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