Workout Video for Poodles

…and Poodle People

For all you poodle people out there who are committed to physical fitness and energetic workouts, here’s the perfect workout video for you AND your poodles! It features Mariko Takahashi in a parody of Susan Powter’s first fitness video. It was created by Nagi Noda for Panasonic, one of 10 films made for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Enjoy, and try not to choke while you’re laughing!

Filed under Health, Humor, Poodle Skills, Poodle Videos, Showing Off | Comment (1)

April Fools Poodle Hoax-Hoax

A story circulating in the international news and in the blogosphere recently reported that Japanese women had been scammed into purchasing sheep that were being sold as poodles. Come on, they couldn’t see the hooves or hear the ‘Baaaaa’? If I were Japanese, I’d have been very insulted.

Of course, the story of the hoax turned out to be a hoax. From Snopes on their ‘Urban Legends’ page…

The notion that anyone who had ever seen a dog (which is most everyone) could be fooled by sheep proffered as poodles is as implausible (if not more so) as the idea that anyone could really mistake a rat for a dog. (The claim that “sheep are rare in Japan and most people do not know what they look like” is just silly: even schoolchildren who have never seen live sheep learn to identify them from pictures and drawings and can recognize them as something distinctly different than dogs. Certainly the creatures’ bleating instead of barking and having hooves in place of paws are some basic, easily recognized clues.) And in this case the tale is not something that supposedly happened to the indefinite “some tourist” in “a foreign country,” but to thousands of Japanese in their homeland, people who were reportedly shelling out the equivalent of $1600 per sheep-dog before anyone caught on to the scam and blew the whistle.

No, the swindle story never made the news in Japan, which should have alerted gullible net-noobs to something amiss. Besides, the least bit of fact checking would have demonstrated that the company supposedly perpetrating the scam – ‘Poodles As Pets’ – doesn’t exist in Japan.

The hoax hoax was promoted when radio personality Paul Harvey broadcast the story on his For What It’s Worth program, reporting that “Thousands of women paid many thousands of dollars for miniature white poodles which are now growing up and turning out to be furniture-eating-sheep.”

Hahahaha!!! Oh, my. Looks like there are some newscasters out there who needed a classroom poodle in school to teach them that there is indeed a difference between a dog and a sheep. The Japanese already knew better!

Filed under April Fools, Humor, Poodle Crossbreeds, Poodle Lore | Comment (1)