Road Apples by Tim Sanders
July 1, 2013

The Ultimate Insult

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For several years an e-mail has been circulating which claims that the scientific term for a large group of baboons is actually “congress.” I felt that this was a scandalous insult to decent, honest, hard-working individuals who believe in achieving their goals by putting personal interests aside and working as a team. Why insult baboons by comparing them to congresspersons? I decided to look this up. Here's what I found:

Words that classify people or animals as groups are called “terms of venery.”

Zoologists have given animals many unusual terms of venery. For example, you can have a prickle of porcupines, a mob of kangaroos, a cloud of bats, a clutter of cats, a clutch of chickens, a sleuth of bears, a waddling of ducks, an army of frogs, a gaggle of geese, a boil of hawks, a party of blue jays, a rafter of turkeys, and even a gulp of swallows (which makes perfectly good sense, if you think about it). You can also have a convocation of eagles, an exultation of larks, a parliament of owls, a company of both parrots and moles, a cohort of zebras, and a congregation of alligators. And while you can find a pack of weasels, a den of snakes, a walk of snails, a bed of eels, a barrel of monkeys, a whoop of gorillas, and a buffoonery of orangutans if you put your mind to it, you won't find a congress of baboons anywhere. With minimal effort you will find that there are bloats of hippopotamuses (or hippopotami, if you prefer), cackles of hyenas, messes of iguanas, and even oozes of amoebas. But when it comes to that elusive congress of baboons, it doesn't exist.

The proper term for a group of baboons, toiling away, carefully grooming each other and picking ticks and fleas from each others' furry pelts, is a “legislature” of baboons. Your smaller gathering is usually referred to as a “subcommittee” of baboons.

And since it came up, a large group of parasitic, legislative ticks is called a “nest” of lobbyists.


Perhaps that fanciful “congress of baboons” e-mail was inspired by our non-baboon legislators in the U.S. Congress, who allotted $592,000 to the National Institutes of Health back in 2001 to do some very critical research. Their task was to answer that age-old question that has perplexed all the great minds of history. Many of us have, in fact, asked ourselves that same question when visiting the zoo: “Why do chimpanzees throw poop?”

I doubt that anybody has reached any meaningful conclusions about the poop throwing monkeys yet, given the fact that in depth Freudian psychoanalysis often takes decades. Maybe the NIH is working hand-in-hand with the military to promote a new anti-terrorist weapon. “RUN ABDUL, THE INFIDELS ARE THROWING POO!” Whatever the case, there are other examples of government waste too numerous to mention. But we'll mention a few anyway, just for the fun of it:

Here's part of a June 4, 2013 USA Today report by Susan Davis:

“Washington–A division of the Internal Revenue Service spent $4.1 million on a conference in 2010 in Anaheim, Calif., that included ‘questionable expenditures’ for keynote speakers, video production and gifts for IRS employees, according to an audit released Tuesday by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.”

The article goes on to list the following:

$50,187 went toward the production of videos of various IRS employees dressed up in Star Trek outfits. (One of them, Commissioner Faris Fink–yes, that's his name–actually wore Mr. Spock ears. Others simply lived long and prospered in their street clothes. On your dime.)

Two keynote speakers netted $44,000. One created six paintings during his presentation. They included portraits of Albert Einstein, Michael Jordan, Abraham Lincoln, U2 singer Bono and two of the Statue of Liberty, all smiling, holding 1040EZ tax forms. A seventh painting, showing Justin Bieber's grandmother broiling her grandson's pet pigeon, was lost. Twice.

$64,000 was spent on gifts for IRS employees.

A $133,000 commission was paid to two event planners whose contracts “had no incentive to negotiate a favorable room rate for the IRS.”

The IRS spent a total of $37 million on conferences across the country in 2010. By comparison, they felt that the paltry $4.1 million Anaheim expenditure wasn't much at all.

And, as if all that weren't enough silliness to keep the taxpayers happy, here are a few more ridiculous Congressional expenditures, all preceded by those important little black dots that we journalists call little black dots of importance:

• In 2008 and 2009, the Department of Justice spent $121 million on 1,832 conferences. A good time was had by all.

• The government has already spent $750,000 on a new soccer field for terrorist detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. A healthy prisoner is a happy prisoner, and there's nobody happier than a terrorist in a turban, robe and sandals showing his stuff on the soccer field.

• The U.S. Agency for International Development created a Pakistani version of “Sesame Street” for $10,000. (I'm not sure, but I believe I read that, due to Muslim insistence, Miss Piggy was stoned in the first episode.)

• In February of 2013, a federal taxpayer-funded study began sending “gay lingo” text messages to methamphetamine addicts to encourage them to use fewer drugs and more condoms. This bit of congressional enlightenment cost taxpayers $509,840.

• In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency gave a $141,450 grant to the Chinese to study hog manure. They also gave a $1.2 million grant to the UN to promote clean fuel.

• In 2012, we, the taxpayers, also contributed $325,000 to develop a very realistic looking robotic squirrel to study how a very realistic looking live rattlesnake would respond to it.


So, if you've forwarded that cheesy chain e-mail calling a crowd of baboons a “congress,” you should apologize to your e-mail friends. And more to the point, you should go to the zoo and apologize to all the baboons, who are probably planning a class-action suit right now. You might want to wear a raincoat and carry a cardboard shield.