Evidence That the Human Race is Weird, but Worth Saving

On Saturday, July 7, 2012, Denver’s Highland neighborhood reenacted for the second consecutive year its own version of the Running of the Bulls, an event that has been a tradition in Pamplona, Spain, for nearly eighty-two thousand years.¹

Everything about this looks fun. Educational, too—this photograph
gave us good reason to look up the phrase “carotid artery.”

While the Running of the Bulls is held in many other Spanish cities and also in various other parts of Europe, Mexico, and even (oddly enough) Nevada, the spectacle did not gain worldwide attention until the 1926 publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and—of far more cultural significance—the 1991 release of Billy Crystal’s enduring classic City Slickers.

The event, which is a prelude to a series of bullfights in the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, has garnered quite a bit of negative publicity in recent years and even protests from the kinds of folks who, for weird reasons they probably can’t even articulate, object to living creatures being stabbed to death for our entertainment.

What the Denver event lacked in injuries, violent deaths,² and Billy Crystal’s buttcheeks, it more than made up in terms of fishnet stockings, wheels, and blind terror,³ as the bulls in this case were not actual bulls but rather members of the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls, who chased participants around a one-kilometer course with wiffle-bats in hand and, without a doubt, murder in their hearts.

Fool—never look behind you! This was almost certainly the last thing this man ever saw.
Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post.

Proceeds for the event are to go to the Tennyson Center for Children. If we were forced to decide between risking getting killed by an angry 2,000-pound bull to get an adrenaline rush, or getting bopped by a pool noodle for charity, we know what we’d pick. But, of course, both options involve running, which is stupid—so screw ’em both, we’re staying right here on the couch.

It beats being trampled and gored to death, for any number of reasons.
Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post.

NOTES
1. All numbers approximate.
2. Fifteen bull runners have died in Pamplona since 1910. But that number reaches into the thousands or even hundreds of thousands if you count all the bull runners who have died in Pamplona of other, non-bull-related causes, such as fright, cancer, old age, and death. So, really, running with the bulls is horrifically dangerous.
3. Possibly nose rings, too.

Ha! We Get It!

 

Wait, hang on. 

Nope, we totally don’t get it.

What?
 

Obama's "Real" Birth Certificate Fails to Prove that Hawai'i Isn't in Kenya

Skeptics also note that the “Birth Certificate” fails to include any traditional form of identification such as a driver’s license, credit card or ATM card, DNA map, retinal scan, or stool sample.

In a disappointing but perhaps inevitable concession to the deafening jabbering of some of the most batshit crazy people in our nation’s history,¹ President Barack Obama released his long-demanded long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011, adding another layer to the colossal mountain of evidence in support of the well-established fact that he was, in fact, born in the United States of America, just as he and the handful of sensible people left in the country—Democrat, Republican, and miscellaneous—have maintained all along.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, in a stunning display of gall that would be hilarious to imagine but an embarrassment because it actually happened, succeeded in distorting his perception of reality to the point where he was actually willing to blame Obama for the distraction this non-issue has caused:

“The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy,” Priebus said. “Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority—our economy.”²

The good news, though, is that now that Obama has finally decided, once and for all, to stop accusing himself of being born in Kenya despite all the common sense and evidence to the contrary, hassling himself for answers to questions that he shouldn’t have been silly enough to raise in the first place, and interrupting reasonable discussions with his half-baked nonsense about conspiracies, he can get down to finding answers to the real questions at hand.

Those real questions are, of course (1) how could Obama possibly have known, forty-six years before his election, that his future presidency would depend on creating a perfect forgery of both the official birth certificate and the long-form version, and (2) how could he have not only produced such a document but also managed to infiltrate the Hawaiian government offices where such records are kept and insert the birth certificate(s) and all the necessary ancillary paperwork without being undetected, just a few days after he was born? What kind of superhuman infant was he?

The fact of the matter is that those birth certificates and records are there, plain to see, and are indistinguishable in every possible way from real ones—so he obviously pulled it off somehow. But before you start going on about how such Machiavellian scheming, complex motor skills, and mastery of language, government paper stocks, and ink mixture are rare even among children born to supervillains with giant, pulsating brains, you should consider the far more reasonable option: obviously, the current-day Barack Obama simply has access to a time machine, and he traveled back to 1961 and explained these convoluted plans to his younger self in a language that only he and others from his home planet would be able to comprehend.

Honestly, use your heads, people. It’s so simple, a child could have figured it out. Especially one with a giant, pulsating brain. Private citizens had access to time-travel technology as early as 1985; a sitting President could easily have gotten his hands on it.

When this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you’re
going to see some serious shit.

NOTE

1. To be fair, not everyone that wondered about Obama’s birthplace is necessarily batshit crazy. It’s quite possible that a great many of them were sane, but too intellectually lazy to do the very few minutes’ worth of online research required to throw plenty of light on the fact that the claims put forth by birthers have been uniformly ludicrous. Really, we’re trying to be serious here. We know several decent, reasonable people who had their doubts about Obama’s citizenship—friends, some of them, although they might have changed their minds after reading this—and still others who joked about it but, we suspect, didn’t actually buy it . . . and yet we still have no idea how this line of thought is possible in a reasonable person.

2. “Obama releases birth form, decries ‘silliness,’” Denver Post, April 27, 2011.

Fake Pandas for Sale

In one of the most stunning advances in bizarro genetic engineering since 1997’s pot-bellied elephant, northern Colorado farmer Chris Jessen has bred a miniature cow that sorta looks like a panda.

Our latest crime against nature. Possibly just a misdemeanor.

This made news not only locally but also across the country (in the Washington Post and Orange County Register, among others) and as far away as London,¹ which leads us to believe that either 2011 has (with this notable exception) started off in a spectacularly boring fashion, or that this weird little cow’s existence is far more momentous than one might suspect.

The birth of Ben, the miniature panda cow, is not Chris Jessen’s first encounter with shrimpy animals. His “hobby farm” is depicted in various brief articles as a sort of haven for wee creatures—not only miniature cows and donkeys but also an animal described by different sources as either a miniature kangaroo or a wallaby, which is, as we understand it, similar to an oversized miniature kangaroo, only smaller.

From what we’ve been able to learn from a casual stroll through the Internet, $0.75 to $1.00 per pound is not an unreasonable price if you’re looking to buy a fully-functional cow. Ben, however, may sell for as much as $30,000. This may seem like a lot, but it is certainly much, much cheaper than the trying to buy an actual panda, so one might consider this a bargain.

For a mere thirty thousand dollars—barely enough to make a down payment on a home in many parts of the country—you can invest it in an animal that kinda resembles a totally different animal. But wait—there’s more! While most bargain-basement cows are bred to produce milk or be delicious, the panda cow is said to “not have much practical use”—beyond, presumably, standing around chewing and crapping all day with flies on its eyeballs.

We’re not about to tell you how to spend your money—if Ben the Imposter Panda is the pet you’ve always been waiting for, knock yourself out. A delegation from China has already visited Jessen’s farm and was reportedly fascinated, so this weird little venture may well pay off. But unless Ben the Imposter Panda tastes exactly like real panda, or proves he can mimic adorably fat panda antics such as pantomiming kung fu or getting stuck in a tree, we’ll just keep saving up until we can afford the real thing, thank you very much.

100% authentic panda. Accept no substitutes.

NOTES

1. Capital city of Guatemala, according to our Geography Department.