"The poodle community is particularly snappish about doodles. Doodle breeders help themselves to the poodle’s brain..."

"... and its low-shedding, hypoallergenic coat, temper the poodle’s supposedly high-strung personality with a mellower breed, and then sell their hybrids for twice as much as poodles go for.... Online, doodles stir darker emotions. 'I love all dogs and own the best dog in the world. But my god I hate those fuckers,' one Reddit commenter said of doodles. 'We have one in my close family and I’ve never met a more neurotic dog.' Many object to the prices that doodles command; Much Ado About Doodles, for example, a Virginia-based breeding business, sells pretrained goldendoodle puppies for some fifteen thousand dollars each.... 'My AKC registered dog was way cheaper and came from champion bloodlines.'... Groomers complain about owners who, instead of troubling themselves with the daily brushing and regular cuts that low-shedding coats require, allow their dog’s coat to develop painful mats that have to be shaved off, then yell at the groomer for denuding their fur baby. A common clarification in anti-doodle discourse is 'It’s not the doodles I hate, it’s the people who own them.' Wally Conron, the doodle dogfather, has apologized for his creation. '... I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy....'"

From "How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour/Poodle crossbreeds have grown overwhelmingly popular, sparking controversy in dog parks and kennel clubs alike" (The New Yorker).

"My client’s magazine is a parody that features humorous pictures of dogs, while Vogue is a fashion magazine that features serious photographs of human models."

"I don’t think anyone would have difficulty recognizing the difference."

Said the lawyer for Dogue, quoted in "Vogue Says There’s Only Room for One Top Dogue/The creator of Dogue, a small canine fashion magazine (circulation: under 100), is being sued by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, for trademark infringement" (NYT).

And here's a quote from Olga Portnaya, the creator and editor in chief of Dogue: "Art and culture have always evolved through reinterpretation and dialogue. For me, this is a larger fight: I’m not just fighting for my own work and our community, but for other independent creators."

Well, there is Teen Vogue, so you might think there'd also be a Dog Vogue — some people buy expensive clothes and accessories for their dogs — if Vogue had a dog magazine, it might very well be called Dogue, so I do think there's some potential for confusion.

Which tag should I give this post?

Lawsuits I hope will fail

Lawsuits I hope will succeed

Neither

 

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"But a recent tragedy-exploiting television series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette features a character using my name and presents her as me."

Writes Daryl Hannah, in the NYT.

The choice to portray her as irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate was no accident. In discussing the show, “Love Story,” one of its producers explained: “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.” Storytelling requires tension. It often requires an obstacle. But a real, living person is not a narrative device. 

There is also a gendered dimension to this thinking. Popular culture has long elevated certain women by portraying others as rivals, obstacles or villains. Isn’t it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?... 

I have never used cocaine.... I have never desecrated any family heirloom.... I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s....

"A love of dogs is somewhat of a tradition for French leaders: the past six presidents all owned at least one black Labrador."

"The two owned by Nicolas Sarkozy, and a chihuahua, reportedly caused damage totalling tens of thousands of euros at the Élysée Palace by chewing on 200-year-old furniture in the Silver Salon. President Macron’s dog, Nemo, was once filmed urinating on an ornamental fireplace in a presidential meeting, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s was a gift from the late Queen and nicknamed Sandringham Samba...."

From "Can the French love of dogs be transformed into election success? Doggy food banks and shared human-dog drinking fountains are among the promises on offer as candidates for the local elections try to win over voters" (London Times).

Check the reaction that's closest to yours.

What good is culture if you can't piss on it?

Why black Labs? Is it racist? Samba... really?

I want political promises for America's dogs!

It's all about love. Love is the answer.

 

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"Cow Licking."

I've been a huge admirer of Georgia O'Keeffe since I first saw the Life Magazine article "Georgia O'Keeffe, on the Ghost Ranch." That was 1968, and I was 17. I've looked at so many of her pictures, in person and in books, but I had never seen "Cow Licking" until this morning. 

