Monday, November 07, 2005

 

H5N1 Panda Fever

Apparently the frenzy over the baby panda at the national zoo has continued. Even spilling over to Fox news. http://www.wonkette.com/politics/butterstick/index.php what is this? The new disco? The world is coming to an end, let's all embrace a captive-bred baby mammal?
Besides, captive breeding is a complete fucking waste of time and money from a population genetics perspective. Captive breeding is not a substitute for habitat conservation. It only works to augment slow-growing populations or ones with minimum critical densities that can be viable in the wild in sufficent numbers. Are you listening, China? If you are still reading after that, I dug out a robin williams bit about captive bred pandas which was recorded before there were any captive bred pandas. Now between DC and San Diego it is almost passe, but here it is anyway:

Even the poor animals like Ling Ling the Panda,
she must mate, so you can build a wing on the Zoo.
They go to China, they anesthetize a Panda,
which is kinda redundant...
They bring him back to America and give him a name like Ping Pong.
When his Chinese name was Who Shu Ko Hu,
Bear with Balls of Steel.
They put him in a cage with Ling Ling, saying: "Go, mate!"
He looks at her like: "I would never fuck her!"
"That is one ugly Panda bitch."
"If you were Panda, you'd know that's the fucking ugliest Panda bitch."
I wouldn't have fuck her with a Koala's dick!
Fuck off!
I would rather lick my own balls, than fuck that Panda bitch!

(I had to put the whole piece in or you, too, would have had to wade through the script of his whole show like I did. who loves ya?)

if you still love baby pandas after all that, you can watch tai shan here http://animal.discovery.com/cams/pandavidr.html. or buy t-shirts here http://www.cafepress.com/bstick. despite being bitter, I believe misdirected conservation dollars are better than no conservation dollars.




Comments:
You have to wonder what message the call-it-Butterstick shirt-in people going for. Che Guevara looked determined and ruggedly handsome on his t-shirts. Butterstick looks, well, captive. Did Che openly raise money for the people who refused to meet his demands? I don't think so. Wouldn't the blogosphere be better served by mounting a small intensely violent guerilla operation to hack into National Zoo headquarters and change all references to the panda from Tai Shan to Butterstick? I suppose we ought to respect the attempt to popularize a slightly less-cute image of the panda, if that's indeed what's going on. Sort of preparing us for when Butterstick is old and jaded and has gotten lax about hiding his chainsmoking habit. Unless of course the whole thing is a very sly play on the fact that Tai Shan is supposed to mean "peaceful mountain", in which case I am all admiration but still won't be buying a t-shirt.
 
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
 
susykrasnerimissyou neglected the other possible meanings of "Tai Shan": "moss mountain," which is as boring as peaceful mountain, "big mountain," and "attitude mountain," both of which do much to revitalize the Robin Williams spin on things. Yes, folks, that little butterstick-sized bundle of panda is actually a mountain of attitude. Because attitude is invisible, see?
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?