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