Chanel, the world's oldest dog until her death last week, wore giant sunglasses.

Port Jefferson Station, N.Y.–Chanel, the world’s oldest dog, died last week. She was 21, or about 120 in dog years, and looked more like Carol Channing than a bottle of expensive perfume.

In fact, there were many odd parallels between the lives of Chanel and Channing.

Until her death, the white-haired dachshund held the Guinness World Record for being the world’s oldest dog. Channing, 88, holds the Guinness record for being the world’s oldest active performer.

Chanel was energetic until her death, and could often be seen motoring around PetSmart on her Rascal scooter or absentmindedly standing in the dog run with her left leg stuck out, making it hard for the other dogs to get their business done. Channing’s also full of life, and is often heard shouting dirty jokes to the cashiers at the supermarket.

Chanel suffered from cataracts, and wore giant sunglasses to protect her eyes from damaging UV rays. Channing also wears huge glasses, but hasn’t explained why.

Like Channing, Chanel was fiercely independent—for a kept dog, at least. Owner Denice Shaughnessy says Chanel refused to wear her hearing aids, kept her home at a constant 72 degrees but wore bulky sweaters and booties, and regularly enjoyed a meal of boiled chicken with whole-wheat pasta. So does Channing.

But Chanel and Channing weren’t alike in every way.

In one of many unexplained similarities to the dog Chanel, Carol Channing, the world's oldest living performer, also wears giant sunglasses.

Unlike Channing, for example, Chanel refused to dye her hair when it turned white from old age (it used to be red), and she never learned to beg for food.  Channing dyes her hair blonde, and relentlessly begged Broadway producers to allow her to continue starring in the popular musical Hello, Dolly! until they finally forced her out in 1996.

Also, Chanel’s teeth, unlike Channing’s, were her own. She enjoyed chewing on a specially selected soft treat designed for her ancient teeth between meals. So does Channing.

In another strange similarity between the dog and the entertainer, Chanel kept odd hours and often got up in the middle of the night to get a drink, usually water, then had to search for her bed. She had two doggie beds and alternated nights sleeping in them.

Channing, meanwhile, also gets up at night to get a drink, usually gin or whiskey. And because she’s been married four times, she often has trouble remembering which bed she’s sleeping in now.

Chanel is not the oldest dog ever.

That honor belongs to Bluey, an Australian cattle dog that died at the ripe old age of 29 years, 5 months in 1939, when Channing was just 18 years old.

Channing is not the oldest entertainer, either. That honor belonged to her friend, comedian George Burns, who died in 1996 at the age of 99.

To fully appreciate feet, you have to look at them. Unfortunately, that can make you nauseous, because feet are ugly.

Don’t believe me?

Try this: Take off your shoes and look down at your feet. What do you see? Bones? Tendons? Veins? Little tufts of curly hobbit-hair waving in the breeze? Cracked, yellowed toenails? Unexplained lumps and divots? Greasy wads of multicolored lint and toe-jam stuck between wrinkled folds of skin?

Feet are mostly practical things--designed for walking, kicking and making podiatrists rich.

It’s enough to make you heave, and I didn’t even mention seriously nasty problems like warts, fungal infections, callouses, corns, chilblains, bunions, gout, fallen arches and cracked skin, let alone crooked toes, hammer toes, ingrown toenails and those weirdly elongated toes that look like skinny, overdone breakfast sausages rolling around on an empty dinner plate.

Retch.

Still, feet are pretty amazing, even if they’re amazingly ugly.

Take Usain Bolt’s feet, for example. Bolt is the 6-foot, 5-inch-tall sprinter from Jamaica who set world records this month in the 100- and 200-meter races. He runs so fast, his size-14 feet look like they’re barely touching the ground. But, in fact, they’re absorbing more than 1,000 pounds of force with each powerful stride. In effect, Bolt’s a human stock car, and his feet are the tires. That makes him the Dale Earnhardt of track and field, if NASCAR—the Deep South’s favorite sport—had any African-American drivers, of course.

