Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

by John Hodgman

And then I noticed there were not one but two corgis at this party. Not replicas, but actual corgis being held by their owners in the middle of the room. Corgis, of course, are adorable full-size dogs with deformed, miniature legs. Part of the reason they are so adorable is that they always seem to be cheerful and smiling even though someone chopped their legs off, generations ago, through selective breeding. I didn’t recognize the owners of the corgis. They weren’t comedians. It seemed pretty gross to bring dogs to a nerd party just to get attention, and I didn’t like that these corgi owners were getting more attention than me. So I asked my friend Kevin: Who invited them? “Oh, they weren’t invited,” he said. “The corgis were.” Kevin explained that they were famous corgis on Instagram. One of Kevin’s colleagues was a big fan, so he contacted the owners and invited them to this party. I learned that one of the Corgis is named Linus, and the other is named Chompers, and I’m going to go ahead and say the first and last name of the man who invited dogs to a party because I want him to be known: Conor Lastowka. Later I would do some research on these dogs. Not surprisingly, Chompers is more famous than Linus, because Chompers is an incredible name for an Instagram corgi. Chompers has 132,000 followers on Instagram as of this writing, whereas Linus has only around 15,000. On his Instagram account, Chompers does co-branded poses with vacuum cleaners and boutique pet food compani...

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