Up, Up and Away

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?!

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

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?

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

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

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!

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