A Small, Fat, Furry Thing

All guinea pigs are interested in politics and have their own political views. Badger for example, like his hero Margaret Thatcher believes that greed is good (As evidenced by the size of his butt.), Ronald Reagan wasn't senile for most of his second term and that Augusto Pinochet should have been given a Knighthood. Whereas I hold somewhat more liberal views. I'm particularly liberal with distribution of my bush chocolate for instance. This deep seated political interest inherent in all cavies stems from the time when the Incas held sway in our native Peru. A private members bill put forward by a member of the Inca parliament proposed that it should be compulsory for every family in Peru to eat a guinea pig at least once a week. A heated debate followed. I say "heated" advisedly because the heat was coming from three hundred cooking fires prepared by the honourable members in anticipation of the inevitable "YES' vote.

Still on the subject of politics it appears that our dear Prime Minister's greatest enemy (Other than the Kevin Rudd - her own Foreign Minister.) is Julia Gillard. Just before the last general election she told the nation that there would never be a carbon tax on mining companies in any government she leads. Then straight after the election she changed he mind and introduced a carbon tax. Trouble is she then allowed the opposition party to convince the electorate that the tax was to be levied upon them rather than the mining companies. She should have taken a lesson from John W. Howard.  (The W stands for Winston by the way - Just so that we all know where he stands on the Republic debate.) He said that there would never be a Goods & Services Tax before the general election. Then Hey Presto! before the next electoral term was up we had a Goods & Services Tax. Quite right too. It was what the country needed and if he'd promised it before the election nobody would have voted for him. However, he certainly didn't allow the opposition to dictate the debate afterwards. The same applies to the carbon tax. It's good for the nation, but all of a sudden Ms Gillard is as popular as a porcupine in a condom factory for introducing it.

Now she's done it again. To retain power at the last general election Ms Gillard needed the support of a number of independent MPs, one of whom required a promise from her Australian Labor Party (Why Labor, not Labour by the way? We're not yet the fifty first state of the USA despite Mr Howard's nose once being  firmly wedged up George Dubya's bottom passage.) that they would introduce legislation to limit poker machine gambling. Julia made this promise, won the independents' support and so remained in power. Now she's reneged on that deal saying that there isn't enough support for the reform bill to pass through parliament.

Obviously she knows that more than half the members are in the pocket of the casino/gambling lobby, but all this has done is given the Liberal opposition party more ammunition. Why not introduce the bill anyway and test the numbers. That way, if it did fail to get through you could blame the opposition. Or are you in the pocket of the casino/gambling lobby too Julia? Still, what do I know? I'm just a small, fat furry thing who's testostricles drag along the floor when I run. Kind of like Bill Oddie.

Finally today, I couldn't help but notice that the newspaper lining the bottom of my cage had a "Letters to the editor." page jam packed with people whinging that Australia has become a "nanny state." It's apparently a nanny state because drivers are forced to wear seatbelts and cyclists to wear helmets. Well, listen you lot. When you crash your car and fly through the windscreen at one hundred and ten kilometres an hour or fall off your bike and smash your dumb heads on the road, who do you think pays for your three months in hospital, your electric wheelchair, all the other special equipment and your twenty four hours, seven days a week carers that you need because your brain is so badly damaged that you can neither walk, nor wipe your bottom passage? Yep. That's right - my staff and all the other tax payers. So, try to spend less time whining about "nanny states" and more time considering the possible consequences of not buckling your seat belt or wearing your helmet. You might want to start wearing a cricket protective box too because next time I hear someone complaining about this I'm going to run up their leg and bite their dangly bits.

Shall I Bother With Tomorrow?

