The Owl's Monocle

This old dead tree just ain’t what it used to be so I’ve moved.

Please visit the new site: theowlsmonocle.com for much, much more continuing wisdom.

It seems that wearing luxurious furs and skins is well and truly taboo now. Gone are the days when a young rapper with an unpronounceable name can sign his first record deal and then get shot to death in a parking lot wearing a genuine chinchilla coat without incurring the scorn of the nation. Is this what our forefathers would have wanted? Is this the world Benjamin Franklin died fighting the Canadians to protect?

Species such as arctic fox, mink, clown fish, python, Scandinavians, and polar bear have all been granted an amnesty of sorts in this age of bleeding-heart-socialist-obamacare. People still want to wear warm, fuzzy, fluffy fur though. They just don’t want to endure the judgmental stares, hurled red paint, and an aging Pamela Anderson chirping at them on the Interwebs. 

So what have they turned to? Faux fur. That’s right, the Eastern Lowland Faux Fur. A nondescript rodent resembling a muskrat that is now feeding the world’s insatiable lust for pelts. Just go to any department store. The racks are lined with coats trimmed, lined, accented, and completely made from the faux fur. One WWF study discovered:

“For their nauseating Holiday commercials alone, Old Navy is responsible for the deaths of over 1 million faux furs.”

 Every year hundreds of millions of live faux furs are shipped from North American ports like Halifax and New York to China. Once there, China’s “efficient killing machine” child workforce descends on container load after container load dispatching the witless animals with the kind of savagery and glee only a child can show.

Despite this one heart warming aspect of the faux fur trade though, it is a vile thing with tragically almost no awareness in global society. I challenge you to make a difference.

Ask that 10 year old girl wearing the pink faux fur fringed Hanna Montana coat if she knows she’s a fucking murder! When her mother comes over panicking about a strange man making her daughter cry at the bus stop, Angrily ask her too. Please.

The poor little faux fur will thank you. Society will too… someday. 

Manatees are known by many names. Sea Cows, water Zeppelins, “poor man’s walrus”, boat motor stoppers, and “very unsexy mermaids”, are some common monickers. Manatees are this to be sure though: Fail Whales. They are fail whales in that they simply fail at being a whales. It’s true. They are very poor at being whales, but this is not all that is strange about the manatee.

From its incestuous breeding preferences to its bizarre egg-laying rituals, the manatee confounds. 

From its terrible hearing to its even worse eyesight, it frustrates. 

From the way the female eats the male after copulation to the way it lures astray mariners to their murky graves with seductive songs, the manatee astounds.

Why do they look like walruses, but without any of the things that make walruses better than them?

Why don’t they use their gills?

Why do they only eat seagulls?

Why the hell are they trying to break all of the outboard motors of hard working Floridians? Perplexing, to say the least. 

There is just so much we do not know about the manatee, least of all, why such a strange amalgam of creatures even exists.

This weekend is Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada. For our American readers who might wonder what makes it different from your Thanksgiving, picture something between July Fourth and Halloween being celebrated on Columbus Day. 

Sine winter blankets the Great White North for 16 months of the Canadian year, the harvest occurs only every second year, making it a somewhat significant occassion.

It is a great feast where, traditionally, a Canada Goose is poached in strong, generic tasting beer for 12 hours and then smothered in lots and lots of delicious gravy and cheese curds. Of course, the meal is followed by festive drunken hockey fighting.

Happy Thanksgiving Canada!

Has God lost what made him “The Steve Jobs of Heaven”? His designs are so iterative lately. Almost evolutionary, even. Where’s the maverick who gave us Tyrannosaurus Rex?

Scientists from around the world add yet another chapter to the endless debate at the 234th annual Pegasus vs. Unicorn Symposium in Davos, Switzerland this week.

While I admire the commitment to scientific rigor, one cannot help but cringe at the $100 million event in these tough economic times. Not the least because the last unicorn was ground up for fertilizer more than 60 years ago, and there has not been a credible Pegasus sighting since the attack on 10 Downing Street in 1910.

Further calling into question the value of this meeting, and tarnishing the majesty of these magical beasts, is the existence of this:

The Okapi.

The word okapi means literally, “unfortunate offspring” in Congolese pygmy dialect. These idiots stumbling around Central Africa are, believe it or not, actually the progeny of Unicorns and Pegasus.

Unlikely though it may seem, The beautiful union of the two most exquisite beings to survive the crash of Noah’s Ark did not bring to earth an animal so divine it must truly be wrought from Heaven itself. No, it is this bloody bastard. Threatened as it may be, it is still far too common for for my taste. If you see one at a zoo, throw a rock at it.

…it’s just their soul escaping.

NO! THIS IS WRONG!!!

Cats With Owl Faces

The common Western Minotaur. Once as much a part of catacombs and fighting pits as axes and horrific disembowelments, they are now all but extinct. Sadly, most people alive today have grown up without knowing a single person who has been gored, ravaged, and eventually devoured by a minotaur.

  While not as docile as their genetic cousins, cows, minotaurs are also not as reasonable as their other relative, man. Though one might not think that this mixture of bull-like strength, seething rage, and bull-like intelligence could be problematic, it actually proved to be.

Its propensity for staggering violence and copulation with queens doomed the minotaur’s hopes of ever integrating into human society… or bovine society for that matter. Forced to retreat to dark, terrifying places to eek out their existence, minotaurs became increasingly alienated and their populations began to dwindle.

At the turn of the last century, labyrinth popularity was at an all time low. Nobody was really sure who built all the damn things in the first place, but they certainly weren’t building any new ones. In fact, most people owning them who hadn’t been dismembered by the inhabiting Bull-Men were already sealing them off or dynamiting them for fun. This proved to be the death knell for the hapless minotaur.

By 1850, with the notable exception of Sweden, most countries had passed laws making it difficult for women to engage in sex “with bulls, or bull-like men”. More so, being dragged off into “…complex caves, and warrens, and the like…” to be raped, manacled, and left for dead was strictly outlawed. While today these laws seem draconian and oppressive, they were typical for the times.

It is a story we are all too familiar with by now; destruction of habitat, dispersal of weakened population, and restriction of carnal desires to do unspeakable things to people. These are the hallmarks of the ends of species at the hands of man. We mourn you dear Minotaur, as we do the Irish elk, sabertooth tiger, giant sloth, and nobel Triceratops who passed before you.