We've been in this "shelter in place" phase for a little over a month now.
I guess I've gotten used to not "going out to eat". It was kind of weird not to go to church on Easter.
I'm still not used to this toilet paper issue. At first, it was due to all of the big bad hoarder people and we were promised that the supply chain would catch up. Here it is a month later and seeing a pack of toilet paper for sale at Kroger is like seeing Haley's Comet.
My next-door neighbor told me, from well over six feet away, that she found a pack of toilet paper at Costco. It is good to know we have a hookup.
Like other Americans during this time of sheltering, my wife and I have watched the Netflix documentary "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, And Madness" Netflix describes the show as "A zoo owner spirals out of control amid a cast of eccentric characters in this true murder-for-hire story from the underworld of big cat breeding." A better description would be "A White Trash Freak Parade. Oh yeah, there are some tigers."
"The Tiger King" is a guy who calls himself Joe Exotic and he runs a
He breeds tigers in this zoo to sell to people who happen to have two thousand dollars and just a few brain cells.
He has multiple tattoos and multiple earrings. He has this high-pitched nasal twang and sold music videos of himself singing his songs like the haunting (not in a good way) "I Saw A Tiger"'.
To top it off: he has a mullet.
His enemy is Carole Baskin, a sanctimonious bottle blonde with a bit of a past. She runs a wildlife animal rescue sanctuary in Florida which takes in wildlife when people learn (the hard way) the novelty of a baby tiger ends when it becomes an adult.
Joe and Carole have a mutual dislike for each other and spend a lot of their time making lawyers wealthy by suing and countersuing. While Carole is more right than Joe, she is one of those smug crusading activists who is trying to make the world a better place and makes you sick. Joe is just a bipolar mess.
A good bit of the documentary is spent on Joe's accusation that Carole had her millionaire (second) husband killed for his money. Joe's evidence: The husband disappeared and they have never found the body. Now in the real legal world (I know this from years of watching "Perry Mason"), that is not technically "evidence". But Joe harped on it time and time again how "Care-roll kilt her husband and fed hem to the alliegaters" and "Care-roll fed her husban to the tie-gers" and (my favorite), "Care-roll burreed her huzban unner neath that septic tank".
From my observation, a lot of people believe Carole was involved with her second husband's disappearance and/or death mainly because Carole seems like a person that would tell the teacher they forgot to assign homework. For what it's worth, O. J.Simpson, someone who actually, well, you know, says he thinks Carole did it.
You meet a lot of people in Tiger King. Kelci Saffery, a transman who is now an amputee due to sticking his hand into a tiger cage. John Reinke, the zoo's manager, does not have any legs due to a zip line accident. John Finlay, one of Joe's "husbands", barely had any teeth. It was like you had to be missing something to be associated with Joe Exotic.
The zoo's head keeper was a man named Erik Cowie, who along with John Reinke, didn't seem to have a dishonest bone in his body. You wonder what road he had to go down to end up working in a private zoo headed by Joe Exotic. Erik is a walking personification of "Sunday Morning Coming Down".
Joe is always doing something outrageous. Like his same-sex wedding to two other men. I didn't think polygamy was legal in Oklahoma. He had an internet TV show. He ran for President. He ran for governor of Oklahoma. At campaign events, he passed out condoms with his picture on it.
Joe has turned narcissism into a type of performance art. He makes Donald Trump seem like a wallflower.
Joe brings in an investor from Las Vegas named Jeff Lowe who uses baby tigers to score poontang in Vegas. In fact, one of the points Tiger King makes over and over again is a tiger is an aphrodisiac and not, as popular legend has it, an animal that can eat you.
Joe begins to spiral out of control, I guess. He looked pretty out of control beforehand to me. He hatches an incredibly dumb plan to hire a hitman with an obese strip club owner who has a worse haircut than Joe to kill Carole. It turns out the obese strip club owner was working with the Feds and Joe is now sitting in jail.
What have we learned from Tiger King? We've learned that there are a lot of people in the wildlife animal subculture and all of them have a screw loose. We've learned that Wal-Mart donated its expired meat and chicken to the zoo and that the zoo employees could go through it and keep the good stuff for themselves. We've learned no male in Oklahoma wears a shirt.
We've learned that in the middle of a pandemic, we'll watch anything.
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