“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

-Wm. Butler Yeats

Yes, the Bills lost a heartbreaker to the Accursed Patriots /spits. But all is not lost. The Bills have Tampa this week, and there’s nothing to rebuild your confidence quite like shitting in the mouth of Tom Brady /spits.

Another slow NFL News Day. Literally, the biggest news is Ryan Fitzpatrick finally having surgery to repair his Week 1 hip injury.

Accordingly, we turn to JV Foosball for today’s sampling:

*You thought you could escape the sordid tale of a stripper, her monkey, Halloween and the University of Texas football team. You thought it was some sort of candy-and-alcohol-hangover hallucination, an Internet Age version of Scrooge’s crumb of cheese or underdone potato.

No no, my friend.

As previously summarized: a trick or treater was attacked by a monkey at the home of the Texas Longhorns’ special teams coach, but the monkey belonged to his girlfriend, who is a stripper that he left his wife for, known as the “Pole Assassin” and who uses the monkey in her act and is tweet-defending herself and the monkey in a conversation with PFTCommenter.

You know, a full month later and reading that still gives me this:

Now, the alleged trick-or-treater’s alleged parents have allegedly filed civil suit against the alleged Pole alleged Assassin and her alleged co-monkey-custodian Jeff Banks for gross negligence and defamation. Allegedly.

In the suit, Amy and Casey Clinkenbeard

state that their child

was invited to go through a haunted house on Banks’ property with two friends. Afterward, he was invited to see the alleged monkey (Gia) who he was told gives high-fives.

The kid (who is apparently in the 11-13 age range) decided this sounded great. So when his hand went up, Gia bit the shit out of it and refused to let go, requiring the kid to “manually pry the monkey’s jaw open.”

As a side note, is there a way other than manually to pry a monkey’s jaws off your bleeding hand? Like, an Automatic Monkey Jaw Opener? If not, there’s money to be made there…

Anyway, after the kid saw a doctor to get it treated, the doctor called P.A. and asked about Gia’s vaccination status. P.A. refused to tell him, presumably while yelling something incoherent about HIPAA. However, by way of easing the concerns of a medical professional, she did disclose that Gia had bitten her before and she was fine. Free Lawyer Tip: never ever admit that you knew your animal had a history of biting people. Also, given that all the pictures I see of P.A. look like she hasn’t showered for weeks, I wouldn’t rule out rabitic hydrophobia.

So that’s the gross negligence bit. The defamation part comes from P.A.’s statements on social media (since deleted) that the kid was trespassing in the monkey area and should have known better.

Now, here I am split. Texas trespass law is a mystery to me, other than the fact that you are allowed to shoot any man on sight as long as you yell “Dang varmint! Git off my property!” within two minutes before or after the shot. See State v. Yosemite Sam, 20 S.W. 2d 335 (1948). Presumably exposure to an attack primate falls into similar bounds. I assume an invitee may reasonably be limited to certain parts of a property. Also, as anyone who has read The Coach Zimmer Chronicles or seen Raiders of the Lost Ark knows- only a fool trusts a capuchin.

So there’s an element of assumption of risk.

On the other hand, monkeys are not fucking pets. They are majestic, proud wild animals who are also sneaky as shit. Call me a Monkey Fascist, but there is no safe way to keep a primate in a private residence. And if there’s a better example of an attractive nuisance than a high-fiving stripper monkey, I’ve never heard of it.

So there we are. I await an entry of appearance by Rusty Hardin or Sidney Powell or Johnny Cochrane’s Ghost on behalf of the monkey. All I know is that until we get a Beansie/Gia crossover, we are all losers.

OBSCURE MOVIE OF THE WEEK: Johnny Dangerously!

Funny Michael Keaton! Marilu Henner! Dom Deluise AND Danny DeVito! A send-up of gangster movies, it represents an odd moment in 1980s Hollywood. It’s a deeply flawed movie with a lot of beautiful, fleeting moments connected by banal stupidity. It cannot decide how much to mock it’s source material and how much to celebrate it. The Death Row scene (below) is a true classic. The subsequent car-wrapping-paper scene is just painful.

On the whole, not Keaton’s best work. Plus, Joe Piscipo. Ugh. But still worth your time.