Even regular people’s feet are interesting, though.

A pair of human feet normally contains about 56 bones, or about one-fourth of all dem bones in the human body. They’re connected by 214 tenacious ligaments and 38 hard-working muscles, as you learn the hard way the first time your car runs out of gas on the interstate and you have to walk 20 miles to the nearest gas station in your dress shoes.

Something else you often learn after a vigorous hike is that feet can reek. That’s because they each house about 250,000 sweat glands and can excrete up to a pint of moisture—basically sweat—a day. Bacteria belly up to this nutrient-rich sweat bar for a refreshing beverage like construction workers go for cold beer on Friday afternoons, and often with the same result: They get drunk and piss themselves, creating a stinky mess in their shoes.

Not that Madeline Albrecht minded the stench. Albrecht lived in Cincinatti, Ohio, and for 15 years she made a comfortable living testing foot-care products for Dr. Scholl’s. It’s estimated she sniffed 5,600 feet during her career, earning her a not-so-coveted spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Usain Bolt's feet are like powerful engines propelling him to victory.

Another world record holder in the foot category is Matthew McGrory. He was 7-feet, 4-inches tall and stood on size 29-1/2 feet until his death at 32 in 2005. McGrory lived in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and was an actor, appearing as a giant in films like Bubble Boy, House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects in addition to television shows like Malcolm in the Middle, Charmed and Carnivale. He was also featured in Marilyn Manson’s music video for Coma White and in Blondie’s video for their 2003 hit Good Boys. I don’t know anybody in the latter band who could verify this, but I suspect lead singer Debbie Harry, a former Playboy Bunny, appreciates tall men with big feet. You know what they say about men like that and women like her.

McGrory reportedly enjoyed being famous, and was amused by some of the correspondence he received. Once, he was contacted by the Center for Bigfoot Studies, which asked for a photograph and the measurements of his record-breaking feet. Another time, he received a letter—addressed to “the man with huge feet”— from the Dutch Leather and Shoe Museum, requesting one of his old, custom-made shoes for its collection.

Big or small, feet and shoes go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Or, in some households, like feet and peanut butter. Or feet and chocolate. Or feet and strawberries, feet and schnapps, feet and massage oil, feet and other feet, and, well, feet and–trust me here–just about anything and everything you can imagine pairing with a pair of feet. As ugly as feet are, they seem to be powerful aphrodisiacs for some people. So powerful, in fact, I’d bet cash money that 2 to 5 percent of you stopped reading this column the second I mentioned feet and shoes, slipping into an imaginary happy place filled with $1,000 Manolo Blahniks or 6-inch stripper heels.

For those of you slightly less ”adventurous” readers who are still with me, let me say that I’m perpetually astonished by what people do in the privacy of their homes. Even more flabbergasted by what they’ll do in front of God and everybody on YouTube. I searched YouTube for videos related to feet, and I can confirm it’s got more than 365,000 foot-related videos available to the home viewer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Not surprisingly, you have to bypass a lot of very sketchy-looking footage before you get to a video about feet that’s also family friendly, such as a clip called “Boogie Wonderland” from the 2006 movie Happy Feet. It’s about cute dancing penguins.

Penguins don’t wear shoes—they can’t afford them on a fisherman’s salary—but humans have been wearing shoes for at least 5,000 years. The reason is simple: It’s estimated the average person walks about 10,000 steps a day, or more than 115,000 miles in a lifetime—enough to circle the globe more than four times and make thousands of trips from the couch to the refrigerator and back in failed searches for decent snacks.

Actor Matthew McGrory had size 29 1/2 feet. Actor Danny DeVito did not.

All that walking could be done without shoes if the earth was covered in shag carpet. But most of the planet’s surface is littered with stone, sticks, broken beer bottles, discarded hypodermic syringes, shattered vinyl Dan Folgelberg albums and other useless debris. Try walking around with bare feet on all that razor-sharp junk for very long, and you’ll end up staggering into the doctor’s office on bloody stumps instead of sweatin’ to the oldies in your Nikes with Richard Simmons.

