If dogs can wear dog hair, why can't I?

Chris mentioned this weird Japanese book on combating depression by limbering up your sphincter which I’d seen linked to before. What I hadn’t looked at was the “People who bought this book also bought” section, which included a lot of other books on farting, but also Knitting With Dog Hair: Better a Sweater from a Dog You Know and Love Than from a Sheep You’ll Never Meet.

Thoughtfully, Amazon has put up a bunch of sample pages, which mention such useful things as “Presumably you are not allergic to your dog, but we don’t recommend using petspun in gift items without checking with the recipient first, and we caution against using dog yarn for baby clothes.” (I particularly like the word “petspun”.)

They haven’t refined the craft far enough to have a useful way of extracting cat hair from hairballs, though, which sounds like an oversight to me.

As always, it’s the comments that are truly mindboggling. I have no idea whether these guys are taking the piss or not - I would have thought so, but then, they’re American - but consider: “No more bulldogs or boxers for me–I want a dog that I can brush, spin, and knit big soft golden retriever sweaters.” Yes, the woman is seriously thinking of choosing the next dog she gets on the basis of its by-products. Boggle.

Fittingly, the three lists this book appears on are “What the ??!” (list also features Nude Yoga: “The funny thing is, if you do these exercises right, you won’t be able to see the screen for about half of the video”), “Terribly Disturbing Items that No One Should Buy” (doesn’t actually feature anything else remotely disturbing, unless you count pink flamingos or Martha Stewart as disturbing) and “Chewbacca’s Amazon.com Wish List” (oh, my aching sides).