I'm terribly sorry, but my Monday blog post is about to become my Tuesday blog post. This is because it's becoming too much to help my male staff write his Wildlife & Wilderness blog and help him with his reverse people smuggling business as well. So in a rare concession I have allowed him to publish his blog on a Monday while I move mine to Tuesday. In any case most of my readers are in the USA and Europe where it will still be Monday anyway. Here in Australia we are a day ahead of you (Except here in Queensland where it is still 1955.) which means while you are working, we on the underside of the planet are sleeping, hanging upside down like bats, and while we're desperately trying to eke out a living during the day, clinging to trees and rocks and stuff so that we don't fall off you are sleeping comfortably in your beds, unaware that half of the world's population has all their blood rushing to their heads.

In actual fact I am thinking of starting up an on line advisory service for those of you living in the past on the wrong side of the world. For a small fee you will be able to go to my website http://www.shallibotherwithtomorrow.com/ on a Sunday night and see what's happened on Monday. You will then be armed with all the information you need to make your day a success. For example if Monday has been terrible in Australia, the stock markets have crashed, the Australian cricket team has lost and John Howard has made a political comeback, you people in the USA and Europe might want to consider stying in bed and giving Monday a miss. It's a brilliant concept and I think I stand to make an absolute fortune which I intend to blow on basil.

This morning my male staff fetched our carrying cages down from the top of the laundry cupboard. This usually means just one thing- a visit to the vet. I've had enough of vets. It seems every time I go there one of them pokes a baseball bat sized thermometer up my bottom passage and then, to add insult to injury, weighs me and tells me I'm gaining weight. They did it again today too - not the baseball bat treatment thank heavens, just the weighing thing. We were only there to have our nails trimmed. The moment I saw my female staff approaching with that "I'm going to grab you and stuff you in your carrying cage." look on her face I started to squeal like a girl. I knew what was coming. I'm not as stupid as I am hairy. I hate that damned carrying cage and I always make sure I huddle in the back of it looking as miserable as possible to make sure that my staff are well aware of how I feel about it. Annoyingly Badger doesn't seem to mind. He's had the baseball bat and weighing treatment before too, but he either enjoyed it or has some sort of  memory problem. In any case he always sits at the front of his carrying cage, giving everybody death stares through the bars.

So anyway, as we sat in the waiting room waiting for the vet - Auntie Kara - AKA Doctor Friggin' Doolittle to call us in, a possum entered the room. I don't mean he came in on his own, strode up to the receptionist and said "I"m feeling a bit off, can I see a vet?" No, he was being carried by a lady in a box, that is to say he was in the box, not the lady. That would be silly. If the lady was in a box she wouldn't be able to see where she was going. The possum was covered by a blanket and had evidently been hit by a car. The lady had found him by the side of the road and he seemed unhurt apart from being a bit dazed. He must have been dazed because no lumping great human is ever going to catch a healthy possum. The receptionist took the possum from the lady and took him out the back of the surgery. That's the great thing about Aussie vets. They will treat injured wildlife at no expense to whoever brings the animal in. When the animal is well it then goes to one of many volunteer wildlife carers who look after it until it is well enough to return to the wild. You are even welcome to call the carer to see how the animal is faring.

Why then, would you not stop to help an injured animal? Especially in the little town close to where we live where there are two good vets and nothing is a long drive. It's a two minute detour at the most. My male staff came across a dazed baby possum a couple of years ago as he was on the way to his office. It was staggering across the road and cars were taking detours around it but not bothering to stop. My male staff pulled over, wrapped the possum in an old towel and took him to Auntie Kara. The whole thing took barely two minutes. My male staff later found out from the volunteer carer that the animal was alive and well and was soon to be re-released. Even if you see an obviously dead marsupial by the road you should stop. If it's a female there may be live babies in her pouch. Anyway, my male staff says that if he was lying injured by the side of the road, he'd hope someone would stop and take him to Auntie Kara. Though these days you never know.  

A Kilo of Basil

To get this blog written I have to balance on my male staff's right shoulder as he sits in front of the laptop and whisper the words I want him to write in his ear. If his grammar is incorrect or he makes a spelling error I bite his ear lobe. It's a system that I find works really well. He rarely makes the same mistake twice, but he does have sore ears and enough ear piercings to hang dozens of earings from. He never utilises the ear piercings though. He says that because they're all on one side it would make his head unbalanced. Of course in my opinion his head is already unbalanced.

