Portraits of Brief Encounters: Connect the Dogs
/In January police closed a street in Florence, Alabama, after a suspicious package was found outside of the local courthouse. The package turned out to be a bag of hotdogs. In September of 2008, the bomb squad was called to Citizen Bank Park, home of the Philadelphia Phillies, after three suspicious packages were spotted near the stadium. After detonating the packages it was discovered, from the meaty shrapnel, that they were also hotdogs. (Leftover hotdogs that the Phillie Phanatic had been firing out of some sort of wiener cannon for a commercial shoot earlier that day.)
Following my recent discovery of this trend of potentially explosive frankfurters, a street was closed here in Vancouver after a suspicious device was reported to be found in a parked vehicle. The Explosive Disposal Unit determined it was a false alarm but never disclosed whether or not the suspicious device was, in fact, hotdogs. This leaves me wondering how many of these “suspicious packages” or “devices” that are reported every day, all over the world, are actually just hotdogs? And why have we grown so suspicious of our once revered campfire cookout staple? Is it because of that one Simpsons episode where Principal Skinner wears a hotdog bomb vest? Or that hotdogs cause 17% of food asphyxiation deaths of American children aged ten and under and are a nutritional dead zone? Or are we finally grossed out about eating compacted tubes of jumbled up livestock anuses and feel the need for police intervention? That’s probably it.
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