Won't someone think of the tigers?

I knew this was coming, but didn't imagine it'd be so anti-climatic. The pro-tiger rally was held in San Francisco, with nearly as many dogs as people in attendance.

Still, the folks quoted were right - it was a tiger being a tiger and what do you expect of an animal that gets loose?

The folks at PETA really shit the bed on this one, by not latching on from the start. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, there were four or five people who showed up for a bonfire and they put a happy face on the turn out by telling everyone how heartfelt their participation was.

The funny thing is that some poor reporter got shipped out to witness this on a slow news day. This had to be a new kid at the paper, working on New Year's Day and forced to come up with something.

It's amazing that I'm beating the bushes to get back with a newspaper, isn't it?

As a means of basic housekeeping, here are a few things that have been sitting around:

* There's a chart that has the remaining shows that were filmed before the writers' strike to help you figure out when TV will suck like crazy. With The Office already dried up, among others, it helps to know how many episodes are left around the dial.

Considering new shows like The Big Bang Theory are already on their third lap around with only six or seven episodes filled, I wonder when the networks will cut those off.

I'm most afraid of the new reality shows that are in the works. Most are very, very bad and run the risk of destroying any sort of watchable television.

* Finally, after catching up with my friend, Heather, over the holiday, I'm pretty sure I couldn't fill her shoes at a government think tank. I could, however, break down rap songs into their basics for graphical representation.

If econ had been more like this, I would have opted for a different major in college.

(Image from: MyConfinedSpace.com)

BPC (* Before Political Correctness)

We all like to feel better about ourselves, whether it's the money we give, the time we donate or the products we buy. As I've covered here before, we're pretty vain creatures and don't mind doing the right things, but we'd prefer that someone be there to see it.

From living in a greener fashion - and why do you think I talk about it here so much? I'm one of the worst ones for narcissistic altruism - we are more likely to do what we think is right as long as others can see us being so damned good.

I'd love to see someone set up a hidden camera with a homeless guy on the same corner and have a crowd present for an hour and absent for the next. I think it could be pretty interesting.

I also think it allows the incredible markups on cruelty-free meats and related products so people with a hair too much expendable income can wander around high-end grocery stores with a great sense of self-satisfaction because their chicken was killed in the fastest way that is humanly possible.

I thought of that this week when I saw the story about a whale harvested off the coast of Alaska with a harpoon tip from the 1880s. The piece missing from the BBC's write up is that the tip was designed to carry a charge that would explode and cripple the whale, blowing a chunk out of the animal to make it easier to harvest.

I'd love to see how an exploding spear would be marketed for today's shopper. In the 1880s, you just explained that this let the whalers haul in the animal faster, which meant less of a chance of losing the carcass as it sunk.

I'm seeing a contemporary ad campaign about this being more humane, resulting in a quick, painless death for the whale. Or they could swim around with a hunk of metal embedded in a shoulder blade until the whale was finally finished off in the third century it had seen.

That could happen, too.

(Image from NHL94.com)

The good old days

Know why I love YouTube so much?

Because of stuff like this.

I first saw this years ago when living in the Wellington apartment and though we were "adults" we were miles away (and still are) from being grown ups.

Know how to tell? Check your pants for urine after a minute and change of this beauty.

People? Not very smart

Just to get the wheels moving after the time off, here's a quick link I found through Poynter.org that grabbed a story from Maryland about how shops are scattered throughout the mall.

It just goes to show that no matter how special you think you are, how many works of art you see or massive European cathedrals you've been awed by, at the core, we're all pretty simple monkeys.

It's like the studies you see about people always turning right when they enter a new space and you realize that most of us are hard-wired the same way. Now, with a few precious hours left before I'm due back at work, I'm off to smear Cinnabon over a few dozen pairs of pants.

Prove that I'm a simple animal, will they...

Oh, I've had those days...

Well, technically, I never bit a panda but I know that feeling.

I really can't do much more with this because I can't stop smirking and snickering whenever I look at the link. You know those Internet stories you read out lud, word for word to the person sitting next to you?

This is one of those puppies.

You see, a Chinese man got drunk, climbed in with a panda, got bit and bit the fucking bear back... Happens all the time over there. Pandas are like squirrels in China, I hear.

Here's a little taste:

“No one ever said they would bite people,” Zhang said. “I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don’t remember much.”

Thank God they didn't sell jugs of beer when I was in college. Things could have gotten ugly... er... Things could have gotten uglier...

(Image from: steverolston.com)

Stingrays 1, People 1

This opening paragraph in the Times Online should tell you pretty much all you'd need to know.

At least ten stingrays have been found dead and mutilated on Australia’s eastern coast in the last week in what conservationists believe could be revenge attacks for the death of Steve Irwin, the popular naturalist and television personality.

My word, that is a stupid, stupid idea.