Then the other day just as we were settling down to write a new blog post the Nortons anti-virus thingy pops up on the screen to say that it has detected two threats in my blog and had therefore blocked it. I could neither see my completed blog posts nor write a new one. Prompted by several bites to his earlobe my staff made further enquiries and discovered that it wasn't my blog that was the problem at all, it was Blogspot - the blogging medium run by Google. However, as you can see from the appearance of my blog they managed to sort things out between them. This is the trouble with technology, unless you have a degree in computer science you feel so helpless when things go wrong. The only reason my male staff didn't throw the stupid laptop out of the window was that it might kill an ant or something, then there would be tears and feelings of guilt that would last until his next lamb vindaloo.

Now I'd like to draw your attention to a charming fellow by the name of Nigel Franks. This animal loving young man ran over a kangaroo and then dragged it behind his car until he reach the town of Wodonga, where he then dumped the animal in the main street. He was charged with aggravated cruelty and his car was confiscated as this was his fifth motoring offence. This seems pretty lenient to me. What happened to three strikes and you're out? I ask myself why Mr Franks would do such a thing. Well, apart from being an utter dickhead he obviously has no respect for life. People who have no respect for an animal's life are also a danger to human society. I'm willing to bet a kilo of basil to gram of Badger's bush chocolate that this individual will be up before the beak within eighteen months on a charge of assault or something. Animal abuse is so often an early symptom of violent and sociopath tendencies and it's time it was taken more seriously.

It has come to my attention that things are become tense between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands again. "How does this come to the attention of a guinea pig?" I hear you ask a little sceptically, as though you didn't believe that a guinea pig really is responsible for this blog. Well, don't forget that I sit on my male staff's shoulder and sometimes when I'm thinking about what to tell him to write he checks out the BBC website in order to catch up with the news and find out how many goals his precious West Ham United Football Club have lost by. Both the British and the Argentinian governments must be be deeply unpopular at the moment so they're rattling a few sabres at each other to try to distract the unwashed masses at home from the fact that they neither have a job nor any prospect of getting one anytime soon.

Meryl Streep, er sorry, Maggie Thatcher and General Galtieri took it too extremes in the eighties. Back then Maggie was left with no option but to fight those dastardly "Argies" because unemployment had topped three million and she was as popular as python at a guinea pig convention. Then BANG! Down goes the General Belgrano and suddenly she's the best thing that happened to Britain since Sir Francis Drake frightened the Spanish Armada away with his bowls. Maggie says it was a matter of principle and she couldn't let those dastardly Argies get away with invading the Falklands because a dozen or so sheep farmers there wanted to remain British. Principle? Hah! She's the one who said "There's no such thing as society." In other words it's every man for himself. Oh well, at least we know that Mr Cameron won't be invading the Falklands because he had to privatise the Royal Navy to pay for bailing out the Bank of Scotland.

Bad Language

Did I hear Newt Gingrich correctly? Did he really say that Mitt Romney is not a suitable presidential candidate because he speaks French? I think he did you know. It's just as well that poor old Mitt doesn't speak Russian or he'd be rounded up with the other commies and shoved back under the bed where Mr McCarthy found them in the 1950s. Funny isn't it? Mr Gingrich himself speaks passable Spanish, but that's obviously okay. He must have a subversion rating for languages and Spanish is obviously somewhere near the bottom. I bet I know which language is at the top. It starts with Arab and ends with ic. My guess is that if Newt is ever elected President his first act will be to ban all teaching of foreign languages in school. At least the top five most subversive languages.

