Oscar and Kyala have moved on. Toga, their three-month old Jackass penguin, stolen from their home at the Amazon World zoo on December 18th, is presumed dead. Kyala has laid a new egg, and they hope to put this whole horrible ordeal behind them. It's time for healing.
When Toga had been gone about 10 days, Oscar and Kyala started to build a new nest. In one of the many news stories covering this development, Kate Bright, the zoo manager--and it seems, resident interpreter for the penguins--said:
I imagine Oscar and Kyala manning phones (penguining phones?), delegating search parties, going on air, tears in their eyes, begging for their baby back. But I guess we have to assume they made every effort a penguin in captivity can make to find Toga, meaning waddling around the penguin pen a few times and then raising up their slick little flaps of arms in a penguin shrug.
But their human friends did make great efforts to find Toga, including a 44,000 dollar reward ($600 came from the US government). "No questions asked," one British anchor pleaded, "We just want to get Toga back to his mum and dad." One of thousands of responses, an email from a young girl, told the zoo that if indeed Toga was stolen as a Christmas present (inspired by March of the Penguins) she would propose a swap to the theif: "I'll give you my new Xbox 360 in exchange."
E Wesp's piece on March of the Penguins and recent coverage of the "trojan pandas" in the China/Taiwan conflict (are they cute and cuddly or are they communist spies?) point to the potential political underpinnings of our relation to adorable animals. But much like the extensive coverage of the Jonbenet Ramsay investigation edging out what some would consider more important concerns (like Kosovo, for example), Toga the penguin has dominated media coverage in Britain and elsewhere for the past month, putting politics on the backburner. Tony Blair's visit to Iraq? Who cares! Look at the penguins! They are like little men in tuxedos! Nukes in India? HAVE YOU SEEN MARCH OF THE PENGUINS????
Of course, March of the Penguins did this to Toga. And certainly affected the way the Toga stories have been colored and received. There has been rampant anthropomorphism in the Toga coverage. Consider these two moments:
One story showed this photograph alongside an article reading: "Pictures of his crestfallen parents Kyala and Oscar made the front page of many newspapers while donations and messages of support flooded in from all over the world."
While a follow-up story about Oscar and Kyala's new egg showed this picture and caption:
This is like when I was a kid, and I could swear one of my stuffed animals could exhibit emotion. Same bead eyes, same felt mouth, occassionally he was happy, but very often he was obviously upset. And it broke my heart to see him that way.
There have been, of course, less than sentimental responses to the snatching of Toga. One blogger, in an ungenerous stab at Toga's breed, commented that Toga was "kind of a jackass for letting itself get stolen from a zoo" and further questioned his intelligence for needing his mother to put food directly in his mouth. Nevertheless, we are all now anxiously awaiting the birth of the replacement Toga, and officials at the Amazon World zoo have installed closed circuit cameras and motion sensors to prevent further penguin-napping.
And Oscar and Kyala are moving on. A new baby is on the way. "It will help them get over it," Kate Bright told reporters. "In the wild they would have to get on with it."
One last interesting turn of this tragic tale would be of the Jonbenet Ramsay type--perhaps we will find out that Oscar and Kyala ate Toga?
This is a guide to the software that publishes Printculture. Now--especially after the redesign--in need of some kind of update.
A two-part reflection on the relationship between the development of freedom in video games and the social structure it reflects and reproduces.
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One of the first pieces I wrote for printculture, it uses passages about the appeal of irony-free zones from David Lipsky's Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point to contemplate the role of irony in a post-9/11, post-2004 election world.