But I believe there’s another reason people wear shoes: Feet are ugly and shoes pretty ‘em up a little.

If you disagree, try going to work, church or school in your bare feet. Just be prepared for people to nervously avert their eyes when they pass you in the hallway. Some of them might gag. Except for one or two people (probably computer nerds or humor bloggers) who rarely said a word to you before they saw your bare feet. They’ll be downright chatty, and may seem overly enthusiastic, excited or even agitated. Enjoy the attention, but don’t expect much eye contact, because their heads will be tilted down the whole time.

And it won’t be the floor they’re staring at.

You want to know how fucked up I am?

I’ll tell you how fucked up I am.

I commute to work by bus four to five days a week. It’s about an hour’s ride, and I hate it because it’s monotonous, smelly, noisy, uncomfortable and inconvenient. I don’t know who designed bus seats, for example, but I think it might have been the fucking Nazis.

There is one compensation: Most of the time, the bus is half empty, and I have room to spread out, put on the noise-canceling headphones and doze. But sometimes, for no particular reason I can discern, the bus fills up and seats get scarce.

This makes me unhappy.

Unhappier.

I hate sitting next to strangers.

Hate it, hate it, hate it.

I don’t want any bus friends, and I don’t like making small talk about the weather, politics or the economy when I could be sleeping. I especially don’t want to be forced to overhear the silly college students’ animated conversations about epistemology. Fuck epistemology. I don’t need to analyze how knowledge affects my beliefs and perceptions of truth. Plato, Socrates, Descartes and their epistemologically oriented buddies can go piss themselves. Handguns, cigarettes and Rush Limbaugh are bad and should be eliminated or, at the very least, disregarded. End of discussion. Class over. Now fuck off.

So, in order to protect myself from getting an unexpected seat buddy, I try to emit negative vibes that clearly communicate, “Don’t fucking sit next to me. I don’t care if this is the last open seat on the bus and you’re 89 fucking years old and pregnant with fucking triplets. Stand up for the next hour rather than sit next to me.”

I do this subtly—by putting on my sunglasses, closing my eyes and feigning sleep, scowling, and trying to look smelly or even contagious: “You don’t want to sit here! I’ve got syphilis! And it’s the new kind you can get just from sitting next to strangers on the bus!” I also refuse to move my backpack out of the empty seat next to me unless I’m asked, and I throw one leg out to the side like I fucking bought the seat next to me and the entire aisle it’s bolted to.

These tactics almost always work. Nobody dares to sit next to me.

But here’s where it gets weird for me.

As the bus lumbers from stop to stop and gradually fills up so much that people start taking any available seat except the one next to me, I inevitably start wondering, “Why isn’t anybody asking if this seat’s available? Am I that ugly and repulsive? Or am I scary, like the guy in the front row who mutters to himself and furiously scribbles notes on the backs of fliers he picked up at the bus stop? I don’t want to be shunned. Why won’t anybody sit here? What’s wrong with me?”

And that’s just fucked up. One part of my brain is loading the Ruger and psychically screaming, “Fuck off! Go away! You suck! Leave me alone!” And another part is getting misty and whimpering, “Take this seat! Pick me! I have a peanut butter sandwich in my backpack that we can share! Let’s talk about the weather—or epistemology, you decide!”

I don’t get it.

What am I, schizophrenic?

Maybe I need medication.

Extra medication.

Or perhaps I should just skip the fucking bus and drive to work. I hate those people who ride the bus to work with me.

Although, to be honest, I might miss them a little, too. Especially Joe, Steve and Norman, those lugnuts.

Oh, for God’s sake!

Fuck me.

Hot wings embody the American spirit better than anything else.

If you asked the American people what makes our country great, 65 percent of them would say it’s democracy, 33 percent would say democracy plus guns, and 2 percent would say they’re undecided because 2 percent are always undecided no matter what the survey’s about. That’s just the way it is with polls. You could ask people if they wanted red-hot steel rods poked into their eyes and 90 percent would say no, 8 percent would say yes and 2 percent would say they were undecided.