My female staff had a few interesting times back in the nineteen eighties when she visited America. One nice lady asked where she was from and when my female staff said that she was from Australia she said "Oh my goodness, but you speak such good English." Pretty cute eh? Neither of my staff speak a foreign language, though my male staff has a smattering of gibberish when he's had half a bottle of wine or so. (Gibberish is not the language of the people of Gibraltar by the way.) Humans who speak English tend to be lazy with languages anyway because they assume that everyone speaks their language, and the British have long known that to make a foreigner understand what you're saying you simply have to shout......in English. In any case, if they didn't speak English they just pinched their country until they did.

A few years ago my staff were on holiday in Spain. In a remote village in Andalusia's Sierra Nevada mountains they stopped for a refreshing cup of coffee. My male staff, being an adventurous soul decided to try out his Spanish on the swarthy gent behind the bar of the cafe.
 "Dos cafe con leche por favor." He said in what he thought was an Andalusian accent.
 "Two white coffee's wiv milk coming up." Replied the bartender in a broad cockney accent. "Do you want sugar?" My crestfallen male staff returned to his table clutching two cups of white coffee muttering about "bloody students and their stupid holiday jobs."

Remember my staff's friend Auntie Jan? She's the one that tried to undertake a series of experiments on me to try to determine my level of intelligence. You may recall that she gave up having learned that I was too intelligent to take part in her stupid experiments. I just sat there and stared at her contemptuously as she tried to get me to do all manner of un-cavy like things. Like fetch and sit and play dead. Anyway, she's a university educated English lady and is very cultured except when it comes to Chinese people or people from South East Asia. She always reverts to a kind of pidgin English in the mistaken belief that adding a Y to the end of a word makes it easier for Chinese people to understand.
 "Please you telly me where me findy posty office." and "Me likey buy cup of tea. Please you telly me where I buy cup of tea." You get the idea. It's very embarrassing to witness.

On the other hand my male staff who is also English, but about as cultured as a Pakistani army latrine has travelled widely in his capacity as a reverse people smuggler
(See http://pemery.blogspot.com/2011/01/michael-bolton-in-drag.html back then I called male staff Pea and female staff Chook.) but the only words he's picked up are the naughty ones. He can swear fluently in several languages. He can also say beer in many languages, mainly because it's more often than not "beer." He studied Japanese in business college and has never used it since. One phrase has stuck in his mind however. "Kono sakana wa shinsen des ne?" He says he thinks it means "Is this fish fresh?" But it could equally mean "I think your mother is a lobster's bottom." So he's reluctant to use it.

Let's Go Sledging

Australia Day is over for another year, so there'll be no more binge drinking in this house. At least not until the weekend - tomorrow. I was glad that it rained most of the day because Australia Day usually means fireworks, and fireworks scare the bush chocolate out of me. Yesterday they were rained off so I didn't have to hide in my straw with my paws over my ears. Both my male staff and I are proud adopted Australians so we find it a shame that Australia Day has in part been taken over by flag waving rednecks bent on jingoism. My male staff has an Aussie friend who compares the whole thing to a Hitler Youth Rally. That might be taking it a bit too far but there is certainly an element of that about it. In one high profile case former international cricketer Rodney Hogg tweeted "Just put out my Aussie flag for Australia Day but I wasn't sure if it would offend Muslims. So I wrote Allah is a s... on it to make sure." Smart tweet Rodney, so witty.

Mind you, Australian cricketers aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer at the best of times. They frequently come of second best in a sledging contest. (For the uninitiated, sledging is the art of insulting or "getting into the ear" of an opponent in order to put them off their game.) Here's four prime examples. The two West Indian batsmen Brian Lara and Ramnaresh Sarwan were known to be very good friends. Aussie bowler Glenn McGrath was getting ratty because Sarwan was scoring a lot of runs from his bowling.
  "What does Lara's dick taste like?" Said McGrath to Sarwan.
  "How should I know?" Replied Sarwan. "Ask your wife?"
McGrath then became even more ratty and said the F word quite a lot.

