Put your Covid mask back on, the cocaine hippos are attacking!

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

We’ve now reached the “looking back with some degree of fondness at Covid” stage of humanity’s descent into the depths of hell. Because say what you like about a global pandemic that killed millions and changed all of our lives, at least it would have stopped Tucker “breastfed until he was 9” Carlson from going to interview Vladimir Putin.

Still, at least the Covid-era face mask is now back in Belgium after health authorities issued a “code orange” alert because of a sharp rise in influenza cases.

That’s great news for those of us who have several thousand masks taking up space in a drawer and bad news for the swivel-eyed loons who “do their own research” and think Covid was invented by Bill Gates and Taylor Swift.

But those same masks won’t protect us from a much bigger danger — Pablo Escobar’s marauding cocaine hippos (and if there isn’t a band called that, I’m up for starting one).

The drug kingpin had four hippopotamuses as pets in his private zoo in the 1980s (let those among us who haven’t had a private zoo cast the first stone) and that number has now reached 170. They are not, despite the name, actually on cocaine — hippos prefer weed! — but they are on the rampage in Colombia, with reports of hippos invading a schoolyard as well as terrorizing local fishing communities.

Considering the amount of actual cocaine that makes its way from Colombia to European ports such as Antwerp and Rotterdam, surely it’s only a matter of time before the cocaine hippos make their way onto a shipping container bound for Europe (are you sure about this? Ed).

If I were, say, an angry farmer intent on making my feelings known about EU agricultural policy, I wouldn’t be setting fire to Place du Luxembourg (that job can be left to interns on a Thursday night), but instead releasing a menacing hippo into the European Parliament (after first applying for the correct kind of entry badge, of course).

CAPTION COMPETITION

“Leave him, Viktor, he’s not worth it!”

Can you do better? Email pdallison@politico.eu or on Twitter/X @pdallisonesque

Last time we gave you this photo:

Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze.

“Hmm, so you’re saying you will be king for life … Can you tell me again how Sweden became a monarchy and whether you were a president before?” by Witold Strzelecki.

Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s deputy EU editor.