My Lemur Won Jeopardy! and I Will Never Sleep Again

In order to explain exactly why my life has taken a turn for the insomniac, I need to give you two pieces of background information.

AJD and I habitually watch Jeopardy! in the evenings, and usually we have company when we do it.  A number of the animals have watched an episode or two, but the really die-hard Jeopardy! fans among the Wild Republicans are Hrithik and Gilly, although it's worth noting that Zebulon seems to have similar predilections.  Gilly watches because he likes puzzles and games, and also likes commercials.  Hrithik watches because he really wants to win.

Now, by "win" I don't mean "win" in the usual sense; I should make that clear.  For Hrithik, the win conditions are as follows: you win if your species is mentioned in a Jeopardy! clue.  Since Hrithik is nothing if not patriotic, he also wins if Madagascar is mentioned.  Winning the usual way is easier, believe it or not.  Until very very recently, Hrithy had won exactly once in several years, and that was with a mention of Madagascar rather than ring-tailed lemurs.

The second thing that you need to know is that Hrithik has recently taken up meditation.  I think he started about four months ago.  The meditating Hrithik looks pretty adorable.

It looks very cute, right?  Well, it's markedly less cute if you're in the same room.  I always thought that meditators, if they made any noise at all, made peaceful, restful noises.  Like, you know, 'Ommmmmm' or something.  Hrithik does not do this.  No, no, the noise Hrithik makes sounds like nothing more than a particularly obnoxious car alarm.  It goes something like this: 

'WAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaaaa....'

Why?  I don't know!  It's not clear to me whether this is some sort of traditional lemur form of mediation or whether it's something he somehow came up with on his own.  I'm inclined towards the latter, given that I've known him for years and he's only just started this nonsense, and also given that he's a bit touchy about the whole thing.  But either way, it sucks!  His favourite time for meditation is night, because he is nocturnal, and... well... do you think you could sleep with that car alarm noise going off in your room for hours every night?  I didn't think so!  And the worst part is, he's been getting more and more enthusiastic about it as time passes.

In fact, he's become so enthusiastic about it that he's started proselytising.  Oh yeah.  I'm not kidding.  Look at this:

He taught the kittens to meditate!  The kittens!  And of course they loved it, perverse little creatures that they are.  Stal has to work his ass off to get them to pay attention to their Archaic Feline lessons, but Hrithik gets it in his head to teach them car-alarm meditation (it ought to be boring, given that they're kittens with the attention span of gnats, right?) and they just eat it up.  One moment the north room was a haven of slightly-bizarre tranquility and the next minute there are five kittens and one ring-tailed lemur shrieking their heads off zenfully.  'WAAAAAAaaaaaaaWAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaa...'  Gaa!

You know what it is?  They're Buddhists.  I really think that's it.  The kittens are Buddhists and therefore they're naturally predisposed to meditation.  Which is a problem, because it's hard to tell them not to meditate without stepping on their religious rights.  Fortunately they're not as diligent about their meditative practices as Hrithik is.  They're still doing it, though.

So I imagine you're wondering what on earth Hrithik's inner peace has to do with Jeopardy!, and after all the point of this post is not to complain about his influence on the kittens.  Here's what happened.

About two weeks ago, AJD knocked on my door to announce that it was time for Jeopardy!.  As is my usual wont, I asked Hrithik if he meant to come along, and he replied that no, this time he was going to stay in my room and meditate to see if it helped his game.  I shrugged and relayed this information to AJD as we settled down to watch the game.

And would you believe, he won?  Ring-tailed lemurs were one of the clues!  They even showed a picture of two of them.

We thought that Hrithik would be sad for having missed his big win - but we were wrong.  No, no, he was delighted.  Clearly, he explained, this is a sign that he's meditating properly.  He's reaching that higher state of consciousness.  He's doing something right and he must keep doing it!

