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Pigs, Goats, Comedians

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It really doesn’t make sense to spend much time sharing things on the Internet if you are in any way bothered by the feeling that you are a dope, a loser, a chump, a tool, someone who can’t count, or both. No matter how smart you think you are, eventually something will happen to demonstrate that you are easily used by other people because you are willing to believe things that are not true.

The latest bit of proof supporting this Internet Law is the case of the Pig Saves Goat viral video, in which a baby goat with its foot stuck at the bottom of a pool of water is dislodged and pushed to shore by a virtuous pig.

This supposedly heroic act by a brave porcine bystander at a petting zoo made the global rounds in September. News programs ran with the footage and millions cheered.

It now comes to light that the event was staged for a television show, and required a crew of 20 that included divers, animal trainers, plexiglass wranglers and animal welfare monitors.

Some skeptics were correct five months ago when they first saw the clip and questioned its believability. Others who saw it at the time and didn’t say anything are now realizing they knew all along that something was wrong.

I’m with them.

I immediately became suspicious when I noticed that the pig didn’t dive down to the bottom of the pool to use his teeth to pull the goat hoof out from between the pinching rocks, as any other normal pig would do in that situation. My doubts were also sparked by the realization that when both animals were on dry land and the rescue was an obvious success, the pig didn’t smile, wink, pump his hoof in the air or give anyone a high two.

That seemed odd.

Quite a few major news organizations bought into this ruse by unquestioningly featuring it on their programs. Some journalists say this proves beyond any doubt that the mainstream media are feckless and lazy. Those critics should surrender their journalism license for having some doubt left to begin with. And don’t check to see if there’s such a thing as a journalism license – that will just complicate the story and make it harder for you to get out of the office at a reasonable time.

I’m glad I saw this video back in September and decided not to use in on Trail Baboon. That means today I can feel like I’m not a dope or a loser. But I did share the back story, which was saved until now as a clever and effective way to promote a new Comedy Central series which has its premiere tonight. That certifies it – I’m a chump.

Describe an instance when everyone around you was wrong, and you were right. (If there is no such instance, please – make one up.)

45 thoughts on “Pigs, Goats, Comedians”

  1. Good morning. I think I’m more know for being wrong than being right. I’ve been told many times that I am going in the wrong direction and that was what I was doing. I think there was at least one or two times when everyone thought I was going the wrong way and I was actually was going the right way.

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      1. When I made the claim that I might have been right once or twice, I was told that I was wrong. However, this is another case of being right when others thought I was wrong.

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I often am right about some issue or another. That said, however, it is not always like being right does me any good. Especially when it involves the other party having a lot of power. One can be very, very right and still get nailed by those wielding power.

    Years ago when I worked for a local county as a Children’s Mental Health Case Manager, the State Department of Human Services decided to do a compliance audit regarding a particular procedure. I was the first person in this county to hold my position because it was a new program, so really the guy was auditing my work. First they sent people out to audit the files. Three months later they sent out a notorious idiot (excuse the judgement) to each county to give us feedback about how we scored. The guy sits us down and tells us, “Well, you failed the audit, but you failed it better than any county statewide.” He takes a breath to keep talking.

    I interrupted him

    “Wait a minute. You mean everyone in the state failed the audit?” I asked.

    “Yes, everyone failed. But your county failed but your score was the highest in the state, and just under the failing mark.”

    I said, “So how is this procedure do-able, if everyone doing it is doing it in a failing manner? Maybe it is not possible.”

    “Oh, it is. But nobody did it right.”

    It went on from there. My boss sat there speechless and impotent, snivelling and smiling, because I was so mad I was saying what she should have said and would not.

    I was right. The thing was not do-able because the stateDHS set an unreachable standard. They were wrong.

    And we still failed the audit.

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  4. I could tell you about that one time in the mountains of the Serengeti, surrounded by agents of one of the most nefarious international cartel of spheniscidae, when I was the only member of our elite band to know exactly the thing to be done to make our escape using only duct tape, jello and an incendiary tract…but it’s a state secret and if I told, then you all might find that one day you had an “accident” with a large vat of goat milk cheese…

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  5. OT: we are all moved in, almost all things in place. Old place cleaned. Lease papers, stuff this afternoon. One trip to a chaity. can barely use my hnads.