I honestly cannot fathom how a rational human being random ass biped, possibly with opposable thumbs, thinks that killing an animal - and an animal without a cell phone or Internet access at that (stingrays have notoriously bad credit and aren't pre-approved for either of these) - would have any impact whatsoever.

Really, what the hell is going on here? Aren't there better ways to expend energy than vigilante stingray slaughter?

Here are three better things to do: Anything, nothing or hunting dolphins. Dolphins have communication skills, at least. Take down one of those bastards and word spreads fast.

Stingrays? Not so much...

(Photo from Mote.org)

Animals are full of hate

It's strange that on the same weekend that saw Steve Irwin taken from us, we saw many displays of animals that hate at the Minnesota State Fair.

From pigs carrying shivs to cows that were simply waiting to the right moment to launch a massive stampede, we saw many cases of hatred in the animal world.

If you need any more evidence, I submit this picture.

Sheep, as you may well know, are the most hateful animals in God's kingdom.



Think of that the next time some hippie tells you eating veal is cruel. That baby cow would probably have grown up to steal your car radio or commit identity fraud.

Crocodile Hunter not eaten by crocodile

Crikey, what were the odds?

If you had come to me last week and offered odds on how Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, would die, I'd have taken alligator/crocodile attack over any other option.

Stingray attack? Never would have entered my mind.

It's kind of strange, because while Irwin came across as a human cartoon, he seemed to be a pretty nice guy. Now the outpouring of support from the zoo community is pretty touching to see and many are singing his praises as a man who did a lot to help conservation and education efforts.

Like Mr. Rogers' funeral coverage, but with more scars and puncture wounds.

I think my favorite memory is a show that airs every now and again, but never fails to make me laugh.

He had squatted down as he was doing a little explaination about some species of pit viper (snakes that use heat to identify prey) and the realized he was crotch-first into a nest of poisonous snakes.

Words cannot describe the look on his face when he heard the first rattles starting from six inches under his groin.

A few months after the episode aired, a group of us were in the Blarney Stone on Clark Street and Animal Planet was on TV later in the evening, because Margo loved to watch that after the 10 pm to midnight crowd came and went.

As we sat at the bar, I was talking about how much I loved the above mentioned episode and wouldn't you know it, that was the episode on TV right then.

It was like Mystery Science Theater, but with the possibility of a man getting bitten in his naughty bits.

You can't out a price on TV like that. Keep your Survivor re-runs, you can't go wrong with an unhinged Austrailian who was easily distracted or excited.

(Note: Disconnected in Suburbia and Frank the Tank have also weighed in on the subject. Enjoy.)

(Image from dswnet.com)

Homicide, life in the woods

For those of you who listen to country music, this will make complete sense... for those who don't? This will make complete sense.

Troy Lee Gentry, half of the group Montgomery Gentry and the little guy without the Amish hat on the right, is up on charges that he all but snuck up on a sleeping, deaf bear and killed it with a machine gun. The reality is that he was a step or two away from that.

According to the reports he bought a tame bear from a Minnesota man, then "hunted" it in a pen, shooting it with a bow and arrow. This opened a whole can of bees on talk radio here this afternoon.

You had callers who hunt bears who said "real" bear hunting was a lot harder than this and others who said this sounded about right when it came to how a bear hint works. Hunters from all over the area were calling in and it was pretty entertaining for an hour or so on a slow sports day.

One of the first callers was trying to explain bear baiting, where a hunter hangs a bag of trash in a tree for weeks or months leading into hunting season and when Yogi comes for his free lunch later in the year, there's a hunter waiting to pop him in the skull.

Now that's a sporting chance.

Back to Gentry, though, he allegedly hunted this thing in a fenced in pen about the size of the Metrodome's playing field. No word on if that was the baseball field or the football field.

He even went so far as to film the whole episode and re-edit it to look like a draining hunt so he could show his buddies what a real man he is... heh.

My favorite call of the day was from a good ole boy from Gentry's home state of Kentucky who called it chicken-shit hunting and kept calling Gentry's entire family a group of clowns. He also pointed out that regardless of time in the pokey and up to 20 grand in fines, the worst part of this for the singer is the complete loss of dirt road cred.

This is at least three times as funny when you consider that these two jerkoffs have built an entire career around being tough guys and real Southern boys. It would be a bit like finding out that Kid Rock goes to bed at 9:30 every night with a small glass of wine and a good book.

The strange thing? They're booking him for mis-tagging the bear as "wild" because there's no real law against shooting a tame bear in a small pen, just if you falsify the records about where you shot it.

This apparently has something to do with whether or not you can stuff the bear or not. Uh-huh, right.

I think that regardless of how you feel about the morality of hunting or in this case, execution-style bear removal techniques, it comes down to one of the e-mails the show got in the middle of the afternoon, who said that this is like losing you virginity to a hooker. Sure, you technically had sex, but you didn't really earn it, so where's the sense of satisfaction in that?

