Titty Monkeys

A man who tried to smuggle 18 monkeys by hiding them under his jumper has been arrested by border police. Roberto Zavaleta Sol Cabrera attempted to enter Mexico City International airport with several non-indigenous titi monkeys stuffed into socks and hidden in a girdle strapped around his waist.

Now, I’ve heard of lots of weird things being smuggled before, and in a whole variety of creative ways, of course, but did they say “titty monkeys” and, if so, how do I get me one of these things?

Apparently, these endangered titty (spelled ‘titi’) monkeys were discovered after officials spotted the smuggler behaving “nervously” and detected a mysterious bulge under his jumper. I guess that isn’t very surprising given that the man had about a dozen restless primates shoved down his drawers. That’s certainly bound to make one look a little uncomfortable, isn’t it? Now, the pants bulge part I’m just going to overlook here. I know no one has ever pulled me over at any border crossing for any suspicious pants bulges, so I’m just going to let this one pass.

Furthermore, a spokesman for Mexico’s Public Safety Department said Cabrera became “markedly nervous” when questioned about what he was carrying; as if having a pantsload of titty monkeys isn’t enough to make you a bit anxious. Hell, if it were me you would have seen me coming for the bulge in my pants miles away. My bulge would have shown up for inspection way before I did. But good call for the customs officers for being able to identify people with livestock on their persons nonetheless - nothing gets by these guys! But unfortunately, two of the monkeys were already dead.

And dead titty monkeys is definitely not a good omen.

The 38-year-old admitted that he had bought the six-inch South American monkeys in Peru and then carried them in his luggage on a flight from Lima. He claimed to have hidden the creatures in his clothing to protect them from X-rays in luggage-scanning equipment. Wasn’t that considerate? Wouldn’t want the cramped and suffocating monkeys to be threatened by any harmful x-rays now would we?

No one likes a cancer ridden titty monkey after all.

He was arrested on charges of trafficking an endangered species and taken to the office of the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection for further investigation. Titi monkeys are a protected species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, and a special permit is required for their legal possession. The Mexican government also just recently placed restrictions on imports of primates, but monkeys continue to be sold along with parrots and reptiles at the Sonora market in Mexico City.

Cabrera said he had paid $30 for each of the monkeys, which can be sold for up to $1,550 in Mexico. He described the animals as “pets”, as Mexico has a deep-rooted tradition of keeping such wild animals as pets. The South American border country is also key trade route for people trying to smuggle animals into the US.

Thirty dollars for a titty monkey? What a deal! That’s definitely less than I would pay locally here. Except that maybe Cabrera should have consider making his fortune selling titty monkeys on eBay instead.

The Sandwich War

Today, quite possibly, another of the seven signs of the Apocalypse has been turned loose upon us. No, not plagues of locus or frogs raining down from the sky or anything like that, but Burger King did just launch its new NY Pizza Burger in Times Square.

Why is that so bad? The burger, if it can be called that, comes on a 10-inch bun that contains four quarter-pound burger patties, pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, Tuscan pesto sauce and marinara sauce. The burger is then cut into six slices, like a pizza, and served in a cardboard box not unlike a pizza box. It contains 2,520 calories and costs $12.99 US.

Good lord, that’s more calories than most Africans, will see in an entire week for Pete sakes! You practically have to take out life insurance just to purchase one over the counter. I hope some of the proceeds are going towards Third World Famine, as this is just ridiculous. I wonder what those poor starving children would make of these commercials of entire families sitting down to a single sandwich.

Why would anybody need that much food at one sitting? Sure the intent is for the “burger” to be shared and not tackled alone, but, really? I somehow doubt this is how it will play out.

This is, however, only the newest in a long line of new ultra-fatty fast-food meals. Others include the KFC Double Down — two pieces of deep-fried chicken sandwiching cheese and bacon — and the Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger, a bacon cheeseburger that uses Krispy Kreme doughnuts as a bun. Just what the world needs, of course.

How fucking gross is that?

Yes, our precious fast-food joints are literally waging war on each other to create the most least-healthy and lethal sandwiches legally available for sale at any restaurant.

Personally, I blame the Food Network and their recent features about American “Culinary Classics”, like ‘Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” with host Guy Fieri. He’s literally breeding a whole new culture of high-calorie, high-fat, low-nutrition, yet impeccably delicious food. He’s practically taken a spatula and bashed in Jenny Craig’s head with it.

Screw your hoity-toity cerviches, ragout’s, salads and stir-fry’s, its hello sandwiches the size of Rhode Island. Shit, I say throw in an $1.99 for an angioplasty and then supersized for your casket.

