DogsEyeNews - Danish cartoon attacks Shih Tzu

No target is too small or insignificant to escape the razor sharp wit of the Danes.

For ancient owners of the Shih Tzu, the Tibetan temple dog is regarded as sacred. So revered is the tiny scamp that portrayal of its cutey-pie visage is regarded as sacrilege.

The Danes, being relentless perfectionists in all things, even cartooning, moved swiftly as soon as they learned of the ban. The Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, commissioned Danish cartoonists to attack the prohibition on images of the Shih Tzu.

The published cartoons, one of which is shown here (in the interests of press freedom only), caused immediate reactions throughout the dog world.

The American Shih Tzu Club decried the cartoons while also appealing to its members to remain calm. "We would have hoped that the Danes would corrected their path to one where there is respect for different points of view," said a hastily issued press release, "but we don't want people burning down embassies over this."

Meanwhile, Muslim cartoonists are struggling to come up with something that aggravates Westerners as much as the Danish cartoons aggravate the people who read Islamic newspapers:

Queen of Denmark as belly dancer zzzzz

Hilter as pedophile like that's worse than he was???

It can't be easy for Muslim cartoonists; they are, after all, members of the press and educated intellectuals. How hard it must be to connect with your "inner fundamentalist."

DogsEyeNews - Danish cartoons are the new teak

Thanks to the efforts of a handful of cartoonists, Denmark is back on the international stage. After years searching for the something to revive the flagging popularity of Danish design, everyone is talking about the Danes.

Denmark is perhaps the most insular and conservative of all the European countries. At the 2003 Venice Biennale, the Danish art activists Superflex distributed a poster and t-shirt reading: "Foreigners, please don't leave us alone with the Danes!"

Danish modern furniture was introduced to the North American market in the 1940s, where it captured the imagination of artists and designers. By the 1960s half of all furniture produced in Denmark was exported to the USA. Characterized by a lack of decoration, the pared down design aesthetic depended on the strength of hardwoods like teak, mohagany and cherry. Through the 80s and 90s, however, as modernist style spread worldwide and evolved into more eclectic styles, Danish design lost its distinctiveness.

Subsequent efforts to rejuvinate Denmark's international profile have faltered:In 1995, a group of Danish filmmakers momentarily brought Denmark back into the spotlight with a pared down approach to filmmaking called Dogme95. In 2004,
Canada's Bruce Mau contributed to an international exposition called SuperDanish, attempting to thrust Demark into the forefront of future global change by identifying seven visionary Danish projects.

The Danes are still wondering how it was that their modern furniture design became so
popular (e.g., Danish detective at Berkeley), but it seems they have a gift for this sort of thing, having unwittingly done it again. While governments around the world rush to condemn the cartoons -- US state department spokeswoman, Janelle Hironimus, said: "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable." -- there is no such thing as bad press; the cartoons continue to spread and with them Danish notoriety. We can expect the next decade to find Danish cartoonists in high demand, setting worldwide standards for iconodules.

Dog Behavior - Malcolm Gladwell on Pit Bulls

One of my favourite writers takes on the issue of stereotyping, comparing the failure of racial profiling to catch bad guys to the recent ban on Pit Bulls here in Ontario. (in The New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2006)

Gladwell is getting at something insidious, a creeping and creepy tendency to not care if methods are based on reason, on facts or even on whether they produce results. It is refreshing to find this presented in a way that is not critically disabling. Gladwell points to things we know about dogs that are dangerous, about who owns them and why they own them, knowledge that can be used to actually solve problems.

'Course not everyone agrees. Some folks in the park think the ban will do more good than harm. We'll have to wait and see what the statistics are a year from now.