I think the thing that will ruin it for all of the fans who get off on the group's image will be this little tidbit - the bear's name before he iced it was Cubby. Yeah, you're all man when you shot an animal that shares a name with a Mouseketeer.

(Photo from charlottesvillepavillion.com / chaffeezoo.org)

Hakuna euthanasia

This type of shit just makes me furious. Punch a clown furious. Spit in a salad bar furious.

Allow me to quote the first two graphs from a week or so ago:

Five meerkats at the Minnesota Zoo were destroyed and tested for rabies Thursday after a girl was bitten when she reached her hand into the animals' exhibit.

The meerkats -- two mates and their three offspring born this spring -- had been vaccinated for rabies, but were ordered killed by the state Department of Health because the girl's parents didn't want her to have to undergo a series of rabies shots, said zoo collections manager Tony Fisher.

God forbid that Little Suzie Fuckwit gets a series of shots because she stuck her dumbfuck arm into an enclosure full of wild animals as her dumbfuck, mouth-breathing jackass parents stood idly by.

I'd like to hope they lost track of this kid because they were distracted as the DCFS agent was asking for ID as they prepped to release these kids into a pack of wild dogs where they'd have a fighting chance, but I suspect they were just watching their other little brats running free and tea-bagging the grizzlies or something.

I mean, Jesus...

It's good this little shit got a chunk taken out of her hand and all, but nothing says, "Stop being such a dumbshit" like a series of rabies shots to the gut.

Did we really need to kill five animals because Ma and Pa didn't want to have to take this brat to get her rabies boosters?

The funny thing is that I get a strange sense of calm when I look in my Bible under the book of Darwin, which says, in part: "Lo, the stupid and weakest members of a species tend to take care of themselves. That, or they are elected to public office."

(Image from moviecitygeek.com)

We must do our patriotic duty and defend the nation's bug zoos at all costs

In a story from the hopper that keeps coming back around and around, the nation has been transfixed/moderately concerned/slightly uneasy laughing at the sheer stupidity of thosands of travellers forced to dump out shampoo bottles as the enter security checkpoints.

I imagine that this too, shall pass. Much like lighters being banned in favor of no more than three books of matches and sweeping layoffs a year after hiring a full army of TSA agents, this will settle and the world will be safe for those flying with yuck mouth and Listerine again.

Also, the U.S. continues to miss the boat when it comes to what is and what is not important in our ongoing War! On! Terror! (OK, it took several tries andhaving to write the HTML code by hand to get that link to take... I think the governement is somehow involved in trying to shut down the hippie blogger menace here.)

To quote the opening paragraph: "A Homeland Security database of vulnerable terror targets in the United States, which includes an insect zoo but not the Statue of Liberty, is too flawed to determine allocation of federal security funds, the department's internal watchdog found."

No shit? You'd think that the temp hired to type that up in the first place would come to the same conclusion.

As we had the water cooler discussion at work today, I asked in all seriousness if anyone thought that this whole thing is a head fake by terrorist organizations to get everyone watching the airlines as they plan for any place but.

One strange thing I came across was as I was trying to think up a way to describe this thought process to a co-worker, I needed an American equivalent of a reason to try and attack a much bigger country and my mind immediately went to "If you needed to bomb the hell out of America for $15 million..." I think that sums up why we're getting bombed so much in the first place.

The concensus was that a sporting event was next, but the question remains - why on earth would you try and bomb a plane at this point when it's one of the most sriously guarded industries in the world now?

Why wouldn't you just walk into a major stadium and do your damage there? Seriously, you're going to try and mix chemical from three shampoo bottles to make a bomb that will blow out the wall in an airplane bathroom? Didn't MythBusters teach us all we needed to know about explosive decompression?

My homeboy at Disconnected in Suburbia is advocating focusing on the positives and not worrying so much. I'm going with at least focusing in the right direction. Yes, the planes are important, but what else are we concentrating on?

I have to say the thought of an organization that's responsible for our collective well-being worried about the terrorist menace striking us in the petting zoos isn't giving me a lot of confidence here.

Instead we're going to hassle people who won't stand for the national anthem and those that speak out against the US in small Bible Belt towns? Look at the rest of the watchdog list: bean and bourbon festivals and a kangaroo center?

We might not have found a surefire way to rate our national assets, but we may have proved that computers have a sense of humor or are starting to get pissed off at us.

Still, whenever the next attack happens, we'll all be shocked, despite the fact that we tried so hard at keeping the airports safe. Tring to cause a problem there when we don't see that level of security anywhere else is the equivalent of trying to rob a bank when the Brinks truck is parked outside with the door open and engine running. Where's the sense in trying to up the degree of difficulty?

It just doesn't add up.

Finally, when I'm brought in for questioning later tonight and you see me on the news, keep in mind I had a hat on today and my hair doesn't usually look that bad. Oh, and I usually shave Saturday or Sunday... I'm getting a little scruffy.