The dog didn't have a bucket list!

"New York Man Takes Dying Dog on Bucket List Adventure Across the Nation."

Why would you take a suffering, dying dog on a big road trip instead of just keeping him in his familiar, comfortable home? For Instagram? For cheeseball "human interest" stories in the media?

Just yoking.

At Abby's Caf�...

... talk about whatever you want. (Note: Moderation is on this morning. Sorry!)

More pictures of Abby at The Puparazzo, here. Also new over there, a Corgi and a white German Shepherd.

At the Akita Caf�...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(The photo is by Meade. See the whole sequence here, at The Puparazzo.)

Australia threatens to kill Johnny Depp's dogs.

"The penalties for breaching Australia�s biosecurity laws are severe, according to the agriculture minister [agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce]. 'Mr Depp has to either take his dogs back to California or we are going to have to euthanise them. He�s now got about 50 hours left to remove the dogs.'"

Countdown clock at the link.

The agricultural minister actually said: "It�s time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States. He can put them on the same chartered jet he flew out on to fly them back out of our nation."

The Michigan Liquor Control Commission violated Flying Dog Brewery's First Amendment rights.

Said the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

The Commission had barred sales of the company's Raging Bitch brand on the ground that the label � a Ralph Steadman drawing that might be seen as suggesting that beer could make you drunk � was "detrimental to the health, safety or welfare of the general public."



ADDED: Here's the PDF of the opinion. I love judicial description: "The label for 'Raging Bitch' beer depicts a wild dog presenting human female genitalia as well as possessing semblances of human female breasts."A taste of the facts:

Flying Dog�s CEO, James Caruso... stated that the company chose the �edgy� name and label because it reflected the nature of the Belgian yeast used to make the beer, and it promoted the Flying Dog brand. Caruso also represented that his employees��many ladies working with Flying Dog��and female customers in bars where Flying Dog conducted market research loved the label and thought it was humorous....

Click for more �

"Barbra Streisand/Bitch Attacks Flight Attendant."

You know, that's a funny headline at TMZ but...

Our sources tell us ... a female flight attendant [on some billionaire's private jet] noticed the dog [Barbra's 12-year-old Coton de Tulear ]and went over to pet her, but Sammie snapped, biting the woman's hand ... puncturing the skin and opening a wound that required stitches.

... don't just go over and pet somebody's dog.

(Virtually all the best-rated comments at TMZ make the same point: "Don't jst reach out and pet somebody dog," "You don't walk up to a dog that doesn't know you or that you are not familiar with and try to pet it," "You never pet a dog without the permission of the owner first," etc.)

Meade texts from the backyard.

Late day on Picnic Point.

"Supreme Court respects Fourth Amendment, protecting meth heads."

The headline at Kos.

Yes, this one breaks down mostly as you'd expect, if you follow the Court on these matters.  Justice Ginsburg wrote the opinion of the Court, including the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  Yes, they acknowledge, officers can do additional tasks which are required for their safety, or which don't prolong the stop, but that's where the line is drawn:

Traffic stops are �especially fraught with danger to police officers,� so an officer may need to take certain negligibly burdensome precautions in order to complete his mission safely. On-scene investigation into other crimes, however, detours from that mission. So too do safety precautions taken in order to facilitate such detours. Thus, even assuming that the imposition here was no more intrusive than the exit order in Mimms, the dog sniff could not be justified on the same basis. Highway and officer safety are interests different in kind from the Government�s endeavor to detect crime in general or drug trafficking in particular.

But what if they do that search really really quickly, asks Eric Holder? No!, responds the Court....

There are 3 dissenters: Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito.

"15 Dogs Before And After Their Spring Haircuts."

Aw!

At the Dog-and-Skateboard Caf�...

... you can roll anyway you want.

"Apologies to my wife, but Penny, my miniature poodle, is my world."

"She�s been the inspiration for countless cartoons...."

"We do, however, have a problem with the fact that those who are so quick to condemn Dunham say nothing about these men."

