Tags
blobfish, Donatella Versace, Edinburgh Festival, Facebook, foreskin, International Ugly Animal Preservation Society, Jabba the Hutt, John Prescott, leftvent angler fish, Mr Blobby, Philistines, Reduced Shakespeare Co, Rollinng Stones, Samson, Tasman Sea, trout pout
(Drawing by Alan Riverstone McCulloch)
They come from the Tasman Sea and ichthyologists
say they are the ugliest fish in the seas.
Well, my granny used to tell me there were plenty
more of them in that particular element. But I do
wonder how they manage to attract the opposite sex and
propagate, when they look like Mr Blobby in the act of
frowning.
They have been likened to Donatella Versace, Jabba the
Hutt, John Prescott and a beardless Col. Sanders.
The male becomes a big bag of testes and that’s his sole use
in life.
Which reminds me of a joke delivered by The Reduced
Shakespeare Company, in Edinburgh, at The Festival, some
years ago. They were producing The Bible on stage, in a rapid
series of sketches, as was their wont.
One of the actors, wearing an animal skin, rushed towards the
audience and boasted:
I took the foreskins of the Philistines!
His sidekick queried this utterance by asking:
What’s a foreskin?
It’s that useless bit of flesh that hangs on the end of a penis,
said Samson.
Oh! rejoined the stooge. I thought that was a man!
Cue for hysterical feminist guffaws.
Anyway, why does the blobfish expand in such a manner?
Apparently it is a strategy to ensure that sex happens in a
big environment. It is one way of being noticed.
Maybe they could sign up to Facebook, or a fishy dating agency?
Yes, blobfish are arguably uglier than the naked mole rat, which
is the mascot of the International Ugly Animal Preservation
Society.
However, they are not so desperate as the male leftvent angler
fish, which may fuse himself, along with other males, onto the
female, and, in the manner of Hamlet’s aspirations, thaw and resolve
themselves into a dew, melting the skin of their mouths and the
female flesh until they absorb blood vessels and the two, or twenty
two, become one.
Cue for further feminist reaction.
I mean, sometimes a girl just wants to go shopping without a male
being joined to her hip, monitoring her spending.
I only saw one example of an even uglier specimen on my travels
Down Under. It was on a Rolling Stones comeback poster and I’m
not saying to which member of the band I am referring.
But think Trout Pout.
Candia Comes Clean 