The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingRing-tailed Lemur - Issue Fifty
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Ring-tailed Lemur from Christiano Artuso The Ring-tailed Lemur is endemic to the island of Madagascar where they range from gallery forests to spiny scrub in the southern regions of the island. They are opportunistic omnivores, primarily eating from as many as three dozen different plant species, and their diet includes flowers, herbs, bark and sap, particularly from the tamarind tree. They have also been observed eating decayed wood, earth, spider webs, insect cocoons, arthropods (spiders, caterpillars, cicadas and grasshoppers) and small vertebrates such as birds and chameleons. They have a slender frame and narrow face, and their long, bushy tail is ringed in alternating between twelve or thirteen black and white transverse bands. Their coat varies from gray to rosy-brown, sometimes with a brown patch around the tail region. The hair on the throat, cheeks, and ears is white or off-white and also less dense, allowing the dark skin underneath to show through. They are relatively large, with their average weight at 2.2 kilograms and their body length ranging between 39 and 46 cm. The average troop contains 13 to 15 individuals and their home range size varies between 6 and 35 hectares. They are a female-dominant species, and females socially dominate males in all circumstances, including feeding priority. Dominance is enforced by lunging, chasing, cuffing, grabbing and biting. Although the females may seek outside males, they typically mate within their troop. Their breeding season runs from mid-April to mid-May and gestation lasts for about 135 days. The offspring are born in September or occasionally October. One offspring is the norm, although twins may occur. Due to their diurnal lifestyle, they also sunbathe; the lemurs can be observed sitting upright on their tails, exposing their soft, white belly fur towards the sun. They will often also have their palms open and eyes gently closed, as if meditating. Like other lemurs, this species relies strongly on their sense of smell, and territorial marking, with scent glands, provides communication signals throughout a group's home range. They use many different calls, including those which concern group cohesion and announce the presence of predators. Despite their relatively small brain they can organize sequences, understand basic arithmetic, and preferentially select tools based on functional qualities. Listed as endangered by the IUCN, only about 2,000 ring-tailed lemurs are estimated to be left in the wild in 2017, making the threat of their extinction serious. Their native predators include the fossa, the Madagascar harrier-hawk, the Madagascar buzzard, and the Madagascar ground boa. There are also introduced predators like the small Indian civet, the domestic cat and the domestic dog. As this suggests, they are mostly threatened by the actions of people, such as habitat destruction, the bushmeat and pet trades, and poaching for zoos.
   


Politically Uncorrect Advertising--A Gold Mine

by

B. Craig Grafton

The head chief corporate executive of advertising had his staff assembled in the high domed, mahogany paneled, plushly carpeted, corporate cathedral of a conference room. The memo for them to assemble had just been executively ordered by him only ten minutes ago, a quite short notice actually, and definitely not normal protocol. That made everyone anxious, nervous, upset, and they wondered what lay before them, downsizing, reorganization, poor sales, or what? In any event they all knew that it had to be something very, very important for them to assemble on such a short notice as this. So they sat there on the edge of their seats with bated breath facing the front of the room when suddenly they heard the double doors behind them burst open. Together as one they turned. There was their silver haired gray fox of a boss, all six-foot-three of him, slim and trim as always, who now graced them with his regal corporate presence. They focused their eyes on him as he grand marched down the aisle to the front of the room and as he passed by each and every one of them, straightened themselves upright in their chairs and stiffened their spines and minds to attention, best they could anyway.

So now he stood before them upright, ramrod straight, staring them down, his face so stern, so grim, oh so serious. Then he purposely made a point of fondling his two hundred dollar blood red tie, smoothing down his pure ivory white shirt, and pulling down and straightening out his thousand dollar, or more, tailor-made, not off-the-rack, navy blue suit. Next he cleared his unphlegmy throat on purpose in a no-nonsense commanding sort of way that signaled for everyone to listen up and listen up good, pilgrim. Sure of himself now that he had everyone's undivided attention he began.

"Thanks to one of our competitors, who shall remain nameless, who jumped on the bandwagon of political correctness, we are taking a new direction in our advertising. From now on, starting today, this will be our new ad."

He did a crisp military about-face and pulled down the scroll that he had set up behind him. The crowd gasped a silent but noticeable gasp, a gasp they knew they shouldn't have gasped.

It read as follows:

Gay Pride stands for sex change operations for minors.
We don't.
We're the American Mainstream Brewing Company.
We're your brewing company.

Short and sweet and sour and to the point, just the way he liked it. He waited for applause but when he got none, he got impatient, and desperately seeking their approval, he bellowed out, "Well? What do you think? Is this genius or what?"

The captive crowd, now knowing what they were supposed to do, took the bait, swallowed it, and in unison, erupted lava like with overflowing applause. The head chief corporate executive then waited for the tidal wave of excitement to flatten itself out. But, oh no, it didn't. The crowd kept it up for a couple of minutes or so to make sure they made themselves look good and to atone for their wrong doing of gasping. Then, when everyone finally had enough, and when all was deadly quiet on the corporate front again, he preached on.

"When this one runs its course we will change the first line to read: Gay Pride stands for bringing drag queens to elementary schools and leave the rest the same. Repetition as you know is the key to good advertising. Drill your message into the public's mind. Repeat it over and over and over again so that it becomes wedged into the corners of their baby brains and they can't get it out. There's a gold mine of political correctness out there that needs to be mined and by God, and with God as my witness, we're gonna milk it for all it's worth. Now get going, get out there and dig us up a fortune, and let's give our competitor the proverbial shaft. What do you say?"

The crowd loved the hokiness of it all and roared its approval.

"Meeting adjourned."

Everyone jumped up from their seats, all excited like, and raced out of the conference room back to their own personal little cramped cubby hole of a corporate office, their minds racing a mile a minute as they did so, panning through nuggets of advertising gems that randomly popped into their now reprogrammed monothematic minds, hoping to strike the mother lode of uncorrect political advertising, and make them all rich, very, very rich indeed.

B. Craig Grafton is a retired attorney and has had some legal fiction westerns published by Two Gun Publishing and Twenty First Century American Fairy Tales by The Scarlet Leaf Review. They are available on Amazon.

 
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