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.