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  6. Most of my right/wrong stuff was with Wasband. Whatever it was we were arguing about, he had to be right, but he would not admit that need – made it seem like I was the one needing rightness. Was very slippery, but I still know that some of the time I was right.

    About the only time I can think of when Everyone else was wrong and I was right was teaching the kindergarteners… and even they were gaining on me. Will think more on this.

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    1. As a teacher I think you do need to stand your ground against school kids who might be apposed to what you want them to do. I was told that as a substitute teacher it was okay and maybe a good thing if you were strict to the point that you were disliked by the students. I didn’t think it was necessary to be that strict.

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    2. I had a similar situation w/ my wasband. If I would come home and say “I’m tired”, he would say “I’m not tired”. Or if I would come downstairs and say “It’s cold down here”, he would say “I’m not cold”. By the end of marriage, this got to be quite a problem and I eventually ended up using bad words to tell him I didn’t care how he felt. Not good.

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      1. There are lots of people who want to be right all the time. Actually, I have those tendencies. I can get along with a person who always needs to be right if there are other things about them that I like which off set their need to always be right. For example, if I share lots of common interests with another person I can get along with them because we will not be in conflict too often. However, when I am in conflict with a person I like who always wants to be right, there will be times when I will need to suppress my need to be right.

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  7. Morning–
    Kelly and I have this bit we do. When you’ve been proven wrong you say ‘Once again, I was wrong. You were right.’
    I think it probably started spewn with vitriol during an argument, but has now just become one of those comfortable familiar phrases that comes out when the tension is getting too heavy. The proper response to that is simply to say ‘Thank you’.

    Thanks for all the elephant jokes yesterday. They were great!

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  8. Oh, gosh, I’m right 101% of the time, so no single incident stands out. But I found it interesting that the commercial before the pig-goat video at the Comedy Central website was for Pizza Hut’s PIzza Sliders. It seems they have managed to reinvent the venerable pizza bun from my elementary school cafeteria–probably MOST elementary school cafeterias from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

    Makes me wonder what the next “slider” food will be. My guess is White Castle will reinvent their sliders and call them Retro Sliders or Classic Sliders.

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. Did the pizza burgers at your school feature glorified sloppy joe mix and a pristine 2″ square of processed cheese food product sheet?

      Bottom half of the bun burgers were better than top half of the bun burgers, IIRC.

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      1. Exactly what we had, MIG. I think the cooks got triple duty out of the sloppy joe mix. It went into sloppy joes, onto pizza buns, and I think was essentially the sauce they put on top of spaghetti.

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  9. It isn’t like me to feel I’m right but everyone around me is wrong. And yet I can remember one such time. In 1980 I won a contest about fishing with kids. My reward was an all-expenses-paid fishing trip to the Florida Keys. We fished the mangrove flats for bonefish and tarpon and then we took a trip to fish around boat wrecks for barracuda and assorted seafish, such as snappers and groupers.

    I was in the company of celebrity saltwater anglers and celebrity guides, men who were famous for their fishing exploits. One of them, a suntanned giant of a man named Cal Cochran, might be the most bigoted man I’ve ever met. Several members of the party had written multiple books and given countless seminars on saltwater fishing techniques. Several were hosts of their own TV shows. It was hard for this kid from the Midwest to not be intimidated by the cocky, aggressive experts I fished with.

    But on one point, I thought they had a lot to learn. I was shocked at the way those guys treated the fish they caught. Every fish was gaffed (and thus killed) even if they didn’t mean to eat it. I came from a strong tradition of “catch and release,” a policy of treating fish with reverence and returning almost all of them unharmed to the water. These saltwater guys took it for granted that they would kill every fish they caught.

    And they were not impressed with my concerns. They seemed motivated by a conviction that the “sea is full of fish” and by the sense that “if I don’t keep this fish I caught some other @sshole will.” To me, they seemed bloody, greedy and disrespectful toward the fish that made their sport possible. My gentle protests marked me as a loony liberal who really didn’t understand fishing.

    Years later I saw some of these same men delivering an entirely different message on their fishing shows. They had begun to sense that the bounty of the seas was not endless and they were pushing a strong conservation ethic. Well, better late than never!

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  11. Morning all. I work in corporate America, so I have way too many of these stories, but I am feeling smug lately because of one of them. Over a year ago, my company purchased some software that my division would have to use – of course did not ask anyone in my division to try it out first. After three days of training and making lists of issues that the software company would have to fix, I told my boss that as it stood, the software wasn’t usable. Then I kept my trap shut through meeting after meeting and supposed fix after fix. They kept saying the software would roll out, but the date kept getting pushed back and pushed back. About two weeks ago, techno-folks started finally saying outloud that we would not be using this software after all.

