More Gay Penguins

From the L.A. Times:

Z and Vielpunkt, two male Humboldt penguins at Germany's Bremerhaven Zoo, are the proud new parents of a healthy penguin chick.

"Another couple threw the egg out of their batch. We picked it up and put it in the nest of the gay penguins," veterinarian Joachim Schöne told the German newspaper Bild of the pair's entry into parenthood. Z and Vielpunkt faithfully cared for their adopted egg for more than a month; in late April it hatched. Since then, they've been taking care of their chick around the clock; it's still too young to feed itself, so the dads feed him fish mash, Schöne explained.

"Since the chick arrived, they have been behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do," the zoo said in a statement.

The Bremerhaven Zoo's same-sex penguin couples (there are three such pairs in residence there, all males) first made news back in 2005, according to the BBC. At the time, the zoo announced plans to "test" the sexual orientations of the six penguins, who'd been seen engaging in mating rituals and trying to incubate rocks as if they were eggs. Gay rights advocates were outraged when the zoo brought four new female penguins into the colony in a bid to encourage the penguins to reproduce, and the zoo later nixed the idea. (In the zoo's defense, Humboldt penguins are classified as vulnerable to extinction, so it does make a certain amount of sense to be concerned about them reproducing. And since Z and Vielpunkt have done just that, everyone wins!)

Sorry, it was just too sweet to not repost. But it leaves me wondering one thing: why, exactly, are we obsessed with gay penguins? Seriously, folks. I prefer my lesbian seagulls, which reminds me of a song:

So inappropriate, and yet so funny. Trivia: did you know that the inspiration for the Hills from King of the Hills came from two sometimes characters on Beavis & Butthead? God, I remember when that movie came out. I went and saw it, and I still don't remember why.

This blog post is like a Simpsons episodes... one topic to the next until we don't remember what we originally talking about.

Gay penguins. (I apparently, per my labels, have written before about penguins. Weird.)

There, now it really is like a Simpsons episode.