New Year's Eve

Once upon a time, there was a species called the human race, homo sapiens, who lived on a small blueish green planet called Earth. That is to say, the humans called themselves homo sapiens, meaning "wise man", although they didn’t actually ask any of Earth’s other species what they might have to say about that. Give or take the odd war, homo sapiens more or less managed to live up to the title that they claimed for themselves, inventing some very clever things along the way like the stock market, iPhones and the conveyor belt sushi bar.

The other species were more or less content to let homo sapiens get on with all this, until one day something really extraordinary happened. In 2011, some members of the human race got together, and, using some very sophisticated motion picture technologies, proceeded to create a piece of narrative storytelling the like of which had never been seen before. It looked like what they called a “film” and starred various actors like Robert DeNiro, Halle Berry and Michelle Pfeiffer, who had been in some very good films in the past.

But this wasn’t really a film. It was really a collection of words and pictures that had escaped from a greetings card factory. And not a very good greetings card factory either. Oh no. This film had escaped from the kind of greetings card factory that makes the type of greetings card you might think about buying because they’re so bad it’s almost funny, but then at the last moment, you have to put them back on the shelf because they’re really just so bad.

And so upon seeing this “film” (which had been called “New Years Eve” in an effort to trick people into thinking it might be the type of film they would like to see because it was released near the date it referenced) all the other animals of planet earth decided to take action. They rose up against the humans and demanded that they no longer be allowed to call themselves homo sapiens. And so from that day forth, in penance, the human race was known as homo stupidus and the people who had made the film were put under perpetual house arrest, and all the other animals on planet Earth lived happily ever after.