Vol. 91,  No. 1
Hellmouth, Arizona
Feb. 10, 1991

  HELLMOUTH ZOO DIRECTOR
  FIRED BY MAYOR PRUNER!
        
        In a sudden move that this community's overlarge and snarly pack of cub reporters will surely be bleating about for years to come, controversial Municipal Zoo and Exotic Animal Crematorium Director Dr. Jerry Archbibble was fired yesterday by Mayor Frank Pruner, an action that is certain to raise in the Hellmouth Town Council immediate questions about the tangled involvements of the mayor's own company, Pruner's Imitation Tree Farm, in supplying fake trees for the zoo's new landscaping program, and which thrust into the hot limelight the obscure activities of a previously little known outfit by the name of Cruikshank and Cranston's Crematory Supplies, apparently the main dealer with the zoo over the past several years and implicated now in charges of providing substandard services and shoddy goods.
        The Zoo Association reacted with shock to the unexpected firing of its longtime friend Dr. Archbibble.  A number of docents whose close ties with the Director at this and other zoos go back a long way stood tearfully by the tastefully-decorated enclosure of the giant mouse lemurs, one of his many prize acquisitions.  Others stared balefully at the stinky galagos and wondered what would now become of them.  Several elderly khaki-uniformed gentlemen repeatedly threw down their purple handkerchiefs on the ground in frustration and picked them up again, thus expressing the feelings of everyone present. Smoke rose from Snack Stand #2 as Billy McCardle burned a bunch of hot dogs in uncharacteristic protest, and it almost seemed to at least one observer that even the animals were finding it difficult to cope under the new and difficult circumstances. The zoo flag, a beautifully-rendered anaesthetic dart in the rump of an aye-aye-aye colorfully emblazoned on a field of dark-green silvervine leaves and surrounded by a
(Cont. on page 2)
 
  PIGGLESHAM'S LEMUR GUIDE INACCURATE, CRITICS DECLARE
 
 
IMITATION TREE MARKET
UNAFFECTED BY RUMORS
 
(UPI) Hellmouth, AZ.  Rumors to the effect that Dr. Jerry Archbibble, Director of the Hellmouth Municipal Zoo and Exotic Animal Crematorium, will soon be fired as a direct result of his dealings with Mayor Pruner's Imitation Tree Farm, and that the imitation tree market is on the verge of collapse, remain just that, rumors.  The imitation tree market, for the past decade centered in Hellmouth, has been holding steady, and there is no evidence that any controversy regarding imitation trees or the zoo's director lies in the town's immediate future.
      Imitation trees were first introduced into the United States in 1984 by local Hellmouth entrepreneur Frank Pruner. Mr. Pruner went on to establish a prosperous gobo root farm and was elected as Mayor of Hellmouth in 1989, replacing Col. John Barnsworth Beazleton, USMC Ret.
 
 
Primate Nooz is published on the 10th of every month, except for those months when there isn't an issue, and aside from those months when it is published on the 20th, by the Ralph A. Bennett Teasdale Corp., Dr. Peter Pan Troglodytes, President-in-Chief. Copies are shipped to every major zoo and animal testing facility in the U.S. and air-dropped over much of Africa, Asia and South America (except for Costa Rica).  Back issues may be obtained (or possibly not) by writing to: Primate Nooz Back Issue Office, c/o Pruner's Imitation Tree Farm, Hellmouth, AZ.
 
(Reuters)  London, U.K.  One of the most comprehensive and authoritative research works to be published in the last tenth of the last century, Pigglesham's Comprehensive and Authoritative Guide to the Mouse Lemurs, has come under severe criticism in British scientific journals over the past several months, shaking the very foundation of lemuroid taxonomy and calling into question some of our most cherished notions about Madagascar and its relationship with the African continent.  The Guide, published in twenty-seven volumes, was compiled beginning in 1932 by Sir Henry Wadston Peepsworth Pigglesham, self-styled lemur expert and a driving force behind British primatology, and it has remained one of the standards in the field ever since.
      According to L. Patrick Rodney-Cecil, editor of the prestigious The British Review of Primates, primatologists and other interested lay people from Bali-Bali to Cheesequake have been sending in scathing letters, citing many innacurate measurements, fudged statistical analyses, misidentified elements, and unsupported and unwarranted conclusions.  Dr. Rodney-Cecil offered numerous examples of mistakes in methodology that undermine if not negate virtually all of Pigglesham's theories.
      It is a mystery how his work has been so universally praised until recently.
 
 
Now available:  Pigglesham's Comprehensive and Authoritative Guide to the Mouse Lemurs, set of 27 volumes, leatherbound, $899.95.  Get yours now, there won't be any more!  Call 777-NOOZ.
 
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