Happy Ever After, All

I WAS GOING TO leave this one alone, but what the hell. The Sun (uh huh) reports on our favourite gay penguins. They were the ones allegedly "quarrelling with another male over stolen eggs" - although we still haven't heard back from the interpreter regarding the veracity of that quote. Maybe they were quarrelling about getting into Noah's Ark. No? Well, I thought it was funny. Anyway, they've only gone and got married, haven't they? Yes, the saddlebacking bible nuts might not allow us to wed in California, but the Chinese will let penguins do it. So there. Oh yeah, and best wishes to the happy couple. I hope it all works out. Previously: Gays Make The Best Parents

In Pictures: 2008 By Garçon Stupide

January: Barack Obama announces that his favourite TV show is The Wire (the seminal cinema experience of this decade), and that his favourite character is Omar Little. Well, that should have made Mister Obama my favourite politician, like, ever. Except he added, "That's not an endorsement. He's not my favorite person, but he's a fascinating character," which yours truly decided to interpret as a wholesale attack on the gay community. I'm a bit silly.


February: Keyontyli and Taleon Goffney, known to boys (and maybe even a few girls) the length and breadth of the world wide web as gay porn twins Keyon and Teyon, are arrested for a series of alleged robberies. The juicy details of the story are widely reported, but no one seems interested in delving into the real heart of the matter. Who are these young men, and what happened to them, for it to come to this?



March: Serapis Kephra, a.k.a model and stripper K-Rock, is taken by cancer.








May: Left-wing, pro-gay, pro-green, pro-diversity Ken Livingstone is ousted as London's Mayor. Conservative toff Boris Johnson, infamous for his quips at the expense of gays and ethnic minorities, is voted in. Within weeks, one of his deputies is demanding Afro-Caribbean Londoners go back where they came from, whilst another resigned following financial irregularities.




June: BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF (or to put it another way, the most exciting forty-seven seconds of television this year).

July: The story of Kamal, a young gay men in Iraq, makes for gruelling reading. Rape and torture are rife for our brothers (and sisters) in that country. I wonder where Kamal is now, and what 2009 holds for him?






August: I love animals. They're much less disappointing than people. I especially like dogs, so the BBC's expose of the pedigree dog industry sickened me. Man's inhumanity to man? Man's inhumanity, I say.






September: D'Angelo, D'Angelo, D'Angelo... You been gone so long, and after reading David Peisner's incredibly informative article in Spin, I finally understand why. They say the Voodoo man will be back in 2009. I really hope he is.






October: The justice system claims my bff, my ex, my rock, or as R. Kelly (hmm...) once said, my homie, lover, friend. Losing him was like losing a limb, and I was angry. I lost it, and I haven't really recovered yet.






November: Nabeer Bakurally is the 28th - and last - teenage boy murdered in London in 2008. Shaquille Smith, left, was killed in August, at the height of the murders. The loss of so many bright, beautiful young men is horrific. I mourn them all. We were once them.





December: Religion sucks. God is a lie. December sees the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and the marriage of an eight year old child in Saudi Arabia to a middle-aged man - fully sanctioned by an Islamic dictatorship (meanwhile, the Pope compares Us to the holocaust).

Gore: Eau De Mort

Oh, innit nice: a perfume that smells like rotting flesh, by PETA. It's a response to the Burger King gimmick whereby you could run around smelling like a whopper, presumably with a pack of drooling canines in tow. PETA says: "Most cows killed for fast-food burgers are castrated and branded without any painkillers, fed a diet of hormones and antibiotics, and often transported to slaughter without food or water in all weather extremes. At slaughterhouses, they are strung up by one hind leg before their throats are cut and their skin is pulled from their bodies – sometimes while they are still conscious."

More here.

Racial Purity and Deformed Mutants, Part II

Back in August, the BBC screened an expose on the disturbing tactics employed by pedigree dog breeders in Britain, and the part played by the Kennel Club and Crufts, the world famous pedigree dog show. Check out the original story here. The BBC has announced that it won't screen next year's show, the first time it's missed covering the event in forty years. The decision follows a collapse in talks over what to do about those breeds at risk of serious health problems - brought on by decades of inbreeding. "We need to be confident the measures being taken now and planned for the future are effective in addressing the issues raised about the health of some pedigree dogs before we return to broadcasting the event," said George Entwistle, controller of BBC Knowledge.

