Fei Fei’s owner bought him a pair of sunglasses as a joke.  But now the fashion-mad mutt refuses to leave his home in central China without his wraparound shades!

“I think he likes all the attention he gets on the street,” said his owner, Bo Lee.  “I bought them to protect his eyes, but now if I try to leave the apartment without them, he howls the place down.”

Story at Daily Star

Playing pranks on dogs is half the fun of owning them.  There’s the old “peanut butter on the roof of their mouth to make them talk” trick.  And who doesn’t love throwing twenty blankets on top of their dog and seeing how long it takes them to escape?

Perhaps the biggest prank of all is dressing up your dog in a silly costume.  Half the trick is trying to keep your dog from ripping off its costume before you can snap a photo.  Manofest.com has collected 55 photos of dogs in ridiculous costumes.

55 Ridiculous Dog Photos

Pabst, a boxer mutt rescued from a shelter by Miles Egstad of Citrus Heights, California, won the annual “World’s Ugliest Dog” contest on Friday at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in California.

It was an upset victory for Pabst, who beat former champion Rascal, a pedigree Chinese Crested.  Pabst’s owner Egstad took home $1,600 in prize money, pet supplies and a modeling contract with House of Dog.

Miss Ellie, a blind 15-year-old Chinese Crested Hairless, won the pedigree category, in spite of or possibly because of the fact that she kept sticking her tongue out at the judges.

Story at FoxNews

The origin of the name “hot dog” has been widely debated.  Here is what the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council has to say about it:

“References to dachshund sausages and ultimately hot dogs can be traced to German immigrants in the 1800s. German immigrants brought not only the sausage with them in the late 1800s, but also dachshund dogs. The name hot dog probably began as a joke about the Germans’ small, long, thin dogs. Ever the butt of humor and rumor, the moniker that stuck was likely a joke regarding the provenance of the tasty sausage served on a bun cut lengthwise.”

The term “hot dog” first appeared “in college magazines in the 1890s. Students at Yale University began to refer to the wagons selling hot sausages in buns outside their dorms as dog wagons. It didn’t take long for the use of the word dog to become hot dog.”  The first confirmed printed reference to hot dogs appeared in an article published in the October 19, 1895, issue of the Yale Record which referred to folks “contentedly munching on hot dogs.”

If this little dog could talk, I bet he would say, “Hot dogs are not real dogs!”