As the pudu will play an increasingly important role in society during the coming year, and since the serious study of pudus involves a number of specialized anatomical terms, here’s a handy chart, created by the International Pudu Society for Knowledge Bark of Pudu Bark Anatomy Bark Bark Pudu (IPSKBPBABBP):
The IPSKBPBABBP hopes this will help fill your future pudu-anatomy-discussion needs. And happy new year.
May your 2005 be filled with pudu, pudu, and more pudu.
Writing from Tasmania, which is a great place I’d love to write more about and surely will someday. But I just don’t feel like it right now.
I wish I knew how to do more to help the people who need it right this minute. I wish I knew how to get my government to behave without its usual level of shameless self-absorption and shortsightedness.
$35 million. Swell.
The death toll is rapidly approaching six digits — imagine 30 September 11ths, if you wish, with all the sudden speed, chaos, and complete wreckage of human life that entails — with the number of affected people surely ten times that high. And the richest country in the world, the one which believes itself to be singular among nations (thus ironically fulfilling the notion before the neurons have even cooled), can only muster a few dollars per life destroyed.
What’s $35 million?
The amount it takes to fix up one park in Pittsburgh.
It’s exactly one new school in Montclair, New Jersey.
It’s what Dick Cheney put in his own back pocket by ditching his Halliburton stock.
And it’s one four-thousandth of what the U.S. has spent invading and occupying Iraq.
Tens of thousands of dead in a dozen countries on two continents, after a disaster so large it literally changed the map of Indonesia and completely obliterated the southernmost tip of India.
Survival infrastructures are simply gone now in many places. Famine and pestilence are likely to take at least as many lives if the rest of us fellow humans don’t do enough to help right now.
$35 million. George W. Bush is telling the largest Muslim nation on Earth that the massive destruction in Aceh is worth less than the United States spends on occupying Iraq every day.
Obscenity.
Well, now we know what the pudus have been up to… I don’t have rights to the news photos, so here’s an illustration:
Details are just as sketchy, but apparently the reindeer have been
getting as red-state/blue-state as the rest of us. Dancer and Prancer
for some reason tend to be a bit more progressive than the rest, and
want Santa to consider economic sanctions against the Bush
administration. Dasher and Comet, meanwhile, have been pushing to
unionize, largely as a result of bad experiences working with
Volkswagen and Ford/Lincoln-Mercury in the 1970s.
Donner and Blitzen are more right-wing, and while they’ve been fighting
the other four, Cupid and Vixen have taken a libertarian position,
agreeing with the latter on economic issues but wanting everyone else
to stay the hell out of their private lives.
Apparently, things got so bad that Santa had to call in the pudus.
Alert reader Amy picks up the story, as she heard it while reading North Pole newspapers (apparently not online):
Being small, however, does not dampen the determination of these
would-be heroes. In fact, the smallest pudu is so resolute that he is
always the last to call it a day, and Santa has to carry him back to
the stables.
The youngster seems to have won the hearts of the entire team of reindeer.
It seems this smallest pudu is the one whom we should thank most. We pick up the story from just a few days ago:
Santa walked and smiled. "Ho, ho, ho, little one. This is too big a job for any one animal."
And with that, the youngest of the pudu suddenly began to cry. As Santa
tried to comfort him, he looked around at the gathering reindeer,
searching for words. Then taking a deep breath, in a very tiny voice,
the pudu began:
Strangely, at this point, the disembodied voice of Burl Ives picks up the story:
and Happy Everything to you.
Thanks to Amy, and to you, dear readers.
A Very Merry Absolutely Whatever, from the bottom of my heart.
This separated-at-birth observation via email from my buddy Joe Fedorko:
As Joe points out: if I’m the Capote estate, I’m suing.
UPDATE: Credit where due — as noted in the comments, First Draft was here first.
