Tiger Attacks: Is This Really a Problem?

merican media is in a frenzy the week following a brutal tiger attack on magician Roy Horn in Las Vegas. The Oct. 3 mauling of the entertainer happened at The Mirage hotel-casino show in front 1,500 lucky paying fans. Ever since the incident, news organizations and infotainment sources have been bringing a steady deluge of information on tigers and tiger attacks to the public, prompting the question: Is this really a problem?

Horn, 59, of the famed unambiguously-gay duo “Sigfried & Roy,� remains in critical condition following the near-fatal tiger attack. The tiger, a white 7-year-old Siberian tiger, the same kind it’s hard to get a photo of Horn without, was being quarantined and apparently held for questioning following the mauling. Witnesses said Horn was alone with the tiger onstage when it grabbed his arm; Horn then tried to fend off the animal with a microphone, but it offered no comment on its intentions. The tiger, whose name was not released to reporters, then went for Horn’s throat and dragged him off-stage. Those who saw the event described it as “terrifyingly amusing.�

No doubt it was gruesome to behold, and will be part of an hour-long Fox special in the future, but what about preventing further incidents of tiger-related injuries? One man has received possibly-fatal injuries already, and much other damage has been inflicted: 267 Sigfried & Roy workers lost their jobs and The Mirage lost a $44 million-earning act. What other damage have tigers inflicted on the American public?

According to a PETA pamphlet mistakenly mailed to the commune, over 15,000 tigers are privately owned in the United States, despite being illegal as pets. Since 1990, six adults and two children have been killed in tiger-related incidents, and over 60 have been seriously injured. Statistics on how many tigers or individuals are involved in the entertainment industry are not given, but it’s easy to assume most illegally-kept tigers are not kept secret by taking them onstage for a show regularly. In fact, truthfully, how you can keep a tiger amongst other people at all without anyone knowing about it is itself a mystery, given this reporter’s cat Knickers receives complaints from nasty neighbors on average of once a week.

Since the mauling at The Mirage, lawmakers have apparently done nothing further to discourage further tiger attacks. Though with media hype building, the exact number of licenses and permits necessary to bring a wild animal show to town will likely be revealed as tiger-related news proves a thin resource.

Reports continue to flood in about the outpouring of support for Roy Horn and his companion, meant in the working sense, Sigfried Fischbacher. People arrive in droves at a makeshift memorial in front of The Mirage and numbers of them hold candlelight vigils in front of the hospital where he continues his recovery process. So many people have visited the Sigfried & Roy website, it has reportedly crashed numerous times. Meanwhile, 11 million children in Africa are left orphans from AIDS epidemics and the UN projects 2 billion people worldwide will live in poverty by 2030.

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Buddha?

Buddha who?

Indeed. Well, it's time to set the record really straight, like Tom Selleck straight. Because I'm tired of people on the street arguing with me that Buddha was one of the original members of Cypress Hill. So strap on your thinking caps boys and girls, we're embarking on a magical journey to the Land of Not Being So Stupid.

For starters, you probably know Buddha as that big fat Oriental guy smiling and giving the thumbs-up in ads for Chinese restaurants across the country. What few know and may be surprised to learn is that he was also the father of a worldwide religious movement, sort of like Jim Jones without all the mass suiciding. Or think Eddie Murphy in that Holy Man movie. I haven't seen the movie, but it seemed like it had something to do with religion.

The problem with the Buddha is that everyone has their own idea who the man was. For some, he's known as the source for the famous philosophical quote "It ain't easy, bein' cheesy." For others, he was an inspiration to the morbidly obese worldwide. Others are just crazy.

Case in point: feminist voice Liz Gromer of the Humboldt, California Daily Bitch.

"If you want to buy into the bullshit Hollywood image of Buddha, you go right ahead if it helps you sleep at night, thinking of Buddha in this glamorized image of some great big fat fucker from China. But the truth remains the truth, and the truth is Buddha was an 87-pound woman from Chicago, and she had an ABORTION. That's right, and I hope it rocks your pathetic little sanctimonious world, you fucks."