Australian wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh once said to England's Ian Botham. "Hey Ian, how's your wife and MY kids?"
Botham replied. "My wife's fine, but the kids are retarded."

The great, but somewhat Porky Aussie bowler Shane Warne invariably managed to get South African batsman Daryll Cullinan out very cheaply, but it had been a couple of years since they had met on the cricket pitch. As Cullinan strode to the wicket to face Warne's bowling, Warne said "I've been waiting two years for this.
Cullinan replied. "Looks like you've spent it eating." He was out to Warne's bowling for a big, fat zero moments later.

Sledging is not confined to Australians, though they are the world sledging champions. Brilliant Pakistani batsman Javed Miandad called the beer gutted Australian bowler Merv Hughes "A fat bus conductor." Moments later Hughes got Miandad out and as the batsman walked disconsolately past Hughes on his way back to the dressing rooms Hughes merely said "Tickets please."

So, what's the moral of this story? Easy. Sledging is at best a waste of time and at worst can be used against you. As Shakespeare once said. "Shut your bloody gob and get on with the game."
 

The Scent of Eucalyptus

I do like the Sunshine Coast Daily. It really is the best newspaper around. So thoroughly absorbent. I've asked my staff not to use those upmarket glossy magazines like Vogue in my cage although I do enjoy widdling on those stick insect models. Trouble is the widdle then just sits there in a puddle with the model looking up through it at me and then I start to feel guilty. I think to myself "Poor girl. Not only is she emaciated but now she's drowning in guinea pig wee." Of course then I forget about it and it goes cold, and gives me a nasty surprise when I tread in it later. That's why I prefer the Sunshine Coast Daily. Occasionally, very occasionally, it has an interesting article to read too.

Many people now know about civet poo coffee or Kopi Luwak as it is more properly known. This is horrendously expensive coffee which is produced by feeding coffee beans to Asian palm civets. The beans then pass through the animal and pop out of its bottom passage as the finished product, well almost. Some producers remember to wash the beans first before making your morning cuppa with it. I believe I may have mentioned in a earlier blog post that I was concerned that my staff might begin forcing Badger and I to eat coffee beans too. I wouldn't put it past them, especially as civet coffee sells for a hundred and sixty dollars a pound. It's easy to imagine them scurrying around behind us collecting our bush chocolate in a coffee cup and then flogging it at the local farmers market, while we, filled to the eyeballs with caffeine race round our cages like a couple of hyperactive wind up toys, unable to sleep for weeks at a time.

Well anyway, the Sunshine Coast Daily says that the idea has spread to China where some bright spark has hit upon the idea of fertilizing his tea crop with panda poo. Panda poo is not black and white as you would perhaps expect, but it does produce the world's most expensive tea. This chap bought eleven tonnes of the stuff, though it doesn't say from whom. Maybe there's a shop in Beijing called "Turds R Us" or something. Chinese tea drinkers reckon the first batch of this panda plop tea will be the best ever and is expected to sell for - wait for it - thirty thousand US dollars for five hundred grams. If that's a little beyond your means you had better wait for the inferior subsequent crops which will sell for only three thousand dollars for half a kilo.

Here in Australia they have been selling bags of "lucky" koala poo in wildlife parks for years, and now with the increase tourist numbers from China I'm expecting to read in my favourite newspaper that someone from there has come up with a way to value add to the raw product. "Try a koala poo thickshake for that genuine eucalyptus taste. Good for the sinuses too and guaranteed to leave your breath smelling as fresh an Australian copse." That's copse - not cops. Australian cops don't smell fresh at all - more like a corpse actually. Anyway, I digress. My point is that poo has a lot more uses than you think. It just takes a little imagination. Here in Australia we never really made the most of our poo. It's pretty much left laying around where it drops, which is why we have so many flies.

