Did You Know There Are Awards That Recognise Stupidity?

No kidding. They’re called Darwin Awards in honour of Charles Darwin who contributed the theory of natural selection – survival of the fittest so to speak – towards the knowledge pool of humanity. 

But the awards are for people who get killed through their own stupidity. In the process, they do humanity a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool so to speak. 

Perhaps the Arizona woman who tried to pose for a selfie with a jaguar might qualify for a Darwinian honourable mention. 

What do you think happened?

Of course, the woman who stepped over a barrier to take a selfie at a zoo in Arizona in the United States was attacked by the jaguar.

That’s what happens when you fish in the sea of life without bait. Or try and run up a down escalator. 

When she crossed the barrier and approached the enclosure to photograph herself with the jaguar, it swiped out through the fencing, leaving deep gashes on her arms.

Wildlife World Zoo director Mickey Ollson said there was “no way to fix people crossing barriers”.

“They’re there for a good reason,” he said carefully avoiding the impulse to add: “Duh!”

Although the protagonist was a woman, 70 per cent of all Darwin winners are male and, again not surprisingly, most winners have come from the United States. Think Trump and no one should be surprised. 

Here’s another rocket scientist from Arizona again. According to police reports, a man accidentally shot his own, well, sausage while shopping in the meat aisle at Wal-Mart. 

Arizona law does not require a permit (nor a holster for that matter) to carry a firearm, so our hero felt free to carry his piece “commando-style” (unholstered) beneath his waistband. 

When the unholstered gun drifted down into his jeans, he reached in and accidentally pulled the trigger while repositioning his weapon. This loose cannon’s low hanging fruit didn’t have a chance. Neither did said loose cannon. 

Firearm supporters can add this event to the arsenal of ammunition against gun control. 

Not every winner is from the US, however. India has its fair share of people a few poppadoms short of a curry too.

Driving home from a wedding, Prabhu Bhatara idled the car on the roadside to relieve himself in the woods. From a squatting position he spied an injured bear— no less. And what does he do or think? 

The rocket scientist thinks selfie. 

Meanwhile, instead of intervening, the passengers in his car pulled out their mobiles and filmed the carnage.

As he neared the bear, the passengers advised him against his plan. Rocket scientist that he was however, the former wedding guest was determined to fulfil his full selfie potential. 

Once he was within reaching distance, the bear turned out to be not as injured as it seemed  – maybe it was just a bad hair day – and lunged forward, pinning Mr. Bhatara to the ground, “killing him on the spot,” according to Forest ranger Dhanurjaya Mohapatra.

Then, perhaps disgusted at this epic display of homo sapien apathy, a stray dog joined the fray in an attempt to save the man, and tried to fight off the bear! The bear, however, seemed to believe that the world had one too many selfie-seeking humans and finished off poor Mr. Bhatara.

According to media reports, once the body was retrieved, forest officials treated the bear for its injuries. The dog, although probably still disgusted, was unharmed.

Despair not my fellow Malaysians. Although we may appear to have an over-achiever’s share of rocket scientists, morons and dim-witted people, there is always one bright shining thought that we should keep in mind.

It could be far, far worse.

Surprise post!

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Leaving Seems To Be The Hardest Word

Old Crooks Never Die: They Just Steal Away 

Former Prime Minister Najib Razak is popularising the notion that it’s OK to be shameless even if you might be dreadfully guilty.

“Try me if you can” seems to be the former premier’s abiding credo and, to be sure, he has been dodging what could be a judicial bullet for ten months now.

So it appears that until he is finally brought to face the music, the 65-year-old former leader will continue to don black – parka, jeans and sneakers – and ride into the sunset because it wows youthful rebels without a cause into believing that shamelessness for fun and profit is not just fine but dandy and perfectly de rigour.

In such a universe, old axioms get tossed out the window. Perhaps even the one that says crime does not pay.  And you can seriously forget the one that says “the truth will set you free.”

Heaven help us for we are losing it where values – or its lack – are concerned.  It appears that politics trumps everything including patently distasteful posturing.

And yet, the President of the Malaysian Chinese Association Wee Ka Siong recently suggested that his party might learn a thing or two from Najib’s motorcycle-riding antics “to stay relevant.”

Do you remember all those PM apologists who suggested at the time that it was always someone else’s fault – his wife, Fat Boy, etc? Now we know who’s calling the shots: BossKu (Our Boss) on a Moped.

