i am conflicted.

it doesn't feel very good to laugh at people when infelicitatious events befall them. while that may not stop one from laughing at them anyway, the tendency is that one's laughter doesn't carry with it the same timbre of uninhibited hilarity as, say, laughter directed at someone who is being an idiot. which is the converse point to be made - it does feel very good to laugh at someone who's being an idiot.

should one then blog about an unfortunate event, but one which stems from someone's idiocy? a weighty question, and one worth thinking about. while you're thinking about the answer, you can entertain yourself with the following in the meantime. again, from the archives of that fount of all things wise and... well, not so wise, the bbc.

so, there's this country. cambodia it's called. located - well, never mind that. so there's this country, cambodia, which happens to be partially inhabited, as countries are wont to be, by midgets. some of these midgets, as midgets are wont to do, like to fight. these fighting midgets, as fighting midgets are wont to do, set up a league through which they could organise - you guessed it - fights. with each other. and this league, in a staggering display of cambodian-midget-inventiveness, is named the cambodian midget fighting league ('cmfl'). or, perhaps, it was named the cambodian midget fighting league. but we'll get to that eventually.

this forementioned cmfl had a president, one yang sihamoni. mr. sihamoni had, in his stable, 42 midget fighters. mr. sihamoni was inordinately proud of his league of extraordinary midgets. so much so that he created an advertising campaign, wherein the tagline was that his midgets would "...take on anything; man, beast, or machine."

this lofty claim aroused the ire of a disgruntled fan, who in turn vociferously offered the view that the cmfl was engaged in false advertising, and that a single lion would defeat the combined forces of the league.



this fired up mr. sihamoni, whom we can observe to be a midget in intellectual, if not physical, stature. never one to back down from a challenge, he decided to call the bluff of this dastardly fan, and set out to turn the fight into a reality. he arranged for a male african lion to be shipped to the city of kâmpóng chhnãng, which, appropriately enough, contained a coliseum. even more bizarrely, this lion was named panthera leo.

the cambodian government, in a rare display of sensibility, voiced concerns about the upcoming fight. equally sensibly, they promptly agreed to let the fight go ahead on the conditions that they were to get a 50% commission on each ticket sold, and that no cameras were allowed in the coliseum (presumably, so as not to startle panthera with flash photography. wouldn't do to get the beast angry, after all. might be - what's that word i'm looking for - dangerous.)

so, in front of a sell-out crowd, cmfl took on panthera, in what promised to be a titanic struggle of 42 little midgets against one camera-shy lion. mr. sihamoni was in a ebullient mood before the fight, bullishly predicting that his fighters "... could out-wit and out-muscle [panthera]." 12 minutes later, the fight was called, with 28 midgets dead and the other 14 unable to continue, as a result of injuries sustained during the fight. such as broken bones and missing limbs, which, the bbc opined very helpfully, "rendered them unable to fight back."

42-0 to the cat family. full article in comments, per normal.