(Photo: Phuketwan.com)
It was while planting some somewhat Cnidarian-looking Anasazi beans this morning that I thought, “Boy, I sure would love to come up with a solution that works for everyone in the Asian libido-enhancing industry.” You know, the one that involves slaughtering bears just for their gall bladders, rhinos just for their horns, and tigers just for their, well, the last thing I’d want harvested off my own body.
Then, staring at the yin/yang swoosh that divided one of my beans in half, I hit upon something. Having driven my son the five vegetable oil-powered hours to the big city aquarium last week, it was marginally understandable that jellyfish were on my mind. The aquarium placard was quite informative: not only are they decidedly not endangered, as I can attest both thanks to more than a few surfing-related stings and the fact that my Alaskan fishing net used to fill with as many stinging jelly blobs as salmon, but they are actually legitimately nutritious (unlike rhino horns). Plus, take a gander at the more colorful and juicy barrels in any Asian market: raw jellyfish is already an accepted delicacy, and just disgustingly-textured enough to be considered medicinal by love-lorn zaibatsu executives and mid-level Communist Party officials.
Now all we need is the black market “healers” (and don’t confuse these with legitimate Asian practitioners, who for Millennia have been treating folks as successfully as modern Western doctors do today) to simply focus their vitality Placebo Effect efforts away from endangered species and toward the more common jellyfish varieties — evidently Rhopilema esculentum and Stomolophus meleagris are scrumptious. That will stop me from finding nine hundred pound bears shot dead with only their gallbladders missing, as once happened in Alaska. And it will even make my surfing safer.
Now, on to another kind of surfing: in advance of a social media and viral marketing campaign on which I have been convinced by my handlers to embark in advance of some truly exciting and soon-to-be-announced new projects of mine, I’m starting to post clips from my live Green Comedy event, called Petroleum Free In One Year, on the new Funky Butte YouTube Channel. Here’s the first one, which readers of these Dispatches will recognize as a snippet revealing the source of my billy goat-inspired PTSD. Hope you enjoy — there’s more to come.
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2 Responses:
May 28th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
How does video proof relate to “smell reasons alone” or did I miss out on the latest upgrade to HD?
May 28th, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Ah, the dangers of pushing the boundaries of sub-clauses. What can I say? I’m a literary risk-taker. I’d hoped that sorting through the commas would allow the reader to come up with: you don’t want a billy goat in your hemisphere, for smell reasons alone. Believe me, this is true. But I love your implied prediction that our next generation movies will incorporate not just century-old 3D experiences, but century-and-a-half-old Scratch-n-Sniff technology. There’s no moving forward like moving backward. Or, as the omni-directional ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’ puts it in “Mostly Harmless,” ‘Oh, so you think time moves in that direction?’