Monkey Time

If you can imagine Hell on earth, I think I just read about it in The New Yorker, which ran an article detailing a Jimmy Buffett-themed senior housing complex in Florida. Heat, humidity, spiders, alligators, panthers, lizards, "Cheeseburger In Paradise" playing nonstop. If that sounds like good livin' to you, go get all you can of it, and take my share too. I've seen the Buffett folkways and I guess you need more of those Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops, and baggy shorts to fit in. I have none. 

I know this makes me seem an outlier but the thing I like about Florida is reading things like this: 

There is a troop of vervet monkeys that live near a busy runway at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.  There are no native American monkeys, but in the 1940s, someone brought some little vervets from West Africa and set up a breeding facility and spectator zoo. There are now 40 descendants of those original arrivals running around a 1500-acre section of Dania Beach.

These simians get assistance from members of the Dania Beach Vervet Project, who all work to preserve the colony.  These monkeys are local stars! TV and newspapers all go out to cover them when the news about not being able to tell people there is such a word as "gay" slows down in the Sunshine State. Visitors and nearby residents feed the monks, despite signs saying not to do so.

The vervets (Males typically grow to 2 feet and weigh 15 pounds; females reach 18 inches and 10 pounds) are used to posing for pictures with passersby, and live about 20 years. Not bad, for a state where the governor flouts science and common sense in his effort to be on fox news all day and all night.  

And they have adapted away from their traditional dinner fare of spiders, ants, lizards, seeds, and flowers in favor of what humans bring them: Sugary things and salty things.

So for centuries, they were used to chowing down on the bounty of the wild, and now they only want Pop-Tarts and Cheez-Its.

Maybe we could chip in and get them all little Hawaiian shirts and flip flops and surf shorts to really complete their humanness.