burning them for the danger they posed to "the sanity and well-being of the greater European continent." SS terror squads raided mansions in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and destroyed untold quantities of stupid portraits featuring dogs wearing pince-nez and foppish hats with the hands of Lord Marlborough or Alexander the Great. This of course was entirely hushed up after the war because we need our villains cast in black and white and the idea that a group of monsters could have performed such a service to the world was rightfully offensive to most people.

Thanks to this paintings of this style are now pretty sought after and guys in the Midwest with doctoral degrees and careful moustaches spend hours discussing them in online forums. This, however, is a fake, you can tell because a dog would never have been allowed to attain the rank of Rear Admiral.

HOW MANY DOGS DO YOU SEE

2008-06-30T10:01:00.004-04:00

Jesse: Like that optical illusion where the picture is an old woman and a young lady this photo can be taken one of two ways; the ambiguity is so locked into a half empty/half full dynamic that it could be used in psychological testing. Now if you're an optimist you're seeing this Norman Rockwell scene with the big dog as the watchful father waiting for these little guys to finish eating so he can lead them running off in a line connected tail-to-mouth, across main street and the frozen-over pond past the old mill to visit down at the orphanage for Christmas morning. If you're more negative minded you see him getting ready to show these pups a thing or two and go crazy on seven bowls of Kibble. There's also the more nuanced option where the big dog is about to pull rank to take his share and then back away gracefully or that he's staring at a very small bug behind that puppy, but the world of dogs is black and white (this is a pun, they cannot see colors) and so there's no room for this kind of varied interpretation.

Lisa: I don't know, there's something something about this picture that makes me want to die. In a good way. Maybe it's the fact that it combines my favorite things (dogs, food, friendship), or that there are SEVEN ADORABLE PUPPIES being FUCKING ADORABLE, I mean GODDAMN mister just LOOK at them! I also like the fact that their tails are in varying degrees of waggedness, CAN YOU TELL HOW HAPPY THEY ARE TO BE EATING? No, no, TO BE ALIVE? And I like to think the grown-up dog in the background is their older brother Chester whose mom was like "Chaz, I really need a nap do you mind taking them outside for a little bit?" and Chester's like "but Moooom I don't want to they're so dumb!" when in reality he's like the proudest big brother in the world and when he watches them play he thinks they're the smartest and cutest pups that ever walked this green earthhhhhhhh~

Size Doesn't Matter!

2008-06-29T11:51:00.003-04:00

Jesse: I'm pretty down on small dogs as a rule, but there's something charming about a situation where you can imagine that a man's love for his son is measured in direct inverse proportion to the size of his dog.

The thing is there's a tendency for big men to outfit their lives with all kinds of jumbo-sized trappings like they're some kind of giant who actually needs a truck that can haul twelve tons of concrete and a recliner as big as the base of Lincoln Memorial. Usually it comes off as ridiculous but in the case of a dog it makes sense; a man's dog acts as an avatar of his personality and so needs to match it in some sense, meaning that a small dog flows about as well as him carrying a change purse. But the same is true for a kid and this guy at least has the fatherly restraint to realize what having a dog that isn't twice your size can mean to a child and that no good is going to come out of keeping around some gargantuan beast that can fit the boy's head in its mouth like it's a tennis ball.

So if you're feeling like there's no hope for the world think about this guy walking this dog, feeling like he's pulling a ball of cotton on a string, envisioning a 300-pound mastiff setting off car alarms with its bark when the little yipper gets spooked by a pigeon and cowers inside of a tin can and he's like "Poochkins man when are you going to learn" and scoops him up into his sweatshirt pocket to carry him home.

Whatever Happened to Man's Best Friend?

2008-06-28T18:14:00.005-04:00

Jesse: Now with the advent of ICanHazCheeseburger and FailDogs or whatever they are life is different for dogs. You have these goofy motherfuckers and their contrived mugging, acting like some North Florida family purposely setting up a situation where the child hits his father in the balls with a whiffle bat and filming it to get on America's Funniest Home Videos. These kind of minstrel show antics are tragic because you can see the life's work of dogs like Lassie and Rin Tin TIn, who made it clear that the essence of a good dog was loyalty and bravery and quiet self-respect, just totally going down the drain. The level of dialogue has been lowered to some pathetic mutt scraping and soft-shoein' around, posing with his head stuck in a container of cheez balls and howling "Home on the Range" in the backyard praying that someone will come out and throw him a Beggin' Strip.

So you end up with dogs like this who you can't blame because they're just doing what they think they need to earn their master's love when in reality no one wants to live with the dog who gets internet famous for trying to swallow an entire cactus. That novelty shit has no real place in the home. But this dog is a type - he probably has another dog or two or three cats to compete with for attention and he flips over his food bowl so it lands on his head ad makes that dumbfounded "who, me?" face and his master is like "Goddamit Terrence I'm late for work I don't have time for this." and he takes this as a sign he has to try harder to amuse him when really all he wants is him to sit at his feet in the evening and maybe fetch the newspaper once in a while.