doodledee

By my calculations, somewhere around 2/3 of the population of Wisconsin will have monkeypox by the end of the day on Thursday. From there, it will only be a matter of hours before it jumps the border, most likely ruining what would have otherwise be a pretty nice weekend. Damn you monkeys and your stupid pox!

Strangely, it turns out that the people who caught monkeypox didn't actually catch it from monkeys. (Cheaters!) Instead, I guess most of the people got it from prairie dogs that they had purchased as pets. That's right: prairie dogs as pets.

Now don't get me wrong. I think those little prairie dogs are frickin' cute. You see them at the zoo when they're in that big concrete circle thing and you watch them dig and run around and stand there and look at you and all you can think is, "Man, they are so stinkin' frickin' cute!" Then I usually think, "Man, I want one of those as a pet!" NO WAIT, I TOTALLY DON'T.

Anyway, the real issue here isn't the wackos who want prairie dogs as pets, it's the fact that some disease you catch from prairie dogs is called monkeypox. Is this just yet another example of brilliant spin control from prairie dog special interest groups? Hardly. The truth is that prairie dogs aren't even the real culprits. They just picked it up while frolicking around the pet store with some of the other pets-to-be; this makes them innocent - and cute - bystanders.

Ah-ha! So it was monkeys! It all makes so much sense now. Remember back in the late 80's / early 90's when all those dorks wanted to have pet rhesus monkeys to ride around on their shoulders like some James Bond character or maybe that Ross dude from Friends? Well now that that fad has passed, pet stores are probably overrun with monkeys whose only form of entertainment is to put little saddles on the prairie dogs and ride them around the store, spreading their pox wherever they go. Mystery solved, monkeys it is.

Well no, not exactly. But close.

Instead of monkeys, I guess some sort of freakishly huge rat was the source of the pox. Even stranger, these giant rats were in the pet store because people actually like to keep them as pets! Holy stupid pet week. And it's not like the rats are even cute - they look exactly how you would expect a 10-pound rat to look. And maybe it's just me, but the idea of a 10-pound rat nibbling oyster crackers from my hand sounds... well... ewww.

The moral of the story is: don't hang out with monkeys from Wisconsin.