i m p u l s e c r e a t o r phÓrum

I can't stop laughing at this picture. It's brilliant. It's even better when you know the backstory; the chinese guy getting kicked in the head by a monkey is their trainer. He taught the monkeys taekwando as part of their routine to entertain passing shoppers. Then, one day he slipped, and moment, that single solitary instant of broken focus was all it took for the monkeys to snap. They seized their opportunity and just started laying into him, with the martial arts maneuvers that he had taught them. He was spin-kicked in the head, then punched in the eye by a backflipping monkey while onlookers tried to work out if it was part of the show. He turned to grab a stick to beat the monkeys off, but when he turned back to engage the monkeys in combat, one had already armed itself with a bigger stick and whacked him in the face.

I've long asserted that I don't believe in karma; that this universe displays nothing even remotely resembling cosmic balance. Today I have to re-evaluate that belief, because in a moment of perfect karmic justice this guy - this awful monkey-enslaving prick - got spin-kicked right in his Goddamned face by a monkey he trained, and a dude caught that singularly perfect instant on camera and uploaded it to the web. This is cosmic retribution at its finest, it's most unutterably basic and perfect.

Today we learned that if you chain up a bunch of monkeys and make them perform martial arts to amuse shoppers then, one day, you're going to lose focus - even if just for a split second - and when that day comes, those monkeys are going to kick your Goddamned arse like you wouldn't believe.

I think that this is proof that Leibniz was right; we live in the best of all possible worlds.