I love it. Don't you? But let me tell you how I happened to run across it this morning. It was 5:43 a.m., and I'd been downstairs in breakfast-and-blog mode for a while when I got this text from upstairs:

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

I know what that is. It's Meade, sending me a Bob Dylan lyric and boldfacing the part about a small dog licking the face of whoever "you" is. Who is this person whose only teachers — law professors — are Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the jungle, and the sea? He rode in on a white horse, he's buff and handsome, and now he's lolling about in a field with a small dog licking his face. Maybe you remember being told that this song, "Jokerman," is about Jesus.

I don't know about that. I see that Dylan said it was something "mystical" that came upon him down there in the Caribbean — something "inspired by these spirits they call jumbis."

I didn't get far into that because Meade texted "What is that famous painting?" And he didn't mean that Dürer painting that is the first image in the "Jokerman" video, that image that just about everyone thinks is Jesus but is the artist himself, Albrecht Dürer:

Meade was thinking about something else: "Black man, lying supine on desert sand with stars above and a small dog."

I immediately thought of Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy":

Yes, that's not a dog. It made me think of this scene in a Chaplin movie I'd watched upstairs last night while Meade was watching basketball downstairs:

Texting this morning from upstairs, Meade thought it might be a different Rousseau painting. I found "La Noce," which has a "comically oversized and awkward" dog that, we're told, takes "the eye deep into the composition" and asserts the artist's "position as the master of spatial paradox."

I text-typo'd "that’s the only rousseau with a god that i found."

I asked Grok, "What's that famous painting with a dog licking a person's face." And then "Is there ANY famous painting showing any kind of tongue-licking?" and "Dog or person or other animal — now I'm just looking for licking. I'm thinking licking isn't seen as something worth painting — too in-the-moment and active to be frozen into a still image. But maybe somebody did it. All I can think of is that Rolling Stones logo."

And that's how I found "Cow Licking."

UNANSWERED QUESTION: Why did Meade send me that Dylan lyric and boldface "with a small dog licking your face"? I think it had something to do with the rumor that Mayor Mamdani has a secret plan to run all the dogs out of New York City.

Juiciest dog rumor since "They're eating the dogs."

"In an ad for Amazon’s Ring camera that ran during the Super Bowl, a new A.I.-powered feature called 'Search Party' helps reunite a tearful little girl with her missing dog..."

"... by activating all the cameras in the neighborhood to find him. The feature works by using A.I. to scan video captured by all the participating Ring cameras in a neighborhood, pinging the device’s user should the reported dog pass in view. The device’s user can then notify the pet’s owner (they can also decline). Scores of posters online have decried Ring’s new feature as dystopian and terrifying. In a rare unifying moment, members of the political right and left expressed their discontent. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, posted on X: 'This definitely isn’t about dogs — it’s about mass surveillance.' And the conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller wrote, 'The Ring cam lost dog ad is just propaganda for mass surveillance.'"

From "What Homeowners Need to Know About Smart Home Cameras/A new Super Bowl ad is raising questions about the power of doorbell cameras" (NYT).

Here's that ad:

The Harry Nilsson tag is not a mistake. His recording of "Without You" is the background music.

In the ad, "can't live/if living is without you" is used to express a little girl's feelings about her dog. Such dark thoughts to impose on a child. I mean, it can happen — see "12-Year-Old Girl, Unable To Cope With Loss Of Her Pup, Dies By Suicide" — but let's try harder to keep darkness off of children. The theme of inability to live without a particular loved one is an adult theme.

"Most people just don’t have a human who wants to cuddle them twice a day and force them on walks."

But if you do, you might not need a dog to preserve your brain volume.

"Even as a child, I’d watch Uncle Henry force Toto into the basket, with Dorothy sobbing in the background..."

"... and think, It’s only fair. I mean, he did bite the woman."

Writes David Sedaris, in "And Your Little Dog, Too/Two small dogs, both unleashed, rushed toward me, snarling, and one of them bit me on my left leg, just below the knee. It all happened within a second" (The New Yorker).

A few days after I was bitten in Portland, I wrote a short essay about the experience, which I read at a show in Anchorage, Alaska. The audience reacted much the way people had at the Salem book signing. “Really?” I said. “I get nothing here?”

