Dork Productions

Last semester I enrolled in a seemingly simple Geography 100 course.  Little did I know that my professor was going to turn out to be the man below, Jerome Dobson.

Jerome is the President of the American Geographical Society, and his passion for geography is unfathomable. The only information that I have retained from his class, besides the image of the house his parents conceived him in, was about the Tsavo Maneaters.  The wikipedia article and Dobson’s stories differ slightly, but I prefer to rest my faith in Dobson, because I love his love for the truth and for geography.  Anyways, the story goes like this:

Right around 1900 ad some railroad workers were working on the Kenya-Uganda Railway.  Little did the helpless workers know that they were being stalked by two maneless male lions!  In the night these two maneless male lions, named the Tsavo Maneaters, would kill the men while they sleeped, drag them back to their den, and licked their skin off, drink their blood, then eat them.  The workers even started building thorn fences but the lions managed to somehow crawl through them.  According to Jerome that is.  These maneless male lions eventually killed 135 of the workers before they got caught and killed.  Engr. Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson is the man who finally tracked and killed the wild beasts.

This wild tale has also been the basis of a major hollywood film, titled The Ghost and the Darkness.  The name comes from what the locals had named the two lions, one was the Ghost and the other was the Darkness, and I am still trying to figure out how they could tell them apart.  The movie, made in 1996, stared Val Kilmer, and won an Oscar for Sound Editing.  So even though I haven’t seen it personally, I am willing to bet that it is exceptional.

Here is a picture of the dead and stuffed lions: