January 06, 2004

You're Kidding, right?
Sadly, no.
posted by forksclovetofu 20 years ago
  • I don't get it. Would the NYT be kidding about people actually dropping a possum on new years? Or that other people actually care about it enough to threaten them? Or that they end up cave in and drop a dead one? Or is the joke that someone would actually call this news at all? But I think the real question here is why PETA doesn't go after that bastard that brutally murdered this year's possum with his automobile.
  • I don't know about the US, but here in NZ possums are an enormous pest, eating native birds' eggs, small animals and native seedlings. I fully support possum hunting and although I wouldn't swerve out of my way to hit one I know people that do. Any dead possum is a good possum. It's just a pity they breed so fast. Also, possum-fur nipple warmers and g-strings are a great NZ souvenir. I recommend you all get some.
  • The NZ possum isn't the same critter as the US one. Yours has a thick, bushy tail; ours has a scraggly rat-like tail. Nobody would want a G-string from the North American variety, I assure you. Unless they had some sort of Gollum fetish. Euuwwww.
  • Hell of a way to start the New Year, saluting a dead possum Yes, yes it is. Although I fail to see the improvement with a live one. As for the pest problem you have in NZ Tracicle, you should do what we do in the southern US, eat them.
  • Heh, I thought that was only on the Beverley Hillbillies.
  • well, to be fair, it seems more like it's in your neck of the woods
  • I love my possum, but it lives in Australia where it belongs. It is one of the most exceedingly stupid animals on the face of the planet, but I don't let these things bother me.
  • First time I've ever heard damper described as "like a hotdog roll". Now I want to make some, but there's an open fire ban and it's only good when cooked in a fire... I've eaten alligator, grubs, snake, kangaroo, ostrich, and a truckload of venison in my lifetime, but never possum. What does it taste like? (And don't say chicken.)
  • Someone needs to create the PETA harasser drop... from a cliff.
  • wait wait - something about nipple warmers??
  • These past two threads are putting me in the mood to consume dead animal flesh, preferably cooked.
  • Behaving Like a Jew When I got there the dead opossum looked like an enormous baby sleeping on the road. It took me only a few seconds -- just seeing him there -- with the hole in his back and the wind blowing through his hair to get back again into my animal sorrow. I am sick of the country, the bloodstained bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grilles, the slimy highways, the heavy birds refusing to move; I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything, that joy in death, that philosophical understanding of carnage, that concentration on the species. I am going to be unappeased at the opossum's death. I am going to behave like a Jew and touch his face, and stare into his eyes, and pull him off the road. I am not going to stand in a wet ditch with Toyotas and Chevies passing over me at sixty miles an hour and praise the beauty and the balance and lose myself in the immortal lifestream when my hands are still a little shaky from his stiffness and his bulk and my eyes are still weak and misty from his round belly and his curved fingers and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet. -- Gerald Stern
  • Great poem, Bees! Where ya been?