Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Butt surgery
A man in England has paid for his goldfish to have an operation. Not cosmetic surgery, I’m glad to say, but a procedure to relieve it of constipation. The vet managed to unblock the offending poop-duct, and the fish is now convalescing in a beaker of Lucozade. Animal lovers are praising the goldfish owner for spending a considerable sum to save a creature worth loose change, but I suspect that guilt was the motivating factor. Humans are renowned for giving their pets food unsuited to their digestive systems.
Back in my circus days, there was a clown who fed his parrot sausages and baked beans. When I questioned the suitability of this cuisine, he said “How would you like to live on a diet of bird seed and nuts?” There was no point answering such an asinine question. The parrot naturally suffered from wind, but that didn’t bother its owner, who taught it to say “Feeling farty!” before blowing one off. It gave you some warning, I suppose.
If you’ve been reading this post studiously, you will remember that I mentioned cosmetic surgery in the first paragraph. This was no flippant aside, because I have recently been thinking about disturbing news from Brazil. A former beauty queen called Andressa Urach is currently recovering from life-threatening complications arising from buttock enhancement surgery. She underwent the operation prior to participating in the Miss Bumbum pageant of 2012, in which she finished runner-up.
Do the tournament organisers have any responsibility for Miss Urach’s doleful condition? On the one hand, she’s an adult who did what she did of her own free will. But on the other hand, the impresario has a duty of care to his cast. I would be racked with guilt if any of my protégés injured themselves in their eagerness to please me. If these Bumbum events are to continue, they should introduce a rule requiring all the bumbums on display to be 100% natural, with immediate disqualification for any contestant with surgical modifications. It would be no different, in my view, from banning athletes who’ve taken performance-enhancing drugs.
When I mentioned this idea to my friend Smacker Ramrod, he gave it his unqualified blessing. The main attraction of such pageants, he said, was to fantasize about rubbing your face against the contestants’ fleshy parts. A pre-requisite for such pleasurable imaginings, he added, was that the flesh in question was composed of living tissue rather than an inorganic substance. He would rather rub his face on a natural wobbly woman, he said, than a female body made taut with gelatinous implants.
I would like to think that Smacker is speaking for the vast majority of red-blooded men. Whether or not this is so, his endorsement has encouraged me to write to the producers of the Bumbum pageant, advising them to adopt my rule. I will suggest that they call it “the Bananas rule”. I’m not a vain ape, but it would please me to leave a small mark on human history.
Labels: buttock enhancement surgery, constipation, goldfish, Miss Bumbum, parrots
Friday, March 13, 2009
Wild parrot chase
A British charity has given an amateur birdwatcher five thousand pounds sterling to hunt for an Australian parrot that is probably extinct. It’s money well spent in my view. The problem with parrots is knowing for sure whether they're really extinct or just lying low. A month ago one of my females said:
“Yo, Bananas, do you think the purple-crested peckerhead has died out? We haven't been woken up by that motherfucker for ages.”
“By golly, you could be right!” I exclaimed. “No wonder I've been sleeping like a lark. God willing, the curse of the midnight squawker has been lifted!”
And then, of course, on that very night, it was caw-bloody-caw as I slumbered in my hammock, interrupting a dream about my favourite episode of Little House on the Prairie. Thankfully, a resourceful monkey silenced the featherbrained fowl with a well-aimed plum stone, causing it to parachute to the ground in a daze. I marched to its landing spot and warned the parrot that the next time it disturbed our sleep its beak would be embedded in toffee.
Now I don’t know anything about this Australian bird, but it’s obviously high time someone got on its case. Its haunts should be monitored and its intentions should be exposed. If you let a parrot play dead in the Great Australian Bush, it’s only a matter of time before it emerges from its hiding place to carry out a sneak attack on some innocent wombat. I just hope they’ve given the birdwatcher enough money to do a thorough job. These expeditions have many expenses – a room at the inn, the cost of equipment, hiring Aboriginal porters, buying drinks for the local Sheilas, etc, etc. They should wire him some more if he runs out of cash before getting a good sighting.
