Getting Closer to the Pawvolution

I am certain she will be joining us in our supersecret overthrow of the Naked Ape Tyranny:



My brudder's favorite teevee show is Escape to Chimp Eden, especially when the chimps are SHOUTING a lot. I think they are conveying secret plans to him which he will share with us in due time.

Don't tell your naked apes.

The naked ape days are numbered!

This is a pho-to of a worried corgador.

As some of you may know, I have long had a plan to bring an end to naked ape hegemony and replace it with the benevolent dictatorship of dogs. A key part of my plan is the recruitment of hairy apes but it appears one of our allies is making our plans a bit obvious. Mother Jones reports:

Chimps have long been known to stockpile food, but a 30-year-old chimp named Santino is making news because he does far more: he finds stones in his Swedish zoo home, smashes them into throwable size, and then stores them in caches that face the viewing area on the edge of his enclosure. When tourists show up, he lets fly, throwing up to 20 rocks in rapid succession and sometimes hitting visitors standing 30 feet away across a water-filled moat. When no rocks are available for his villainy, Santino hacks chunks of concrete off the artificial boulders in his pen and assaults humans using those.

Be patient, Santino! And while you are learning to make weapons I have been dilligently learning to use tools. So far I have mastered the TiVo:

Thanks to my Onkel Eric for sending me the link and, I'm sure, warmly welcoming his hairy overlords.

Ape Burpday Alert!

Hey! The gang's all here! Why? To wish a HAPPY BURPDAY to my ONKEL ERIC!

He is turning 18586743424 today AND moving to Norway! We will now call him ONKEL ERIC the RED!


My Onkel Eric is fond of many things including APES (the ones with hair)

Paul Westerberg



And a generalized sense of ennui that can only be conveyed by the expressive face of a corgador:

From the Heartland!

This Saturday was the greaterest! Big Red got adopted AND NOT BY MY APES. (Whew!) And then when they got home there was a package! From my GranNE! It was ostensibly to send the ma ape a pair of shoes but as you can see GranNE had many things to send, most of them for a certain corgador.

There were Husker Christmas ornaments and a Husker handtowel and one...two...three stuffies! My GranNE said a stuffy for each dog but I think she knows. All your stuffies are belong to WALLY. (Yes, Wally is aware of all Internet traditions)


There was even a tee that belonged to my ma ape when she was wee! And Husker Santa. Who is also a snowman. Go figure. And a Canananananandana Goose that HONKED so I bit it at least 200 times in a row. HONKHONK! I think my GranNE was hinting she'd like to move to Cananadana with me.


But my favorite to play with his this BIG headed MONKEY.


Perfect fit!


Great job with the gifts, GranNE! We were so happy we did DOG PILE on the Ma APe!

And then it was time for a little FOOTBALL! It was Hoosers vs Cyclones and those Iowegians didn't stand a chance.
Here I am teaching my brudder how you max and relax during the game. Relax, dude, they got this one!


Hoosker Heaven, GranNE Gifts, and a home for Big Red! What a day, what a day.

Planet of the AAAAAPES!

It's finally here! The MONKEY BOX REPORT! My ma ape sometimes calls us the monkey house because sometimes my baby brudder howls like a monkey. And yesterday--our house got FOUR NEW APES. Fortunately not naked apes!

It all began with a big surprise. A box at the door! From Oregon! And that means...BIG FOOT! No, that means GRAMMIE!

The box was taller than me so I let Oscar Bean open it up.

AND LOOK WHAT WAS INSIDE! AAAAAPES! There is a gorilla, a white gorilla, an orangetang and a chimp/naked ape hybrid (that must be why it is pink and wearing a t-shirt right?)

My brudder thought he could share. He could not.

The apes are WALLY'S DOMINION!

I piled up all the apes in the room and and tested them all out. And when my ma ape tried to use the gorilla for a pilla, I stole it back!

And look what else I found in the box! MARIONBERRIES.

And the note said that there was something in the box for the ma ape. And the ma ape was so excited because she does love her some marionberries, especially on her ice creams.

