TODAY: Let’s begin the year by talking dog

Pooches air their griev­ances, just don’t call it cat­ti­ness …

Local blog aggre­ga­tor Tomorrow.sg sug­gests: “From Sat­ur­day 28 Jan (Chi­nese New Year Eve) to Tues­day 31 Jan (third day of Chi­nese New Year), Tomorrow.sg will only pub­lish posts that con­tain the word “dog” and/or “oranges”, or actual pic­tures of dogs and/or oranges. The posts can still be about any­thing Singapore-related, as always — they just have to include the theme words.” But before you get ‘too cre­ative’, edi­tor Daryl Sng adds: “Sub­mis­sions about dogs dyed orange will be referred to the SPCA.”

Well, it is going to be the Year of the Dog, and a rudi­men­tary search has found some bits of the blo­gos­phere dom­i­nated by dogs.

Read more at TODAY­on­line [pdf][text]

Tech­no­rati Tags: blog, Chi­nese New Year, dog, sin­ga­pore

Her­biesphere (herbiegr.blogspot.com/) is writ­ten in the first per­son, that is, by a 6 year old golden retriever named Herbie.

Her­bie blogs his daily adven­tures, includ­ing one on Mon­day where he was attacked by a cat. “I get along well with cats, in the sense that i want to play with them but they do not want to play with me,” he howled.

Her­bie even painstak­ingly makes a ‘re-enactment draw­ing’ of the alter­ca­tion. And if you can’t make out the squig­gly lines, it’s because, as Her­bie explains, “a paw can only do so much with a mouse”.

One of Herbie’s acquain­tances, Joey (joeyjrt.blogspot.com), a Jack Rus­sell Ter­rier, is a civil defence vol­un­teer search and res­cue dog.
“I got my basic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion last year, and was given a Cer­tifi­cate and a SCDF Dog Vest. Alas, the vest is too big for me as SCDF did not think they would have a small res­cue dog,” Joey says.

On the sub­ject of life-saving pooches, even as the urgent call went out last week for human blood donors as the bank ran low, another plea was made on behalf of a col­lie who needed a blood trans­fu­sion after surgery.

Up stepped Kings­ley (kingsley.wordpress.com/) and his human com­pan­ion, in answer to both calls. But, as Kings­ley laments, he was put on standby as a donor, while she was rejected because of her low hemo­glo­bin count.

“It was funny,” he adds, “Some­one (a silly human) asked if i was doing this so that i could go into heaven. i growled and snapped back, “Don’t you know? All dogs go to Heaven!”

For those who didn’t know canines too could give blood, Kings­ley gives a blow-by-blow account of how it hap­pens, plus nuggets such as “did you know that there are 15 types of blood types for dogs?” and the fact there is no blood bank for dogs in Sin­ga­pore. Oh, the discrimination.

For the less tech­ni­cally savvy dog, there’s the pop­u­lar web-portal and blog-engine called Dog­ster (www.dogster.com), a poochi­fied ver­sion of the pop­u­lar (human) social net­work­ing por­tal Friend­ster (www.friendster.com). On Dog­ster, dogs and their own­ers can log in and start pop­u­lat­ing typ­i­cally dog-related infor­ma­tion such as ‘breed’, ‘nick­names’ and ‘favourite toy’.

But as Live Jour­nal blog­ger ‘Austin Dern’ (austin-dern.livejournal.com) says, “With all Year of the Dog talk, it’s easy to over­look other impor­tant topics…”

Such as, appar­ently, a locally pro­duced ani­mated film Austin that depicts the myth behind the ani­mals of the Chi­nese zodiac, and, as I under­stand it, a cross-species race fea­tur­ing the 12 animals.

“Part of what fas­ci­nates me is, if I under­stand bits of the myths cor­rectly, the win­ner of the race was Rat, who out­ran all the other ani­mals by the sim­ple expe­di­ent of cheat­ing early and often. He welshed on his promise to wake Cat for the race, freaked out Ele­phant so he wouldn’t run, and rode on Ox right up to the fin­ish line, then leapt ahead for the win,” Austin muses, wor­ry­ing about the eth­i­cal value of such a story.

Pick your myth, praise your dog, and toss your fish, but what­ever you choose to be your tra­di­tion, don’t for­get to blog it this Chi­nese New Year.

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over a year, and even if it’s the Year of the Dog, he has resolved to behave less like a female one.