It’s official: the barbarians are at the gate. There is now a species of monkey named for an online casino. This is another one of those stories that might turn out to be a spoof, but has been picked up by several major news organizations, so I guess it is legitimate. Even if it isn’t, it’s a good laugh.
From the LV Sun:
A new species of monkey will be named for GoldenPalace.com, the Internet casino that paid $28,000 last year for a grilled cheese sandwich supposedly imprinted with an image of the Virgin Mary, an online auction house said Wednesday.GoldenPalace.com paid $650,000 for the naming rights in a March 3 online auction. The proceeds of the auction were to benefit Madidi National Park in Bolivia, where the species was discovered by a Wildlife Conservation Society scientist last year.
The formal name of the species will be Callicebus aureipalatii, a Latinized version of Golden Palace, and its common name will be “GoldenPalace.com Monkey,” CharityFolks.com, the Web site that handled the sale, said in a news release issued Wednesday.
“This species will bear our name for as long as it exists,” GoldenPalace.com CEO Richard Rowe said in a statement. “Hundreds, even thousands of years from now, the GoldenPalace.com Monkey will live to carry our name through the ages.”
The new species, a type of titi monkey, is about a foot tall and has a golden crown and a white-tipped tail. The term “titi monkey” describes about 30 species of monkeys found in South America.
New monkey species named for GoldenPalace.com
Is there anything that GoldenPalace won’t put their name on? What if the CDC started auctioning off naming rights for new diseases. I can just imagine doctors being contractually obligated to say, “You’ve caught a GoldenPalace.com upper-respiratory infection.”
I can only imagine the search engine hits I’ll get now that I have “titi monkey” on my site.
This works out perfectly, because the monkey already had a “golden crown.” Who does marketing for GoldenPalace, anyway? That person deserves a serious raise.