Owen & Mzee (Sweetie, dont read!)

You know what's cool about the Tsunami that hit SE Asia near Christmas back in ought-four? No Animals washed up on any beaches. No mass-animal deaths were reported anywhere along the coast of a whole freaking continent. Two, actually! Now, I'm not one of those deviants who cheers when the "wasteful, destructive, world-consuming and world-destroying" humans get screwed over by nature like it was some freaking morality play. Many people are not phazed by the idea of whole populations of mostly women and children being starved out like in Darfur but they cry when they see a kitten with a cold. Those people are misguided.

I'm just saying, that crazy natural-disaster telepathy animals have is freaking awesome. I think people have it, too. We've just lost it. Too many Fritos ads or something crossed the wires in our noodles. We've been reduced to "Oh-oh! Big storm's a-comin'! I can feel it in my knees!"

You remember Owen & Mzee don't you? It was the cute story of the baby hippo who was washed out by the Tsunami. The hippo ends up somehow with a 130-year-old tortoise in a zoo and they adopt each other. I found a great little book today, based on their NYTimes Bestseller.
How that book was longer than this paragraph, I'll never know.

Anyway, the book has a great little twist at the end- the Back cover, technically. Here it is in its hastily, low quality-scanned, entirety:

OK, Here's the kicker:

It took three people to write this??!! Plus a photographer?? Wow! No wonder it was seven bucks for six pages! The photographer couldn't have penned this? What? Are all of the liberal arts jobs federally protected now and no one told me? Damn unions!

And what is it teaching? Dammit, seven bucks for a children's picture book, you'd better be teaching my kid something. I fail to see a lesson here.

It advertises the second in a series, but it doesn't mention the last book where the Zoo admits that its job is to represent nature, no matter how cute the unlikely friendship. Owen is separated from Mzee and moved to a cement bunker in a zoo in India where shoeless schoolchildren throw pop cans at him. He grows old rubbing sores on a lonely old tree while dreaming of nestling with Mzee who is dead anyway.
The end.

OK, I'm kind of a cynic.

~Jimm