The Most Interesting Dog in the World

I recently found out that the beer company Dos Equis is going to be ending their "Most interesting Man in the World" ad campaign. You know the one. It started all of these memes:

I don't know if Dos Equis is looking for a new spokesperson, but I think I have a candidate for them if they want to reconsider extending their "most interesting" slogan:

Griff's favorite thing recently is climbing onto the backs of sofas behind people, laying down and proceeding to slowly flop lower and lower in between all the cushions so that nobody is comfortable and he can't get out without help.

On the bright side, I got this photo as a result.

And now, a million captioned versions of that picture that I made on a website that puts meme text on stuff:

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The Dogs Broke My Wife

Every now and again my wife gets caught in a loop where she find something (usually herself) so goddamn funny that she devolves into hysterics for minutes at a time, laughing at pretty much nothing. 

I took this video a while back when the dogs were being a pair of complete assholes and it launched Emily into what can only be described as a physical manifestation of  a person who "literally can't even".

Maybe it's just me, but I just find these fits of hysteria infectious. Whenever I need a laugh throughout my day I get out my phone and play this video and it never fails to put me in a good mood.

I'll just leave this here in the event that it can brighten up someone else's day just a little.

If that made your day even an infinitesimal amount better, I'm glad that I shared it. If you know of somebody else who might need something to make them laugh at something dumb for a few minutes in an otherwise crummy day send this to them too. Or send them a video of yourself breakdancing while wearing one of those inflatable t-rex suits. Or go to their house and give them an atomic high five. Or do literally anything to make you or someone else just a little less full of rage and disappointment at the world.

P.S: I feel like I should apologize for the fact that I shot the video in portrait mode. I wasn't raised by wolves, I know better then that.

Year of the Dog

People Who Take Their Dog to See Santa Are A-holes.

There are many Holiday traditions that I simply don't understand. One such tradition is taking your dogs to go have their picture taken with Santa Claus.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against Mall Santas or anything like that. When you are a kid, going to the mall to see the ACTUAL Santa Claus and tell him what you want for Christmas is a completely awesome experience. (I of course am the exception as I distinctly remember being pant-crappingly terrified of going anywhere near Mall Santa as a child. Apparently my general dislike of strangers even included Father Christmas himself).

I love the Idea of taking kids to see Santa when they are young. It's an experience parents can treasure, it creates a memorable moment for the kid, and its all around a good bonding experience for everyone involved.

You know who gives exactly zero fucks about Santa Claus though? Your dog.

Our furry family pets have no concept of Christmas, Santa, or generally anything besides wanting to eat food, nap and lick their own butthole. In fact,  in my experience they are downright against the idea of being taken to a strange place to be plopped on a chair with a large, scary bearded stranger, and then screeched at by their owners and yet another stranger with a camera trying to get them to look in the right direction.

The entire ordeal seems generally confusing and upsetting for them. The exercise of taking the dog to see Santa is clearly entirely for the benefit of the owner without consideration for how dog feels about it.

In fact, here is a short list of things I've comprised that you can do for your dog that they will appreciate more than being taken to see Santa:

• Give them a dog treat
• Take them for a nice walk
• Throw a ball or a stick with them for a while
• Literally just do nothing and leave them alone to do whatever it is they are already doing
• Take them for a ride in the car (to a place where they aren't going to be manhandled by a festive stranger)
• Give them a nice belly rub

Further, here is a list of things you can do with your dog that they may not appreciate necessarily, but will cause them less displeasure and confusion than being trundled off for a strange and uncomfortable holiday experience.

• Read a complete Shakespeare play to them start to finish
• Register them to be a wedding officiant on a shady internet site
• Show them a series of artistic photographs of Cantaloupes
• Make them a fake ID
• Pretend you are a character on Cheers and shout "Norm!" at them every time they enter a room before returning to whatever you were doing.

When it comes down to it, I just don't get the appeal of dragging a creature who has no concept of Christmas to take a picture with Santa Claus, an experience which is clearly not enjoyable for them, purely for the sake of my own gratification.

Or at least that's what I thought about it before this:

My wife decided she wanted to take the dogs to see Santa. I articulately and clearly explained why I disagreed with the practice. I then packed the car up with two dogs and a pair of Christmas hats at 8.am on a Sunday because as it turns out I do not get a vote and therefore can shove it.

Now, I still believe all of the things I said above are true, but goddamn if watching that man in his fake beard struggle to hold my two dogs still long enough for the photographer to snap a picture as they flailed their little asses off trying to get away from him was not the best thing I've ever seen.

They hated it. They hated Santa from the top of his red hat to the tips of his pleather faux-boot shoe covers. They hated the stupid Christmas hats we put on them and they hated the noise of everyone trying to coax them to look at the camera. They are pretty well trained dogs, we constantly get compliments in public abut how well behaved they are but they were simply not having one bit of Santa.

Now, while my dogs hated this, I on the other hand could barely stand I was laughing so hard while trying to convince the photographer to take the picture when Olive  was a blur of kicking feet and Griff was halfway off the chair making a break for it while Santa desperately held on to his back legs.

In the desperate confusion of writhing dogs and flopping elastic-bound Christmas hats the photographer actually managed to snap the above picture in the .5 seconds the two of them were holding still and looking in the same direction. Personally I'd have much preferred this years Christmas card to be a picture of them being maniacs, but you can't win 'em all.

If you take your dog to see Santa Claus you, like me, are totally an A-hole. You know what though? I'm alright with that because someday those  four-legged little mongrels aren't going to be around anymore and you'll always have a hilarious memory and a potentially epic photo to remember them by.