At least some things have changed. Previously MO1 always denied that anything was wrong with 1Malaysia Development Fund. Now he concedes that there was, indeed, wrongdoing but it was a “systemic failure” and everybody should be blamed.

Harry S Truman, the 33rd President of the United States had a plaque on his desk that read “The Buck Stops Here,” meaning he was the one who took responsibility for everything that happened during his tenure.

Alas, the buck seems to have stopped at other destinations in this case. 

Low Teck Jho had never heard of Harry Truman but he’d heard of Harry Houdini and he had a healthy respect for the legendary magician who could escape from anything and who made things disappear into thin air.

Houdini may not have known that crime did not pay as well as politics. But far away across the oceans and safe from the madding crowd, the fraudulent fatso known as Jho Low knew it and mouthed a silent benediction to its sentiment as he uncorked yet another bottle of champagne to celebrate not having to ride mopeds in the humid heat of his homeland.

No, he much preferred comfort in well-cut suits. The corpulent conman believed in keeping his wits about him preferably in a land where Everybody Didn’t Know Your Name and where Interpol was both unseen and ignored.

You had to be smart but quiet. It was like underwear, the pudgy purloiner reasoned. It was important that you have it on but not important that you show it off.

The beefy brigand took pride in the fact that he was scrupulously fair. He did not, for example, want to stand trial in Malaysia because he thought he would not get a fair trial there.

But that was not to say that he might consent to being tried in the United States or Singapore where he was also wanted. That would be oh-so-unfair to his beloved Malaysia, his tanah tumpah darahku.

Fat Boy had principles and, by God, he was sticking to them. Who says there’s no honour among thieves? 

Leaving Seems To Be The Hardest Word

Michael Rotundo might have been a kid once but he appears to be hell-bent on remaining immature forever. 

Even after repeated notices and an offer of cash to move out of his parents’ home in Camillus, New York, the recalcitrant Rotundo pulled a real-life Failure to Launch and refused to budge. 

So, his parents did what every loving mother and father at the end of their respective tethers would do.

They took him to court.

Early last year, a New York judge ruled in favour of the parents, Christina and Mark Rotundo, and ordered the 30-year-old man to leave. However, he wasn’t going down without a fight. He claimed he’s owed a six-month notice, which would give him ample time to prepare for such “a big step”. 

Television footage showed the rebellious Rotundo to be bearded bespectacled and, true to his surname, beefy. He was also lazy and a cheapskate to boot: his parents testified that he’d never paid rent nor did household chores, all the while obdurately remaining at home where he wasn’t wanted in the first place.  

Was Michael always like that? 

It would seem so, certainly, his parents thought so. Michael, it appears, didn’t need anyone to make a fool out of him: he was more like a do-it-yourself type. At 18, neighbours recalled his mother getting furious with him for always kicking spilled ice cubes under the refrigerator. 

But for the future tyrannical tenant, it was simply water under the fridge. 

He was always a strange kid, his father recalled grimly. There were five in the family and Michael was convinced that one had to be Chinese because, statistically speaking, one out of every five people in the world is Chinese. 

He suspected that it might be his elder brother Colin or his father or his mother. Or it could be his younger brother Lee Ho Pang but he still suspected it was Colin. 

You might say he was strange. Incidentally, both Colin and Lee have since moved out of the family home and lead successful lives. 

Maybe it had much to do with his surname. Indeed, in his heart of hearts, the stubborn squatter acknowledged that he had always yearned for a good, stout, Anglo-Saxon name like Major.   

Now there was a name for you, thought the corpulent colonist admiringly. And you could be inventive with first names here. You could name your son Michael or Sergeant, or for the truly accomplished, B Flat Major. 

Alas, poor Michael. It had to be hard having a name like Rotundo and being neither slim nor svelte like his brothers Colin and Lee. It wasn’t that being fat ran in the family: it was simply the fact that he was the only one who didn’t run in the family. 

Worse, his nickname during his formative years was “Ample”: you might not leave home too if you’d been called Ample for most of your natural life.  

During his teenage period, the would-be recalcitrant refugee took refuge in Diet Cokes. It made him feel better about having two Big Macs and a strawberry sundae for lunch every day for most of his high school days. 

But you know what they say; hell hath no fury like an ousted obdurate. Michael’s planning his own revenge: he wants to choose his parents’ nursing home. 

