The good news: Air sa国际传媒 says you can now bring small pets on the plane with you.
The bad news: I got the seat next to Barack Obama. Jeez he's fast. Smacked that cat like an Iranian riot cop.
By now you've seen the footage of Obama killing the fly. He's doing a TV interview in the White House when this bug lands on his left hand and -- wham! -- he nails it with the right. Bye-bye fly. It was like something out of Kung Fu. I half expected the interviewer to say "Time for you to go, Grasshopper" and shoo the president out the door.
It was impressive. Had George W. Bush tried the same move, he would have aimed for the fly and hit Iraq by mistake. Bill Clinton would have knocked the intern right off his lap. Dick Cheney would have tried to kill the fly but shot Condi Rice instead.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals weren't amused, though. No, when asked for its reaction to the president putting the bam! in Obama, PETA issued a gentle rebuke: "He isn't the Buddha, he's a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act." The animal rights group also sent the president a Katcha Bug脗聶 Humane Bug Catcher, a device that resembles a cross between a toilet plunger and a solarium.
At least Obama got away more lightly than the American Veterinary Medical Association. The vets, meeting in Seattle next month, have planned an excursion to watch the famous salmon-throwing fish merchants of Pike Place Market. To clarify, these fish are dead. Nonetheless, PETA ripped into what it referred to as a sea kitten toss: "Fish are intelligent, sensitive animals who deserve better than to be torn from their ocean homes, only to have their corpses used as toys at a convention of veterinarians -- the very people who are charged with helping and protecting animals." PETA asks: Would the veterinarians find it entertaining if the tossed animals were lambs, hamsters or cats? (No, hamsters are too easy to catch.)
Now it's Stephen Harper's turn to be the filling in the PETA pocket. Noting the pre-Olympics announcement of new sewage treatment plants for Victoria, the Virginia-based organization has written Mayor Dean Fortin suggesting one be named after the prime minister.
"Processing sewage isn't the only thing that sa国际传媒 needs to do in order to clean up its act before the Games," PETA says on its website. "That's why we're suggesting that until sa国际传媒's prime minister finally washes the blood of baby seals from his hands, one of the new sewage plants be named the Stephen Harper 'Something's Rotten' Sewage Treatment Plant in his honour."
Gosh, that's quite the image. I mean, Harper shakes his son's hand with those blood-stained mitts. But it isn't the first time PETA has linked the seal hunt, the Olympics, and gory imagery: Earlier this year it parodied the 2010 Games logo with a graphic of an inukshuk clubbing a seal.
And that stunt was tame by PETA standards. In March, a German court slammed the group for a travelling display that compared slaughterhouses to the Holocaust.
In January, NBC refused to run PETA's Super Bowl ads, which featured voluptuous women in sexy lingerie fondling vegetables. Last year, the group urged Ben & Jerry's to use human breast milk in its ice cream.
It also bought a Kentucky cemetery plot near that of Col. Harland Sanders, then erected a headstone that spelled out "KFC tortures birds" (though last August a PETA member wearing a lettuce bikini paraded outside a Victoria KFC in support of the restaurant's new vegetarian sandwich).
The worst, of course, was the time they tried to kill me by daring me to eat a meat-substitute Tofurky脗聶, a challenge I accepted in accordance with the First Rule of Responsible Journalism (always take free food).
Burst my appendix a mere three weeks later, spent Christmas in hospital.
Still, even though the PETA didn't apologize or send flowers or bacon, I decided to forgive them. That's because you have to admire the passion of people so committed to a cause that they would murder a columnist with no more thought than Obama would give to swatting a fly. If their tactics are outrageous and offensive, well, they can counter that the treatment of many animals is outrageous and offensive, too.
Maybe they'll get a chance to make that argument to the president. Just don't sit too close. He's fast.
