Well, it was another bad year. Attendance at the Hellmouth Municipal Zoo and Exotic Animal Crematorium declined again, the famous Day Range Hotel in fault-ridden and little-known Makanza Mountains National Park fell over, and that giant space primate is still heading toward the Earth, with unknown consequences for all of us here in the Tri-City area, but aside from that it has not been much better.
      GREAT BLUE BEARDED MARMOSETS went on a tear in January under their annual compulsion to seek long-term monogamous relationships with like-minded females.
      In February, Leif Englanberg and Olaf Petersen were lost briefly during an expedition into the interior of the Hatt-al-Kabob, from which they emerged later that evening after several frenetic and exhausting hours
with lurid and fantastic tales of huge sand worms and monkeys that only come out at midnight.
      March was marked by the eerie nocturnal wailing of the FRILLED INDRI, an animal that wails only when its environment is being ravaged and ruined, and later in the month by the 123rd Semi-Annual Conference on Primate Nomenclature, which unhappily confirmed the basic split between the great apes and the lesser primates, something that most of us here at "The Year in Review" had long suspected and which only the hylobatids took exception to.
      In April, giant leech prospectors (the leeches were giant not the prospectors) thoughtlessly decimated the only known habitat of the GRAY-FOOTED MUSCATEL, leading to a harsh editorial in the Gorgonzola
Gazette.
      In May, the bottom fell out of the local tropical products market both literally and figuratively when an enormous sinkhole opened up right in the middle of Muggley's Main Street Mall in downtown Cheesequake, instantly swallowing a resting POUCHED LANGUR and several CROESUS MONKEYS.  Two days later, a disastrous fire swept through Pruner's Imitation Tree Farm,
scorching an acre of fake oaks, and scattering planting crews willy nilly.
      Chester Champ's Chimp Safari went belly up in June, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and spoiling the plans of a number of hopeful nulliparous GIANT AFRICAN PYGMY CHIMPANZEES, while in July our very own Mr. Chris Shaw took some time off from his demanding responsibilities as West Coast Correspondent and Really Scientific Letters Editor for the Nooz to personally oversee the construction of an outdoor sauna and digital video center at his soapstone-lined hideaway high in the Hollywood Hills.  Regrettably, the vibrations caused his entire backyard to slide down into a neighbor's swimming pool.  Sorry, Mr. Shaw.
      A letter-writing campaign was initiated in August by the Black Brothers of the ancient and venerable Very Secret Order of Sifakapithecus, the ancestral SIFAKA who according to native legends was supposed to have crossed the mountains of Madagascar on the back of a turtle.  The Brothers have condemned the recently-stated Nooz position that sideways hopping (or 'unilatereral