And now, from "Gay German Penguins and the zookeepers who love them" files, and Yahoo News...

Sudiegirl sez: Wow. When I read this article, the first thing that popped in my head was the quote from “Ghostbusters”…”Dogs and cats LIVING TOGETHER…MASS HYSTERIA!” Well, while it’s not inter-species dating, it’s still pretty interesting. But let’s see what Sudiegirl can come up with.

Germany's gay zoo penguins still fending off female advances
Wed Feb 8, 3:08 PM ET
Six gay penguins at a German zoo are still refusing to mate with females of the species flown in from Sweden in 2005, the zoo said. (Apparently, this discounts the notion that human beings are the only ones that really are conscious of their gender preference. I wonder what’s next…a sequel to “March of the Penguins” called “Brokeback Antarctica”? Would Morgan Freeman narrate, or Harvey Fierstein?)

The problem was that the female Humboldt penguins have proven too shy in their advances, the director of the zoo in the northern port city of Bremerhaven said. "The Swedes will not make the first move," Heike Kueck said. (That’s funny…my second husband was of Swedish heritage…he was a pretty forward little man.)

The females were flown in last year in a bid to bring the males to mate and help save the Humboldt species from extinction. (So they’re flightless waterfowl Swedish mail-order brides? That’s a new one.)

Kueck said last year she was optimistic the initiative would be successful because zoo keepers had noticed that at one point a female penguin had managed to cause a couple of males to "separate". (You know what? It was just a fluke…there was a Judy Garland film festival that day or something.)

The zoo has 10 male penguins of which six have shown strong signs of preferring male company and formed couples among themselves. (And that’s a bad thing…WHY? It’s not like penguins are endangered. There’s plenty of penguins to go around. If these boys don’t want to play on the hetero team, bring in more boys. DUH! Sooner or later, a boy and girl penguin are gonna get busy.)

The initiative to "turn" the penguins and make them mate had prompted a furious response from gay rights groups. (This made me think of the movie “But I’m a Cheerleader!” In that movie, a girl is sent by her parents to a center where gay people are supposedly made straight. But really, that still doesn’t totally prove to me that they’re “gay” per se. It seems like “gay” these days means more than that, you know?)

In a statement posted on its Internet website, the zoo on Wednesday sought to defend itself from fresh criticism. (But what about stale criticism? That’s discrimination.)

"We will be delighted if the penguins form even one heterosexual couple and manage to produce first an egg, and then a little one," it said. (Can’t you do artificial insemination, like to hogs? Or HUMANS?)

"But of course we accept the male couples that have formed and we are not trying to enforce heterosexuality, as we were accused of doing last year." (Makes you wonder what they did the year before that?)

Sudiegirl’s final opinion?
This is too weird. I never thought penguin sex would be any problem other than Opus wanting Diane Sawyer or Connie Chung. Wow.