On this side of crazy, the real Buddha was born in Northern India in 565 B.C. as Siddhattha Gautama, which isn't that bad once you consider that this was a country where people were naming their kids things like Dikshit and Assum. Gautama was born as royalty; real royalty, not the crap we have now like Paris Hilton or a bunch of inbred Brits. As a child he rode around on pygmy elephants and his feet weren't allowed to touch the ground until he was seven, that kind of thing.

Buddhists believe that Gautama was born after having a go at reincarnation innumerable times in an attempt to become the Buddha, or "Bitchin' Guy." In nearly all of the lives he ended up being a gay hairdresser in New York, so he had to start the whole thing over again too many times to count. Eventually, however, he fulfilled the Ten Paramitas, a Mexican entrée that is very difficult to prepare, and was ready to be born as the Buddha.

While she was pregnant, Gautama's mother had visionary dream of a magnificent white elephant handing her a hamburger, which was delicious but needed relish. She took the dream to mean her son-to-be would either be a great success, or would just love bun meat.

A seer who had crashed the party for Gautama's birth told the father, King "Dan" Suddhodana, that his son would either grow up to be a great king or a kick-ass spiritual leader. Dan quickly set out to prevent his son from having any kind of character-building experiences, so that he would go the king route and Dan wouldn't be stuck with a lousy spiritual messiah for a son, forsaking material excess and laying around the house all day.

The young Buddha spent his childhood like any other boy, trying to kill small birds, but because of his wealth he was able to forsake throwing rocks and just paid the birds to fly into the rocks themselves. After seven or eight years he tired of this and turned his attention to spiritual matters. Ten minutes later, he discovered girls, and it is best to gloss over the next several years in the Buddha's biography.

In 545 B.C., Buddha was kicked out of college for boning the Dean's daughter, who was then 16 but had tits like a 24-year-old. A dissatisfied Buddha would drift aimlessly for the next few years on the George W. Bush plan for character development, except they didn't have cocaine back then and you had to juice a lot of toxic berries to get high. Eventually, Buddha was married and had a child in 540 B.C., though he was unaware of either fact and ended up deserting the family he didn't know he had to embark on a pilgrimage to find his lost shaker of salt, i.e., Enlightenment.

On his way out of town, the Buddha famously saw his "four sights": a dying man, a sick man, an old man, and the smug fucker who got the sick guy sick and killed the dying man and who kept pointing at the old man and laughing that he was so old. It was then that Buddha realized the four sufferings of existence: to be old, to be sick, to be dead, and to be an asshole. Buddha decided then and there that none of these were for him.

Gautama wandered in the wilderness for three years and in an act of self-denial, he ate nothing but Pringles the whole time. He would never eat them again. After the Pringles phase he tried eating nothing at all for two more years. After the second year, Buddha realized that denying the body the pleasures of food is "boddhishiti," or "bullshit." He then immediately ate three large pizzas and spent the rest of the week contemplating indigestion. Pretty much from then on the Buddha was Marlon Brando fat, but nobody gave him any crap about it.

Buddha then traveled to Rajagaha and studied meditation under the eccentric masters Alara-Kalama and Uddaka-Ramaputta, who argued constantly over who was uglier. Under their tutelage, Gautama achieved a transcendent state of deep meditative peace, which he summed up as "big whoop," before telling Alara-Kalama and Uddaka-Ramaputta they were both equally ugly and leaving.

Gautama decided he would have to go it alone to find true Enlightenment, and so spent the next four years contemplating why hot dogs come in packs of ten while buns come in packs of eight. After the fourth year spent in contemplation, Buddha realized he didn't even like hot dogs, and was enlightened.

From then on, Gautama was known as the Buddha, or as a bodhisattva, which is Hindi for "Big Deal." He quickly attracted legions of followers, to whom he passed on his wisdom about low-maintenance haircuts and not eating yellow snow. The Buddha would travel the countryside for the rest of his life, enlightening the masses and terrifying All-You-Can-Eat buffets across the land.

