Death to Hogs!

Dispatch

Hellish plague of feral hogs was unleashed by the Spanish conquistador de Soto

The population of Texas may soon be replaced by super-tough, super-intelligent feral hogs with vitals armored by plates of gristle and tusks that can reduce your innards to jelly.

Millions must die.

By Jack Chorley

The year was 1539, and Hernando de Soto knew not the wrath he had already wrought upon the New World. The Spanish conquistador had sailed west to plunder and colonize the Americas; unknown to him, aboard his armada were the makings of an epidemic that would lay suffering upon the American Heartland for centuries to come. Not as the result of smallpox nor influenza, though the sailors were surely rife with those diseases. It was the domesticated Sus scrofa — otherwise known as the European boar, three hundred of which made the 1539 voyage with de Soto before he released them into the Texas wildlands with the hope that they would proliferate enough to provide sustenance for coming generations of conquistadors. Over time, these once-domesticated boars sprouted sloping snouts, grew coarse hair and brutish tusks, and proliferated with exponential zeal throughout the woods and grasslands of America. Today, over ten million feral hogs, the descendants of de Soto’s progeny, roam wild …

Departments

Bouquets & Brickbats

By The Editors

To Timothee Chalamet. We like Timothee Chalamet, even though the costs of approval can often seem exorbitant. We don’t understand why sane people are supposed to enjoy the experience of spending five hours and twenty-one minutes watching sand, or whether the giant sandworms that occasionally emerge from this bleak landscape are good or bad. We’ll tolerate the fact that he shows up regularly on Celebrity Row looking like a refugee from a Livestream where he ate Tide pods. We’ll even tolerate the double “e” in his first name. Such is life in these United States. On the other hand, we thought that Timothee Chalamet’s version of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown was better than anything that the master himself has made available onstage for the past 25 years or so. Clearly, Timmy-thee works hard. His talent — and his appeal to the younger female members of our family — is undeniable. And unlike so many other would-be movie stars in what is clearly Hollywood’s most depressing era, he …

Death to Hogs!

Bouquets & Brickbats

Draw Me