Hey Guys,

I meant to send this to the list a while ago. I got the following story from The New Yorker under the title of "Crouching Tiger, Trembling Penguins." (Apologies to Neil who has read this before.)

Penguins in the Coney Island Zoo being stalked by feral cats. The penguins are trembling not so much from fear, but because they are jackass penguins and that is a biological quirk of theirs. Anyway, the zoo hired an exterminator to get rid of the cats -- but he proved upsetting to the nearby pro-cat neighbors who were disturbed by his evasive answer to the question of how he actually got rid of the cats. (He replied that he sent them to a friend of his in New Jersey who, um, "took care of them." I don't know if non-American readers can pick up on the obvious Mafia-like overtones to the reference to the friend in New Jersey here.) So, while the penguins of Antarctica are migrating to the beaches of Brazil (a story I heard about months ago on National Public Radio), penguins held captive in the land of the free cannot even tremble in peace for fear of being turned into cat food. To paraphrase a quote by Herman Melvlle, "Ah, Penguins, Ah humanity!"

Pat C. Closet Penguinphile