The Kennel Club had this to say: "The Kennel Club regrettably had to refuse to comply with the unreasonable demands insisted on by the BBC, to exclude certain breeds of dog from the group competition at the show. These demands took no account of the measures the Kennel Club has in place to improve the health of pedigree dogs." All a bit late in the day - if the Kennel Club were at all concerned about the health of the dogs, then they wouldn't have waited until their obscene practises (such as the mating of mothers and sons, and brothers with sisters et cetera) had been exposed on national television before taking action. And how, exactly, do you reverse the effect of decades of inbreeding anyway? Remember, there's around 10,000 pugs in Great Britain, but they only have the equivalent gene pool of 50 individuals. Pugs are susceptible to serious eye damage simply from bumping into things - and that's just one example of a breed in trouble. Pet food brand Pedigree has withdrawn its sponsorship; the RSPCA and the Dogs Trust have both cut their association with the show.

Gays Make The Best Parents

Tell us something we don't know - and now it's been proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, at a zoo in China. A pair of gay penguins were given eggs of their own after trying to steal those of straight penguins (who had to get their wings dirty and mate with a female - UGH!).

"They've turned out to be the best parents in the whole zoo," one of the keepers said. Now, how they measured the parenting skills of the gay penguins against those of the straight ones I don't know, but quite frankly, attempted theft of someone elses unborn baby doesn't seem like a good start.

According to the Mail Online, the picture shows our clucky couple "quarrelling with another male over stolen eggs."

Right. That's according to the qualified penguin interpreter, is it?

The full story is here.

PIGS

This article has been updated and moved.

You can find it here.

Tortoises Will Inherit The Earth!

Take a good look: this tortoise is 176 years old, and that's a jolly long time by anyone's standards. Towleroad and the Telegraph have more.

Racial Purity and Deformed Mutants

How many of you own a pedigree dog? A Cocker Spaniel, a Husky, a Dalmatian? Or for the ladies amongst you, a Chihuahua? I guess you feel pretty proud of yourself, with your pure breed canine - no ugly mongrel for you, right? Well, this might come as a shock, but what you really have there is a deformed, disease-prone mutant with a life of suffering ahead of it: and it's your fault. The BBC has exposed the dark underbelly of pedigree dog breeding and the horrific consequences of decades of inbreeding. Three quarters of the dogs in the UK are thought to be pedigree and there are some two hundred different breeds - each with their own set of problems. Labradors are beset with joint and eye problems. Golden Retrievers face an alarmingly high rate of cancer, whilst Boxers suffer brain tumours and a rate of epilepsy twenty times that of humans. Rhodesian Ridgebacks have tiny holes in their skins that form direct channels to bone, tissue and organs. Bulldogs can't breed or give birth without human intervention. Cavalier Spaniels are plagued by brains that are too big for their skulls. In human beings, it's generally accepted that reproduction between mothers and sons, and brothers and sisters, et cetera, is a bad idea. But for some reason the practice has been encouraged - indeed, enforced - in canines. The result is that pedigree dogs have only 10% of the genes they had forty years ago. There's around 10,000 Pugs in the UK, yet amongst those 10,000 dogs, there's the equivalent gene pool of only 50 individuals. The faces of Pugs are now so flat that the animal damages its eyes when it bumps into things. It wasn't me describing pedigree dogs as deformed, disease-prone mutants. That's the opinion of the RSPCA's (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) Chief Vet: "What I see in front of me is a parade of mutants. It's some freakish, garish beauty pageant that has nothing to do with health and welfare." He's talking about the glamorous world of dog shows, and Crufts in particular. Crufts is described as the world's greatest dog show, and is organised by the Kennel Club. The Kennel Club publishes the Breed Standards, which breeders follow religiously; the Breed Standards dictate the qualities dogs must display in order to win at Crufts. These qualities are purely cosmetic - Boxers must have "massive" heads, Pugs curled tails, sausage dogs short legs - and dogs are bred for these qualities alone, with no regard for their quality of life or long term health. Just look at the footage of German Shepherds at Crufts, unable to walk properly because their hind legs are so ludicrously short in comparison to their front legs. In the UK, £10 million a week is spent by pedigree dog owners on vet fees. It costs half as much to insure the health of a mongrel as it does that of a pedigree dog: that's because mongrels live longer and have considerably fewer health problems. Here's something else to ponder on: Crufts was born out of Eugenics, the doctrine that sought to genetically improve mankind by breeding the best with the best. Mixing of the races was strictly forbidden (James Earl Hardy would approve) so the human race could be purged of undesirable traits. The movement found its ultimate champion in Adolf Hitler. You can still see the BBC documentary, Pedigree Dogs Exposed, here. If the footage of Boxers having epileptic fits doesn't sicken you, nothing will.

