Monkeys Love Blogging

Rick's Satire Report News
St. Louis, Missouri

Maverick researcher Fred Jones has determined that monkeys can become quickly addicted to blogging. Jones initial research conducted at the St. Louis Zoo consisted of installing PC’s in the zoo’s chimpanzee exhibit area.

According to Jones the PC’s were equipped with special chimpanzee keyboards. The keyboards contained graphic symbols previously developed in prior research on monkey language. The keys included, for example, a monkey throwing his own waste to express a feeling of anger. Number keys utilized bananas, one banana meaning the number one and so forth. An embedded program in the PC’s then converted the symbols into English.

Each chimp was assigned a blog template and blogger name and given addresses of human bloggers.

According to Jones the majority of the chimps became glued to their monitors ignoring the environment surrounding them. Swinging from branch to branch was down by 73%. The previous occupation of sitting motionless while staring into the distance decreased by 81%. The younger monkeys chasing one another around the cage and from tire swing to tire swing while the elders watched went down markedly as the older chimps were no longer interested in watching the youngster’s games. Jones said the obvious ‘marker’ to blogging addiction came when mom chimpanzees quit picking whatever it is they pick from the little chimps heads.

The elder female chimp, ‘Franny’ became fond of posting about her husband “Grins’. Her posts regularly bashed Grins for his failures in communication and romance.

Her elder husband ‘Grins’ posts were often rants about the fact that the young chimps didn’t understand how hard life was in the ‘old-style’ zoos.

The young chimps blogged randomly and virtually unintelligibly about apparently nothing at all.

In all cases according to Jones the chimps appeared hopelessly addicted to blogging, sitting in front of the PC’s all day and into the night.

Human researchers that I interviewed say this research has important implications for assessing human blogging behavior but that one should not jump to conclusions. Joan Liberal, a Princeton researcher with the ‘Acceptable Behavior of Humans Enforcement League’ said “After all, these are monkeys we are talking about, not that there is anything wrong with monkeys of course.” She said the monkeys needed to be placed into a rehab group, hopefully funded under an affirmative action clause of Zoo legislation. She also expressed concern that the handicapped chimps did not have special handicapped accessibility keyboards. When informed that none of the champs were handicapped, Ms. Liberal said “Well, of course not, they did not properly provide for them.” She then broke into tears, made unintelligible comments about ‘bastard zoo-owning Republicans’, and then dismissed herself from additional questioning.

According to Jones the research has been hampered by the removal of the PC’s by zoo officials. They were removed when chimps from a Mexican zoo showed up unexpectedly in the cage one morning. Zoo officials did not know how the Mexican chimps had made their way to St. Louis but arrangements are being made to either deport them back to the Nuevo Laredo Zoo or make them St. Louis zoo citizens. Apparently the Mexican chimps were drawn to a better way of life in the St. Louis Zoo.

Meanwhile it was deemed detrimental to the Mexican chimps integration process since the existing PC resources were not plentiful enough to go around.

Regular zoo visitor Irene Smith said she missed the good old days when the monkeys threw their crap at unruly teenagers. "Maybe now that the PC's are gone they can get back to just being monkeys", she said.