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    1. I spent a lot of time trying out an expensive machine that would not work in a lab when employed at Hormel Foods. I kept trying to get it to work and never came close. For some reason they kept on asking me to try to get the machine to work for a long time after it seemed clear that it wouldn’t for.

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  13. i had just been asked to join the schooll associated committee on goodness to help raise funds to give the classrooms stuff they need and to give scholarships to the 3 kids who win the drawing for college tuition assistance based on the deep pockets of the committee. i wa sthe new guy in the4 meeting and the new business and old business came up for discussion. well it seems someone had donated 50,000.00 to the foundation to put them so far int he balck that they ware all feeling real good about their little organazation and they were discussing what to do wityh the money. they had never had this kind of money before and it was important to do the right thing. one of the guys ahd a friend of a friend who was a financial advisor whlo could help them out, usually he didnt do things for portfiolios of under 250,000 but he thought he cousl help us out. i commented that with the market as screwed up as it was right now that gold was the way to go where it would not be vulnerable to the market weirdness. they wnet ahead and gave it ti the advisor and 3 dayas later the morgan stanley nosedive happened and the 50,000 had been transformed into 1500. no apology no offer to do anything, the committee guy whio invested the money thought the approproate response was to call the rich guy and tell him what happened so he could give another 50,000. he didnt. they continue on their way and i was asked not to let the door hit me int he ass on my way out. some people just dont like to be reminded of what wrong decisions they have made.

    my offce manager wanted to buy a house i told him no, no, no yes thats the one. it was a run down duplex in south minneapolis near lyndale and lake. he had been there about a year and the neighbor came over and told him he had just sold his house to a developer who was going to do lofts in the area. i checked into it with hima nd found that the project included his house. i instructed him to be the hold out house built into the side of the museum if they went ahead without him , well they bought every other house but his and they were aftere him hard. i told him to hold out for x and he settled for 90% of x and went out and bout a house on lake minnetonka with the proceeds.
    he fixed my snowblower this year so we are even. it ws a good year to have a snowblower

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  14. Invariably when I am right and everybody else is wrong, I really, really, really would rather be wrong. I see that train a-comin’, a-comin’ down the track….

    and I know it is heading straight for the team. Cheerful, optimistic people who lead happier lives than I can even imagine state confidently that all will be well, and I really hope it will, but experience tells me this is just not going to work out as we would all like it to.

    And then it doesn’t.

    Not the clip I was hoping for (you know the one, where the bridge ISN’T there, and it is somehow all Moriaty’s fault, even though he has been thinking nothing but good thoughts about that bridge), but always worth seeing Donald Sutherland as Oddball.

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        1. A personal favorite that in my world is a double feature with Spinal Tap. Throw in a 2-liter bottle of Orange Crush and you have the perfect (if weird) triple play.

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  15. There were 3 jobs that I left voluntarily, much earlier than I’d planned to leave. It was not so much I’m right, you’re wrong, but a chasm in philosophy or world view that couldn’t be breached.
    – In teaching it was “33 kindergarteners in one room is NUTS.” Nothing they could do about it.
    – Managing a vet clinic, I had a boss who exercised the “seagull style” of management – swoop in, sh** all over everyone, and fly off… (I was not blameless in that one, but still.)
    – Bookstore job under “Benevolent Dictator” who was better at the dictator part.
    In each case, I didn’t argue with them, because they knew my stand. I don’t think any of them were surprised when I left, or sad.

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  16. While in Westminster Abby recently, I had to correct my traveling companion regarding the difference between Queen Mary, the older sister of Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen of Scots. My companion thought they were the same person. Well, they are not, and she didn’t want to believe me until we saw the tomb for Mary right next to Elizabeth, and the tomb for Mary QOS, located right across the corridor. I love being right.

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  18. I have an adjustable rate mortgage that I’ve had for about twenty-five years. Everyone I know has at one time or another been eager to refinance, because they were sure interest rates would never go any lower, and they wanted to have a fixed rate mortgage to guard against rapidly rising rates. Some of my friends refinanced more than once, incurring closing costs each time. My rate is 2.875% right now, and over the past couple of decades it’s averaged around 4%.

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