MEGAMOUTH ON THE MENU

This is only the 41st megamouth shark ever found, and - as all the newspapers, and cryptopundits across the world delighted in telling us yesterday - it ended up sauteed in coconut milk as a delicious meal.

That is not what I am blogging about today, well not directly. In recent months there have been several other stories such as this, where rare, rediscovered, or other such singular beasts have been caught only to be consigned to the cooking pot.

I am afraid that I find the tone of such stories vaguely racist. I was brought up under the final days of the British Empire, an institution which is these day is treated by many people as if it were a branch of NAMBLA, and I could speak Cantonese before I could speak English (and still dream in Cantonese now), and the number of people from all manner of our former colonies who sent me letters of condolence when my parents died from Fiji, New Caledonia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Kenya and various parts of the West Indies, have proved to me at least that the portions of the erstwhile empire in which my parents operated must have been doing something right.

From my earliest days I was taught (by parents, Amah, and teachers) that one does not sneer at people from different cultures just because they don't do things the way that you do, and that is something that I have always tried to do throughout my life. And it is something that the CFZ has always done, which is why, although I think that the natural world would be a much better place if indigenous people did not eat bushmeat (or whatever the Phillipino equivelant is), I ain't gonna point fingers.

But that is not why I am blogging.

The reason that I am blogging this is because, as you know I am not very well at the moment, and yesterday I went to bed early having taken my medication. Now, I have not taken recreational drugs for some years, and have not taken them regularly since the early days of the current decade, but remember well enough what it felt like to be stoned. And last night my quetiapine (possibly in conjunction with a sustaining curry and a mild hangover) got me completely wasted, and I put on some psychedelic music to celebrate. Lying in bed listening to Scott 3 and pootling about on my laptop, I found this following video on YouTube, and became convinced of one important, and - I think - possibly overlooked scientific truism.

The megamouth shark looks like an elongated tadpole made of plasticene, and last night I was convinced that it had been made by the late Tony Hart!