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“THE NOOZ SPEAKS OUT!”          
       
From the steamy treetops of Borneo and the muddy shrimp lakes of Bali-Bali to the dangerous vine forests of Gabon and the scarred, eroded, ecologically-ravaged and ruined countryside of Madagascar, and farther still to the poison-filled basin of the ancient, ant-strewn Amazon, monkeys, apes, and prosimians, and a number of tree shrews, are once again peering at humanity with a degree of unabashed disgruntlement.  Another year seems to have come and gone, and despite our most heroic efforts, primates have sunk even further.  Oh sure, you might say, what about the establishment of the Old Primates Retirement Home right here in Hellmouth?  What about the doubling in the number of ASL-using apes?  What about the setting aside of one hundred prime hectares of Brazilian rain forest for species that can prove they are endangered, the publication at long last of the official primate family tree, and the Interspecies Conference held in Ouagadogou, Upper Volta?  What about NASA giving satellite photo information to primates to help them find ripe fruit, without charge?  What about the controversial choice of a giant mouse lemur from Togobogo as Time Magazine's 'Animal of the Year?'  Sure you say.  But are these things really important?
      As the highest representatives of the primate world, we here at the Nooz have watched their situation gradually deteriorate and slowly get worse. We have seen the quality of their lives diminish.  We have observed their populations decline, their horizons darken, and their hopes drown.  We have watched all this and remained silent.  Shame on us!  Now we feel that it is time to speak out.  We are even now planning just what it is that we will say.  We don't know yet what it will be, but it should be soon.  It will be strongly-worded and hard-hitting, and it won't hold anything back.  It will, in a few cases, cause people to actually lose the ability to breathe, in which eventuality oxygen should be administered, or a good slap on the back of the head.  When we finally do speak out, it will cause primates to twitch their prehensile tails (if they have them) and wiggle their ischial callosities (again, if they have them).  It will be HOT!  So be sure not to miss the next few exciting issues of Primate Nooz. Get 'em while they're here, there may not be enough to go around.
  
 
3000-YEAR OLD GORILLA
FOUND LIVING IN PEKING ZOO
  

      The recent embargo on bananas from the tiny west African nation of Togo was an international effort on behalf of Togo's neighbor to the east Benin, which has been trying to prevent Togo from illegally importing endangered primates from Benin.  Togo's neighbor to the west, Togobogo, does not support this effort and has promised to supply its small friend with several giant pygmy chimpanzees and a potto or two. Togo has been smuggling crusty macaques and red-toed baboons from adjacent areas of Benin, but they have promised to stop. The feisty Togolanders claim they desperately need the rare primates, but they won't say what for.

      It has come to the attention of the Nooz that two papers circulated of late in the primatological world, “Nosepicking in the Pongidae” and “Burrowing Behavior of Wild Bluetail Monkeys at the Makokou Study Area, Gabon,” which we took to be genuine, are instead totally spurious, idiotic and downright insulting to the intelligence of anyone over seventeen. We are shocked and indeed dismayed to have thus been so duped by this obvious fraud, and we apologize to every last one of our readers who saw our glowing reviews in the last issue and rushed out to procure these articles.  We have taken measures to see that this never happens again.

(Reuters)  Beijung. A gorilla has been discovered living in an enclosure at Beijing's Thousand Uplifting Sentiments Zoo that scientists have declared is at least three thousand years old.  The find was announced in the Zoo Times of Beijing and in various wall posters. “It's incredible,” said Dr. Hai Phu Yuk, Chairman of the Political Zoology Department at Beijing University, “but we have dated the RNA profile, and its subcutaneous genal nodes give us a figure of 3,000 to 3,500 years, more or less.” The animal appears to be a rare West African white-kneed gorilla.                  (Cont. on p. 4)

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ENGLENBERG AND PETERSEN Cont. from p. 1.

as of Monday the pair had not checked in, and so it is officially presumed that they are lost.  The last time they disappeared, they discovered wierd spitting monkeys that lived in burrows and backward native tribes that had no names.  They said later that it had sometimes been hard to tell which was which, because many of the natives also lived in burrows. They eventually emerged after several days in the forest, festooned with lianas and blinking in the hot, equatorial sun, to tell an anxious world their incredible story.  It is a great measure of their plucky persistence and purposeful perserverence that this proud and phlegmatic pair of prestigious primatologists had the presence of mind to prevail in such a predicament, the prankish prattling of the press notwithstanding.
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