Though many in the West have a hard time taking the Buddha seriously as a religious figure because he never wrote a best-selling book (Jesus) or built much of a self-help empire (Hubbard), many slackers have adopted the Buddha as their patron saint, allowing them to camouflage their persistent sloth as a sign of low-grade Enlightenment. But their more-industrious neighbors are quick to remind them that while ancient people had to put up with the Buddha crashing on their couch all the time, at least they got some clever haikus out of the deal.

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I return from a pretty fun weekend here, folks. The Divine Miss C has just finished her very first DVD commentary, and I can say without fear of contradiction (unless one of you dildos has actually done a DVD commentary for a film you've been in, which I very much doubt) that it was a great experience.

The film was Li'l Poachers, the fantastic adventure film where the six kids get lost in the Florida Everglades and have to fend for themselves against animals and sub-human Cajuns. It was a lot like that Lord of the Flies movie but without all the depressing kid-on-kid violence and half-naked boys. Like if Disney had done that movie. If you remember loving Li'l Poachers and are saying to yourself, "Hey, wow! Clarissa Coleman was in that movie?" Eat me. Yeah, I was in the movie. You know what else, nutsack? I'm in the commentary, too. So there. You can't keep me down.

The DVD production staff got all six of us kid stars back for the commentary—me, Tim T. Toolkitty, Jeffy Smurtz, Franz Golgannis, Pockets O'Shannon, and Dina Frazell, who played the tough girl back then because you couldn't have lesbians in movies. All of us were reunited for the first time in 15 years. It was too bad the director Chummy Styron couldn't have been with us, but as you probably know he shot himself (to death) shortly after the film opened at number one at the box office. Funny, I guess—despite all that success he still said in his suicide note he had lost hope there was any good in the world.

Once we got re-acquainted with each other and knocked back a few brewskis (would you believe only I thought to bring a case of Coors?) we started on the commentary. We had to stop and start over a few times, believe it or not. It looks (or sounds) so easy when you're listening to the commentary at home, when those two or three guys who do that do it, but it's a lot harder than it seems. It took me a while to get the hang of it. Here's some quick tips I learned.

It's not considered good commentary when one of your fellow actors comes on the screen and you say, "Man, you've gotten fat, Jeffy." Also unacceptable: "You looked better as a kid for sure, Franz." I would almost say that my early attempts at commentary made me unpopular with my co-stars, but I eventually got the hang of it.

The proper way to do commentary, they said, is to let the audience in on how the movie was made. So I made several revelations in my next attempts at commentary, things like, "We weren't really in the Everglades at all," and "I think the director had to do this movie because his gambling problem had become so expensive he couldn't make art films anymore." I had other behind-the-scenes information, too, like when I said, "There's the pirate they put in the movie because the studio wanted to make a clone of The Goonies." Apparently, though, discussing the salary everybody got for the movie is some kind of big fat taboo.

I tried "stories," too, little interesting tidbits that the general public doesn't know. I pointed to a tree on the screen and asked Pockets, "Remember when we used to get really high back there before we had to shoot scenes?" Or telling them, "There's where Dina made a pass at me. I was very flattered." Nobody seemed to like my commentary, truthfully, they kept saying they might have to edit a few things out, but you learn to like getting edited in the entertainment biz, at least if you've been edited as much as I have. I bet more than half of the brilliant things I've said off-script have never been used. Or all of them.

As a bonus tip, they really don't like it when you shout out every time you're on the screen, "There I am! Look!" They also really hate it when you're not on screen and you keep asking, "Wasn't I in this scene? Where am I? Why aren't I in this scene?"

In the end, though, despite the fact my commentary might not even make it onto the disc, I would highly recommend doing a DVD commentary for the experience alone, should you ever get the chance. Yeah! That'll happen.

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