Animal Armageddon

I called it – the bears are up to something.

Not only are the Americans themselves secretly rallying around their anti-Canadian sentiments, but now they’ve also enlisted the aid of bears to help them in their conquest. Bad enough they decided to gas flocks of Canadian Geese in New York’s Central Park, but now they’re turning loose grizzly bears on hapless Canadian vacationers.

This past weekend a Canadian woman from London, Ontario was attacked by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park at the Soda Butt campground close to the Wyoming-Montana border. Deb Freele, an avid fisherwoman was sleeping in her tent when she awoke to find the grizzly bear nibbling on her arm.

Talk about the ultimate buzz kill to any camping vacation, eh?

Granted, the bear also wandered off to attack two other American campers in the park and mauling one to death. But, hey, that’s not really surprising considering that once you wind up a stealth ninja bear, it’s next to impossible to get them to stand down again. It’s a cocked and loaded weapon ready to fire on anyone that comes into its path. But there’s no doubt in my mind that this was intended to be a meditated attack on the unsuspecting Canucks.

Luckily, Freele only escaped with a broken forearm and multiple bite marks down to the bone. Her husband who was sleeping next to a nearby running stream never even awoke.

So the question now is how do we Canadians retaliate?

I say we mount lasers to the heads of our caribou and drive the herds south of the border to wreck havoc. Or maybe we could enlist beaver volunteers to be a bonsai-style weapon by stuffing nuclear explosives in their orifices and then ship them to the major American city centers to detonate on arrival – Beaver Bombs.

Fight fire with fire, or fauna with fauna as it were.

Animal Apocolypse

I know that most people still view news stories about wild animals caught doing human things as cute, or even endearing. I however – do not. In fact, I have tried time and time again to warn the homo sapien citizens of Mother Earth to be very wary as the animal apocalypse is on the rise.

I warned you about the Senegalese monkeys fashioning sticks as spears and then again when Travis the murderous chimp when on his Xanax induced rampage. And remember those accursed rats being taught to use miniature rakes to retrieve food? Then there was the case of the hippie bear raiding marijuana fields, and the “innocent” elephant junkie. And let’s not forget about the whole teaching monkeys to control robotic limbs with their minds. Shit, we’re practically begging for it. But does anyone listen to me? No!

I am guessing that Walt Disney, Marlon Perkins and even the Crocodile Hunter have succeeded in lowering our collective guards against these rather dubious omens. And, here again, is another example of nature getting a just little too close for comfort to our way of life.

In Denver, a black bear attracted by the smell of a peanut butter sandwich managed to open the door of a car, climb in and got stuck, knocking the gear stick into neutral and sending the car rolling down a slope into trees.

Oh, suuuuuure. A peanut butter sandwich…a likely story.

My guess is that the bear was actually scoping out the car and attempting to hotwire it so he could take a little joyride around town looking for innocent human victims to attack and maul. Maybe Yogi has gotten tired of trolling around the national parks looking for picnic baskets and decided he needed to get himself set up with a set of wheels instead. Maybe he was looking to swipe the car and sell it for crack…who knows. The bottom line is that I do not believe for a second that the bear was just after a peanut butter sandwich.

As coined by the long ago misunderstood rock outfit Great White: “One bitten twice shy, babe…”

Apparently, the blare of the car horn alerted the members of the Story family who realized 17-year-old Ben's Toyota was no longer parked in the driveway of their home in Larkspur near Denver.

When they went to explore they discovered the car and trapped culprit at the bottom of the hill — a giant bear with teeth bared and claws tearing through the car's interior. Sounds like an animal in the crazed throws of a drug withdrawal if you ask me. The bear was apparently trapped inside the car for two hours before police were able to release the animal who then ran off into the nearby woods. Or maybe, the bear was enjoying the unedited ‘Inna-Godda-Da-Vida’ album on eight track in the Story’s stereo before he sobered up and decided to take off looking for another vehicle to break into.

I say that if we are ever going to stand our ground, now is the time to do it before it’s too late. What’s next? Pigeon prostitutes? Antelope running for town council? If we continue to stand by idly and just coo and laugh over these silly animal stories, we’re bound to be their bitch sooner or later.

Remembering Gord's Chick

I was reminiscing the other day while walking to the office about the changing face of the St. Catharines downtown core. I thought about Gord’s Place on James Str. and the times that I used to waste away there on weekends drinking my face off during my High School and University days.

Ahh, Gord’s. Yes, the den of inequity from which spawned a thousand pubescent substance abuse problems.

