Business Insider did the (wet) nose to the ground investigation. See the original video:

And the new ad.

The verdict?

The spot features said bulldog scrabbling across what appears to be Armstrong's Artesian Classics Color Wash in Birch Natural. (No, we're not flooring experts; the Armstrong website tells us this is what the spot features.) In the commercial, the dog is referred to as "Charlie," but we thought his body and skating style all indicate that he may indeed be Tillman.

Guess what? He totally is Tillman. A rep for BBDO, New York, confirmed this afternoon

BRO. Bark Burnquist over here is cashing in. Glad to know ad agencies are spending scrilla giving the people The Real McCoy instead of some fake-ass wanna be ruff ridin' pooch. Still complaining about not being able to get a job? This dog's got hustle and—possibly—a slick backwards-manual-to-fakie-ollie. The job market needs skillz. If Tillman teaches us anything, it's that they're out there. Dogg.

Abramson is spending a year writing about having a puppy, which is the type of soothing content that people enjoy in these hectic times (along with porn). Puppy puppy-doo, just how cute are you? The New York Times is here to help you answer that question, valued readers. ***SPOILER ALERT***:

A sick dog is often especially loyal and lovable, and can bring the pack, dog and human, closer together.

This week's tale of dog sickness isn't on the Most Emailed list yet—get to work, slavish "cute" addicts! Click boy, click!
[Related. Pic: Flickr]

See, the second installment of her year-long book proposal about "the challenges and satisfactions of raising a puppy" is entitled "Chewing Toward Bethlehem". It's about chewing and how much puppies like to do it. Let's compare and contrast!

For Didion, who was writing a skeptical piece about the supposedly utopian counterculture taking hold in San Francisco in 1967, her title referenced the last line of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" in which he imagined that everything in the world was turning rotten.

The title "Chewing Toward Bethlehem," on the other hand, makes no sense. Eh, who cares as long as it hits the NYT's Most Emailed List.

Good luck with that. It's like we can already see the movie adaptation in our heads. Yes, there's a flickr page if you want to go look at a cute dog.

According to the official White House portrait/baseball card of Bo, the Portuguese Water Dog's favorite food is "tomatoes – or toys." Something was off. Tomatoes? Really? Isn't there something about dogs and tomatoes?

So we took to the internet, and sure enough—they're poison!

Tomatoes and even raw tomatoes contain a chemical called glycoalkaloid solanine, which is very poisonous to animals. You may find this strange since humans eat tomatoes all the time and they are considered very healthy food. However, they should not be fed to animals because can cause them digestive problems.

Shocked as we were to learn that the mild-mannered Obamas, this portrait of a happy, well-adjusted family, are slowly killing their own pet, we kept our cool. We know better than most that you shouldn't trust what you read on the internet. So we rang up Tony Knight, a professor at Colorado State University's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. And what he told us made our blood run cold.

"Tomatoes belong to the same family as nightshade," he said. "Mother nature didn't design dogs to eat them. One or two tomatoes is not going to do anything to a large-sized dog, but no—they're not a good food. The glycoalkaloids could cause colic and bloating—they stop the activity of the intestinal tract."

There could be no longer be any doubt. Bo's life was in danger. We had to warn him! But how? First, we needed to call the White House. Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe they just didn't know the toll those tomatoes were taking on the poor beast.

And that's when the bottom fell out.

"Bo does not eat tomatoes," a spokeswoman for the First Lady told us. What? But the baseball card—you said... it clearly states that... how can he not eat tomatoes when you said his favorite food is tomatoes!? What kind of Kafka-esque nightmare were we in? War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Eating Tomatoes is Not Eating Tomatoes.

It was all a joke, they say. When Bo first came to the White House, back in April, Obama ad-libbed a little zinger to the press: "The only concern we have is apparently Portuguese water dogs like tomatoes—Michelle's garden is in danger," he said. So when the White House ginned up its latest propaganda campaign to foist Bo on the American people just like they're doing with Communism, they inserted a little joke in there—"Favorite food: tomatoes—or toys"—for the greater glory of the Anointed One, to remind us all how funny he is.

So Bo does not eat tomatoes. Never has. Never will. And that's the story of how we spent an hour-and-a-half trying to get a goddamn veterinary expert on the phone because of a grand and diabolical lie told by your government. Now we know exactly what it's like to be Iranian.

It's true. Not just a few magnetic letters, mind you, but the entire fucking alphabet. Doctors at Seattle Grace a PDSA hospital (which is basically Seattle Grace but for British cats and dogs, who get awesome health care) had to perform emergency surgery on Jack, a golden lab. The prize is in the pullquote, though. Says Dr. McBarkey*:

"We had to operate straight away with both a gastrotomy, where we opened up his tummy, and an enterotomy, to remove more pieces of fridge magnets that had made their way to his intestine.

The letters were well chewed and not easy to identify."

