Neal’s Belch no. 163 for 1st Oct, 2004
I’ve always been fascinated by the ability of seagulls to fly through dry, non salty air which doesn’t even have any fishes swimming around in it.
You don’t see whales doing that. They just beach themselves and wait for the locals to either hire a crane or chop them up into whale fillets while a passing seagull craps happily over them from above. I think it’s something to do with the way they’re brought up. Seagulls tend to be encouraged to leave the nest. By the age of eighteen, your average seagull has moved out from home and is either living at University or in a bedsitingroom apartment somewhere near the big city.
Whales, on the other hand, carry on living in the sea with their extended family for their entire lives.
They dream of leaving, of course. But when there are only seven seas to choose from they are bound to end up living near relatives no matter where they go to. That’s the sad truth about whales and seagulls Although obviously it’s not sad for the seagulls, except the ones who care about whales – but there’s not too many of those.
The seagull is a selfish creature, not given to thinking about the needs of other creatures with whom it is forced, as the seagull sees it, to share the earth. The seagull would be much happier if it had a whole planet to itself.
Seagullworld would be a haven of peacefullness and amphibianity, where nobody ever gets stranded on beaches and the seagulls don’t get made into whale fillets, unless there’s a new young trainee chef on the block who can’t tell the difference between a seagull and a whale, and who also has the ability to fly.
But there aren’t very many of those.
Chefs’ hats, you see, are built to a very un-aerodynamic design. This is done to comply with one of the hygiene regulations, which states that people who work in the preparation of food for public consumption, must wear headgear that is not likely to blow away if a gust of air shoots out from a just-opened oven. A quite legitimate concern, of course, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making chefs unable to fly, at least while they’re on duty.
Nurses don’t generally have this problem, by the way.
Their hats are much more aerodynamically shaped. Unfortunately, this (mostly female) sector of the medical profession is racked with inhibitions and lack confidence in their flying abilities, so it is very rare, if ever, that you will see a nurse flying over a dead whale and crapping on everybody.
Unlike the good old confident seagull.
Personally, I don’t hardly ever fly at all. When I want to go somewhere that is a particularly long way away from me, I generally hire the services of a commericial airliner and a pilot. I keep the cost down by sharing the aeroplane with a few hundred other paying passengers, and we keep the toilet facilities to a minimum.
Sometimes we splash out and arrange for a motion picture to be shone onto a screen on the inside of the aircraft, if it’s a transatlantic flight like the one I will be taking in a couple of weeks.
In the olden days, before there were planes, people used to have to drive everywhere, and it was a right royal pain in the ass. The car used to get wet and the salt water would damage the paintwork, and sometimes the car would sink, and you’d have to flag someone down and get them to tow you back up to the surface.
There was no such thing as in-car entertainment, either. The local radio stations in the middle of the atlantic are mostly intolerable, producing low brow nonsense aimed mainly at sea horses who like to listen to horse racing commentaries and who spend their days fantasising about the life of their athletic cousins who live on dry land.
For some reason they are envious of land horses, who get to run around a track and who spend their Sunday afternoons hoping they don’t trip over a snail and break their legs, because we all know what happens to horses whose legs get broken, don’t we? If a human breaks a leg, it gets put in a plaster and it’s all fine after a few weeks. But apparently the medical treatment for horses with the same ailment is different, in that they get shot in the head rather than bandaged up.