... of glowsticks & dice

Blast from the past - panda reviewed
Sunday, April 08, 2007

We're back you silly bunch of asiaphiles! And what better way to kick it all off by doing a most scandalous rewrite of the most scandalous post of last version, good for numerous comments of outrage! You've guessed it right, men and women of the internet; today we review the panda. Come to think of it, I'm just too disgusted to write about this. Here is the original post, with a few slight modifications.

What the fuck is wrong with these pandas?

I went to the panda zoo in Chengdu once, which is perhaps one of the more boring things I have done in my life. Until recently, I mostly hated badgers. Now, I hate pandas. (09/04 - I now suspect them to be family!)

I'm really glad they are endangered, I mean, it's about time. There's not a whole lot pandas are doing to preserve themselves, anyway. They just sort of sit there, nibbling away on a sheet of bamboo (which some time long ago, a hungry monk saw, and since then the Chinese, too, eat bamboo) and kind of ponder the problem. I don't really understand why they haven't gone extinct a long time ago. They will only eat bamboo and need weird bamboo-corridors to move because they won't pack lunch when moving around. If they cannot at any point during the day sit down and reach for a pole of bamboo, there's a lot of trouble. Why is the only thing pandas will eat bamboo, which isn't even food, but wood? Have you ever seen anyone build houses out of, say, slabs of steak? Have you ever seen anyone eat bricks for breakfast? I've
not, so why do pandas not understand the purpose of natural resources, like anyone else does?

So, when I was in this 'panda zoo' - a very accurate description; imagine a zoo but take out the animals in every cage and replace them all by some pandas instead. I was kind of sheepishly wandering around trying to find the pandas, which was much like finding Waldo. Out of around 30 cages or 'areas' (cages with trees) I've seen only, maybe five pandas, although there would be hundreds of signs posted around saying stuff like "this is chi-chi" and "here lives poo-poo". Pandas always have double names, because this is considered cute and obviously these pathetic creations are to be considered that, much like how a retarded child or your demented grandmother going for a wee in the closet would be considered 'cute'.

The most interesting species I came across in the panda zoo was the red panda, which is not a panda but much more like a squirrel or a raccoon. I guess they figured out long ago there was never any future in looking like a massive black and white furby. There were also several drunken panda in a particularly large cage, subsidized by the Sichuan 'panda'-cigarette factory. They were hanging around in trees and pushing some old tires around, and this one time I think they started fighting but halfway during the first lunge by the bigger panda, they both felt tired and decided to call it quits, after which another panda fell out of the tree with a loud groan. Then all the pandas started eating some bamboo, and it was clear they had done enough for the day.

I really hate pandas, and it is most fortunate that female pandas can only get it on one day a year. All pandas are invariably lazy and thick and so I don't think they will actually even realize when it's 'that time of the year' and if they do they will probably prefer eating some more bamboo anyway.

I also punched a panda in the nose once, when he came too close to the cage, but that is another story.

And so, we arrive at the conclusion! How well do the pandas perform in the great scale of things? Is there even a proper way to measure such impotence? There is!

Final rating:
One star!
Pandas are the saddest thing to happen to China since they invented gunpowder and thought there was nothing left to invent so stopped progressing as a civilization since then. Not even the dodo would steep so low!