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“THE NOOZ EXPRESSES
              ITS DISAPPROVAL!”
 

        For years now, Primate Nooz has been cruising along quite adequately, treading a worn path, following a tried and true routine, using a well-tested mix of international, national and local news items and such features as “Spotlight on the World,” “What Is...?,” “Report from the Field,” “The News Behind the News,” “200 Months Ago Today,” and “Dr. Doody's Cutting Corner,” all in a format of four pages.  In fact, the basic design of the Nooz has not changed since the turbulent era of publisher Frankie T. Crankstrom and executive editor Larry Harry Morble in the 1950's when every issue was redesigned entirely from the masthead to the acknowledgements.  Suddenly, in the last issue, publisher Arnett Putney, III and executive editor Widen Lundale, Jr., without warning, decided to listen to the advice of West Coast correspondent Chris Shaw and try something new. They redesigned the Primate Nooz masthead.  They put in horoscopes! And they tried that idiotic 'Recommended Reading' letters feature by the eldest son of Win Wing Wan, which just didn't work.
        They basically went for the tabloid look.  The whole tone of the Nooz became rather silly, we felt.  “Cold Snap Hits Borneo,” indeed! “Announcements and Rumors?”  “Two-Headed Chimpanzee Found in Cheesequake Basement??”  “Giant Space Primate Heading Toward Earth???”  Come on!  We resisted their stupid plans as far as we were able.  We thought they were wrong and said so.  We stood up and shouted. We fired memos back and forth like missile salvos. We fought them head to head, toe to toe, tooth and nail.  We wrote an editorial about it, but they dropped it.  We tried to publish an open letter, but they tore it up.  We grumbled and they glared, but we thought that our points had been well taken because this issue was pretty much back to normal.  We thought we might have won the day, but little did we know that they were even then plotting to expand the Nooz to six pages, planning to pad our serious material with the sort of moronic fluff that we deplore in other publications like PRIMATE LIFE, and counting on our basic good nature to allow them to get away with it.  We told them that we would fight again, we told them that we would not be silent, we told them that we would not be intimidated, and they told us to leave their offices.  We slammed the door on the way out.
        So, we don't know where we'll be when the next issue comes out, but at least we will have expressed our opinion and that of a good many others in a forceful and dignified way.  We will have said what we believe and to hell with the consequences.  If you are reading this, it will mean that we have succeeded in our plan to kidnap publisher Arnett Putney, III and executive editor Widen Lundale, Jr. and hold them in the supply room until this editorial is printed.  Good luck to us!
 
 
CHIMPANZEE LAUNCHED IN 1962
IS STILL CIRCLING THE EARTH
 
   

        Although an international search team led by Senhor Teófilo Afonso Rosario Sobradinho and including Dr. Oondóué M. Boué, the tall and lanky Dutch primatologist Piet Mons Apeldoorn, and the redoubtable Eric Scotmeister Fleiglehaus, has been concentrating its efforts to find missing Professor Mitsuo Ohhohoho in the green and unruly forests of northern Bali-Bali, rumors are circulating that he has been sighted on the island of Tasmania, arousing some suspicions that he is not really lost at all, but may have instead been merely playing an elaborate game. The Nooz has learned that he tried something similar in 1972, pretending to disappear in order to create publicity for his book The Professor Mitsuo Ohhohoho Primate Identification Book and African Jungle Survival Guide.  His publisher has not been able to shed any light on the situation.

        A well-known amateur paleontologist from the Page Museum in Los Angeles has been visiting the nationally heard-of Hellmouth Tar Pit, where she is helping to excavate the remains of several giant cave mice from the tarry mass of Ice Age bones.  Ms. Bobby Rivera-Santos graduated ten years ago from Sigsbee Junior Night College and was instrumental in establishing the Arizona Sabertooth Rattlesnake Association.  She is an acknowledged expert on the fossils of the class of animals characterized by long saberlike canines, including the sabertooth rattlesnake, the sabertooth mountain elk, the sabertooth badger, and of course the sabertooth tiger.  Although the giant cave mouse did not have saberlike canines, it was the preferred prey of several saber-bearing animals, and wherever cave mice are found, these other creatures may be found also.

(UPI)  Houston, TX.  The four-year old female giant pygmy chimpanzee who was launched into orbit in 1962 is still alove and circling the Earth, according to sources at NASA.  She was originally expected to be in space for only a week, yet she has apparently been able to survive for over twenty-seven years! Engineers and scientists at the Johnson Space Center are at a loss to explain just how she has managed to accomplish this feat, since they have had no contact with her at all for twenty-six years, eleven months and two weeks, which was when the capsule's telemetry went dead.  “She should be out of oxygen by now,” said one technician who chose to remain anonymous.
        The space-travelling ape has twice been on the cover of PRIMATE LIFE and was the subject of a special stamp issued by the French Postal Service in 1973. Two years later, an international organization was formed called Keep Pongids Out Of Space, with headquarters located in Libreville, Gabon, which has been attempting unsuccessfully to determine her fate ever since.
        The plucky chimp was fired into orbit aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket, and immediately captured the attention of the world by giggling hysterically over the intercom.  A contest among America's elementary schools to pick a name for her was won by third-graders at Frumpton-Lacksdale School in Hellmouth who chose the name Giggles.  The winning students were invited to Houston to visit the Space Center and meet Giggles when she returned, but when the retrofire system failed, it was decided to just leave her there and see what happened.  The then-third graders have been waiting in Houston ever since, a fact that many of their parents have complained about.
        Asked how they can be so sure that Giggles is still alive, puckish NASA spokesperson Brandon O'Keefe Mulligatawny stated, “Oh, it's just a feeling, I guess.”
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