Zombies love Jumbo size everything

Zombies like to jumbo-size  everything. We love to jumbo-size fries, pop corn and hamburgers. We also like jumbo jets, jumbo deals and jumbo size breasts. Jumbo is good. Size matters no matter what odd people say.

I came across with the gossip about where did all this JUMBO craziness started. It was 1861, a Tuesday I believe. Noonish. Some Arab traders captured a cute 2-year-old African elephant calf on the plains of Abyssinia (google-map it), actually very near where my coffee-drinking-goat was born. As they didn't know what to do with it, they sold it to a European animal collector (not to be confused with a animal behaved tax collector). The cute elephant's name was JUMBO, name given by the Zulu to a large package or parcel (jumba). Jumbo was big as he weighed about half a ton and was five feet tall.

By 1880, I think on a Tuesday also (coincidence) the showman P.T. Barnum was looking for a star for his already famous Bailey Circus, which by then was in possession of the London Zoo. It took him about two years and a lot of dinner invitations to convince the Zoological Society of London to part with the animal, their most famous guest, for $10,000.

London zombies did not like the idea and an uproar started, you guessed right... in London. Queen Victoria was upset also and demonstrated her point of view by not lifting her pinkie at tea-time. I recall that Mark called me (yes...Mark Twain) and said "Jamrach said it was no use to think about it; that Jumbo was as popular as the Prince of Wales and the Zoo wouldn't dare to sell him; all England would be outraged at the idea; Jumbo was an English institution; he was part of the National glory; one might as well think of buying the Nelson monument"

I was about to ask Mark who this Jamrach guy was but he did not elaborate and I didn't want to interrupt him. He had a temper.

British zombies were very proud of their zoo collection. In Victorian England, the zoo represented the power of the Empire...of the British might. A London newspaper said at the time that Jumbo was a popular figure as well as an Imperial Symbol. Selling Jumbo was perceived as of a kind of treason, a betrayal of the public.

Sadly enough, Jumbo's destiny was even worse. His jumbo-size fame came to an end when at age 24, during a Circus tour to Canada, the animal was killed in a train accident. The sales of Thomas Alva Edison's "Jumbo" electric dynamos (that guy had a nose for publicity) went down. People were very upset.

Eventually Jumbo went back home (well...not home-home, but London) in the form of a taxidermic attraction and even after dead, gave inspiration to Walt Disney who named his cartoon cute elephant "Dumbo" . So now you know it.