Following the fate of the needle-tailed swift a few weeks ago comes news of another rare creature's early demise:
(With apologies to Rodgers & Hammerstein)
Where the skies are all bright, a lucky fellow
Splashing in the waters of his native Greece
Might just find him a tasty octopus
Brought ashore for a family feast.
And it’s too late to rant and rave and bellow,
Now it’s done and the creature is quite dead,
That it sure was a cockeyed octopus;
Only six legs attached to its head.
The creature in the case
Was just the second of its race
Discovered in the waters below,
But our hero had the will
A cephalopod to kill
And serve up with a nice merlot.
You could say that this hungry tourist fellow
Should have known it was rare right from the start,
But there's now no hope;
That American dope
Flash fried it and tore it apart
A la carte.
(As an extra trivial treat, the singer is Reba McEntire, who plays sharp-shooting, vowel-torturing survivalist Heather in the cult film 'Tremors'. Also, if you missed it, here's a link to Mark Wadsworth's inspired plot conflation 'South Pacific Rim - the Musical'.)
'A holidaymaker who caught and ate an octopus was "horrified" to learn it was only the second rare six-legged specimen ever found.'
Where the skies are all bright, a lucky fellow
Splashing in the waters of his native Greece
Might just find him a tasty octopus
Brought ashore for a family feast.
And it’s too late to rant and rave and bellow,
Now it’s done and the creature is quite dead,
That it sure was a cockeyed octopus;
Only six legs attached to its head.
The creature in the case
Was just the second of its race
Discovered in the waters below,
But our hero had the will
A cephalopod to kill
And serve up with a nice merlot.
You could say that this hungry tourist fellow
Should have known it was rare right from the start,
But there's now no hope;
That American dope
Flash fried it and tore it apart
A la carte.
(As an extra trivial treat, the singer is Reba McEntire, who plays sharp-shooting, vowel-torturing survivalist Heather in the cult film 'Tremors'. Also, if you missed it, here's a link to Mark Wadsworth's inspired plot conflation 'South Pacific Rim - the Musical'.)
Yuk - just about to have lunch too.
ReplyDeleteThat'd be a "Hexapus", surely??
ReplyDeleteSorry, JH!
ReplyDeleteJP, it's problematic; I suppose that's always the difficulty when you name a species after its salient characteristic.
Despite its six-tentacled radial symmetry, the concensus seems to be that it was an octopus, biologically speaking at least; after a while it all starts to make your brain ache, so I just contented myself with using the neologism in the title.