The South Africans have even invented a sport involving dung. The participants pop an impala poo in their mouths (It's only the size of a guinea pig poo.) and spit it as far as possible. The winner is the one who spits his poo the furthest. (Or as we say in Australia - the most furtherest.) There are bonus points for style and degree of difficulty. A lot depends on the contestants choice of poo. It's important to pick one that's fresh, as the moisture content makes them heavier and smoother so they fly further. The dry ones tend to disintegrate in your mouth and you're picking bits of impala dung from between your teeth for days.  Look out for it in the Olympics in London this year. It certainly makes for better TV than synchronised swimming.     

A Cage With A View

From my cage I can look out beyond the budgie's cage where Biggles is usually head-butting his mirror like a drunken Glaswegian and Paolo is normally hanging upside down like a demented blue bat.
(See my third ever blog post. http://pemery.blogspot.com/2010/12/demented-blue-bat.html )
Past the telly upon which assorted irritating commercials are broadcast at twice the volume of the actual programmes, and with ever increasing frequency, is the deck. The deck is where my staff usually have their breakfast, weather permitting. Badger and I are not allowed out here on our own because there's a four metre drop to the garden below where snakes and large birds of prey await the unwary and somewhat dazed guinea pig. We're only permitted on the deck if accompanied by a member of staff, upon whose lap we are forced to sit and endure being molested most mornings.

Hanging from the deck roof are two bird feeders and a bird bath. These are a great source of entertainment. Birds are so much like humans in the way they interact with each other. There are the rainbow lorikeets, gaudily decked out in their team colours. These are the yobby football hooligans of the bird world. They arrive raucously en masse, aggressively shoving all the other birds out of their way, while jabbering and squabbling amongst themselves. My male staff says he encountered a group of Argentinian tourists at a buffet dinner in a London hotel once. They behaved in much the same way. Obviously the Falklands War didn't teach them any manners. Then there's Mary the half tame magpie. She's a regular visitor and stomps up and down with all the arrogance of a tough cop. She strides amongst the lorikeets pecking at the ones who really annoy her, but generally she treats them with dismissive disdain in rather the same way my male staff treated those Argentinian tourists.

Beyond the deck is a view across the green valley to the conical shape of Mount Cooroy. (See photo) Yes, that's conical, not comical.  Although it was pretty funny when my male staff slipped whilst climbing it and broke his leg. He had to be airlifted out, but the helicopter crashed and he broke his other leg. Then while the paramedics were rescuing him from that they slipped on some wet grass and dropped my male staff off the stretcher and broke one of his arms. But I'm sure you're not interested in any of that. To the north of Mount Cooroy I can see a sliver of blue ocean - the Coral Sea. Sometimes I see ships in the distance and I wonder what it would be like to travel on one to my ancestral home in Peru. Then I think "Nah! Sod it! I'll stay here and eat some more parsley."

In any case what if the captain was like the courageous Francesco Schettino of the doomed Costa Concordia who sailed his ship close enough to the shore for his brother to throw him a pizza for his dinner.
It sailed across the water like a Frisbee and Captain Schettino caught it like a pro. He opened the pizza box and was about to order the ship to turn when he noticed that his brother had forgotten the anchovies. Naturally enraged, Captain Schettino forgot to order the turn and BANG! Who put that friggin' great rock there?

As the ship started to sink the good Captain made sure he was the first aboard the rescue helicopter, still clutching his pizza. There was then a much broadcast radio conversation between the Harbour Master and Captain Schettino. It was a bit crackly and in Italian of course, but I've been able to translate it for my readers. It went like this.

Harbour Master:  Schettino! Get back aboard your ship and help the passengers and crew.

Captain Schettino:  Your kidding right? It's dark and wet down there and my pizza's getting cold.

Harbour Master:  You need to get back on your ship. How many dead do you have?

Captain Schettino:  How would I know? I'm three hundred feet up in a chopper with a slice of lukewarm pizza in my hand.

Harbour Master:  Get back on board your ship................NOW!

Captain Schettino:  But my piz............................Oh alright, but send me some garlic bread.