Specifically, I was thinking about what might have transpired to the infamous “Gord’s Chick” who also happened to frequent the place. “Gord’s Chick” was your typical Goth girl you see at any “alternative bar” you may wander into; all done up to the nines in retro lingerie, tights, knee high boots, pale make-up and black eyeliner…basically, your average local Siouxsie Sioux rip off. While there – and she was at Gord’s every night – she would dance up a storm to any hard-edged Goth tune the DJ had a mind to play at the time. She was part graceful ballerina; part whirling dervish. She was both scary and exhilarating to watch. It looked as if she was trying to conjure up some wrath of God via a typhoon, hurricane or some other random destructive act of nature…and man, was it sexy!

But where does someone go after being a Goth? What’s the next stage of the fashion evolution once you submit yourself to looking like a zombie corpse? I just can’t picture her in later in life wearing cowboy boots and skinny jeans dancing away at a Taylor Swift concert…but who knows? Maybe she has mellowed out in her old age (or whatever age it is that “old” constitutes itself as when you’re classified as an undead), popped out a few puppies and now lives on social assistance down by the railroad tracks.

You never know, do you?

I prefer to think of her as still raging against the dying of the light - a perpetual benchmark as far as full-time dedicated Goths go. I sincerely hope I see her again at some point. Perhaps at the market trying to buy kitten whiskers for her next witchy concoction, or maybe trying to raise spirits in some deserted graveyard or something. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll catch a glimpse of her dancing away by herself in some abandoned bus stop somewhere without a care in the world as if time had stood still and she was still back on the dance floor at Gord’s.

Jogging Your Mind About Running Safety

I have been getting more into long distance running as of late, and it seems I’ve been stressing about all the wrong things.

When I originally started pushing the 10-15km mark on these runs, my initial fear was typically in the usual areas: chaffing, cramping, proper hydration, nutrition, pulls, tears, sprains, heart spontaneously combusted inside my chest cavity – that kind of thing. Little did I know that there were much worse concerns that I should have been considering before heading out on these early morning death marches.

Specifically: crashing airplanes.

Robert Jones of Woodstock, GA was recently killed while running along the beach when a single-engine plane making an emergency landing managed to crash right on top of him. Sucks, huh?

But, hello? How does that happen exactly?

Where it’s true about why would a runner ever need to keep his eyes on the sky while out jogging, how on earth can you manage to miss a plane coming directly at you after it has fallen out of the sky? Well, it seems that Mr. Jones had a fondness for his iPod on these runs and therefore did not hear the airplane coming at him. I also assume then that Mr. Jones really likes his music loud.

Personally, I too love my tunes when I run but I doubt I would ever miss the sound of a crashing plane. This sounds more of a case of “stupid runner syndrome” to me, where once a runner begins to experience that euphoric rush of adrenaline, they also make the idiotic assumption that they are the center of the universe, where everything conscientiously revolves around and avoids them (ie. cars, cyclists, and as it were…crashing airplanes).

To this I would advise: turn down the Bon Jovi and focus more on the impending dangers going on around you. Trust that the impossible is possible and that stupid people are everywhere ready to hurtle into at high speeds reducing you to an oily smear on someone’s windshield.

Skull Quandary

Hey, maybe somebody slipped an asshole tablet into my Corn Flakes this morning or something, but what is up with the recent fashion trend of having skulls emblazoned on everything?

Who shops at Walmart exactly – the undead?

Seriously, on just about every t-shirt, casual shirt, and even dress shirt in the store there is a picture of a skull. Either as the main design across the chest, or small cutesy little skulls sewn onto the breast pocket the skulls are everywhere. When and how did this become the popular designer motif? It's as if the department stores of the world have performed some kind of mass marketing Vulcan mind twist on us all in order to convince us that skulls are, in fact, cool.

I’m sure the teenybopper vitamin-C deficient Goth kids and the greasy meth people you see hanging around at the bus station bumming cigarettes love their skull shirts - but I’m thirty-fucking-seven years old, dammit! I don’t particularly want skulls on my clothes, as I don’t feel that they accurately represent where I am at this stage of my life, thank you very much.

Can you image me wearing skull clothes? What kind of message is that to send out for a single thirty-seven year old man? “Hi, my name is Terry and I may or may not have a body in the trunk of my car. Can I get your number?” I'm not going to coax many dates that way am I? No! I’m likely to have an easier time teaching square dancing to coma patients.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m some kind of a fashion plate or anything – shit, I couldn’t get pussy from a dead cat. Even my fantasies just want to be friends. But if I were to suddenly take to wearing any of these plentiful skull shirts I’d give off all the sophistication of a two marbles rolling around inside a tin can.

Doesn't anyone wear shirts with cute, little harmless alligators or non-assuming horses on them anymore?