A journey into the absurd...

Tonight while watching Aliens vs. Predator (AVP for you fans...), the movie was unable to hold more than a small portion of our attention, so we had plenty of time to talk about other things. Somebody there mentioned that he had caught a glimpse of a liger on TV and it had impressed him. Now, having recently seen Napoleon Dynamite, I knew that ligers were bred for their magical skills, and thus were probably not actual inhabitants of what I like to call "the real world."

Oh, how wrong I was. All I entered into my Google search was the term liger and I was treated to some shots of these huge animals like the one below.

Always wondering if I had stumbled onto a hoax or a well-run urban myth, I began to actually dig around and see if this was authentic stuff. As far as I can tell, they are as real as mules. Here's a site of a zoo in Reno that claims to have one (and some nice shots of them).

Here's one other site with some great photos too.

But the real gem I found upon going back to my original Google search. At the time, item #5 down on Google's results was "The Anti-Liger Alliance." This was the preview text, "Welcome to the official homepage of the Anti-Liger Alliance! We are the only organization dedicated to the eradication of man's deadliest foe, the liger..." That's enough to give you visions of PETA gone very, very bad.

I tried to click through to the site, but it was down, and it was here that Google's site cache feature worked so nicely. Here is the text from the cache link:

Welcome to the official homepage of the Anti-Liger Alliance! We are the only organization dedicated to the eradication of man's deadliest foe, the liger. But what is a liger? Websters defines the liger as "half lion, half tiger, all terror." When you breed a male lion with a female tiger, you get the liger, a perfect killing-machine with only one thought on its mind: exterminate mankind. Right now, ligers live only in captivity but if they were to ever escape, they would surely replace man as the dominant species on planet Earth.

You see, in the ancient times of our caveman ancestors, a lion accidentally bred with a tiger. The resulting monstrocities quickly duplicated and soon unleashed their fury on the world. They were able to quickly exterminate the races of the wooly mammoth, the sabre-toothed tiger, and the dinosaur. It then subdued the other races of animals until only one remained, the caveman. In the Great Human-Liger War of 23,002-22,986 BC, man came dangerously close to extinction by the liger. However, one great caveman leader by the name of Eknok united the human tribes and was able to miraculously defeat the mighty liger army. Some say that he created a giant earthquake to suck the ligers into the fiery core below. I personally believe he constructed a giant catapult that he used to hurl the gigantic ligers into outer space. Nonetheless, man was treated to 25,000 years without the threat of the liger because Eknok, in his great wisdom, decreed that lions and tigers would henceforth be seperated: the lions in Africa and the tigers in Asia.

However, in recent years man has planted the seeds of his own destruction by breeding a new force of ligers. It is only a matter of time before they strike again. That is why the Anti-Liger Alliance is dedicated to the eradication of all ligers and the survival and continued dominance of the human race.

And just in case you were worrying about who is keeping an eye on these ferocious threats to mankind's future on earth, old Optimus Prime is looking out for you (make sure you click the icon)...

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why the internet is a great good thing.