“Labradoodles? Some lady in the city has Labradoodles,” Doc said, putting down the paper.

“Hope it isn’t catching,” said Dud.

We knew without being told what a Labradoodle was, of course. It meant that a good retriever got too close to one of those tippy-toe prancing fluffs and now there are puppies that need good homes. We’d been broken into this world by cockapoos and peekapoos, so a genuine Labradoodle wasn’t that much of a stretch. At least it gave us something to talk about over coffee.

“You know,” said Doc, “if you were to cross Lassie with a Cardigan Welsh corgi, you could get a colling card.”

“You send that same corgi on a blind date with a shar-pei,” said Dud, “and you could end up with a bunch of card sharps.”

“This is getting bad ... but now that you mention it, what if a half Yorki-half old English sheepdog got interested in a lonely papillon. You’d find yourself with yoroldpappis.”

The waitress was giving us looks like she needed our seats at the counter to be empty. Especially since the dog-combo disease was spreading.

“You take one of them Japanese Akitas,” said a guy from the truckers’ table, “and cross him with a Boston terrier, you’d get Akitaboston.”

“But what would it unlock?”

“A Scottish terrier and a great Dane would produce some Great Scotts,” Dud said.

“At least that would sound fairly good in a classified ad,” Doc added, nodding.

“OK,” said our waitress, finally succumbing to the downward spiral of waning intellect, “if you had a part saluki, part terrier and crossed it with a part bull mastiff and part Llasa apso, what would you get?”

“A litter with an identity crisis?

“No. You’d get a bunch of ap-saluki-terri-bulls.”

The groaning continued for minutes while we got refills.

“If one of them Australian dingos got crossed with those little Mexican dogs,” Dud said.

We looked at him and waited.

“Well?”

We shrugged.

“You’d get a dinkahuahua, of course.”

I think that’s when Doc hit him with the napkin.

At least when it was over, no one had suggested a tryst between a shih-tsu and a bulldog.