It is possible, of course, that the parrot really is extinct, making everyone connected with the mission feel like a great big ninny. I hope they’ll quickly get over the disappointment. Extinctions are Mother Nature’s way of cleaning house, replacing uppity guests who’ve overstayed their welcome with promising newcomers. Dinosaurs, dodos and unicorns once thrived in pastures green, only to yield their respective positions to the warm-blooded, the airborne and the hornless. If the parrot is truly gone, it surely made the most of its precious time on Earth by screeching its head off at dozing marsupials.
Many humans don’t realise that their species was once close to extinction. Aeons ago, on the African plains, it was your relative Homo Erectus that stood proud, while the newly-evolved Sapiens breed teetered on the brink. We gorillas thought you were done for and collected your artefacts as remnants of a doomed culture. Then came the great Wanga-weed infestation. Your hominid relatives smoked the herb addictively and got so high that they lost interest in procreating. The men of Erectus lost their erections and the species quickly died out, allowing humans to move into their tastefully decorated caves.
And so, my hairless primate cousins, the path of Life on Earth is crooked, contorted and capricious. A lucky break can rescue a species from the gaping abyss of doom, and propel it onto the pouting pinnacle of prosperity, before it is finally sucked into the swirling vortex of oblivion. Enjoy the ride.
Labels: extinctions, Homo Erectus, parrots
Monday, January 21, 2008
Dog Day Afternoon
The couple were showering together when he called the hound to join them, in spite of the woman’s clear warning that this would be viewed as an unfriendly act (not to say casus belli). Heaven knows what possessed the fellow. Perhaps he thought she would change her mind on seeing the animal’s eager face and long wet tongue. She didn’t, and the man ended up in hospital with a dislocated shoulder for his matchmaking efforts.
This sorry incident shows what can go wrong when a man’s best friend really is his dog. He takes the pooch bowling and buys it a beer, and before anyone can call a shrink he’s invited it to copulate with his girlfriend, quite literally treating the woman like a bitch. Even if she had acquiesced, I doubt the mutt would have enjoyed it much. It may well have gone through the motions to please its master, but a woman’s body probably seems like a rubber dinghy to a dog – too smooth to get a good grip of and too easy to puncture in the wrong place. The absence of a bitch-in-heat smell wouldn’t have helped either. You can’t expect a hound to be a demon in the sack under those conditions, no matter how horny it is.
Now I’m not opposed, in principle, to humans having pets. It’s all a question of choosing the right animal and having the right sort of relationship with it. An American woman once asked me if gorillas made good pets. “Not for humans they don’t” was my reply. It is always a mistake to share your home with an animal stronger than yourself, as it inevitably leads to confusion about who is the master and who is the pet. Even very young gorillas don’t know their own strength where humans are concerned. I remember a judo black belt saying he’d like to wrestle with an infant female in my band who was making eyes at him.
“Put on a jockstrap first,” I advised. “She doesn’t know what testicles are, and if she thinks yours are gooseberries you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
He decided, on reflection, to settle for a handshake.
The best sort of human-pet partnership is exemplified by the 18th century pirate and his parrot. The bird is not held captive and can fly away whenever it wants. It only opts to stay perched on Blackbeard’s shoulder in return for high-quality grub from the cook’s table and a prime view of the action. It can also speak its mind freely and contribute its two cents at crew meetings. Incidentally, it is a myth that a parrot will only parrot the views of its owner. These shrewd little creatures always mimic the phrase that will have the most impact.
My friend Smacker Ramrod, the circus vet, once kept a parrot in his trailer. After many weeks of trying to get it to say things like “Pretty Polly”, the bird stayed resolutely mute. Then, quite unexpectedly, it spoke its first words when Smacker was with a woman who’d agreed to spend the night with him. Just as they were starting to undress, the parrot got their attention by clicking its tongue.
“I love your boobs!” it squawked.
Smacker’s delight at hearing the bird talk was tempered by the fact that it had stolen a favourite line he was about to deliver himself. The girl laughed and said “Thanks”. She then reflected on what she had heard and stopped undressing.
“Hang on a minute!” she exclaimed, giving Smacker the evil eye.
Labels: dog in shower, gooseberries, parrots, pets