But not me. I’m 100 percent certain I don’t want my corneas seared, and I’m also sure the one thing that makes America a leader among nations is hot wings.

“Hot wings?” you ask, gasping in shock because you can’t believe you’re foolish enough to keep reading.

Yes, hot wings and a woman named Teressa Belissimo.

But more about Mrs. Belissimo in a moment. First, I need to explain why most Americans are wrong about democracy and guns.

The way I figure it, America’s democratic system of government isn’t special because lots of countries regularly use the democratic process to elect politicians. Canada, Mexico, Germany, England and France all do it. Even Russia and Afghanistan have gone democratic, albeit awkwardly. About the only truly civilized country I can think of that isn’t democratic is Monaco, which has been ruled by the House of Grimaldi since 1297 without any major problems, unless you’re a conservative Southern Baptist and you consider gambling a major problem. They do a lot of gambling in Monaco, as any fan of James Bond movies knows.

Guns don’t make the U.S. special, either.

Americans own roughly 300 million guns—or one gun for every man, woman and child alive. But people all over the planet wield guns. Yes, it’s true we’re the world champions of using them to kill ourselves. About 31,000 Americans died of gunshot wounds in 2006, for example, which happens to be almost the same as the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War. But foreigners aren’t bad at using them, either. Try stealing a piece of warm naan from a bakery in Pakistan, for example, and you’ll probably get a Kalashnikov AK-47 poked in your eye faster than you can say “Holy Bin Laden, Batman!” Even if the tip of that rifle isn’t red-hot, I’m pretty sure it’s going to hurt badly enough to make you repent and drop your snack.

Which brings us back to the greatest snack of all–hot wings–and the prominent role they play in America’s prominence.

A rare photo of Teressa Belissimo, blessed inventor of the hot wing.

Hot wings are a uniquely American creation. The same can’t be said for inventions we falsely believe are American, such as light bulb, which Thomas Edison co-opted from a British scientist, or the automobile, which traces its roots to a German named Karl Benz rather than Henry Ford. Not even basketball, the zipper, the plastic garbage bag, Crocs shoes or the American superhero Superman are American. They were all created in Canada.

Hot wings, on the other hand, are as red, white and blue as the American flag.

They were first served in 1964 by Teressa Belissimo, who co-owned the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, N.Y., with her husband, Frank. Their son, Dominic, was the bartender. Teressa hatched the idea of deep-frying chicken wings and tossing them in cayenne pepper sauce when some of Dominic’s college friends unexpectedly dropped by the bar late one night with a killer case of the munchies. I don’t know if Teressa asked the boys why they were so ravenous—times were different in 1964, and she probably assumed they’d been out innocently frolicking in the park with a football. And perhaps they had been; kids were different then, too. But I do know that Teressa was so low on regular food and yet so desperate to feed them, she accidentally invented hot wings. Better yet, while the wings were cooking, she also decided to tide the boys over by serving leftover celery sticks with blue cheese. And thus, an industry was born.

The Belissimos’ story is so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye, partly because it’s a heartwarming tale about a tight-knit Italian-American family that works together to overcome adversity, and partly because I almost always accidentally get hot sauce in my eyes when I eat hot wings. Trust me when I tell you that eyeballs don’t like capsicum, the chemical in spicy peppers that makes hot sauce hot. Just thinking about it makes my eyes water uncontrollably.

But I also believe hot wings say more about the American people than anything else I know. Remember that until the moment Teressa anxiously dropped those chicken wings into the vat of hot oil, wings were usually thrown away or boiled to make soup stock. You couldn’t even feed them to your dogs because they’re so bony. But Teressa bravely took these rejected chicken bits and turned them into delicious appetizers that can also be enjoyed as a main course—unless you have digestive problems or other health issues that prevent you from eating fatty foods, of course. And in that magnificent moment of creative genius, the tale of an ordinary mom, her unusually hungry son and a simple bag of unwanted chicken wings became a striking metaphor for the founding of America itself.

