Parts of Britain woke up to snow today as forecasters issued several ice alerts after warnings that up to half a months worth of rain will fall on already flood-hit areas.
East Gloucestershire, parts of Wiltshire and South Wales were pictured blanketed in snow this morning in the first dusting of the winter.
The Met Office issued several alerts for snow and ice across the South East and South West of England, South Wales and the West Midlands that were in force until 10am.
And the usual pics of the snow “blanket”:
Meanwhile, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula:
All that said, however, the flooding in northern Britishland has been heavy:
…and those are fields, not a river bursting its banks.
Let’s set the scene, here. You and a bunch of your buddies go out to a nightclub in a foreign country — let’s call it Western Europe — and start doing what you always wanted to do with a bunch of women Back Home but couldn’t because the women’s brothers and cousins have no sense of humor and are likely to cut your nuts off. Now these “foreign” women are not only dressed like whores but also seem to have no brothers and cousins whatsoever. But for some reason, they get upset with being pawed, fingered and squeezed without giving permission (go figure, right?). So they call the club bouncers and you get tossed out on the street because you’re acting like oafish animals.
Do you think, “Hmmm… maybe this isn’t the way to do things here. Perhaps we ought to change our behavior somewhat.” Of course you don’t — because, as it happens, you’re a bunch of oafish animals. (And let’s take a wild guess at this point, and assume that Back Home is nowhere close to Western Europe.)
So what you do is return to the same nightclub and demand to be let back in and when refused entry, you try scaling the fences and getting in that way — you know, like you used to do Back Home. The bouncers, for some reason, aren’t having any of this and toss you back out onto the street.
Whereupon you and your oafish buddies pull out a couple machetes (that you just happened to have about your person) and attack the bouncers.
No doubt, when these pricks are eventually captured it’ll be all about the pore starvin migrants and asylum seekers, and some asswipe German judge will rule that the bouncers were actually to blame.
And when the German people get upset about this, they’ll be labeled “rightwingers”…
…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.