He Does Work In Mysterious Ways

This is a true story and it happened in a place called Pahrump in the North American state of Nevada, which just goes to show you town planners the dangers of giving weird names to a) babies and b) towns. 

How would a kid like it if you named him Pahrump?

Any guy with half a literary bent would immediately tell you that it rhymes with Harumph and that, surely, cannot be good. 

I digress, however, and you must forgive me for it is an occasional hazard of growing old. 

As I was saying, the picturesque town of Pahrump had a brothel and it had a church and the twain, as you can imagine, heartily disliked one another. 

It was, however, a cordial dislike bordering on indifference and based on the sound economic principle of – shall we say? – static market share between the non-warring but coldly antagonistic parties. 

But Rita “Here They Are” Diamond, the splendidly endowed owner of Diamond D’s, the said brothel in question, had the keen business sense of a Mark Zuckerberg and thought nothing was too big for this business: she was looking to grow her stream of recurrent earnings. 

In three words – ok, four – she wanted to expand. 

So you can imagine the consternation, nay, the unparalleled rage of the pious parishioners of postcard-picture-perfect Pahrump when they discovered that Rita “Nice Lungs” Diamond was beginning construction on an expansion of her brothel.

“The wages of sin is death,” thundered Pastor Billy “Fire And Almost” Brimstone on the Sunday following the revelatory discovery. But Pahrump’s tax department disagreed, sadly noting that the wages of sin was actually unreported.

 Pastor Brimstone was a deeply religious man who agonised over the minutiae of religion – could Noah possibly have included termites on the Ark? – and believed his flock should fight fire with fire. 

So his local Baptist Church started a campaign to block Diamond D’s from expanding – with morning, afternoon, and evening prayer sessions at their church. 

Old Billy was smart. The pious prelate may have known which class – Smoking or Non-Smoking – the luxuriantly endowed Ms Diamond would inhabit in Eternity but he was taking no chances in the Here and Now. 

And, lo and behold, It Happened and It Was Good. Work on Diamond D’s progressed right up until the week before the grand re-opening when lightning struck the whorehouse and burned it to the ground.

Perhaps the brethren should not have been that smug, so self-satisfied. Well, they were as proud as pea soup and you know what they say: you should never be proud of your humility.

“I’ll show them power of prayer,” growled Rita “Big Jugs” Diamond and proceeded to hire America’s Demon of Damages Melvin “Be Afraid” Brezinski to sue the piety out of Pahrump’s pleased-as-punch parishioners.

According to Associated Press, Ms Diamond sued the church, the preacher and the entire congregation late last week on the grounds that the church…” was ultimately responsible for the demise of her building and her business — either through direct or indirect divine actions or means.”

In its reply to the court, the church vehemently and vociferously denied any and all responsibility or any connection to the building’s demise.

And now I leave you with the end of the AP story and it is reproduced verbatim.

The crusty old judge read through the plaintiff’s complaint and the defendant’s reply, and at the opening hearing, commented, “I don’t know how the hell I’m going to decide this case, but it appears from the paperwork, that we have a whorehouse owner who staunchly believes in the power of prayer…. and an entire church congregation that thinks it’s all bullshit”.

Does that deserve an Amen or what? 

Forget The Womb; Just Stop At Tomb

Things are going crazy out there. 

The latest: a 27-year-old Indian man plans to sue his parents for giving birth to him “without his consent”.

What’s next? A woman taking a baseball bat to a fast food outlet for lack of beef? 

I tell you, the world may be really going to hell in a hand basket. 

– Back to the legal eagle. No one has seriously challenged Jho Low a.k.a Felonious Fatso for resident poster-child for birth control but Mumbai businessman Raphael Samuel is putting up a stiff fight. 

He told the British Broadcasting Corporation that it was wrong to bring children into the world because they then have to put up with lifelong suffering.

The bitter businessman thought he could prove it too. He first pointed out that the leading cause of death was birth. Having laid down that shyster-slick legal foundation, he invoked echoes of Thomas Hobbes – “life is nasty, brutish and short” – to claim that everyone was born “naked, wet and hungry.” 

“Then it simply gets worse,” the morose merchant concluded mournfully. “Don’t you see?”

It is well known that ignorance of the law excuses no one. In India, it also excuses no one from practicing it.

