In celebration of Autumn’s triumphant return from the East Coast, here is a ridiculously adorable newcomer to the neighborhood that I ran into in our local java-cave, the Chameleon Cafe.
This pup needs more socialization stat! She was all timid! If they don’t watch out she’ll turn into the only Bernese Mountain Dog in all of history that conforms to the breed standard! (‘Standoffish’ my butt.)
Spotty dog lips. Soulful brown eyes. Maximum adorability achieved.
There’s a little smile.
Edit 3: Wow. Well, that’s pretty cool. We have a tie for first, and second place is one point behind! Full results are at the bottom.
Edit 2: Man, the competition is really heating up! Two of the pics are neck in neck, with a third making rapid strides from behind! This is still anybody’s game, folks.
Edit: as with last week, remember that daily posts will appear below this one.
It’s cat contest time! I persuaded someone I respect as an animal cute-ologist to pick the submissions for me. These are the results. I would like to say that I am honestly sorry to those of you whose pictures did not get picked, or to those who submitted two pictures but only have one here; my correspondent said that this was a pretty tough choice for him, and it would have been murder for me. (Especially as I know two of the people who submitted entries.)
I would also like to note that people really like their cats. I had two people submit between ten and twenty pictures of their cats, despite the rules only saying two. I decided that it was only fair that I limit them to one entry each. (In theory, people who submitted two cat pictures could have ended up with two finalists in this round, though it didn’t work out that way with anyone in practice.) I admit, though, some of those pictures were pretty darn cute.
And I am still trying to get someone lined up to pick the top five of the dog photos for next week, because I really don’t want to have to do that myself. I wonder if I can find someone at Bay to Barkers next weekend (HINT HINT HINT go to Bay to Barkers next weekend) to do it?
So, here are the entrants, again in a quite random order. Please pick one, and again, if you feel like claiming yours in the comments, that’s fine, otherwise I’ll just keep them anonymous.
ENTRY 1: Kaylee the Dog and Elly the Cat Being Goofy
ENTRY 2: Violet the Schipperke/Pomeranian and Zoolander the Black Cat, Napping
ENTRY 3: Drake the Cat (or Possibly Drake’s Cat) Investigates a Camera
ENTRY 4: Lucca the Cat Snoozes on a Laptop (Lucca may look vaguely familiar.)
ENTRY 5: Lady Jane the Cat Hatches Evil Plans From Under an End Table
Results:
Awesome work, everyone!
Of course the poll ended early again. Specifically, it appears to have ended at midnight GMT. I guess because my database is in GMT? But in any case, it hadn’t moved much lately (two votes in the last 24 hours), so I’m declaring polling closed. The final results:
Congratulations, and thank you to everyone who entered. You guys are awesome! Prizes will be sent out all at once, so please be patient, since we have two more weeks of voting for the other two categories. The next category, Cats, will be posted tomorrow!
Not sure if I posted some of Autumn’s pictures of these three before or not. I took a quick look and couldn’t find them. They live about a block and a half from us, in a little bitty pedestrian alley between two row houses. The road out in front is a cable-car road on a hefty hill, so nobody takes it at more than 15 mph, and the cats seem to do just fine. They get fed by the people in this apartment building, and are quite tame. I hadn’t found them before this, although Autumn mentioned them several times. But now I know where they are, so I can go get some feline fuzz therapy every once in a while.
The eyes on the solid black one. Gorgeous.
Should be pretty easy to guess where the people who feed them live.
Streeeeeetch! Also, cat-butt.
Aww… wonder what he was caught doing?
Was getting in my car when this pup popped up in the window about 20 feet away and let me know, in no uncertain terms, that this was his house and that visitors were not welcome! BarkbarkBARK!
He totally cracks me up.
There have been quite a few people, including some quite famous photographers, extolling the virtues of the iPhone as a camera. Why? Because you always have your iPhone with you. And a camera is no good if you don’t have it with you.
Well, I always always always have my compact camera with me: it’s a permanent resident in my left-side trouser pocket, along with my keys and change. Except yesterday. Yesterday I couldn’t find the damn thing, and rather than spend any real time searching, I figured I had plenty of pictures, and that I was highly unlikely to run into anything that I just HAD to take pictures of, especially since I was planning on going straight to work and then just coming straight home.
And I get to work, and what do I see standing pretty much right outside my workplace than a 9-week-old corgi puppy. To say that I squealed like an eight-year-old girl would be, strictly speaking, inaccurate, because I probably squealed like two eight-year-old girls. And pulled out the iPhone. Thank goodness I hadn’t forgotten that too! I also solicited a few pictures from Havalino’s dad. It’s probably pretty obvious which here are which.
By the way, ‘Havelino’ is an alteration of ‘javalina’, which is another term for ‘peccary‘, a sort of pig-like animal that wanders Arizona, Texas, Mexico, and various parts of Central and South America. I’m not entirely sure I see the resemblance, although I admit they do have pretty short legs.