*Not his real name. Sadly.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press is floating a conspiracy theory that Bo's arrival at the White House—purchased by an owner in Washington, D.C., from the same litter that the Kennedy's bought a puppy from, then suspiciously returned to the breeder months later—was carefully orchestrated so the Obama's could get the pup they wanted and still look like they were rescuing a homeless dog. In the absence of any evidence whatsoever, we concur.

Relations between Chirac's wife and the petite canine, a Maltese Bichon named Sumo, however, are in crisis:

France's former president Jacques Chirac has been bitten by his lap dog Sumo, who is being treated for depression, in a dramatic incident that rattled his wife Bernadette, she told a magazine.

"If you only knew! I had a dramatic day yesterday," she told VSD magazine. "Sumo bit my husband!"

After Chirac was replaced by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, Sumo, you see, was probably having a hard time adjusting to life as something less than the most powerful dog in all of France. The small organism was "being treated with pills for depression," according to Mrs. Chirac.

This is all quite natural, of course. The New York Times addressed the issue back in 1981, sympathizing with the plight of presidents who have lost power:

''For many who have gone to the pinnacle of power, anything after that can seem to be a bit antiseptic,'' said Dr. Robert Cancro, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the New York University Medical Center... ''You feel anger, you think it was unfair. Depression, disappointment, bitterness are always there. There is a sadness, and a feeling of mourning.''

And if you think first dogs are any less sensitive than statesmen, you are a human-normative whore. This syndrome manifested itself just months ago when Bush dog Barney chomped a reporter, in a desperate final cry for attention. Chirac needs to give Sumo more avenues to express himself now that he's suddenly been yanked from power; it's the only way to prevent these sorts of incidents.

Or just keep the ugly ass dog tied up back by the shed. [Pic: Daily Mail]

But not the adults boars, who are clearly out of control.

In October, when hunters shot a tusker in a cornfield south of Berlin, the wounded animal counterattacked, killing one man and injuring another who'd come to finish it off. Every year in Berlin several dogs are gored to death after rashly challenging boars to a fight. On one occasion, three boars got lost in a day-care center on Alexanderplatz in the heart of Berlin and panicked. The children hadn't arrived for the day yet, but the boars nearly gored the janitor.

Also, if you're one of those "vegans or whatnot," then PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BOARS, as "it leads to inappropriate boar-human mingling."

We should add that the video/slideshow included is a perfect example and use of awesome extra Internet-only content.

In Berlin's Boar War, Some Side With the Hogs [WSJ, photo by Florian Möllers]

VP-elect Smilin' Joe Biden, apparently as tired as us of the wait, went and adopted this German Shepherd in the interim. Sooo cute! [Photo: AP]

Our readers have been concerned about their disappearance, empathizing:

I personally unfortunately cannot have a dog at the moment (I have 2 cats in a small Manhattan apt!) but I LOVE love love the puppycam with the Shiba Inus. Because sometimes their little faces seem lonely (or maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me), could you tell me where these puppies are? Are they in a shelter or in a home? Do we know anything about the place we’re looking upon? Someone comes in around 5p it seems to play with them, but they’re otherwise alone. But they have everything they need it seems, especially each other (don’t get me started on what would happen if they get separated, I might be inconsolable). Yet somehow the back door flap is open so they must not be anywhere very cold… I hope not…

For the record, they're in California, and the puppycam was set up so their owners could watch over them while they were at work. We think what happened is that once they reached eight weeks, they were able to be sold to human families as pets.

The remaining puppies look so sad. Now we know why, when our families got new pups, they stayed up crying all night—-it was because they missed their brothers and sisters! And their mom. The puppycam is a lesson on life, coming of age, and loneliness.

This cam has a weird twist; you can like, buy them right off the site. Man, the Internet ruins everything—even the innocence of young puppies. This is a damn puppy mill.

It took Obama less than two weeks to change his puppy promise date by several months. A barking outrage! Not that the lapdogs in the Main Stream Media will sniff out the truth. But Roger Ailes will surely sic his Fox News hounds all over this story, and getting caught in a lie this early is bound to dog Obama somehow. Maybe it's time fur a landmark speech on pet-White House relations?

Also, we all know that Obama is about to get his kids a new puppy. That new-puppy feeling that rushed over the country wasn't about the love of dogs: we want to be the Obamas' puppy. We want him to be a paternal figure who will swoop into office and take care of us. We want him to provide for us and feed us and to make our lives safer.

That's also why the people who are running the puppycam have become objects of speculation. All we ever see is the bottom of the man's legs, who comes in to feed them. "Puppies, you want your toys?" you can hear him saying. He's like Curious George's Man in the Yellow Hat, whose character is so sparsely sketched that the reader can project whatever they want onto him. Why did they decide to start a puppycam? How long will it last? Where do they live? WTF is going on?

Meanwhile, Gabriel Delahaye of Videogum thinks the puppycam is ruining the Internet: "Don't even get me started on the livefeed puppy cam and the threat it poses to the rest of the internet... because who cares about any other site? Puppies!"