Pigs And Polar Bears II

Those crazy folk up Iceland - what are they like, eh?

Not content with brutally slaughtering one lost, starving polar bear, Iceland's finest have only gone and shot up another of the beasts.

You may recall their last excuse was that they didn't have the right tranquilizer, so you might reasonably expect that they'd have it in place this time around.

Wrong.

Towleroad.com reports zoo spokesman Bengt Holst telling AFP: "The chief veterinarian from the Copenhagen zoo had been flown in late Tuesday to help. The police 'tried to get close to (the bear) with our vet, but they did not get close enough to shoot it with the anaesthetiser. Then the bear started running, so the police were frightened they would lose control. The bear could run very close to the populated area, so they decided to shoot it. It was a security problem."

A security problem. Uh huh.

Pigs and Polar Bears

Towleroad.com reports on the horrible story of a polar bear, climate change and some police (oink oink). Who's seen Sir David Attenborough's Planet Earth and the heartbreaking footage of a polar bear swimming, and swimming, and swimming in search of ice, before finally giving up? This is worse:

"A Polar Bear that swam 200 miles from either Greenland or a 'distant chunk of Arctic ice' finally reached land in Iceland, where it was shot by a group of police, They said they were afraid it posed a threat to humans but couldn't wait 24 hours for a "correct tranquilizer" to be flown in.

Actually: "Sveinbjarnardottir's account was disputed by the chief vet in the town of Blönduó, Egill Steingrímsson, who said he had the drugs necessary to immobilise the bear in the boot of his car. 'If the narcotics gun would have been sent by plane, it would have arrived within an hour,' he said. 'They could keep tabs on the bear for that long.'

And then the pigs posed smugly behind it like some kind of trophy — a starving, exhausted, (not to mention endangered) animal whose life had just ended by their rifles."

Hungry? How About Some Cow Stomach?

Some of the UK's favourite chocolate bars (or candy, if you're American) have, since 1st May last year, been manufactured using rennet. As you all know, rennet is a chemical found in calve's stomachs, and is used to make whey.

What's all the fuss about, you might ask? How many of us knew what was in our confectionary before this news broke anyway? Well, I don't know what's in most chocolate bars; in fact, I doubt many chocolate products contain much in the way of cocoa. But what I didn't expect to hear was that something as wholesome and innocent (ha ha) as a Twix or Snickers bar was pumped full of something out of a baby animal's guts.

Masterfoods, who make Twix and Bounty - as well as Mars bars, Maltesers and Bounty - say the new constituent is due to a change in sourcing ingredients. The Vegetarian Society has branded the decision "incomprehensible".

Incomprehensible indeed. At a time when consumers are increasingly concerned about what's in their food, you have to wonder: why?

Who says I don't like fish?

Here's a picture of a fish. Have a good look, because before long it's going to be the only view you'll have of one. Stocks of all fish species across the globe are predicted to collapse completely by 2048. It's a view many experts subscribe to, including Professor Callum Roberts, who launched his book An Unnatural History Of The Seas at the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference in York. The news is worse for Britain - ninety percent of fish will be gone by 2027, and it's all due to over-fishing.

The full story is here.