*headdesk*

But it gets worse, you see.  Now that Hrithik is spending many Jeopardy! evenings meditating rather than watching the show, suddenly everyone in the Wild Republic is winning Jeopardy!.  Not everyone, really, but tons of people.  In the last week, Rochester has won, Parsley has won, the wolves have come close (the actual answer was "red wolf"), and Gus had an honorable mention a few days ago (one of the contestants has a son of that name) and then won yesterday (because of his name, not his species).  And today... well, today everything snowballed.  Humphrey won, Gilly won (because there was a G&S category), and Team Malagasy won (that is, Hrithik and Zebulon).  All with Hrithik meditating upstairs.

So not only has Hrithik himself won twice in as many weeks, but he's engineered wins for half a dozen of the others as well.

This means, unfortunately, that he is a lemur inspired.  He is unstoppable now.  He meditates longer and longer each night, and he's utterly convinced that he's doing it right, and there's nothing you can say to dissuade him really.  I cannot sleep.  None of us in the south room can sleep, except of course for Sleepyhead.  And what's going to happen once the kittens find out about this?  Then no one in the entire Republic will be able to sleep.

Jeopardy! is a destroyer of domestic peace, I'm telling you.  The only positive to all this cacophony is that when AJD finally makes it on the show - and he will one of these years, mark my words - he's going to have one hell of an anecdote.  I will admit that this is small consolation to me now.  At least he's cute.

Guest Link!

I am so very behind on posting.  There are features on each of the newbies coming, I swear!  But first, I have to share evidence that my best friend is as insane as I am.  Check it out - it's terribly cute.

Expansion!

Our local chapter of the Wild Republic has just been enlarged by five.  All of them are adults, which I'm quite pleased about; I love the young ones (they're so cute!), but I was afraid the balance was tipping too far in the juvenile direction.

Alfredo is particularly relieved.  He'd been requesting some reinforcements from his superiors for some time, and the bureaucracy finally decided to grant his requests.  This had more than a little to do with that incident a bit ago, the one where the kittens somehow managed to get illicit bubble gum on Leprosy's tail.  Alfredo had been telling his superiors for months that he needed someone sent here specifically to handle the kittens: it's all well and good that our chapter was chosen to train young felines, but without anyone actually in charge of them, they were getting out of hand.  I'll explain more about this in a later post.  But anyway, his superiors finally admitted that they really should have been listening to him all along, and they found someone to deal with the kittens.  They also agreed that, with such a large foreign delegation stationed here permanently, and with some of the members of the local chapter being more than slightly eccentric and unpredictable (*cough* Plouie *cough*), Alfredo was correct that he could use some permanent legal counsel on staff.

So here they are, our five newest denizens of the Wild Republic:

In the front row, left-to-right, we have Jasper, the leopard, who is here to look after the kittens; Quixley, the zebra, whose exact responsibilities are not yet clear to me; the aye-aye, who has not yet gifted us with his name, and who is the promised legal counsel; and the sloth bear, whose exact role is not yet clear either.  Behind them all we have Meph, the bat, who is from the Ministry of Transportation and who intends to reform the local postal service (i.e. Plouie).  ("Meph" is not his full name; apparently bats are fond of giving each other very long names.)

Yesterday was a long day, full of meetings between various old and new residents.  Alfredo was particularly busy getting everyone settled in.  He's really delighted that we have Jasper now, as you can imagine (so is everyone), but he's not sure quite what to make of the aye-aye.

Father's Day Romping

Yesterday was a big day for Alfredo - I'll explain why in my next post - but he still took time out to spend some quality time with Beppe. 

Here they are playing the time-honoured game of Chase Your Father's Tail.  This is the sort of game that is more or less exactly what it says on the label; there aren't any rules as far as we can tell.  Nor is there a winner or loser; Beppe was very happy whenever he caught the tail, but so was Alfredo.

It's just a bit tricky to work out what is going on in these two tail-chasing pictures, because Alfredo and Beppe are the same colour and Beppe is essentially composed entirely of fluffy.  Any picture we have ever taken of Beppe makes him look like a ball of fur with ears.  So keep your eye on the black spot.  That's the tip of Alfredo's tail.

