GARANIMALS,
Gargoyle
Gargamel
Giraffe
Gorilla
An advanced organizational technique pioneered by a godless gaggle of communist Toastmaster1 design and marketing types. Garanimals was test-marketed on a broad range of unsuspecting toddlers as part of an initiative sponsored by NASA, the RAND Corporation,2 and the reverse vampires.3 The concept, which is so devilishly simple that it continues to astound generations of socially challenged engineers and other pocket-protector types, relies on matching colored animals of all varieties with their mates in order to secure the optimal combination of clothing.
Few are aware that the Garanimals concept was originally designed to solve all of the hassles of dating and compatibility issues. However, it was eventually killed by the monolithic old-economy personal ad industry, the powers-that-be of which were terrified of what Garanimals might do to their profits and stock options.
1. For anyone who doubts this connection, even a cursory look at the Toastmaster International’s online manifestos will reveal their indelible relationship to the Fifth International. I, for one, fully expected their Web site to say “New! Fifty percent less Trotsky!”
2. RAND is, of course, a “think tank,” an institution that provides a variety of services to the community, most prominently a menu of therapies for the chronically undermilitarized. RAND-trained analysts are involved in a variety of projects designed to Save the World from “Them” (you know, those people, the ones who are out to get us). At the top of the legislative docket right now is one of their ill-conceived children, the heinously expensive National Missile Defense (see “Staggering Technological Incapacity”), which used to be called SDI (which, we can only assume, stands for Save the Defense contracting Industry). Although RAND is a contraction of the term “research and development,” it can’t help but evoke images of Seattle Weekly poster child and friend of all taxpayer-friendly social services, Ayn Rand, whose extensive and thoroughly boring philosophical treatises are best summed up by this story: Once, when Rand was having sex with a man who was at once a colleague, student, and husband of a neighbor, she stopped dead in the middle and said to him: “Are you sure you’re not being altruistic?”
3. See “The Simpsons, Obsessive Familiarity With.”
Kate Shuster, Contrib.