I don’t understand people at all. I mean, three people just walked right by this puppy as he was sitting there on the sidewalk. Could YOU walk by this puppy without petting him?
It’s probably a good thing I don’t have a corgi puppy. If one gave me that look, I’d be like, ‘okay, okay, I’ll call in sick again today and spend the day alternately petting you and chasing you around the house.’
The rest (including this one) were taken by his dad.
The pink spots on the nose.
I think someone is teaching himself how to make elephant noises! (Trust me. You want to watch that. All the way through.)
Sorry, guys. Just spent a few hours doing some volunteer (IT-related) work for a worthy cause, and I’m really tired.
But I have something special for tomorrow…
Sweet older pup that I ran into at ‘Food Truck Thursdays‘ at Chameleon Cafe, Pacific and Leavenworth. If you’re in the neighborhood you owe it to yourself to drop by on Thursday evenings: they have a different food truck each week, and a surprising amount of the neighborhood ends up gathering there and socializing. Aside from me cornering these people and tackling their dogs, this may be the first exposure to other people in the neighborhood that some of these people have had!
Very light yellow lab. I guess these are called ‘white’ by some people, but that still feels weird to me.
Someone was begging for skritches. If I recall correctly (and I might not, I’m missing my notes) this pup was being watched by one of Autumn’s dog-walking/dog-sitting competitors, ‘Who Let The Dogs Out!’
And of course the poll ended early again. Specifically, it appears to have ended at midnight GMT. I guess because my database is in GMT? But in any case, it hadn’t moved much lately, so I’m declaring polling closed. The final results:
Congratulations, and thank you to everyone who entered. You guys are awesome! Prizes will be sent out all at once, so please be patient, since we have two more weeks of voting for the other two categories.
(Edit x4: Fixed. By creating a new poll and hacking in the results from the old poll. You will find that you can now vote again, if you voted before. Oh well. Probably won’t bias things too much. Anyway, I will publish the results on Monday, along with the new poll.)
(Edit x3: Well, how nice. The voting software I used appears to have decided to end the poll early, and now that it has ended the poll, it appears to have messed up the formatting of the site and I can’t figure out how to fix either of those two things. And this is a very popular, well-rated, and ‘well-tested’ polling WP plugin, too. Will fix as soon as I can figure out how.)
(Edit x2: don’t forget to vote! Voting for this part of the contest ends on Monday, to make way for the next part.)
(Edit: Woot! I figured out how to pin this post to the top. Normal daily posting is occurring below this post!)
All right, the voting has begun on the top contenders for Dogs of SF’s photo contest, and I am stunned by the quality of the entries. We are starting with ‘city’ entrants, mostly because that category got the fewest submissions. Still enough to pick the top five from, though! This whole thing has worked out even better than I’d hoped, and I’d like to thank everyone who submitted.
Please don’t try to vote a bunch of times for your favorite picture; I am sure it’s quite possible to game these things (in fact, I can think of a few different ways to do so) but I’d prefer if we could all just, you know, get along. I am going to leave this contest at the top of the front page for a week, for voting purposes, but I will still be posting Dogs of the Day… look just below this post for them. If I can figure out how to make that work.
Oh, I just realized: I didn’t ask people if they minded my using their names, so I am going to make the entries anonymous for now. If you would like me to use your name, either email me saying that you would, or claim your photo in the comments below, and I’ll adjust the title accordingly. I know some people are a little sensitive about this stuff. (And don’t worry, I would never publish someone’s email address.)
And now, without further ado, the entrants, in absolutely no particular order:
ENTRY 1: Violet in Front of Postcard Row. This is Violet, a Schipperke/Pomeranian mix, being goofy in front of one of the more recognizable landmarks of the city, Postcard Row.
ENTRY 2: The Golden Gate Bridge near sunset. Only one person took me at my word, and submitted a ‘city’ pic without a dog in it. It has a bird, though!
ENTRY 3: Jasper Enjoying the Breeze on Baker Beach. With the Golden Gate in the background. It doesn’t get a lot more Dogs of San Francisco than that.
ENTRY 4: Lambeau on Bernal Heights at Sunset. This is Lambeau the Tibetan Mastiff, who has been featured on DoSF before. He made me smile the first time I saw him, and no less so now.
ENTRY 5: Devo Surveys his Domain from Bernal Heights. I am honestly not quite sure what Devo is. Maybe we can get his owner to weigh in?
Soo… what do y’all think?
Unless something else exciting goes wrong, voting in the first category of my photography contest starts tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out how to work the voting, and I think I’ve got that. Next I need to figure out how to keep the poll at the top for a week, and a couple of other fun things.
In other news, I’m nearly out of cat pictures… well, out of my own cat pictures, I have plenty of submissions for the contest. So here is a picture of a pair (yes, there are two of them there) of San Francisco residents I found on my way to work a couple of weeks ago.
Always nice to see a few of these wandering through the city.