Dags and Yobbos Continue Mourning Famous Doorstop

This is a very dark day for me. I just...it's hard to write about. I knew it would come, and yet now that it's here, I have no words to express what I feel. Should I even keep blogging after this? What for? What for, when the goddamn rug has been yanked out from under me like this...I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That sounds like self-pity, doesn't it? Why should I let my grief ruin your morning reading? That's all that matters to you, right? You came here to see the monkey dance. Fine. That's all I'm worth. I'll dance for you. I know I'm just your morning humor monkey. What does it matter to you if I'm hurting inside?

I'll try to write something funny. Even though the worst has happened. Even though there isn't one decent alligator story in the news today.

Don't send me patronizing emails saying the alligators will be back. All right? That's not what I need right now. Don't tell me this is Florida and as long as people continue going for canal-bank walks with dogs named FiFi, there will be alligator stories. That doesn't help me TODAY, now does it? So just keep your emails and shut your miserable pieholes. Just stay with me and help me cope. You rotten bastards.

Let me see what else I can find. Hold on while the humor monkey looks for a new banana, okay?

God. This is what I'm reduced to. Should I even write about this? This must be how Connie Chung feels now that she's trying to get a job in infomercials.

Okay, here goes. "Harriet the giant Galapagos tortoise, on the other hand, will never defecate again." That's the latest news from Australia. That's what passes for journalism down there. A blind turtle passing for a 176-year-old relic of Darwin's voyage is dead, and apparently, the only way they can tell is that it went one more month than usual without taking a deuce. I mentioned this the other day. Back when there was real alligator news to write about.

I have to stop thinking back to the glory days. When you could click on Google News and take your choice of a wide variety of small loathsome dogs that had recently been sacrificed to the gods of conservation and natural selection. Shih tzus. Poodles. The occasional Dandie Dinmont terrier. No, let's forget all about that, because now we have turtle news. We're going to read turtle news, and we're going to LIKE it.

Harriet was the pet of Steve Irwin, the Baldrick of pop herpetology. Steve Irwin's pet turtle can't take a crap, so now they're going to bury it in Steve's backyard and tell him it went to dance with the fairies. Or whatever they say in Australia when a pet dies. It's off sniffing the butt of the big dingo in the sky. That's what the aborigines will tell their kids. That's what they said when Peter Allen died.

I wonder...if Steve Irwin got constipated for several days, would they bury him, too?

The Harriet tragedy should blow over fairly quickly. Steve's mum will take him to the store and get him another turtle, and he'll blub for a while and refuse to eat his Vegemite sandwiches or come out of his room to watch "Skippy," and that will be that.

It's a fake turtle anyway. I keep telling people that. Do you seriously believe Australians could keep a turtle alive for more than a week? Please. You know the Australians. They probably got drunk four times a week and forced poor Harriet to suck on a beer bong full of Foster's. She probably died several times a month and had to be replaced by new turtles. Or, in a pinch, old turtle shells manned by zoo employees with little seniority. Steve would take the new hire, paint him green, shove him in the turtle shell, and tell him to crawl around eating carrots off the ground until Steve's mum got back from the turtle store.

The story goes on: "Harriet’s amazing story began when she was just five years old and was one of three giant tortoises taken from the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin on his historic voyage aboard HMS Beagle."

Three turtles? Three? What happened to the other two? Evidently Harriet was a bit ruthless. Turtles are like that. I think we have a turtle Supremes situation here. Remember how Diana Ross screwed Berry Gordy and got the other Supremes canned? I guess Harriet screwed Charles Darwin, and the Mary Wilson turtle and the Florence Ballard turtle ended up as chowder.

I KNEW Darwin was a freak.

Here's more:

That was in 1835 and if you want to get it into some perspective time-wise, it was also the year Melbourne was founded by John Batman, Hans Christian Andersen published his first book of fairytales, Samuel Colt patented the first revolver and Mrs Twain gave birth to a baby boy called Mark.

Did you catch that? Melbourne was founded by Batman. So I guess the original name was Gotham City. Does that make Harriet "Bat-turtle"?

I wonder if Darwin used a Colt pistol to dispatch the Mary and Florence turtles to the big chowder tureen in the sky. While Harriet leered provocatively from her pen, clutching a can of Foster's and clad only in a filmy negligee.

Says the story, "She was 176 years old and thought to be the world’s oldest animal in captivity." So now that title goes to Senator Robert Byrd.

Proving that Americans aren't the only people with the common sense to barely be able to stand Harriet's keeper, the story says:

Whatever, it led to what in my mind is the most amazing thing about Harriet: she managed to live for 19 years with crocodile hunter Steve Irwin without going totally insane. Yes, that’s right, since 1987 Harriet has lived at Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo and not once have we seen the headline, “Crikey! Giant tortoise attempts to kill keeper!”

Maybe there is hope for these people and their dry little island after all.

I question the writer's conclusions, however. How is it possible to conclude that an tortoise is or is not insane? Or homicidal? It may have lunged violently at Irwin every day, only he didn't notice, because by the time the lunge was fully underway, he was already in another area of the park, waving a shrieking toddler at a starving leopard.

You know who they should interview about this? The Slowskys. You know the tortoise couple that pimps Comcast cable? They always complain about cable Internet being too fast. They wouldn't complain if they had the Comcast connection I used to have. It used to take me weeks to download a single midget porn bit torrent. Don't get me started. But I suppose maybe the Slowskys were contacted last week, and they haven't gotten around to responding because they see no reason to rush.

I wondered whether Australians had had a hard time coping with the loss. I called Wylie Minogue, editor in chief of the Sydney Morning Tatler and asked him if Aussies had spent the weekend drunk, mourning the death of the tortoise. And he said, "Yes. 'Tortoise'?"

If the Australians can live with pain, so can I. I'll be strong and keep checking Google news, and maybe some fresh gator stuff will pop up in the morning. Until then, tortoise will have to do.