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In This Issue

• Kicking Your Hamster in its Teeth
• X-treme Zoos Target Market
• Resurrecting the Chili Cheese Burrito
• Sonic in Bad Shape
• Journey into the Land of the Leopards
• Finding Boys Into Whom to Put Love
• Lions and Tigers and Bears, Go Buy!
• Murder Spree Continues
• Art With Dead Mice
• Puppy Love, the Wrong Way
• 19th Century Nursery Rhyme!
• Tender Moments with Bill and Reona
• Bibu the Baby Elephant
• Rob's Relationship Corner
• Marauding Interviewer: What's Your Spirit Animal?
• THEY WATCH
• Letters to the Feditor
• Thyroid Boy
• Interspecies Intellectual Masturbation
• Stickman Theatre

Alice Xie

I fuck you up real bad, ese!

Alice Xie

Aww, what a cute dictator.

Life is full of choices. Some choices are hard. Some choices are important. Some choices are sublimely retarded. If you come home and discover that your roommate just bought himself a hamster - well, guess which type of decision that was. Not that I have a problem with small mammals, but I feel that a college dorm is simply not conducive to the proper rearing of any form of life more complex than a fungus.

Fact: I knew some guys a few years back who had a rabbit. Fact: they got their pet bunny high and drunk and they made it live in its own filth. The difference between the bunny and a first year is that the bunny had no choice. Fact: if the bunny had been a small child, it probably would have grown up to be some sort of violent criminal. Hell, if you gave that bunny half a chance and a machete, it would fuck your shit up and look cute doing it. Conclusion: most of us are simply not responsible enough to care for another creature.

This brings us back to the hamster. My roommate has affectionately decided to name the furry butt-plug "Beatrice." The vermin acts like it owns the place. It rattles its cage with impunity, bites anything that gets near its mouth, defecates all over the place, and, yes, throws its feces. My other roommates put up with this because the hamster is allegedly cute. Apparently anything small and furry is cute. Apparently if Stalin were 1/10th as tall and covered in hair, then we could forget all about him being a murderous schizophrenic because, well, he'd be fucking cute now.

Fact: the hamster has a purple ball. If you place the hamster in the ball it can run around and supposedly not get itself into any trouble. Fact: balls was made for kickin' and sometimes some people will accidentally and totally not on purpose kick a little purple ball if they see it lying around. Fact: those people might not check to see if there's a hamster in that ball. Conclusion: I am an important businessman with many pressing affairs to address and I cannot be bothered to check every little thing I touch to see if it contains a rodent.

There is another thing that my roommates have failed to consider. If you go back far enough in time, there is some common ancestor between rats and hamsters. If you go forward from time at this point you can get to medieval Europe, where rats have the plague. Like it or not, the only difference between this hamster and those rats is a lack of terrible, infectious disease. This hamster is a verminous time bomb. She lives in filth, waiting to acquire some sort of awful malady, and once she has such a disease, she will strike with every ounce of fury in her little body. The casualties will be legion.

Fact: hamsters are revolutionary socialists with little or no regard for the existing economic structures that allow our society to function. If hamsters were in charge, they would blindly dismantle nonessential businesses and banks, instantly crippling all commerce in the country. While this would destroy the political power of corporations and the wealthy, the hamsters will fail to comprehend the effects of the massive unemployment that follows. Fact: hamsters lack foresight because they only live for about two years anyways.

And that's annoying. It's only a matter of months before I have to "be there" for my roommate, consoling him because his blob of fur will no longer make its little wheel squeak. No more rustling around in torn up cardboard, no more sleeping twenty hours a day, no more gnawing sounds during the other four hours. There'll be some sort of insipid eulogy, like "Beatrice... was... a hamster. But she was also more than a hamster. She... um... yeah, she was a hamster." Then we'll flush her down the toilet with as much dignity as anything getting flushed down a toilet can have.

Some pets are useful. Some dogs herd sheep, find bombs, or aid the blind. All dogs will give you unconditional love in exchange for food. Canaries told miners when the air was poisonous. Peruvians eat guinea pigs. Animals certainly are useful, and I'm thankful God gave us dominion over them. All of this, however, fails to explain why we domesticate a mutant-cute-rat-thing which provides no useful service and could care less about the people who seemingly care so much about it. Fuck you, hamster.