Tiger-taming and other bad ideas
I hope Roy Horn recovers fully and goes on to lead a long and happy life. I hope Siegfried Fischbacher also survives the trauma of watching his partner mauled by one of their colleagues, a colleague who happens to be a seven-year-old, 600-pound white tiger. But when I heard one of the TV talking heads this morning asking, "What went wrong the other night in Las Vegas?" I found myself nearly as exasperatedly apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld himself.
"Wha-wh-wha-wh-wh-what went WRONG?" I bellowed. "You take a creature that does not live in the desert, nowhere on earth, unless you want to count the few survivors living in deserts that were once forests, you take this animal and you put him not only in the desert but inside an air-conditioned casino in the desert, with flashing lights and amplified sound and crowds of people, and you put that animal through six shows a week, 45 weeks a year, and then you wonder what went wrong on the one occasion that the tiger behaves exactly like a tiger?"
But Montecore the Las Vegas performing feline was not the only tiger to make the news in the past few days. On Saturday a team of New York City police officers, including a sharpshooter who rappelled down from the roof to shoot the target with a tranquilizer gun, captured/rescued another large tiger (estimated weight: 450 pounds) that was living in a public-housing complex in Harlem. Although neighbors had complained about the smell of urine coming from the apartment and reported the odd behavior of the apartment's human resident, who bought armloads of chicken parts every day at the local grocery, it wasn't until that resident, Antoine Yates, went to the hospital with what he said were dog bites, that the authorities suspected something wasn't right. One of the tiger's roommates there in the Drew Hamilton Houses, a caiman alligator, was also captured/rescued, his mouth duct-taped shut.
Speaking of feeding the animals, The Mirage hotel-casino in Las Vegas has told the approximately 260 employees of the Siegfried & Roy show that they should find other jobs. Some of those 260+ people were responsible for making sure the animals were fed. If those people are no longer being paid to do that, then who IS feeding the animals? They can't just line up at the buffet with everybody else, with or without duct-taped mouths.
Lining up at the buffet does have some advantages over being spoon-fed, however, particularly when it comes to news. While the general rule in both reporting and consuming news is "the more sources, the better," there are a few who prefer the opposite approach:
In a Sept. 22 interview with Fox News, (as reported by the Associated Press) "(George W.) Bush said he insulates himself from the 'opinions' that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories. 'I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news,' the president said. 'And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.' "
By becoming so dependent on his closest advisors for information from the outside world, Mr. Bush is starting to resemble one of his predecessors, a Democrat at that, albeit a fellow Texan: President Lyndon B. Johnson used the same approach regarding the Vietnam war, and he was widely criticized for leaning on the likes of Walt Rostow for information rather than sorting it out for himself.
Mr. Bush seems not to have consulted his advisors, however, when he composed this ode to his wife, shown here in both English and Czech (thanks to our European Bureau Chief, Jesse Lynch, for spotting it). Somebody send that man a National Writers Union membership application.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @10:20 AM
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6.10.03  |
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