Dueling Pandas

Rob emails this:


Mary replies with this:



>_<

Every Child's Christmas Dream

I had dinner with Mary and Rob on Monday night, and Mary brought me a Christmas gift:

A Robot Panda-slave! And her eyes glow green! Mary suggested I name her Dinner, after my Facebook fur friend, but I think Susan Smith might be more appropriate.

I need to make some YouTube videos of it walking and crushing it's young. Stay tuned!

WaPo's Easter Peep Diorama Contest

Greta forwarded this artcle to me from Washingtonpost.com:

Peeps Show
By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page M01

Wow.

We were expecting a dozen or so entrants for our first-ever Peeps Diorama Contest. We got somewhere north of 350 from across the area and the world.

Who knew marshmallow treats inspired such creativity? Here, see some of the inspired entries from the first-ever Sunday Source Peeps Diorama Contest.
There were copious dioramas with antiwar or patriotic themes ("Give Peeps a Chance" and "George Washingpeep Crossing the Delaware," for example). Several chronicled Britney Spears's meltdown in front of the "Peeparazzi." Two dioramas adapted a classic Charlton Heston movie line: "Soylent Green is Peeps!"

There were some that stretched the boundaries of taste, such as the diorama titled "Dear Metrobus: Please Stop Running Over Our Peeps," which featured a cardboard bus with prostrated marshmallow bunnies in front of it. And an Army officer stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, crafted a diorama of Saddam Hussein's execution, with a purple bunny Peep hanging from a noose.

As we said: Wow.

[...]

I pulled out two local highlights:

"Rosslyn Metro Station, Friday 5 p.m."

Semifinalist: "We thought it would just be funny to show the world as most people see it on a Friday afternoon," says Maria McLeod, 27, a sales associate at Express who collaborated with her brother-in-law, Phil Bauer. The pair took some shots in a station with a digital camera and pasted the photos onto cardboard to create the train and the tunnel.



"Peepsamania at the National Zoo"

Semifinalist: "It's about the whole panda hoopla," says Jill Yutan, 45, a landscape architect who lives in Arlington. "I was kind of amazed by all the professional adults out there with their cameras watching Tai Shan's every move."



The rest of the Top 22 photos are here.

CNN.com's editor celebrates 7th birthday

What the fuck is this?



Pandas are faggots.

People and Pandas play-biting

This may be yesterday's news, but the pictures China Daily added of the guy's injuries are awesome:

BEIJING - A drunken Chinese migrant worker jumped into a panda enclosure at the Beijing Zoo, was bitten by the bear and retaliated by chomping down on the animal's back, state media said Wednesday.

Zhang Xinyan, from the central province of Henan, drank four jugs of beer at a restaurant near the zoo before visiting Gu Gu the panda on Tuesday, the Beijing Morning Post said.

"He felt a sudden urge to touch the panda with his hand," and jumped into the enclosure, the newspaper said.

The panda, who was asleep, was startled and bit Zhang, 35, on the right leg, it said. Zhang got angry and kicked the panda, who then bit his other leg. A tussle ensued, the paper said.

Zhang Xinyan is in Renmin Hospital, and both of his legs are badly injured. "I bit the fellow in the back," Zhang was quoted as saying in the newspaper. "Its skin was quite thick."

Other tourists yelled for a zookeeper, who got the panda under control by spraying it with water, reports said. Zhang was hospitalized.

Newspaper photographs showed Zhang lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages and a seam of stitches running down his leg.

The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang as saying that he had seen pandas on television and "they seemed to get along well with people."

"No one ever said they would bite people," Zhang said. "I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don't remember much."

Ye Mingxia, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Zoo, confirmed the incident happened but would not give any details. She said Gu Gu was "healthy."

"We're not considering punishing him now," Ye said in a telephone interview. "He's suffered quite a bit of shock."

Panda bites man, no story. Man bites panda, now that's a story.

China's Family Planning Paradox

From MSNBC, basically they abort a fetus and rape a panda. Did that Panda want to be a mommy? Should you impose frozen panda sperm on the na-na of someone without parental aptitude who just wants to smoke opium and chew bamboo?

