Because last week was such a sad and difficult and busy one for us at the site, and also for the broader world in the way that things have been sad/difficult for some time now, I didn't get around to reading the stellar team coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show that Kathryn Xu and Heather Wei-Xi Chen provided until days after the Best In Show had been ... crowned is wrong, I guess. Given a small liver-flavored treat is probably closer to correct. Anyway, the blogs were spectacular, really as fun to read as anything we've had on the site at any time, and because of that and because a mood reset was in order more broadly, Drew and I invited Kathryn onto the pod this week to talk about partying with 33 Pomeranians and the other delights she experienced while covering the WKC early last week.
The result is not quite as good for you as actually petting a dog, but it's about as close as you're likely to get from this podcast. After the requisite overture, which touched on football and the effects of the brutal cold snap in the Northeast on our already wobbly psyches, we got straight to the dog stuff and mostly stayed there. We talked about the eternal beats of the dog show, the uneasy combination of thrillingly good vibes and creep-o soft eugenics, which dogs have shooters in the stands, the struggle to balance petting dogs and doing journalism, and Kathryn's personal Pomeranian Reverie and her family's pom history. Some longstanding questions of mine were answered, we came to a consensus on there being too many visible scrotums at the Dog Show, and we discussed how her experience there differed from mine long ago. We agreed, as a group, to give the dogs a pass on not respecting the national anthem.
We also talked about the Winter Olympics, albeit primarily about our favorite story of the Milan Cortina games: Sturla The Extremely Emotional Biathlete. Together we unpacked the disastrous process that led the Norwegian to follow his bronze-medal performance in the biathlon by abjectly laying out his extremely complicated recent romantic history on live television. This led into a broader discussion about what is wrong with our biathletes, what age is too old to be doing shit like this, and Drew using the phrase "wood sharpens wood." There was some figure skating chat too, but honestly we could've made the entire episode out of Sturla, and I sincerely hope we haven't heard the last of him. The Funbag topic, which was one of the most obviously High Shit questions in a minute, both fit the Olympic spirit of reaching for peak performance and the Funbag spirit of thinking of really goofy stuff. In its combination of nonsense and transcendence, it fit with everything else—the Dog Show, the weeping Norwegian doofus, and the broader spirit of our enterprise on the pod.
If you would like to subscribe to The Distraction, you can do that through Apple Podcasts or wherever else you might get your podcasts. Thank you as always for your support.
