US is heading for another civil war but this one will just be pathetic
WE read this week about a 50-year-old man who went to a Tiger King-style petting zoo in Florida and paid more than a hundred quid to spend some time cuddling and stroking a black leopard.
Can you guess what happened next?
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Yes, you’re absolutely right.
The leopard decided it didn’t want to be petted so it bit the top of the man’s head off.
It makes you wonder.
What sort of person will walk into a leopard’s cage thinking that soon, he will be walking out again?
And the answer is: An American.
I once said, on television, after I’d been chased across Alabama by a gang of tooled-up, squeal-like-a-piggy good ol’ boys that in certain parts of the States, people had very obviously started to mate with vegetables.
And after this week’s election debacle, I think I may have had a point.
There are now suggestions that a full-blown civil war will erupt between the right-on and the right wing.
TROUSERS FALLEN DOWN
It’ll be Black Lives Matter versus the sort of people you see spectating at a monster truck event.
Already we are seeing vigilante groups of armed militia patrolling the streets, and it’s been suggested that at any moment, bullets will start to fly.
Can you even begin to imagine how hilarious that would be?
Because it would take everyone on both sides about ten seconds to realise that real urban warfare is nothing like anything they’ve experienced while playing Call Of Duty.
Everyone’s seen Arnie coming up the beach with a machine gun in both hands, hosing down the opposition without sustaining so much as a scratch, and everyone’s whooped at the spectacle of Chris Hemsworth accurately picking off targets while riding a horse through Afghanistan.
So they all imagine they’ll be standing in the middle of Main Street shouting, “Hostiles inbound”, and “Secure the perimeter”, while firing an RPG.
They won’t.
Instead, they’ll be hiding behind a low wall, sobbing and hyper-ventilating in a blind panic because their gun’s broken.
Or they will be running away from the action until they are too out of breath to go any further.
Which, for most Americans, will be after about 12 yards.
Or they will find that they’ve clipped so many “tactical” gizmos from the gun store to their belts that their trousers have fallen down.
The last American Civil War was one of the most brutal and harrowing conflicts ever fought.
The next one, if it starts, will be the most pathetic.
Last supper
I DECIDED on Wednesday evening that I’d meet with friends in London for a last supper before lockdown began.
Unfortunately, every single person in the capital had obviously had the same idea.
Things wouldn’t have been so bad if the roads were still being used as roads.
But they weren’t. There was a lane for buses, which were all empty because of the Covid.
There was a lane for cyclists, who were driving, because it was a bit chilly.
And then there was a lane for cars, which was being dug up, presumably to make a lane for those who don’t identify as a motorist or a cyclist.
The upshot was that it took me three hours to cover 3.6 miles.
Sean a double agent
WHEN I heard the news that Sean Connery had died, I thought “What? Both of them?”
I realise people change when they grow old but no one ever changed as much as he did.
You look at the chap in Goldfinger and the chap who won an Oscar for his role in The Untouchables and it’s hard to believe they were the same person.
There’s more, too.
There was one Sean Connery who loved Scotland so much that he had its name tattooed on his arm.
And another who hated Scotland so much he lived in the Bahamas.
Isn't that punishment enough?
A FATHER who killed his son in a 100mph crash has been jailed for four and a half years.
So that means we are paying a fortune every week to guard and feed and clothe and warm a man who, surely, doesn’t need to be there.
He killed his son.
Isn’t that punishment enough?
No half a**e in Austria
AFTER the attacks on the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, French people have taken to chanting “Je Suis Charlie” – I am Charlie – after a terrorist has run amok with an AK or a machete.
It gives everyone a sense of belonging, a sense that they all stand as one against these senseless and random terror attacks.
The Austrians are a bit different.
After the madman ran amok in Vienna this week, everyone started trotting out the expression “Schleich di, du oaschloch”.
Which broadly translates as “p**s off, a**hole”.
I think they can do better though.
Especially if the police were to let it slip that they’d examined the gunman’s body and found that, like all terrorists, he had an extremely small penis.
On the up
BOFFINS have claimed that the average height of the British teenager is not increasing quite so quickly these days, thanks to our bad diet. Hmmm.
I’m not sure the researchers have thought that through, because the average Dutch nine-year-old, who eats nothing but chips and mayonnaise, is now 14ft tall.
Whereas the average French kid, who sucks once a week on the cheek of a stickleback, looks like the weird lovechild of Richard Hammond and an ant.
Sat it aud and clear
HAVING been told to keep our distance in shops, we are now being urged to adopt a similar policy on the road.
Highways England has been trying out cameras that spot motorists who are driving too close to the car in front.
And in just two weeks, they’ve nailed a staggering 10,000 offenders.
All of them will receive a letter telling them to change their driving habits, and that’s lovely.
But it does seem like quite a complicated and expensive way of catching tailgaters.
Wouldn’t it be easier to simply write to everyone who has an Audi?
What's the limit?
MESUT OZIL, who plays football for a team called Arsenal, has told a court that because he’s from Germany, he thought the speedo in his car was in kilometres an hour.
Which is why he was doing 97mph down the motorway.
This reminds me of my youngest daughter, who rang me while driving through France in a VW Polo last year.
“Daddy,” she said.
“The speed limits on the autoroute are ridiculous. My car won’t go 130.”
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May the Fawcett be with you
A COUPLE from the West Midlands have sold a collection of Star Wars toys, inset, they found in their damp garage for £400,000.
It caused me to rush outside immediately to make sure I don’t have a valuable collection of Faberge eggs in my garage.
I don’t.
What I do have, if you’re interested, is a rusty wok, a bike with two flat tyres and a lightly torn poster of Farrah Fawcett Majors.
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Any offers?
Anyone? Anyone?
Double standard
IF Gary Lineker had said on Twitter, “US election goes to the wire after Trump falsely claims fraud”, he’d have been hauled over the coals by his bosses at the BBC for not being impartial.
Luckily, however, Gary did not write that.
But the BBC’s own online news service did.
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