What is the Deal with the Dogs? or: Why I Hate External Hardrives

As you might have noticed this blog already features quite a lot of pictures in a genre I like to call "Dogs Smoking Pipes". In fact, here have the first dog smoking a pipe picture I ever saw and the keystone of the entire collection. In this one the dog is celebrating his birthday with his owner's kids.

As anyone who already follows me on twitter, google plus or facebook I am kind of obsessed with these photos. At the latest count I have a collection of 21 pictures (though I'm always on the lookout for more). As anyone who has been on the internet for about a minute knows people just love dressing up animals as people, or robots, or other animals, or anything that isn't a dog. Basically people just love putting shit that doesn't belong on an animal onto on animals. But there is just something about giving them a pipe that makes it even more hilarious. I guess it's because the dog is kind of actively involved in the whole thing. You put clothes on a dog and it just has to put up with it, you give it a pipe and it could drop it, but instead dogs have apparently for hundreds of years gone along with the whole stupid joke and held pipes in their mouths and calmly posed while their owners take photos. And I'm serious when I mean hundreds of years. Most of the photos I've found are in black and white and a few of them look like they are about as old as the birth of photography. Seriously dogs are awesome and are our eternal partners in doing pointless hilarious crap. Dogs are the truest of bros.

You would be wrong though to think though that pictures of pipe smoking dogs are my entire deal when it come to collecting stupid pictures. I guess my first one was pretty similar in that it was based on this photo of a walrus at a Japanese zoo pretending to use a toy phone. So there was an early tendency towards animals pretending to be people.

Now there aren't so many pictures of walruses on phones. Or at least there weren't. For the first year or so I was in university I dedicated an inordinate amount of time to getting cartoonists and artists across the internet to draw their own interpretations of what a walrus on a phone should look like. I had happy walruses, sad walruses, walruses at payphones, walruses using blue tooth headsets. I had it all! And then I saved the walrus collection and all the other collections I had built up onto my new external hard drive (see I mentioned this part in the alternate title for this post! That's called foreshadowing).

At the time that seemed like a good idea, it saved space on my computer and meant I could take the photos to other people and show them my awesome collection of stuff if they would give me half a second to show them. Unfortunately my hard drive was a lump of shit, it was constantly freezing up and turning itself off without telling me. It was a tiny electronic jerk who hated everything I was trying to do and then one day in a final act of betrayal it just stopped working and I lost everything. My collection of walrus cartoons, my assortment of 50s pulp magazine covers, my surprisingly extensive collection of east African homophobic newspaper covers, it was all gone and the dream was over. Actually I should probably explain that last one a bit unless you get the wrong idea. I don't agree with the sentiment of the homophobic newspapers, I just enjoyed their over the top and confused descriptions of sodomy. With those lost I can never again laugh at a tabloid crying out in distress about men being "savaged by a sinful man's monster whopper" or whispered gossip about "all night bum parties".

And so all I am left with is a group of photos of dog's smoking pipes a thin ray of light in an otherwise bleak and joyless world. I hope that this little cautionary tale (if you didn't pick up on it I was cautioning against cheap electronics and dicking around on the internet when you actually have more important stuff to do, and you do lets face it) you have learnt a little bit about me and how my mind works. I also felt I should just get this whole thing out of the way and off my chest so I can talk about things other people might actually give a damn about.