Hair don’t taste like chicken,
except for chicken hair, which is very rare,
because chickens grow feathers most everywhere.
.
Useless reptilian descendants,
scratching round, pecking the ground,
you’re just the dinosaur’s genetic burial mound.
.
Pointless hairless, flightless birds,
can’t feed your children with lactation,
have you absolutely no mammalian aspiration?
.
Eek eek.
Baby.
Those of you who have been subscribing to the analytical reports of the Chip Laboratories since ancient times know of our well founded efforts to ethicise (ha! take that, dictionary) omnivorism. We are trying folks, we really are. We have put all of this week’s grant money into considering balloon animals.
Some of you maybe scoffing, as you associate these creatures with parlour games and carnivals. However, I am not talking about simple domesticated balloon animals. I am talking about great sweeping herds of massive fortean creatures, blocking the sun on their nomadic trek as passenger pigeons once did sweeping across America. And no, there would be no reliance on foul, poisonous oxygen. These are great helium or methane filled beasts, nodding and swaying as they are blown by the currents of wind, just as giant jelly fish are swept across oceans. Picture them now in your mind, see them billowing and filling the sky. Tremendous storms of them. The wondrous sight of them as they rail against the elements, indeed as they rail against their own ridiculous existence. Observing them as over time they are pitted by hail, scarred by lightning. And the wonder of them is that their pseudo life is no life at all, it is a mere impersonation. Brave balloon bound hunters shall pursue them without ethical quandary, intrepid mountaineers shall stalk them to their winter homes, small children and we here at the laboratory shall wonder at them.
O! If only we could get some nutrition into their skins! Some flavour into the rubber. Some texture into their form. And find some way to stop giant sea turtles from choking on them in their thousands when they critters deflate and drop into the sea. Perhaps it is impossible. But is not the dream as important as any mere actuality? At least this dream can unite us all, omnivores, carnivores, vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians, lacto-vegetarians, lacto-ovo-vegetarians, pescetarians, pollotarians, and pollo-pescetarians, the dream of the hunt of the giant pseudo-beasts in the sky that can sustain us all without troubling our consciences.
Until then, at least we have salad.
[“Life’s Solution” by Simon Conway Morris, p112 ‘Fortean bladders’]
Joe Chip, you are such a child, you hide your feelings by joking about them, you cannot even write the word “LOVE” – there, was that so hard? Now, I want you to really chow down, there, get stuck into it, a great big plate of love. There is going to be a lot of work in this taste test, Joe. You have to work your way through a kilometre (1) of chocolate before you even get to the cardboard of pulped cards. There are so many layers to this planet. I know no human should have to eat roses, but Joe, it is for science, you cannot let a few mouthfuls of thorns get in your way. Stuffed animals and inedible poem after inedible poem. I know Joe, I feel your pain. Here is a hard bit – you are going to fall a great distance through a void. Your guts are going to flip, they will flop, your hormones will go astray, yes, even though you are a boy. It won’t seem empty for a while, there are giga-years of trite and awful songs to accompany you, the god-awful soundtrack to your descent (2).
Are you in the darkness Joe? Do you feel the pressure of the vacuum? How rarefied the air, here in the middle. How lonely you are! But I want you to persist. You are too far for the lights of distant galaxies to penetrate. You are going to have to do this by touch. You will need to trust that you still have senses, and that there is something to detect.
Feel them? The rocks? The weathered crusts, the wrinkles? There is no air blowing down here, Joe. If anything is smooth, it is because it is worn by years. Don’t bite Joe, it will break your teeth. There are no soft centres here. There are no soft exteriors. Not down in the pit of love. This love is ugly, Joe. This love is ancient couples, sculpted by years. This love sits quietly next to a shell that memory has deserted. This love feeds a child that can never love back. This love is dribbling, Joe. This love has forgotten its dreams and turns up to work each day. Its nails are broken, its fingers blue. None of this love is what it was, Joe. None of it is what it thought it would be. It is spastic, it is crippled, it is overweight, it is anaemic, it is windblown and time torn, years shrunk and care worn. This love endured, Joe. It is ugly. It is beautiful.
Yes Joe, I know it is hard to taste with that crass red rayon teddy caught between your teeth (3). I wish you could have skipped that level, or taken a more expensive route at least (4). The things you do for science (5).
(1) Science is metric.
(2) ha ha, he is falling in love.
(3) cheap lingerie, the scabby gifts men buy for themselves but pretend even to themselves that it is for someone else. French maids outfit, anyone? Sexy nurse, perhaps?
(4) such is the level of our funding.
(5) Happy Valentine’s Day, scientists. Your mate loves youse all!
After extensive experimentation in the Chip Laboratory, it has been determined that despite many claims being made about their inherent nature, flags are essentially flavourless. It is the nature of a flag that it may be likened to a thin bland filo pastry, dependent upon that which it envelops for its flavour. A flag may be an encasing on a sausage roll, or it may have a fruity filling. A flag may also be thought of as tofu, useful for soaking up the flavours in a laksa, but otherwise, bleh, what is the point.
