2007 August « Leezer

Watch this while I work on my post about Mrs. Robinson

August 30, 2007

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August 29, 2007

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Dinner

August 28, 2007

Last night after putting the kids to bed and hacking into Leezerslawpartner’s class reunion website to post these pictures of him “Then,”

and, “Now,”

I sat down with a nice 2003 Pinot Noir from the Central California Coast and watched a show about two lions that devoured 135 men in 1898. It may have been 138 men in 1895, but it hardly matters. What is important here is that the National Geographic Channel thinks its audience to be no smarter than a bunch of red-bottomed baboons. Here’s the claim: in 1898 Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson managed a railroad project in British-occupied Kenya. Directed to build a railroad from Mombassa to Nairobi, Patterson employed nearly 3,000 men from imperialist India to build the railway’s bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Two male lions took to sauntering into camp and attacked and killed 135 men during a nine-month period. Patterson finally shot and killed one lion three weeks before shooting and killing the second.

I think Patterson was full of crap. If you do the math, 135 divided by 9 is 15. We are to believe that two lions killed 15 men per month – one every other day – for nine entire months. It seems to me that after the first couple men were killed, a watermelon laced with strychnine would have done the trick.

But Patterson claimed he tried everything from baiting the lions with carcasses to poison to singing Paul McCartney’s Ebony and Ivory in a charming falsetto. Worried that his workers would flee and he wouldn’t get the confounded bridge built, Patterson became desperate, and killed the pair of cats with a Winchester double barrel (side-by-side) 24″ repeating shotgun. Well I don’t really know what kind of gun he killed them with but the point is that his heroism became a fish tale.

Here’s what I think happened to the 135 “devoured” men: they ran off because they were tired of deflecting Patterson’s advances. He was a bit of a dandy. Here’s his picture:

Not having been in the presence of a woman for nine months was making Patterson agitated. He fancied himself a rogue and a scoundrel, and this combined with his heightened sexual frustration made him intimidating for the men to be around. In particular, when instructing a native to “heft that tie” or “lift that pick axe,” he would stand, facing the man, his palms upon the man’s buttocks. They didn’t like this. He also asked a different man each morning to deliver his USA Today wearing nothing but a holster.

Another ridiculous aspect of the “documentary,” was the reliance upon “scientists” to explain the cats’ preference for human flesh over more traditional meals of zebra or antelope. This Einstein said the lions were weak and unable to bring down traditional big game due to chipped teeth and receding gums, so they went for the easy kill. Fool. The lions weren’t inferior, they were lazy. Fish in a barrel is what those workers were. My cat Holly isn’t that far removed from her wild ancestors, the lion. I put Fancy Feast under her little pink nose every day, which is why she’s not hunting for mice. Duh. Here she is, by the way, my pretty pretty pink-nosed princess:

Worried that his harassment of the men would cost him his generous Royal Armed Forces pension, Patterson concocted the lion story to save face and ensure that his wife, Peg, would stand by him when he returned from the bush. She did, of course, pepper him with questions for years about his fascination with holsters.

Posted by leezer

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