Happy Holidays, A-holes.

The Laptop Charger

I learned a lesson the other day; Sometimes following my innate man-instincts to rig something together with nothing but tape and stubbornness is actually a perfectly viable solution. Here's how I learned that lesson:

I'm fairly certain Griff wants to be a bomb disposal dog when he grows up. This is the only logical conclusion I am able to come to based on his obsession with biting through wires.

(On a side note, I would watch the hell out of an Air Bud/Hurt Locker mashup sequel where Air Bud goes to Afghanistan and diffuses bombs like a total badass). 

His first victim was my gaming headset, and at some indeterminate time he nibbled his adorably deviant way through the cord to Emily's Chromebook.

We don't know when he did it, but if we're being honest, it was probably on my watch. This is why we have dogs and not children; if Griff chews the laptop cord I can replace it, but if my baby sticks a fork in a light socket or something I go to jail.

I went out to Target after work the day after the chewed cord had been discovered in order to pick up a universal charger as a replacement. It would seem that our Target carries only one type of universal charger. The creatively named "Targus Laptop Charger" seen here:

Now, I've got a bone to pick with the good people in the package design department over at Targus. Their package proudly states that this charger "INCLUDES 6 CONNECTOR TIPS". What they have neglected to provide you, the customer with is any sort of indication as to what size any of those tips are. Not only is the package sealed in such a way that you cannot look at the tips hidden away in there, but nowhere on the front, back, top, bottom or sides of this thing does it give any information about these six connector tips. 

Presumably they are all different sizes to fit a variety of laptops, but for all I can tell from the way it's been packaged, this thing it could just be a grab bag where some minimum wage factory worker closes their eyes, grabs a handful of connectors out of a bin and chucks them in there at random. If that guy was having a bad day there could just be six identical connectors in there with a note that says "Go F@#k yourself".

Now obviously that's preposterous, there are of course going to be six different connectors, (Also the idea that a factory worker is throwing random connectors in is absurd. They'd obviously have outsourced that job to a robot years ago.) but I've got no way of knowing if any of them are a match for my wife's laptop. 

This thing costs sixty bucks and it's pretty much a total crap shoot as to if it works or not. C'mon Targus, get your shit together.

So there is like a 50/50 shot that this thing isn't going to work, but it's the only one they've got and like hell I'm going to walk out of this Target and have to drive five minutes to the Best Buy right down the road.

I get home with my begrudgingly purchased laptop charger only to discover that none of the six connector tips are even close to the correct size for my wife's laptop. I'm sure, somehow this is my own fault but I feel much better about my failures blaming them on a faceless laptop peripherals manufacturer that cant defend themselves from my snippy internet whining. So yeah, up yours Targus Laptop Charger.

At this point, the laptop is at like 9% battery and Emily needs it for work stuff. Time is short, plus its 8:30 at night and I'm not driving back out so that more companies can lie to me about the universality of their laptop chargers.

I decide it's time to handle this like a man. A man with little to no understanding of electronics or wiring but abundant access to electrical tape and a pair of scissors. 

Sometimes I have what we'll refer to as 'Man Episodes'. These occur primarily when I get the idea into my head that I'm going to fix or build something. A man episode can start any time without warning whenever there is something my brain deems 'manly' that needs doing.

Once the Man Episode has begun, I go completely silent. I suppose my brain assumes that to achieve maximum machismo I am required to be stoic and silent. I'll just get up and begin gathering all of the supplies I think I'll need. I then begin laying them out very precisely in my designated work area like I'm some kind of safe cracker or jewel thief as opposed to an idiot laying out his kitchen table with the same supplies second graders use to make arts and crafts. 

This happens frequently enough that as soon as I begin my supply gathering ritual, my wife understands that I'm off in my own world and pretty much just leaves me to my devices. I presume she is judging me in silence and reflecting on the direction of her life which led her to be married to such a disappointment.

Upon entering into a full fledged Man Episode fugue sate over this laptop cord and completing the gathering of supplies ritual I sit down and begin to work. I am always very serious about the fixin' I am doing during these Man Episodes; my brain invents some version of the task that is way more complicated and cool than whatever it actually is. As I sit there with my little spread of tools and this busted laptop charger the scene in my head looks something like this:

Meanwhile, outside of the delusional badass wire surgeon fantasy I've concocted for myself, the way the situation actually looks is more accurately represented by this: 

I may have taken some artistic liberty with the sparkles, but they just felt right.

I cut away the chewed up bits of the wire and stripped the plastic sheath from the now cleanly cut ends. I found a few different bundles of wires within the outermost casing and using my finely honed skills of knowing what colors are the same color as each other I matched up the individual wires, wrapped them together and taped them up with electrical tape.

When all the individual wires were connected to each other I taped the whole thing up in a wad and admired my handy-work.

Despite looking like it had been smacked together by a chimp in a unitard, when I plugged it in, it worked perfectly.

I am a god.

It has been several weeks since this happened, and I still feel like a total badass every time I look at the cord to my wife's laptop. The life lesson here I think is something like: Though usually rigging something together in a haphazard and likely unsafe manner is a terrible, terrible idea, sometimes it works out and you get to strut around basking in your own glory.

Also, enjoy those small victories in life. When I look at that shittily taped together laptop cord, I feel like I am riding on a t-rex whilst wearing a monocle and fake moustache like some sort of dinosaur riding Cowboy/dapper gentleman. Also the t-rex has a monocle and moustache too.

This is what gets me through the day. 

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