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.