pet connection

On our DogCars.com Web site, we review vehicles with an eye to their suitability for the safe and comfortable transportation of dogs and their gear. We’ve been doing this for a couple years now, and towards the end last year, we decided it would be fun to select “the best” in each of a half-dozen categories, along with a Best In Show DogCar overall.

The vehicle we chose for our Best In Show was the Honda Element, which caught Honda by surprise. See, Honda had been marketing the Element to outdoorsy young men, the kind who are into surfing, snowboarding and mountain biking. The fact that the Element was represented in numbers far exceeding its distribution in the larger population in any agility trial or dog park parking lot had gone pretty much unnoticed by the company.

But not for long.

Honda soon asked us if they could use our logo in a sales campaign, and we loved the idea. The posters hit the Honda dealers this week, along with window clings of the DogCars.com Best In Show award for dealer giveaways. (Poster pictured at right, and I’ve clumsily circled the DogCars.com Best In Show logo.)

Pretty cute, huh?

Honda sent me a few hundred window clings and 100 posters, all of which hit my front porch on Friday. Not sure what I’m going to do with 100 posters, but I know I’ll be framing one for the office, giving one to Jay Gavron, the friend and graphic artist who created the DogCars.com logo and award (as well as the design for PetConnection.com and DogCars.com), and one to the folks at Black Dog, our Web team.

The timing of the posters was perfect, because today for our syndicated pet-care column Dr. Becker and I (with help from DogCars.com editor Keith Turner) are wrapping up a piece we’re calling “5 and 25″ — five dog-friendly vehicles that are less than $25, 000 and get around 25 mpg. It’ll hit our client newspapers and Web sites around mid-August.

Woof-woof and vroom!

Christie’s back! Haven’t talked to her, but I hear rumors she’s home. Glad to hear it, since I’m not intending to blog from Del Mar. I’m hoping this week we can get Kim to contribute something to the mix, too. Plus: A new blogger will make a debut soon. Who will it be? Who?

Elsewhere: The only thing I don’t like about Luisa’s Lassie Get Help blog is that she doesn’t write often enough. Today: Media criticism. She makes the point in passing, but I would make it more strongly: Most newspapers’ pet-related Web logs are nothing but fluff along with ill-informed, poorly reasoned and inexpert commentary. Now, I got nothing against a little fluff, but the media’s non-stop offering of it where pets are concerned (offset only by pit-bull hysteria) is continued proof that those working in the mainstream media generally consider those of us who care about pets to be mostly bubble-headed idiots, to be treated as the same. Click on any of the blogs on the left to see that couldn’t be less true.

Completely unrelated: In the upper-left of the image, you can see a picture of one of my grandfathers. The poster is blocking the picture of my other grandfather. Here are both pictures. Can you guess which grandfather is a McMullin and which is a Spatafore? Not hard, is it? These pictures always make me smile, since my grandfathers are young men in them, such perfect examples of backgrounds, place and time. Granddad McMullin is on a survey team in the California desert, and Poppa Spatafore is in a photographer’s studio in San Francisco, spending the money from a boxing match on a portrait for his widowed immigrant mama. (Side note: “Spatafore” is the Anglicized spelling of “Spadafori.” When I was 13, I started using the older version.)

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