Chicago Tribune ace political columnist John Kass has always had a loopy sense of hummus and a noze for newz. Leave it to the indefatigable Kass, who has ably filled the late, great Mike Royko's shoes on The Trib's A3 page, to come up with this scoop: Roy and Silo, the famed "gay penguins" at New York's Central Park Zoo - celebrated in 2004 by The New York Times - have broken up, and one of them is in a clearly heterosexual relationship.

Here's Kass:

Roy and Silo, the two famous gay penguins at New York's Central Park Zoo, are no longer a pair. Silo has gone straight. They broke up after six years together. Once, they were provided a donated egg. They sat on it and hatched it and this was celebrated as some kind of penguin lifestyle choice in the New York Times on Feb. 7, 2004, under the headline "The Love that Dare Not Squeak Its Name."

But that's so over. These days, Silo has a girlfriend. And Roy? Well, lately he has been observed hanging around a few sexually immature penguins, but he has no real prospects. It seems Roy is a troubled penguin.

"Silo found a young female. Her name is Scrappy," Rob Gramzay, the zoo's senior penguin keeper, told me in a phone interview on Tuesday. "They had an egg. It didn't work out and they might try again."

So, apparently preference for a significant other of the same sex wasn't biologically destiny for Silo. More like a phase he was going through? An arrangement of convenience, perhaps? Whatever.

Apparently the Times has bigger fish to fry, when it comes to penguins, taking issue with conservative plaudits for the timeless values of monogamy and family evidenced by penguins in the popular new film "March of the Penguins." The Times broadly hints that any penguin documentary should focus more on the ills of global warming and intelligent design theory than this one does. Yeh. Rilly. But they do quote radio host Michael Medved.

"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: "This is the first movie they've enjoyed since 'The Passion of the Christ.' This is 'The 'Passion of the Penguins.' "

I like Medved, but I have to agree with Kass's reaction to his quote:

The Passion of the Penguins? I don't know any penguins personally, but I still wouldn't make that comparison. And I've never felt that penguins exhibit much passion, either. Yes, they try to swim away from leopard seals, so they surely feel urgency. But passion?

They waddle and freeze and eat raw fish and blink while standing in the wind on frozen rocks, all the while stubbornly avoiding the essential questions: Who am I? Where am I going?

That is not passion. Yet what is interesting is a strange human passion--the determination to assign human emotions and attitudes to animals, and by extension, putting animals into political camps, whether it be the conservative family-values penguin camp or the liberal gay-penguins-can-adopt-too camp.

I've always loved penguins. They're funny, focused, and in their own odd way, dignified. And I'm definitely going to see "March Of The Penguins." But I can wait until it goes to DVD.

TECHNORATI TAGS: PENGUINS, NEW YORK TIMES

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at September 14, 2005 06:23 PM