HOT DOGS!

You can make a hot dog just by leaving your dog in the car on a warm day, but DO NOT DO THIS, because your dog might DIE from heat stroke!  And if that happens, you will feel guilty and horrible for the rest of your life, which is not how you want to feel, right?  So remember, you have been warned!

But anyway, now that I said that, I will go on and talk about a much better kind of hot dog, and that is the kind that you eat.  Hot dogs are like sausages, except they are already cooked before you buy them.  Mostly they are made out of beef, pork, chicken, or turkey.  When Mom was a kid, her dad used to tell her that hot dogs were made out of the stuff they swept up off the floor at the place where meat is processed.  Of course, this didn't keep Mom from eating hot dogs anyway, since they taste so good.  And it didn't really keep her dad from eating hot dogs either.

The history of the hot dog is kind of hard to figure out because lots of people seem to have got the idea to put a sausage between two pieces of bread.  Frankfurters come from a town named Frankfurt in Germany, and wieners were invented in Vienna, Austria.  In the U.S., about 1870 on Coney Island, a man named Charles Feltman, who was an immigrant from Germany, started selling sausages in rolls.  Which is how the Coney Island Dog got started.

You could buy a hot dog in Chicago in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition or at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904.  And then pretty soon people started eating hot dogs at baseball games and amusement parks and picnics, and they are still doing this today.

Of course, you may be wondering how sausages in a bun got to be called "hot dogs."  So I did some in-depth research on this question, and I learned that "dog" was used as another word for "sausage" at least since 1884, and probably before that.  The first time "hot dog" was used in print to mean "a sausage in a bun" was on September 28, 1893 in The Knoxville Journal.

But that's enough history.  What's more important is how hot dogs should be eaten, which is with condiments like maybe some of these:  mustard, ketchup, pickle relish, cole slaw, sauerkraut, onion, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, cheese, chili, or chili peppers.  The National Sausage and Hot Dog Council US did a study in 2005 that showed that 32% of Americans liked mustard best on their hot dogs, and 23% liked ketchup best.

Some hot dogs have a casing made of sheep intestines, and this is what holds all that meat stuff together while the hot dogs are being cooked.  There are also skinless hot dogs, and these are cooked in a cellulose tube that is taken off  before the hot dogs get packaged.

You should never eat hot dogs cold, even though they have already been cooked.  And this is because if you eat them cold, they aren't "hot dogs" anymore, they are "cold dogs."  Hahahaha!  But seriously, you should cook them or at least heat them up really good so that if there are any nasty bacteria in them, it will get killed. Here are some good ways to cook hot dogs:  grilling, steaming, boiling, barbecuing, frying, broiling, or microwaving.  Or you can even buy a special toaster to cook your hot dogs in.

People eat hot dogs in lots of countries around the world, but not everybody has the same idea about how a hot dog should be fixed.  Here's a picture of some hot dogs in Thailand.

And this is a vegetarian hot dog fixed in a Danish style.

Here is a picture of the World's Longest Hot Dog, which was made in Tokyo in 2005 for the All-Japan Bread Association's 50th Anniversary.  This hot dog is 60.3 meters long.  I think it looks totally yummy, and I'm wondering if there is any of it left that I could eat!

I'm Number 182

Not too long ago, in the Kansas City Star, there was this article about the most popular dog and cat names. I think this list is just from Kansas City, MO, and the way they got the list was they counted all the names of dogs and cats that got city licenses.  So I cannot tell you about the most popular names in Kansas City, KS or in Independence or Olathe or any other part of town.  But that doesn't really matter because Kansas City, MO is where I live, so that makes it the best part!

Maybe you will remember that the last time I talked about popular dog names, I told you that Max was the most popular name of all.  And that may still be true if you are talking about dog names in the entire country.  But now I am just talking about Kansas City, and guess what!  Max is number two here, and Buddy is the number one dog name.  Yes, there are 239 dogs named Buddy, and only 217 named Max.

Then after that are:
Molly (204)
Maggie (162)
Lucy (154)
Sadie (149)
Daisy (149)
Bailey (134)
Lucky (116)
Jack (108)
Jake (100)

And then if you skip over a whole bunch of names, you come to Piper, which is #182!  There are only 16 dogs named Piper in Kansas City, MO, so you can tell that we are a very special and very elite group!

Okay, now for the cats.  Here are the top 10 names:
Shadow (27)
Smokey (27)
Tigger (26)
Buddy (24)
Tiger (24)
Missy (22)
Kitty (21)
Callie (20)
Max (20)
Baby (19)
Gracie (19)

What we can learn from this list of cat names is (1) not many people get licenses for their cats, and (2) some cat names are even dumber than dog names, like for instance, Kitty.  I mean, really!  Is that the best name that 21 people could think of for their cats?  You don't hear of many dogs named Doggie, do you? Well, I haven't, anyway.  Oh, and #36 on the list is Miss Kitty.  I'm not too fond of Baby either, or Missy, or Lucky, or Princess.  But don't get me started!  I'm just glad I have a more beautiful and different name like Piper, that I only have to share with 15 other dogs in Kansas City, MO.

Some Birds We Saw in Texas

When we went to visit Hank and Aunt Cheryl, we saw a couple of kinds of birds that don't live in Missouri, and one of them is the Great-Tailed Grackle.  In Missouri, we just have the Common Grackle, which is not so special as the Great-Tailed Grackle, and also it has a smaller tail.

Grackles have shiny black feathers that sometimes look purplish, or at least the boy grackles do.  The girl grackles are just sort of a boring brown color.  Also they have beady yellow eyes.  Grackles like to talk and yell a lot, and some of them have nasty things to say about dogs.  I will not repeat here what some of those Texas grackles said about Gabe and me.  Mom likes the whistles that the great-tailed grackles make, which our common grackles do not make.

The stuff that grackles like to eat includes insects, tadpoles, lizards, little fish, plants, and sometimes eggs and baby birds.  Grackles make their nests in trees and shrubs, and then they lay between 1 and 5 eggs.  The range of the great-tailed grackle has been getting bigger lately.  You can find them all the way from Peru and Venezuela to Kansas and California.  Maybe they will get to Missouri someday, just like the armadillos.

Another bird we saw a lot in Texas was the White-Winged Dove.  This bird is a lot like the Mourning Dove, which we have a bunch of in Missouri, except it coos in a different way, maybe because it's not as sad as the Mourning Dove.  The White-Winged Dove is always saying "who cooks for you?"  Which is what Barred Owls say up here in Missouri, but only at night.

Anyway, these doves like to live in woods or deserts or scrubby places.  But they can also live in people's backyards.  They are expanding their range, too, so now you can find them in Oklahoma and Arkansas and Florida, instead of just in Texas and Mexico.

White-Winged Doves eat seeds and grains and fruits.  They build nests by piling some sticks on a tree branch, and then they lay 2 eggs.  Sometimes people hunt doves because they are yummy to eat.  I wish I could eat one, but we don't have any in our yard, which is a very sad state of affairs, if you ask me.