Alfredo worries a lot about not being a good parent.  He's always worried that he's not spending enough time with his son because he has so many responsibilities and takes them all so seriously.  Although he almost never mentions his wife, you kind of know he's thinking that if she were only here, Beppe would be much happier.  He's really afraid of screwing Beppe up forever; he's never sure whether he's being too strict with him or too lax, and he's sure that if Laura were here, he'd do a better job.  Alfredo sometimes lies awake at night with visions of poor Beppe needing lots of therapy because he lost his mother and his father didn't know what he was doing.  This is very Alfredo.

It's true that Beppe's got an excessive amount of energy and is prone to do silly things, but he's very very young and he's also a puppy, and that's par for the course.  As far as we can tell, Alfredo's doing just fine. 

Sir Theo is a Bed Hog

Sir Theo has been hanging out in the south room with me the last week or so.  Ordinarily, this is great: he's so big that snuggling with him is like snuggling a pillow with feet and ears.  The problem is that my mattress is quite small, and after a week or so spent sharing it with me, Sir Theo seems to be feeling a bit cramped.  He kept stealing the space.

This happened two or three times last night: not exaggerating.  I would wake up on the very edge of my mattress, almost against the bookcases on the left side, with a large body blocking any attempt to move further right.  'That's funny,' I would say to myself, 'I don't remember sleeping with someone.'  Then, 'Oh, Sir Theeee-oooo,' and I'd do my best to roll over, slide my arms around him, and move us both further to the right.  This solution proved temporary.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised.  Cats are like this, after all.  The cat we had growing up was less than half Sir Theo's size, and she could take up an entire bed easily.  (Once I even woke up on the floor to find her sleeping contentedly in the middle of the bed.)  So at least Sir Theo wasn't dumping me out onto the floor.  And I love Sir Theo dearly and will not hold this against him.  But hell!

It's a Very Tempting Tail

We can now add Gilly's tail to the list of things that fascinate Plouie.

This is an understandable fascination: Gilly does, in fact, have a singularly first-rate tail.  The real surprise here is that it took Plouie six months to notice.

A Tail Inspection

We noticed Alfredo perfoming an inspection of Leprosy's tail the other night.

This was a singular occasion on two counts: one doesn't normally see Alfredo performing such inspections, and Leprosy is such a stickler for details and conventions that you'd not expect him to give anyone cause.  It turned out, though, that the kittens had put bubble gum on Leprosy's tail and Alfredo had to get it off with peanut butter.  Neither Leprosy nor Alfredo was pleased - the kittens aren't even supposed to have bubble gum - and the word is that disciplinary actions are underway.  No word yet on their nature, though.

Mimsy Pulls the Cord

Mimsy's behaviour is sometimes rather difficult to suss out, because he's a bit mad.  So let me present to you a puzzle: what is he thinking in this picture?

We think he was trying to turn it on (which clearly was not going to end well), but what made him choose this particular misguided approach?  Is it his own idea?  Did someone else put him up to it?  Is it a prank or part of a larger scheme?  If the latter, what was the overall plan, and has the scheme been abandoned or not?  Or are we on the wrong track entirely, and Mimsy was trying to do something completely different?  He was singularly unforthcoming when we asked him; his exact words were, 'I have no comment,' which is something he's picked up from Magick or Murchison or someone. 

And Now For Something Completely Aesthetic

As you may recall, I really like black-and-white contrasts.  AJD spotted another good one the other day.

In addition to its aesthetic value, this picture adds to the perpetual mystery of exactly what is going on between Murchison and Magick.  Magick looks like he's bodily trying to keep Murchison away from something here, and we've been unable to determine what that may have been.  Both of them, of course, played innocent and dumb when queried.  They made up some story about Magick politely grooming Murchison's back as cats are wont to do.  Slickly told - they're both professionals - but we're not sure we buy it, given the source.