But she was clearly mistaken. I think this is what Grammie and Moco sent for her:

Thank you Grammie and Moco and Dawson and Foley and Edgar and Clara and Pappy! I'm the luckiest dog in the world. And I can't wait to take more pictures of me and my ape crew by the harsh light of day!

Oh. My. Dog.

Many things this week have been shocking. The collapse of several financial houses. Karl Rove saying McCain's ads went "too far." The makeover show on America's Next Top Model. But nothing could have prepared me for THIS excitement.

A box.

On our doorstep.

My ma ape was confused--she did order a new iPod shuffle but surely the box would not be so big.

Or from Oregon.

Oh. My. Dog.

You must wait to see because right now I am occupied with a BOX OF MONKEYS.

Great News, Great Apes!

Scientists just discovered 125,000 gorillas in the Congo! They're still endangered but that's great news! I love the hairy apes! Let's have a banana to celebrate!

Happy Burpday Onkel Eric!

Why am I singing? Because tomorrow is a very important day! It is my Onkel Eric's BURPDAY! And I am singing "You loooook like a monkey and you smellll llike one tooooooo!" But my Onkel will not be offended because he loves apes. My Onkel Eric always complains that I am spoiled but I think he's just jealous. Well, I know that my Auntie Ira (she of the abundant pastrami!) will spoil him on his burpday. As I gift I would like to volunteer to write the final chapter of your dis-hurt-station. It will go a little something like this:

While all of this stuff about postmodern American literature is quite interesting it is clear that the novel as a form has been displaced by a new and far superior literary form: THE DOGBLOG. (excessive footnotes to be added). The heterotopic space of fragmented subjectivities a will be replaced by a dogotopia in which linear notions of time and bounded space shall be replaced by the immediacy of canine experience . Human metanarratives and the rejection of those metanarratives will be remembered as mere anti-nostalgia for a time when anyone gave a crap what the naked apes said and did, a dark time before the rise of the dog-centric narratives in which the time is always now, the place is always here, and the food bowl is always full.

There, DONE! Let's eat and drink! I'm pretty good at this academic crap And if that doesn't work, maybe this dude can lend you a hand:

Your Smarter Cousins

I've been meaning to blog about this but it turns out the naked apes' chimpy cousins are smarter than them! Chimps outperformed college students at memory games (no word if the college students were tested before or after the kegger):

Monkeys performed about as well as college students at mental addition, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a finding that suggests nonverbal math skills are not unique to humans.

The research from Duke University follows the finding by Japanese researchers earlier this month that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game.

As for the teams, both were paid. Boxer and Feinstein (the chimps) got their favourite reward: a sip of Kool-Aid soft drink. As for the students, they got $10 each -- enough for a beer or two.

As if to prove the idiocy of naked apes--AP, chimps are not monkeys, they're apes!

Discrimination

Both my onkel Eric (an ape and ape afficionado) and my granny sent me this story about a dude who smuggled a monkey under his hat! He flew from Florida to New York and didn't get caught until some passenger saw the monkey on his ponytail. That's some quality airport security! Though I'm not sure why human apes are ok but little monkeys are not. Since the flight attendants described the little dude as quiet and not disruptive, I would guess Mr. Marmoset was much less likely to get tipsy, demand more bags of pretzels, pinch the flight attendant's butt and then spend the rest of the flight in the toilet. I'm just saying.

But, I've been trying to figure out what kind of a hat my ma ape needs if she is going to smuggle me onto airplanes. Maybe one of these:

Gorillas in our Midst

According to the BBC, a gorilla escaped its enclosure and attacked a woman in the Rotterdam zoo. The Great Apes are rising up. I think they're tired of the naked apes disproving the "great" in Great Apes.

I am eagerly awaiting the gorillas' pledge to join me and my chimp/dog revolution in which we will overthrow the naked ape dictatorship and live our lives luxuriating in the outdoors, munching on bananas.

