…to have in the room with you after you’ve just had stomach surgery, and it hurts like hell to laugh:
Billy Connolly (“Och laddie, yer stomach looks like just another Saturday night in Glasgow.”)
Craig Ferguson (“If you were a woman after a C-section, you’d have to get up and wipe the baby’s shitty arse because it’s Match Of The Day on TV and your hubby’s AWOL at the pub.”)
Richard Pryor (“You think stitches hurt? Try settin’ yo’self on fire, honkie.”)
Robin Williams (“Stomach surgery is God saying to you, ‘Here, try a little cocaine.’ “)
Bill Burr (“Look, I’m not saying what you have isn’t terrible — but ever had your girlfriend’s broken acrylic nail wedged in your hemorrhoids?”)
So you’re invited to the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, where the Argies are having a function in your honor. As it’s a formal affair, you have to wear at least a dark suit and a tie.
Whereupon you show up in said dark suit, but with your tie undone, your shirt untucked, wearing a Salvation Army scarf and clown shoes.
A rapper? A tech executive? A rock star? Nope, it’s Al fucking Pacino:
I read this story with interest few days ago, and it seems like a classic case of animals striking back at humans:
“A chimpanzee came in the garden as I was digging,” Ntegeka Semata said in an interview with the publication. She noted that her four young children were with her and as she turned her back to get water, the chimp took her child by the hand and ran off.
The child screamed, which caused the other villagers to pay attention and chase after him, but it was too late. “It broke off the arm, hurt him on the head, and opened the stomach and removed the kidneys,” Semata continued, adding that the child died on the way to the local hospital.
Here’s the thing. The article points out that chimps share about 94% of their DNA with humans — i.e. they’re the closest thing to us in the animal kingdom. That does not make us kinfolk, by the way (just in case the above story didn’t get the point across), and chimps are total assholes: they exhibit all the bad traits of human behavior (murder, cannibalism, torture etc.), and there’s nothing at all cute about them. A friend back in South Africa once described their look as “trying to decide which way to kill you”, and he’s not wrong about that.
I was driving through the Kruger National Park once, and I’d stopped to take some photos of a herd of buffalo, when a young male chimp jumped on the car’s bonnet and stood peering into the car through the windshield. As it happened, I’d left a pack of potato chips on the dashboard, and when the chimp saw it, he started to gibber and jump around, trying to reach the packet through the glass. Of course, I burst out laughing — and when the chimp heard my laughter, he stopped dead and stared at me with that look. Then he ripped off a windshield wiper as though snapping a pretzel, waved it at me, then scuttled off with it like it was a trophy. It was the most human act I’d ever seen from an animal, any animal.
I should have just shot the little prick but they take a dim view of that kind of thing at the Kruger Park, so I just drove off, seething*.
So yeah, I can quite imagine that the chimp in the article above was pissed off at humans, and destroying their habitat sounds as good a reason as any. They know who’s responsible, you see, and some kind of retaliatory action is not at all surprising.
The next time you see some movie where chimps are freed from a medical research facility and set about causing mayhem and murder, I’m here to tell you that it’s not at all far-fetched.
Photo credit: iStock
*Update & Correction Dept.: A couple of Alert Readers contacted me and told me that what happened to me in the Kruger Park was doubleplus unpossible because chimps are tropical jungle-dwellers and not found in Seffrica, ergo it must have been a baboon. In high dudgeon, I went to find the pictorial evidence (i.e. a photo) that I took of the little bastard… and it was indeed a baboon.
Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey introduces us to their movie-rating scale:
I have to say that the very last time I paid a full-price movie ticket was for the final Harry Potter episode — and in fact, I went to the movie house for all the Potter movies. If I recall correctly, the last non-Potter movie I saw in a cinema was Saving Private Ryan, and even that was some time after its initial release.
Every single other movie over the past twenty-odd years has fallen into the #2 category. As far as I’m concerned, there is not a movie in recent history worth the price of a movie ticket, or that is so good that I can’t wait to see it.
That doesn’t mean I think all movies have sucked in recent times — I’ve enjoyed lots of them, and Midnight In Paris, The Fabulous Baker Boys, A Good Year, The Incredibles and Gosford Park (to name but some) I’ve not only watched but watched over and over again.
And I’m not even going to get into the horrible morass that is watching a movie in a cinema today: people talking (loudly) all through the movie, people talking (loudly) on their phones all the way through the movie, people walking in and out of the cinema all through the movie, deafening movie soundtracks with bass turned up so high it can make one feel nauseated, trash and litter everywhere… do I need to go any further?
The only reason I’d go to the movies would be to watch Donald Trump winning his second term on Election Night in November 2020 — and that won’t be screened in cinemas anyway, so I can watch it for free on TV and (even better) see the mainstream TV personalities’ reaction:
(picture credit: some sick bastard on the Internet)
Try to follow along with this story (there may be a test).
Man and woman get engaged ‘cos they wuv each other. (So far, so good, happens all the time.) Man decides that he likes dressing up in women’s clothing. (Okay, this doesn’t happen all the time, even nowadays.) Woman can’t stand the thought of her man stealing her undies and bras (understandable), but instead of handing him his exit ticket, she decides to have an affair with another man (somewhat understandable, perhaps, but getting wonky).
Here’s where it goes all pear-shaped.
Bra-wearing fiance discovers the affair, and when he discovers that she’s going to leave him for Roger The Lodger, beats woman to death with a pole.(I would call that an extreme reaction, but who am I to get all judgey about this?) Then, when charged with his beloved’s murder, he claims that she was “confrontational” and “provoked” him with words. (Apparently, the deceased was Australian, so one can only imagine…)
In the midst of my laughter while reading the article, however, I just can’t help thinking that at some point, all this may somehow have been avoidable.
Maybe if the Brits stopped Australians from coming to the U.K., if transvestism was banned, or if extramarital bonking was outlawed (or all three)…?
