Squirrel Collective Rips Apart Capitalist Dog

Sometimes I get really depressed and annoyed reading CNN, and the Times, and even the BBC. Last week was all about local news and the potential transit strike. So naturally, I'm quite bored.

Thankfully, I can always turn to Pravda for some cynically amusing journalism. Just to give you an idea of how bad things really are in Russia, Pravda has a "catastrophes" section, which is further subdivided into "man-caused tragedies" and "natural disasters." There is enough catastrophe related news to warrant an entirely separate category.

In my browsing, I came upon this article about an organized gang of vicious squirrels that ripped a dog to shreds at a park in the Far East region.

"This sounds nonsensical that squirrels attacked a stray dog and tore it to pieces. If this actually happened, the life of squirrels in the forest seems to be really hard this year. It is typical of squirrels to feed on nuts, seeds and mushrooms. And it is unlikely that squirrels have become so aggressive as a result of some mutation," Newsru quoted the expert as saying.

For some reason, this made me think of something the Soviet humorist Arkady Raikin used to say (my loose translation does a poor job replicating the play on words) - "when you are just dying to laugh, that is comedy; when you are laughing but are afraid of dying, that is satire."