A flag may also have other useful qualities. In Glossolalia, they are often flown from expensive (and unnecessary) utes*, so that upon awakening from a drunken stupor, the driver knows what country they are in. However, my view is that there should be very little call for a nation’s flag to be flown within the borders of that nation. Really, the only flags that should be flown are those of other countries, at their embassies for example. Otherwise, one could just have a piece of material with the word “FLAG” printed on it, because barring some damage to brain, we all know what it is. The only flags for domestic purposes should be those associated with the things that separate us, not the things that bind us, like flags for sporting teams or service organisations (you know, like Lions will kill Rotary, that sort of thing), or schools or perhaps class (for example, a flag signifying ‘intelligentsia of working class origin’, which can also be signified by lack of a Porsche, I have found).
National flags are excellent for Olympics and in association with killing foreigners, that makes perfect sense, it is the domestic use of national flags that puzzles me. One’s neighbours may fly flags from their homes to prove their patriotism. I would prefer it if they paid their taxes and reported all suspicious behaviour to the authorities. I see politicians adorned with them, sports persons draped in them, young men with them tattooed on their necks. My favourite is seeing children ignoring them. It is disrespectful to burn a flag and I do not approve of that, but there are many other things of which I disapprove more. However, these are my personal opinions and have nothing to do with my expert taste testing laboratories.
Flags taste only of other things. They can taste of virtue, hope, respect, eagerness and pride. Sometimes they have crunchy centres that taste of avarice, cowardice and hypocrisy. In too many of the flags we tasted, all other tastes were overwhelmed by blood. However, we have determined beyond doubt that a flag can certainly taste like chicken.
(The Joe Chip portal has been updated and can be observed by clicking here. Please have a look, there is a nice picture of a falcon on a power pole.)
*perhaps you refer to them as pickups or bakkes – the little trucks favoured by persons of trade, and also by other persons who have no need for such a truck.
Wombats are big furry buggers that look like a giant crawling teddy bear and the unsuspecting say “oh cute, so cute” until they turn and outrun your wife and trip her over and you keep running you coward because you have soiled yourself you are so scared, they just keep running and you hear your wife scream because its stopped now, only a fallen victim will stop it, and you hear it, you hear her flesh being torn, it makes a ripping sound, and you cannot ever forgive yourself but you also hate her a little bit forever, because she cannot forgive you, and it is no consolation that the wombat does not eat the flesh, it tears and nuzzles for a moment then returns to its business, it does not eat her because it is a herbivore, but it rips her because it is a nasty big furry bugger, and it could answer the question if it could speak, it could tell you if your wife tastes like chicken, because it has tasted both even though it does not swallow, but even if it spoke, you would be too chicken shit to ask, you gutless wonder. The relief you felt when she fell.
Not to be confused with the cryptid womb-bats.
I tried out homeopathy to see if it tasted like chicken. The homeopath explained to me that water has a memory of that which it contained, of that with which it had been in contact. I was worried that the water may have illicit memories. She said not to worry, that she used distilled water. I asked if that was like amnesiac water. She said, after hesitating a moment, yes it was. I wondered then if all of its memories had been wiped, if it retained the original memory of coming to earth, as part of a barrage of ice comets that over millions of years filled the oceans. Or earlier memories, of travelling through space, out through the Oort cloud in the real back of beyond. George Orwell commented that everyone in Europe had atoms from Julius Caesar in their bodies. The memories each molecule of water must have. Do the hydrogen and oxygen atoms themselves have memories, or does matter only start remembering when it turns into water. Can it remember back to its formation, coming into being from vast cosmic clouds, energy becoming matter.
If it did, I couldn’t taste it. It was just water. If it had been anywhere near a chicken, it wasn’t telling.
(Maybe thats what the flavour of water is – everything.)
(Do not despair, tinned spaghetti on toast is coming!)
Sorry, I see that I have been doing this all wrong. Don’t say I don’t learn. I have now read every other food blog and I see what I should be doing. Lets start again.
I made a salad.
First I took an iceberg lettuce. I broke it up, washing the fragments, carefully removing slugs and returning them to the wild. (Tip – don’t use soap.)
I sliced some carrots with my knife. It hurt them more than it hurt me.
I cut up some capsicums.
I sliced some lebanese cucumbers.
I mixed them together. (Technical term – tossed.)
I threw in some coloured cocktail onions (mmm, food dye), just for a change.
I made my own dressing with lemon and vinegar and the blood of a third world child*. (*No I didn’t but I don’t have any of the exotic herbs everyone else refers to and I felt left out.)
I opened a tin of sliced beetroot and served it separately.
I took lots of pictures of my shitty salad but they did not turn out well. However, that would not stop me adding them if I knew how.
I drank half a bottle of vodka later and vomited everywhere*. That is the picture I really wanted to add. (*No I didn’t. I have never drunk vodka again since a fateful night with a very large Russian when I was young and hadn’t learned I was not invincible. I learned otherwise two hours later.)
Bugger, I didn’t use macaroni. Everybody else uses macaroni.
Yummo, it was nearly as good as germ sausages, and it tasted just like chicken. (Must check microbes – see “Aboot”.)
Isn’t the internet wonderful?
********
“your writing isn’t nearly as “creative” as you think it is”
is that better?
Coming soon – spaghetti from a tin – ON TOAST!!
You Are What You Eat 