Bye Bye, Babar!

Here's one of my favorite post cards that I have sent. The recipient kindly loaned it back to me for scanning. I have scanned the back as well (but it's easier to read the text below), detailing the RRU version of how the postcard came to be. You can also get a huge (2.1MB), incredibly detailed TIFF version.

To help give you a feel for receiving an RRU post card, I've kept the colors I originally used (as much as HTML and browser technology will allow). On the post card, a color change is more or less a paragraph break. For the most authentic RRU post card experience, you should set the fonts as small as possible.

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A typographer's error doomed this [post card] to be [titled] ``Exhausted Renegade Elephant'' (Woodland, Washington, 1979, Photography by Joel Sternfeld) when in actuality it is the world's largest recorded roadkill (the whale blown up by [Oregon D.O.T.] was obviously not a roadkill, but a beach bomb).

The truck in the picture is NOT the vehicle that did in poor Babar. The poor dear, or rather, elephant, was done in by a blue Miata traveling heavily in excess of the Autobahn speed limit. All that was found of the vehicle was a door, which may be seen high up in a tree to the left in the background.

The incident was witnessed by the Cub Scout pack seen to the left of the highway, who were on a 1/2 day, roughing it hike. As a couple of leaders attempted first aid on Babar, a quick thinking patrol leader used his cellular phone to call the sheriff (Rosco P. Coltrane did indeed show up), the local press (who sent the photog who snapped this picture), and the regional pickup unit of Roadkills-R-Us.

RRU put a SWAT team on site immediately in a pickup truck. They kept the flies, vultures, and ivory hunters at bay until the Heavy Critter Unit arrived with the semi seen directly behind the Dearly Departed. Normally RRU prefers 3-day sun-ripened kill, but poachers are constantly a problem with bulk death, so in this case harvest came early.

As a humanitarian gesture in these difficult economic times, RRU donated 10% of the gross (sic) to the local families pictured. Of the rest, approximately 70% was used for Breaded Babar Patties and the rest fed several 3rd world countries for several months. Each of the cub scouts got an RRU coupon book and his picture with Babar.

From the RRU Great Moments Archives, Copyright 1992, Miles O'Neal, Austin, Texas.