Kevin’s Monkey of the Week
Tuesday, July 27th, 2004
My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys. My monkey of the week goes out to any primate who is a service monkey (it’s not what you think, I don’t love monkeys that much). Service monkeys are like seeing eye dogs, but can perform roughly 170 more life tasks than an average canine. These include dialing the telephone, making the bed, and assisting in the loading of a DVD or audio tape. They also provide love and friendship to their helpmates. I like to say, “A dog can roll over, but can he do backwards and forward somersaults, too?”
Most service monkeys are capuchin monkeys, which are slender bodied, arboreal animals. It is poetic justice that the capuchin monkey has finally realized it’s potential as a useful contributor to society, as it was the capuchin monkey that labored for so many years as a punch line next to carnival organ grinders. Of course, most any ape is smart enough to be a service monkey. In the early eighties, though, when monkeys were first being trained for assistive purposes, an incident occurred and it was decided that giving control of a silverback gorilla (and it’s ability to snap limbs) to disabled people who also generally suffer from bi-polar disorder and manic mood swings was not a good idea.
It makes me angry when these primate friends of ours are mistreated even today, as demonstrated in the recent news story about a two-year old in a supermarket who kept pulling on a monkey’s hair until he got bit. Yet, for some reason, it is not the two-year old who is threatened with being locked up. I trace the disrespect back to the 80’s horror movie Monkey Shines, which featured a service monkey trying to butcher his human companion with a scalpel. All the good that Project X had done, like teaching us that chimps could fly jet planes, was wiped out. I think it’s about time this country reexamines it’s attitude toward these special creatures. I don’t even need a service monkey, but sometimes I wish I was a quadriplegic just so I could have one. If I did have one, I would name him Frodo. My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys.
The movie will be bad, but I worry more about the human toll it took during creation. Back when I was in college earning a media arts degree, long before I graduated and took what I like to think of as a “prestige paid internship” at Blockbuster Video, students were often required to write and produce their own media pieces. One guy was a wizard with the special effects, but it couldn’t make up for his painful idea to exclusively produce video tributes to his girlfriend (who wasn’t even that attractive). I thought of him when I thought of the computer effects guys laboring on I, Robot. No matter how hard they worked or how good a job they did, they had to know the movie would still be terrible because Will Smith was in it. I feel really sad for them.
My favorite game was Warcraft II, which pitted a band of orcs against the human race, mostly during Philosophy 201. Somehow, I got hooked up with a junior high kid who wanted to play. I burned his ogre village to the ground and killed his pathetic army of Hammer Trolls in a matter of minutes. I didn’t hear from him again until a month later when he woke me up early Saturday morning with a phone call. Grudgingly, I accepted his offer for play, and before I knew it, my castle had been destroyed by a swarm of hobgoblin suicide bombers before I had even built an armory. The kid had been practicing, and it was clear if I wanted to be any good at computer gaming, I would have to dedicate much more time to it. It seemed to me that it would be a lot easier to be good at something like movie trivia, so I just started watching a lot more movies.
For instance, my names at a couple of the on-line poker rooms are Emma Peel (after the heroine of the British television show, The Avengers) and Pancho Villa (after the feather-weight boxer who died young). For various reasons, it is harder to bluff on internet poker, so I figured one way to incorporate deception is to give other players the impression that I’m female or Mexican. I have a theory that women and Mexicans are often underestimated when it comes to poker. While this theory has yet be proven, I have proved that most poker players are sexist and racist, because I have been told several times to either take my “bitch tits” or “spic cards” and move to another table.
With as many sitcoms featuring bad jokes, canned laughter, and Charlie Sheen on the air as there have ever been, FOX has finally found the secret that would make every one of them good. It’s not presenting them in high definition (although that certainly helps). It’s not even including storylines that revolve around a father instructing his cheerleading son to masturbate before the game so he won’t get an erection while climbing the human pyramid, unintentionally setting in motion a chain of events that will end with another son catching his brother pleasuring himself in a gym locker. The secret is casting Andy Richter.