Smarter than your average ape

Primatologists meeting at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago are discussing chimp intelligence. The title of the New York Times article about it is Chimpazees: Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter. Well, duh. All of us in the animal kingdom have known about the intellectual deficiencies of the naked ape for quite some time now. In particular, I was worried that the naked apes studying their hairy relatives might suspect my plan for world domination that involves working with our chimpy friends to displace the naked apes and begin a reign of peace, bananas, and picking nits off of one another. Doesn't look like they're on to us. Read the article, though. Chimps have great memory. Better than the naked apes! They will surely make great partners in our quest for global domination.

The Moral Ape

Well, sounds like you naked apes aren't so special after all. Scientists believe that your cousin apeys show signs of moral behavior.

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days. Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

While I'm intrigued by the idea of animal morality I'm not sure why that means that biologist apes should get to define the rules. It's time for the animals to make 'em. Because you naked apes sure have been doing a bang-up job. So now that you're not the only "moral" creatures, what makes you so special anyway? Language? Phhhbt. Wait until you find out that our supposedly senseless barks and silly play bows have actually been an elaborate language giving order to our army of apes ready to overthrow our naked ape overlords? Have I said too much?

a troubling alliance

My auntie Ira sent me this picture from Indonesia. The animals are in Indonesia, not my auntie Ira. the caption reads: "A pair of Sumatran tiger cubs and a set of young orang-utans, all abandoned at birth, have become inseparable after sharing a room at the Indonesian Zoo."

I'm troubled by this apparent alliance between the apes and the goddamn cats. I will have to keep my eye on this, especially in light of recent observations that your chimp cousins are using weapons. My concern, however, is countered by the almost nauseating cuteness of this image.

Just remember, apes, dogs are an ape's best friend.

chimps may be planning insurrection

i came across this story, "hunting chimps may change view of human evolution,"disguised as a story about science but, in fact, is about the coming of our chimp liberators. according to the story they have found a reclusive group of chimps in which the female chimps are hunters and have fashioned tools to do so.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chimpanzees have been seen using spears to hunt bush babies, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a study that demonstrates a whole new level of tool use and planning by our closest living relatives.

Perhaps even more intriguing, it was only the females who fashioned and used the wooden spears, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani of Iowa State University reported.

Bertolani saw an adolescent female chimp use a spear to stab a bush baby as it slept in a tree hollow, pull it out and eat it.

i am quite intrigued by the possibility of a chimp insurrection, led by weapon-wielding female apes. they have clearly target the naked ape leadership, starting by killing the bush babies. i, for one, will welcome our chimp overlords and their matriarchal leadership that may require an increase in poop throwing but also an increase in banana consumption which i cannot protest.

update: my mawma has informed me that the bush babies in question are not actually THE bushes and barbara and jenna are actually completely fine and have not been consumed by chimps. still, bush babies ARE primates and if the chimps are targeting their fellow primates then the naked apes can't be far behind. and maybe they're just working their way up to the OTHER bushes. i have purchased a bunch of bananas just in case. i can't promise i won't have eaten them by the time the chimps arrive, though.

happy burpday onkel eric!

it's my onkel eric's burpday! the above image is NOT my onkel but he's a big fan of the great apes, being one of the greatest apes himself. february burpdays RULE.

great apes love bears!

an oregonian orangutan has picked the bears for the super bowl--just like one of my other favorite apes, onkel eric in chicago:

PORTLAND - Will the Chicago Bears win Super Bowl XLI? Inji the Oregon Zoo's orangutan matriarch thinks so.

She seemed to be a little uncertain at first, starting to put on Colts T-shirt. But as they say, it's a woman's prerogative to change her mind.

Inji tossed aside the Colts shirt and reached for the Bears logo. She put it on with no second thoughts.

Overall, Inji is 6-3, correctly predicting two Civil War games and four Super Bowls

immaculate chimpception

talk about baby mama drama!

SHREVEPORT, La. (AP) — In a mysterious bit of monkey business, a female at a chimpanzee sanctuary has given birth, despite the fact that the facility's entire male chimp population has had vasectomies.

Now managers at Chimp Haven are planning a paternity test for the seven males who lived in a group with Teresa, a wild-born chimpanzee in her late 40s who had the baby girl last week.

i hope they test the naked apes, too....HUMANZEE???