Once, back in the late 1700s, around the time our mighty ancestors were having a revolution, there was a French sciency guy, whose name I am at present inadequately motivated to look up, so we’re just going to call him Monsieur Francis Martha Weaseltrousers (or as the French say, les pantaloons de weasel).  Now, Monsieur Weaseltrousers had a theory concerning the relation between animals on one side of the ocean, and their brethren on the other, and it went a little something like this:  Everything in Europe is bigger and smarter and stronger and more fabulous that anything over in America.  This, of course, made him very popular in France, while many great Americans, such as Ben Franklin, thought he was an enormous tard.  Old Ben went so far as to point out that, on average, Americans were a good two inches taller than the French, which he credited to our steady diet of buffalo and monster truck rallies.

            Anyway, if you’ve been watching the news lately, there’s something afoot in Britain that would surely make the late Monsieur Weaseltrousers most unhappy, and would doubtless cause him to mince about ineffectively in a manner most delightfully humorous to behold.  I am, of course, referring to the fact that England is being taken over by American squirrels.  The native squirrel of the British Isles, as it turns out, is the red squirrel, which gains its color from the millions of tiny krill it eats daily as it sweeps through the sky, filtering them through its baleen.  The grey squirrel, on the other hand is purely of American derivation and acquired its coloration in the late 19^th Century, when, during the Civil War, the vast majority of squirrels sided with the South, eventually distinguishing themselves in battle greatly, when, in a daring nighttime raid, they ate General McClellan’s nuts, crippling the Union war effort for some time.

            It is suspected by British Squirrelologists that the American squirrels first found their way across the Atlantic during the early 20^th Century, when old-timey bicycle merchants would routinely use thousands of live squirrels as ballast on the voyage over to England.  Once there, they would dump their cargo of squirrels into the Thames, filling their hold with delightful old-timey bicycles for all the good little children of the USA.  Unfortunately, it soon turned out that grey squirrels were in many ways mightier than the indigenous red ones.  They drank a lot more, were larger, drove SUVs, and frequently carried tiny, cute little firearms.  Alas, the red squirrels were mostly at that time occupied in fighting World War I, or as people called it then, “Fred” (later, when World War II started, and everyone realized they were going to end up having to call it “Fred Jr.” which was too silly to contemplate, they went back and changed the name of the first one).

            In 1918, when a war-weary red squirrel populace at last returned, having left behind their tiny little squirrel-sized gas masks and teensy weensy little machine guns that shot acorns or somesuch whimsical thing, they discovered that they no longer had the advantage of numbers.  And so it has continued ever since, with the red squirrel population dwindling, and the grey squirrels becoming ever more brazen, chewing holes in the Tower of London, beating up little of ladies, and recently taking up residence in Prince Charles ears, where an estimated 500 of them now live. 

            The emergency being what it is, the British government (the cool part, that always made exploding watches and crap for James Bond) claims to have created a Super Squirrel, larger, mightier, and more bloodthirsty than the American invaders, in hopes that it will chase them out, and going on to establish a benevolent dictatorship over the regular original recipe red squirrels, and eventually, the people of Europe in general.