“Dogs are really good judges of character!” someone called out from the darkness.

"Schopenhauer was a lifelong bachelor who had few friends and many enemies, who preferred the company of dogs..."

"... to that of his fellow men and women, and whose own mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, broke off ties with him, telling him in a letter, 'I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.'... [H]e became even more so as he grew older, driven by the belief that solitude was the price of telling the rest of humankind two unbearable truths. First, that it is better never to have been born; second, for those of us unfortunate enough to exist, to expect nothing but suffering and sorrow.... It is curious to think that his beloved standard poodle, Atma, knew what men and women did not know: that his master believed in the care and concern for all living beings...."

Writes Robert Zaretsky, in "Compassionate Curmudgeon/Why we must root ourselves in the real world" (The American Scholar).

"It's like a dog marking his territory. It makes me very uncomfortable."

I said out loud, watching this:

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump shows ONCE AGAIN he is the funniest president after video was released of him giving Syria's president TRUMP COLOGNE...

"The other one is for your wife. How many wives? One? With YOU guys, you never know!"

Omg, how can't you love him🤣😭 pic.twitter.com/iFrTw9AyPO

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 12, 2025

"If spun correctly, a dog’s difficult past can be a selling point. 'People want a dog that has an incredible story, that’s really been saved from something terrible'..."

"... [Heather Hall, the director of One Tail at a Time-West Texas] told me. 'Who wants an eighty-pound black pit bull? Well, we can make you want them, because that’s a really incredible dog that was tied up on an oil rig for four weeks and then fed by two different crews and then got bit by a rattlesnake and abandoned at the vet. Now he can be your heroic save story.' (She later told me that this example was not hypothetical and that the dog is now living happily in Portland.)"

From "The Airlift Operation That Has Transformed Pet Adoption/Euthanasia in an under-equipped shelter used to be the fate of many dogs in Texas. Then chartered planes started bringing them North" (The New Yorker).

Things happen so fast with Trump. He's always dropping one distracting thing or another.

It's hard to keep track of the things you really ought to worry about.

Chomping a wall off the East Wing of the White House? That's so distracting that it must be intended as the distraction. Why do it this week and not next month? Because there's something else that's harder to see, and I'm certainly not seeing it.

"Demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him" — that's something "people familiar with the matter" fed to the New York Times but it's not at the top of the front page anymore.

It's below the story about how dogs are peeing: 

It's down there on a level with Springsteen's "Nebraska," which came out in 1982 and is the focus of a new biopic that already been in the news for weeks.

The dog piss is fresher. 

The top story on the Times front page seems like another throwback: "Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances."

They're still fixated. We're still fixated. It's all about paying attention. Are we dangerously attached to our fixations? Or are we distracted by the latest thing? There's something that's neither of those 2 things and it's what I'm afraid we're not doing.

CORRECTION: There are 2 headlines about the $230 million and I see now that one of them is higher than Bruce and at the level of the second half of the bit about dogs peeing. Sorry. I should have paid better attention. But my point remains and is, perhaps, underscored: We're caught up in a game of paying attention.

"Republicans should not have to clean up the mess Andrew Cuomo and the Democrats created, and we will not allow the political class to interfere with voters or hijack our ballot."

Wrote the party chairs of each of 5 NYC boroughs, quoted in "Curtis Sliwa Has the Spotlight. He’s Not About to Give It Up. Mr. Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of New York City, finds himself a major player in the race. He’s under heavy pressure to drop out" (NYT).

Doesn't Sliwa have a duty to stay in the race, having won the nomination and used the Republican Party's resources? What would that say to those who have donated to the Party? There's a line on the ballot for the Republican — is there to be no one on it?

I don't see the basis for replacing Sliwa with no one. But Trump is one of those who are leaning on him:

"Drug-sniffing dogs swarmed St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary last week when cops were called for possible illegal narcotics on the scenic, tree-covered campus...."