Like chicken wings, we were once a nation of rejects. Early on, America became the home of disgruntled English citizens looking for a place to practice their religion freely. Later, as the inscription on the Statue of Liberty eloquently points out, the nation reluctantly but gradually opened its arms to the world’s wretched, poor, tired, homeless refuse—the sort of people we once called dirty immigrants but now call illegal immigrants so we don’t seem quite so xenophobic. And by working together side-by-side—except for upper management, who get their own offices—America has transformed itself into one of history’s greatest societies.

The Anchor Bar in Buffalo, N.Y. is the site of the original hot wings.

In short, Teressa Belissimo and hot wings are to America what Mother Teresa and curry are to India. Teressa Belissimo is America’s Mother Teressa, the woman who elevated the lowly chicken wing from a mere kitchen castoff to a culinary delicacy that sublimely embodies the American dream.

Americans will eat about 12 billion chicken wings this year, according to the National Chicken Council in Washington, D.C. As they dine, I hope these good citizens—even the 2 percent who are constantly wracked with uncertainty–will not only pause for a moment to ask themselves why the most powerful nation is the world isn’t more embarrassed to be the home of an organization called the National Chicken Council, but also to reflect on the vital role hot wings have played in the development of our cultural identity.

May God bless Teressa Belissimo’s memory, hot wings and, naturally, America.

The Blogger: Why can't I think of anything to write about for my blog? And why am I sitting butt-naked in this park? I could get arrested for this.

Many bloggers desperately hunt for blogging topics for their blogs, maybe because they use pseudo-words like “bloggers,” “blogging” and “blogs” too  much and clutter up their brains with useless bloggity thoughts. I don’t have that problem, thankfully, and because I’m a helpful guy, here are 12 super-hot blog topics I thought of over the weekend. They’re royalty-free, so feel free to use them, and let me know how they work for your blog. And if you have any original blogging ideas you’re not jealously guarding, please share them with the rest of us here in the comments.

1. If God loves us, why does He allow pain and suffering in the world, not to mention Jehovah’s Witnesses?

2. How can we be expected to decide between right and wrong when we can’t even decide what to have for dinner?

3. Darwin vs. Creationists: Are humans really descended from apes, or just some humans, like the moron who works in the office next to mine? He’s always picking things out of the hair on his back, plus he eats an awful lot of bananas and grunts more than I think he should.

4. What’s the meaning of life? Is blogging, watching television and falling asleep on the bus every morning and afternoon on the way to and from work really all there is?

5. Is it truly worthwhile for mankind to spend billions of dollars exploring the universe when most of us can’t even find our way around the city without a Garmin GPS unit?

6. If we discover life on other planets, will I have more friends and fans, or will it just make traffic on the highway that much worse?

7. Are the rich obligated to help the poor, and if I ever get rich, will I treat poor people with respect, or with even more disdain than I do now?

8. Is there life after death, and, if there is, will I have to put up with the same assholes I do now for the rest of eternity?

9. Is time travel possible, and if it is, can I go back to high school to punch that arrogant quarterback Tyler Johnson in the nose and steal a passionate French kiss from his hot girlfriend, popping back into the present before he has time to respond?

10. Are moral values relative or absolute, absolutely relative, or relatively absolute? Most importantly, what does the IRS auditor who’s coming over to the house next Thursday to look over my 2009 tax return think about it?

11. What happens to our souls when we die? Do they ascend to Heaven? Descend to Hell? Are they recycled like aluminum beer cans, or are they auctioned off to the highest bidder, like pappy’s belongings were when he passed on? Or do they simply evaporate into the blogosphere without anybody noticing, like everything I write?

12. Will scientists’ attempts to create artificial intelligence help solve the world’s problems, or merely lead to the development of very sophisticated sex dolls?

I hope you like these ideas. And come on, folks, I know you’ve got ideas of your own. Share your rousing blog topics with the rest of us!