Scientists can’t get sloth to move

I actually spit coffee laughing when I read this. Apparently some scientists at the University of Jena in Germany spent three years trying to get a sloth to climb up and down a pole as part of “an experiment in animal movement,” as the Associated Press reports. The problem is the sloth — named “Mats” — was so totally lazy they couldn’t get it to budge. So after three years, they just gave up and sent the sloth back to the zoo. As the story notes:

Neither pounds of cucumbers nor plates of homemade spaghetti were appetizing enough to make Mats move. “Mats obviously wanted absolutely nothing to do with furthering science,” said Axel Burchardt, a university spokesman.

Whaddya gonna do? It’s a sloth’s world; we just live in it.

I particularly loved the title to the Associated Press story, which I cribbed above — “Scientists can’t get sloth to move” — because it seemed like something plucked straight from The Onion. Indeed, it was almost suspiciously so. Given that The Onion’s tinder-dry prose style was crafted in emulation of the nearly-Asbergian bathos of real-life newspaper stories, and given that The Onion has become such a thoroughly mainstreamed cultural reference point, I half wonder whether the worm has eaten its tail — and bored-gormless GenX news copywriters now craft headlines in emulation of The Onion.

(Thanks to Fark for this one!)

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