After reading
punkgeek's
node on the subject, I mentioned the proposed
laundry gibbons to several of my friends. We came up with a number of different
gibbon concepts (such as
home defense gibbons, which live under the
front porch and have been specially trained to throw
feces at unwelcome
intruders, or
waste-disposal gibbons, which take out your
trash for you) but we decided that the best idea of all was an addition to the standard laundry gibbon
behavior set:
Gibbons nest, right? Many primates do. So give your laundry gibbon an old laundry basket for a nest. Teach your laundry gibbon to scrape out the lint-filters in your dryer; it can use the scrapings to pad its nest with. Then have your gibbon use any excess lint as quilt-stuffing for its blanket! Thanks to the wonders of laundry gibbons, an annoying and useless substance gains function and benign purpose.