"Instead, what they found were first-degree relics — the body or body fragments, such as bone or flesh — of Saint Raphael of Brooklyn, a Syrian immigrant who founded St. Nicholas Cathedral in what is now downtown Brooklyn and was glorified in 2000.... 'The people that found them didn’t know what they were,' said Father Michael Nasser of the seminary. 'They weren’t in a typical container.... We got to meet the K-9 units who came out here for a special prayer and blessing and allowed us to thank them for all they do....'"

The New York Post reports.

"I think what you look like is a standard poodle and I love standard poodles."

A model for a perfect husband, revealed in "My cool cancer story/A year after losing my hair and self image to cancer, I put on my $5,000 prescription wig and look at myself and say, 'THERE she is.'" (WaPo video, free access).

"Those are crimes against the vulnerable, and you’re putting them with a puppy who is vulnerable."

"We do not allow anyone whose crime involves abuse towards minors or animals — including any crime of a sexual nature. That’s a hard policy we have, so she will not be able to.”

Said Paige Mazzoni, head of Canine Companions, quoted in "Ghislaine Maxwell barred from service dog training at cushy prison camp." (NBC News).

"Have you noticed that trump is one of the very few presidents who does not have any kind of pet? I would sooner get rid of those folks than the cats and dogs. Absurd."

A comment on the NYT article, "We Love Our Dogs and Cats. But Are They Bad for the Environment? Some pets have wide-ranging effects on the planet. Here’s how to lessen them."

In the comments, everything always gets around to Trump. 

From the article: "Gregory Okin, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated in a 2017 study that the estimated 163 million cats and dogs in the United States consume a whopping quarter of the country’s animal-derived calories.

"A substantial portion of PETA’s suit focuses on the French bulldog, the most popular dog breed in the United States in 2024 for a third straight year...."

"The Frenchie’s squat body, wrinkly face and batlike ears have helped make it a must-have, Instagram-ready pet for pop stars, pro athletes, online influencers and others who are able to pay the $4,000 to $6,000 or more it can cost to buy one as a puppy.... In its suit, PETA, a self-described animal liberation organization, says the French bulldog standard endorsed by the kennel club requires several deformities, including a large, square head and 'heavy wrinkles forming a soft roll over the extremely short nose.' Such features, the group argues, result in nostrils that are too narrow to allow for normal breathing and several other abnormalities that can obstruct a dog’s airflow. Veterinarians have warned that the big heads, bulging eyes and recessed noses that make Frenchies appealing also create what Dan O’Neill, a dog expert at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College, calls 'ultra-predispositions' to medical problems."

From "American Kennel Club Harms French Bulldogs’ Health, PETA Says in Suit/The animal rights group argues that the standards the kennel club promotes for several dog breeds, including America’s most popular one, cause physical deformities" (NYT).

What's the legal basis for a lawsuit and for standing to sue? Let's read the complaint, here. Go to paragraph 120 to read the cause of action. It has to do with requiring the AKC to follow its own bylaws (which include a primary objective to "advance canine health and well-being").

By the way, PETA doesn't need to win this lawsuit, only to convince people that it's socially unacceptable to acquire a French bulldog: To be part of the market for this breed is to be part of a system of deliberate cruelty. What the human perceives as cute, the dog experiences as suffering. Once you know that, the dog ceases to be cute. At the very least, you lose the ability to enjoy your public image as an adorable dog person. 

The greyhound.

"She is desperate for the book to not be a downer, to be a jolt instead. 'The pity fucking kills me,' she said. 'It kills my strength.'"

"She wanted the perception to be 'the opposite: She’s alive. She’s enjoying her life. This is great.' She went on: 'The book is highly comedic. And then it slides down into horrible tragedy and then comes back up to the punch line.' I’d finished the whole thing, but I had to ask what the punch line was. There were a handful, she said. But the most important one was that you’re never too old to get even."

From "E. Jean Carroll’s Uneasy Peace/In the year and a half since defeating Trump for the second time, she’s written a secret book — and learned to shoot" (NY Magazine).

At the end of this long article, there's some discussion of the security around her home. Asked if she worried about the danger of turning off her security lights so that the frogs that once mated in her swimming pool would sing again, as they had in the past: