The week between Christmas and the New Year is perennially a time of détente in the internet “content” game. Websites publish their year-end lists and looks back, but everything new and exciting must wait to Happen until the calendar turns over. Into this hopeless gap screams a dog wearing pants! But what kind of pants? That’s up to literally thousands of people on every major social network, resigned to the idea that we’ve got nothing better to do.
The dog-pants conundrum exploded when journeyman social-media professional Jared Keller — currently working for Maxim — found the above image on Facebook and tweeted it to his 24,000 followers.
It’s now spread to Tumblr and Reddit, and has been recycled back to Facebook, much more popular than before. There’s even a Twitter Moment about it, whatever that is.
In a Maxim article, Keller traces the dog image to a Facebook page called Utopian Raspberry - Modern Oasis Machine (or “UR-MOM”). An administrator of the page claimed to have drawn the dog pic at 2 or 3 a.m. Monday, after he “saw some dogs wearing pants, and I thought about how they don’t really have arms so their pants should technically go on every leg.”
Keller frames the dog in pants as a population-dividing debate along the lines of “The Dress” — the infamous optical illusion that spawned the most popular BuzzFeed post of all time. It’s not, though: Observers were split nearly down the middle about the colors of the dress, but there’s a clear answer to this dog debate.
Every dog ever seen in pants has sported the two-legged variety. Try to imagine the four-leg garment on a human, or question how it would even stay up without suspenders. Unless you’re contemplating it at 3 a.m., like the original artist, it is absurd.
Or, as one person astutely put it on Twitter, “fuck the first option wtf.”
Even Keller’s own Twitter poll, now answered by 14,000 people, shows that the wide-style dog pants are dumb, wrong, and utterly against nature. Nearly 80 percent of voters agree.
But, like I said, it’s post-Christmas week. Nothing is happening. And when there’s no real Dress, you might as well make your own, even if you have to make it out of rejected, misshapen, four-legged dog pants.