Mr Samuel, of course, understands that our consent cannot be sought before we are born, but insists that “it was not our decision to be born”.

So, as we didn’t ask to be born, we should be paid for the rest of our lives to live, he argues.

Apparently, Mr Samuel’s mission has its roots in a philosophy called anti-natalism – a school of thought that argues that life is so full of misery that people should stop procreating at once.

In fact, Mr Samuel was ceaselessly haunted by the awful and hellish knowledge that somehow, somewhere, a baby was being born every twenty seconds or so on Planet Earth.  

It was something he brooded over constantly, sometimes in the dead of night, and he thought the incessant production should cease immediately or – and here, he choked back a bitter sob – “it would all end up in tears.” 

Woody Allen knew it would all end up in tears but he thought about these things more in a sort of rueful abstract. “Life is full of misery, suffering and loneliness,” the wannabe saxophonist once said. “And it’s over much too soon.” 

Raphael did not know Woody and secretly suspected he would not like the fellow one bit either. “What kind of name is Woody anyway?” demanded the embittered entrepreneur indignantly. “I mean, that’s the whole problem right there…too many Woodies!” 

Maybe there was always something slightly off-kilter about the mournful Mumbaikar. Here was a man trapped in a woman’s body – for nine months and only then was Raphael born. It seemed he had never got over that initial introduction to the world. 

That was then. The once-irate industrialist is now a freshly minted debonair-dandy-about-town. Meet Raphael Samuel, whose face peers out of advertising hoardings and whose address women write to daily proposing marriage.

What is the moral of this tale, you may ask? 

It is simply this: Some men are born famous, other men achieve fame but Raphael talked to the BBC and got fame thrust on him. 

Then he hired a really good publicist.

Sharks Just Wanna Hear Jazz

Here’s the latest breaking news all the way from Australia. Sharks like to kick back to the sounds of Herbie Hancock, even some Wynton Marsalis, but generally sneer at any Bach, Brahms or Beethoven. 

Researchers at Sydney’s Macquarie University have discovered that sharks can recognise jazz music but are confused by classical music. 

What’s all this got to do with the price of fish, you might reasonably ask, and you would be right too except that Sydney’s restaurant owners, emboldened by the news, have begun charging more for shark’s fin soup on the reasonable grounds that a Herbie Hancock-appreciating fish was surely more desirable than one that liked, say, Conway Twitty? 

“What’s all this got to do with the price of fish”? demanded the Australian government indignantly, appalled that taxpayer funds were being used to find out stuff that seemed as relevant as the previous shark finding from the same Macquarie University. 

The aforementioned 2015 finding, however, did cause a frisson of excitement to ripple through Australia’s surfing community after said university discovered that the mushy stuff between the teeth of great white sharks was, almost always, a slow swimmer. 

More seriously, the shark research addressed issues of animal cognition. For sheer mindlessness of research though, the prize goes to a 2015 “anti-hysteria” kit that a local Malaysian university claimed could ward off “evil spirits” for the whopping price of RM8,700 a pop. 

To the bewilderment of psychiatrists from Guatemala to Greenland, the kit used such cutting-edge paraphernalia as chopsticks, salt, lime, pepper spray and formic acid. 

Reuters reported the whole pseudo-scientific, tragi-comedy with a straight face and a stiff upper lip but, mercifully, little has been reported about the kit or its creator since. 

Australians tend to take sharks seriously as there are at least 10-20 shark attacks in the country every year. Here, the Aussies would be well advised to take to heart an interesting piece of cutting-edge research from no less than Saturday Night Live.

Researchers there have found that sharks only attack a person if said person is wet. 

Back to the original research in question. 

The Macquarie researchers, led by Catarina Vila Pouca, trained juvenile Port Jackson sharks to swim over to where jazz was playing, to receive food. It has been thought that sharks have learned to associate the sound of a boat engine with food, because food is often thrown from tourist boats to attract sharks to cage-diving expeditions – the study shows that they can learn these associations quickly.

The addition of classical music, however, confused the sharks which couldn’t differentiate between the two musical genres. 

Vila Pouca added: “Sharks are generally underestimated when it comes to learning abilities – most people see them as mindless, instinctive animals. However, they have really big brains and are obviously much smarter than we give them credit for.” 

Anyone who’s seen the film Jaws would probably go for both the “big brains” as well as the “mindless, instinctive animal” theory. To put the great white shark in its complete, brutal perspective, the original name suggested for the Peter Benchley-written film was Gnaws. 