Writes Katie Halper � speaking for herself and her "Morning Jew" co-host Heather Gold � in a piece titled "9 comedy bits Lena Dunham critics need to call anti-semitic," pushing back the criticism of that Lena Dunham humor piece in the New Yorker, "Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz." Halper and Gold have the thesis that the criticism of Dunham comes from sexism, not any serious concern about anti-Semitism, and you can think about that. I'm just absolutely distracted by this sequence from Mel Brooks' "History of the World Part 1," which is a hell of a lot more than a "comedy bit":



I was in awe, saying out loud, several times: "Why have I never seen this before?" Why isn't that more famous? You endlessly hear � it's knee-jerk at the mention of the Spanish Inquisition � about Monty Python's "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition." Why isn't that Mel Brooks song-and-dance more deeply engrained in the culture? Is it because he's Jewish?

And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the rock, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

The inventor of the Pet Rock has died. "Gary Dahl, the man behind that scheme � described variously as a marketing genius and a genial mountebank � died on March 23 at 78."

Shouldn't that be a genial genius and a marketing mountebank?

One night in the mid-�70s, he was having a drink in Los Gatos.... The bar talk turned to pets, and to the onus of feeding, walking and cleaning up after them.

His pet, Mr. Dahl announced in a flash of bibulous inspiration, caused him no such trouble. The reason?

�I have a pet rock,� he explained.

A pet rock, Mr. Dahl quickly realized, might just have legs.

�People are so damn bored, tired of all their problems,� he told People magazine in 1975. �This takes them on a fantasy trip � you might say we�ve packaged a sense of humor.�

Meade sent me that link along with a second link, which he thinks is good material for a bloggerly riff: "Scott Walker, Allergic to Dogs, May Run Against Political History."

Jeb Bush can lament how he lost a Labrador (named for his brother Marvin) to cancer. Marco Rubio has a Shih Tzu, with a name like a gift from heaven: Manna. Ted Cruz goes one better: His rescue mutt is called Snowflake. (�Dear Jesus, please, please, PLEASE bring us a puppy,� his daughters prayed, according to Mr. Cruz�s Facebook page.) And if Mr. Walker makes it to November, he could face Hillary Rodham Clinton and her toy poodle, Tally.

Mr. Walker, who gives a gloomy stump speech filled with �worry,� perhaps could use a four-legged image softener of his own. But he is allergic to dog dander, an aide confirmed.

And in that, he is running against the long sweep of United States political history. If the ritual for presidential candidates wooing American voters had a handbook, �must love dogs� would be somewhere near the front....

Meade thinks Scott Walker could get a Pet Rock and go all Nixon....



And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the rock, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

"This video makes me nervous. The only reason that you can be sure that the monkey doesn't just snap a puppy's neck for the hell of it..."

"... is because it's been widely shared as a 'cute' video. The owner had no way of knowing it wouldn't."

That prompts somebody else share his "monkey story":

When I was vacationing in Thailand about 20 years ago, I was in a busy restaurant that had a small monkey chained to a perch in the corner. I felt sorry for it and went over to give it some attention. I fed it a treat of some sort from my table and allowed it to perch on my shoulder. Then it shoved its fingers into my eye sockets, driving my lids deep into the space between my eyeballs and eyebrows. It wrapped it's legs around my neck and started humping the back of my head, coming before I was able to tear it off.

I came to realize that having a monkey for a pet would be as much fun as taking care of an incontinent, criminally insane person.

"Why don�t they get a life and talk about something else? People deserve better."

From a list in Politico titled "Harry Reid�s insults: 10 greatest hits." That headline makes it sound as though he was some sort of master of the insult, perhaps not an Oscar Wilde, but at least a Don Rickles. But the closest he comes to saying anything striking/offbeat is...

When [George W.] Bush invited Reid for coffee in the Oval Office in the final weeks of his presidency, the president�s dog walked in, and Reid says he insulted the president�s pet. �Your dog is fat,� he said.

Also, this one isn't an insult per se...

�[Reid] was wowed by Obama�s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama � a �light-skinned� African-American �with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.��

... or not an insult to Obama anyway. It is an insult to Americans in general and it's a hurtful statement indirectly aimed at black people.

People do deserve better. 

At the Ankle-Deep-in-Dalmatian Caf�...

... where did you get those boots?

(That's the latest photo by Meade at The Puparazzo.)

At the Skeptical Dog Caf�...

... are you sure you can trust anybody?

(More pics of Rumor at Meade's.)

At the Black Dog Caf�...

... you can talk about anything you want.

And if you need to shop, please use The Althouse Amazon Portal.

If you need to see more dogs, like the one you see here, photographed by Meade, go to Meade's blog The Puparazzo.