Nature has given us it's opinion on pandas: net zero gain. One panda is born, another is crushed by its sleepy mommy. It's not unlike nature's view of Anna Nicole's children.

The Week in Pandas

Forget about Paris Hilton's DUI and (Asian-looking) Suri Cruise's pictures in Vanity Fair, this news cycle has been all Pandas, all the time.

First up, the birth of a new cub by artificial insemination at the Zoo in Atlanta.


From Wonkette:

What else do you need to know? Some zoo down in CNN-ville has some low-level pandas that make even average pandas seem like Lindsey Lohan.

But the incompetent mama panda was somehow inseminated — artificially, like all panda moms, even in the wild — and now there’s a baby panda that experts say is ugly and dumb and obviously no match for Butterstick.

Our Panda birth commentary comes from Justin and Dr. Jason:

[via email]
theAlphaJohn: Jason, did you get your plane ticket yet to see the new panda cub?
Jason: 1st I need to find a Yeti....so I can make some gravy.
theAlphaJohn: I have some leftover in my fridge. Get us a couple danger dogs and we'll meet you at the airport.
Jason: Everyone knows they don't allow yeti gravy on planes.
theAlphaJohn: I'll tell them it's personal lubricant

Next up, the exciting news from China that Giant Panda Mommy Ya Ya dropped and crushed one of her twins:

BEIJING - Staff at a zoo in southwest China are in mourning after a sleep-deprived panda dropped her two-day-old baby and crushed it to death, local media reported on Friday.

“It was very sudden, but also unavoidable,” Guo Wei, panda department chief at Chongqing city zoo in the southwestern region of Chongqing, told the Chongqing Business News daily.

Ya Ya, a seven-year-old panda and new mother of twins, “appeared tired” when nursing the younger cub in a patch of grass, the paper said.

Her head sagged, her paws separated and her baby fell to the ground next to her. The panda then rolled on to her side and crushed her baby beneath her.

The tragedy occurred because she hadn’t slept or eaten properly since giving birth, Guo said, adding that Ya Ya lacked motherhood experience.

According to Guo, the zoo had tried on several occasions to separate the cub from its mother for their safety, but Ya Ya “was very cautious” and would “roar and bare her teeth” at zoo-keepers.

The elder of the twins was in good health and being cared for, zoo officials said.

But Ya Ya had proved inconsolable, wailing and looking for her baby after its body was taken away from her.

“Pandas who lose their young tend to be depressed for a month or so,” Guo said, adding that the zoo would assign people to care for her and provide special food to improve her mood.

First: HA HA! You crushed your chillin!
Second: I love that Panda mothers have crushed so many of their infants to death like this, we have a baseline norm for how they behave.

theAlphaJohn: [link]
Mike: awww
Mike: she should be locked up
Mike: oh, she is.....she's in a zoo
theAlphaJohn: LOL
theAlphaJohn: don't be a hippie
Mike: i crack myself up sometimes.

And for the final word, once again here is Dr. Jason: "ha...this is why they belong with the dinosaurs......"

Stupid Panda trained like commando, sent into forrest

From WTOP News:

BEIJING (AP) - China on Friday released a panda bred in captivity into the wild for the first time, and the animal scampered into a nearby bamboo forest where he will be monitored via satellite.

Xiang Xiang, a 4-year-old male raised at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in Sichuan province, was trained for almost three years to survive in the wild, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

(1) Can I add the Panda Channel to my DirecTV subscription?

(2) Why is a third world country training stupid animals that won't even help themselves how to survive in the wild? As Dr. Jason Brooks puts it, "They are stupid animals, and they belong with the dinosaurs."

Xiang Xiang, whose name means auspicious, has learned how to build a den, forage for food and mark his territory, experts at Wolong have said. He has also developed defensive skills like howling and biting.

His training began in 2003 in a 215,000-square-foot open-air facility and he was later transferred to an area 10 times the size to simulate a natural habitat.

(3) Who teaches an animal how to bite? A kindergarten teacher?

This story is so fucking odd.

Butterstick Birthday

Has it been six months already? Stupid Panda. Though if we could breed one with a Poodle and make a Pandadoodle, that would be spectacular.