The World According To (Some) Millennials

About a third of millennials in the United States are sort of flexible about the shape of Planet Earth. 

The statement above should terrify you about the ability of the younger generation to look after the world, or at least their ability to stop themselves falling off the edge of it.

In fairness, the statistics only relate to the US but that’s no reason for all of us to feel smug. We are all, in various ways, inter-connected.

OK, let’s be clear here. A third of millennials don’t actually think the Earth is flat. The YouGov survey simply revealed that only 66 per cent of American 18-24 year olds were absolutely convinced that they are currently standing on a celestial orb. The remainder seemed content to take alternative suggestions like, but not limited to, a flat Earth. 

And the phenomenon seemed to be confined to millennials: almost 96 per cent of over-50s knew the Earth was spherical. 

If one were an optimist, one could take comfort in the fact that these millennials were so, well, open-minded.

Brace yourselves folks, going forward, you might see a lot more Donald Trumps’ coming out of the woodwork. 

History generally credits Galileo Galilee as the first person to discover the Earth’s shape although many Greeks think that it might even have been Pythagoras way back in the 5thCentury. 

That the Earth is round has been confirmed over and over again not least by satellite photos of the planet from outer space. 

Astronomy is a pretty exact science much like zoology. Example: there are precisely 350 varieties of shark not including the loan, pool and the UMNO variety.

In short, the notion that the world was anything but round was thought to have been dispelled ages ago. Sometime in the 19thCentury, however, the “flat Earth” theory resurfaced almost as a conspiracy theory. Indeed, the first “flat Earth” conference was convened in the US last year. 500 people attended but we have reason to believe that at least 300 were psychiatrists who were there as observers. 

These people were like those who voted for Brexit: they had made up their minds and didn’t want to be confused by facts. 

People these days like to make fun of millennials as being self-centred, avocado-toast loving, technology driven, fearless young men and women who are choosy about jobs and passionate about the environment.  

Or to put it another way, millennials are the only ones who need a smartphone and a laptop to go online to find that they don’t have very much left in their bank balances. 

But who are we to talk?

Ours was the generation who made a millionaire out of the guy who invented the pet rock. We were the same guys who made a mess of the environment and ours was the generation that lived in – possibly – the best time of all in the sense of the cost of living.

I found a job almost immediately after I graduated and I changed jobs fairly easily. A group of us friends rented a four-bedroom, double storey house in Bangsar in 1984 for the princely sum of RM450 a month! Life was relatively comfortable back then. 

And we bought our first house in our early thirties. 

Most millennials are too busy paying off student loans to think of houses. And, let’s face it without parental support, few can even dream of owning houses. 

So spare a thought for the millennial. And who are we to mock their worldview, if you’d pardon the pun?

Between 2009 and 2018, our Malaysian world went from being flat to round to crooked.

Old Birds Don’t Die, They Just Stow Away

A recent stowaway in business class on a Singapore Airlines flight to London avoided detection for 12 hours before the cabin crew cottoned on to her presence. 

It wasn’t the twister and it wasn’t a plane. It was, however, a bird. 

Dinah was a Singaporean mynah, which longed to transcend its humble origins and trip the light fantastic. In short, Dinah the mynah wanted something finer.  

There were too many of her kind back in Singapore and she wished to be rid of her constantly squabbling flock. And so she resolved to travel to London where she had polite relatives called starlings and where she’d heard a nightingale always sang in Berkeley Square. 

Like most Singaporeans, Dinah could muster a modicum of Singlish, which she had been told would stand her in good stead in the United Kingdom. 

Finally, the avian adventurer wanted to see London because it was a monarchist at heart and hoped it might meet the Queen. Lest we forget, she was also tired of Majulah Singapura and yearned for the return of colonialism and God Save the Queen. 

As she was still a citizen of the city-state, however, she decided that the way to London would have to be by way of Singapore Airlines where she had heard good things about its business class services. 

The ease by which the feathered fugitive stealthily sailed over the republic’s Immigration controls while simultaneously resisting the urge to make a sizeable deposit on the burnished berets of the stolid Singaporeans has now become the stuff of legend and could become a movie starring Meryl Cheep and Jay Leno. 

The militant mynah even had the gumption to dawdle in SIA’s business lounge where she sampled some indifferent cheese that she decided she wouldn’t write home about before she made her historic tryst with destiny. 

But for such a noisy, oftentimes aggressive, bird to have avoided detection for almost the whole flight – it takes 14 hours to Heathrow from Changi – was nothing short of a miracle. You see, Dinah may have been crazy but she wasn’t stupid and knew full well

that a bird in the hand was usually dead.  

And it would have got away with it too. Except that nature took over. You see, there is an unseen force that lets birds know just when you’ve washed your car… or your hair.

Realising that there were only two hours till London, passenger M decided to wash her hair. Alas, the merciless mynah noticed and the jig was up.

In a statement on Sunday (Jan 13), an SIA spokesman confirmed that a bird was found on flight SQ322 on January 7. 

“It was subsequently caught by cabin crew with the assistance of some of the passengers on board,” said the spokesman.

Alas, poor Dinah. She had been handed over to British quarantine officials fearful of bird flu. You couldn’t blame them either: she was a bird and she had just flown.

Singapore has publicly repudiated the mutinous mynah for disavowing its national anthem but SIA is said to be considering her as a flyting advertisement for its business class services along the lines of “well, if you had to stow away…”

Press reports have since indicated that Dinah has taken up with a British starling with a drink problem. 

You see where this is heading don’t you?

I mean, that’s like, getting two birds stoned at once. 

The Quality Of Mercy Isn’t Strained, It’s Murderous

You can take a beast out of the wild, but you can’t take the “wild” out of the beast.

That would seem to be the moral of this plainly-immoral tale.

Alas, poor Deasy.

She had a pet crocodile that she’d christened Mercy. Unfortunately, the beast seemed to have had no such quality because Mercy ate Deasy.

Deasy Tuwo, the head of a laboratory at a pearl farm in Minahasa in North Sulawesi, was killed by her enormous, 14-foot pet last Thursday, the authorities said.

“The 44-year-old’s badly mauled body was found by colleagues the following morning,” Hendrik Rundengan, from the local conservation agency, said.

“The indication is that she fell into the crocodile’s enclosure,” adding that the incident was still being investigated by police.

President Jokowi was more eloquent. “It’s sad to see that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a wild crocodile,” said the country’s head of state so sympathetically that it brought tears to the eyes of his people. 

Watching from the side-lines in Kuala Lumpur, RM – and I don’t mean Ringgit Malaysia – agreed and threw her not-inconsiderable weight behind a worldwide campaign that argued that all crocodiles should evolve into what God had intended in the first place – handbags or, its last offer, shoes. 

But was it as simple as a clear-cut case of Deasy meets Mercy; Deasy likes Mercy; Mercy eats Deasy?

The lab-head’s neighbours were incredulous, pointing out that the two seemed well, close.

Not close enough,  snorted the merciless Mercy which had been plotting this for a while now. That was why, the rascally reptile reasoned,  they needed to be, well, “closer.”

It was, the crocodile reflected with glee, the chance slip between “her cup and my lip” that did Deasy in. It was also why the rapacious reptile had quietly informed her close friend and ally Charity, a snapping turtle much beloved by Deasy, that she intended to have an old friend over for dinner “soon.”

You see, Mercy was no fool. She knew her legal onions as well as any other Indonesian shyster which was why the local legal fraternity extended her a professional courtesy becoming of any self-respecting reptile. 

She had seen the look in her owner’s eyes the day she went past 14 feet in length. It was a look of greed, the look that screamed “there but for the grace of Deasy goes a Birkin handbag worth US$250,000.” 

It was, thought the reptile with a shudder, the RM look.

Mercy had therefore begun carefully preparing her case. She put it out that she was a nice crocodile; a gentle giant and the sensitive sort of liberal who frowned on something as heartless as capital punishment. 

Such were the heart-warming anecdotes about the lovable croc that it divided the Indonesian people. Case in point: onions, for example, made Mercy cry which was a little known fact unbeknownst to many Indonesians. They sympathised because it made them cry too. 

Despite her claim of self-defence, the courts generally took a dim view of owner-gobbling pets. Charity stood turtle-fully by her and corroborated the onion angle but it was all in vain. 

Mercy was tried and sentenced to become shoes. Charity sobbed while  Faith and Hope were nowhere in evidence.

Mercy duly became shoes and was exported to the United States. And a rich American finally got his crocodile shoes.

But he’s suing because they don’t fit his croc.