Even as I greet you in this way, I realize
that it’s rather a liberty on my part to assume that each and every one of you
shares my abiding fondness for the animals…or any other groups fronted by Eric
Burdon.
Hm…not exactly the rip-roaring start I was
aiming to get off to. Let’s try again…
We here in Funsville take a special
interest whenever an animal makes the news. (The name “Checkers” is still
enough to draw a crowd when whispered in a back alley.) So many of our citizens
are animals themselves—albeit mostly of the talking anthropomorphic cartoon
variety—that there’s always a fair-to-middling chance that some local
resident’s distant relative may be mentioned in the dispatches.
The previous week’s headlines, however,
brought us a long-overdue exception to that rule. Before last Friday, no-one in
town—even in the critter-crammed Animal Avenue district—had any more idea than
the rest of the world what an “olinguito” was.
Of course, the olinguitos have known what
they were are all along, despite the bulletins proclaiming “New animal
discovered!” and so forth. As far back as they can remember, they’ve been doing
whatever it is that olinguitos do, and feeling perfectly at home while doing
it, in the remote depths of Andean jungle country. If science wants to call
them “new” simply because it never noticed them before, surely that’s not the
olinguitos’ problem. They’ll just keep going about their business while the
experts get on with deciding whether an olinguito is more like a raccoon, a
bear, a cat, a fox terrier, a cacomistle, a toy panda you win at the county
fair, or my Aunt Agatha’s genuine imitation plush Orlon cloche hat.
In the meantime, the minor cause célèbre swirling
around the discovery of the olinguito has spun off a small musical tribute, by
Animal Avenue’s resident bard and troubadour, the house piano player and
bandleader at the Ashcan Club, Professor DeLuxe. Like the olinguito itself,
it’s not, strictly speaking, 100% new. The tune is that old standard “Mona
Lisa”, familiar to fans of the late great Nat King Cole, if no longer to anybody
else. If you don’t know the melody, google it and have a listen before
proceeding to the lyrical content below:
Touching,
stirring, yet somewhat poignant, n’est-ce pas? As I write these lines, the Animal
Avenue Newcomers, Immigrants, Refugees and Fugitives Welcome Wagon is holding a
special emergency meeting to prepare for the expected influx of olinguitos
looking to escape the inevitable flood of taxonomers, conservationists, documentary
filmmakers, photographers from National Geographic, eco-tourists, exotic
pet traffickers and the zoologically curious that’s about to come their way.
We’ll do our best to help them keep a low profile, but there are never any
guarantees. This isn’t the first time that a newly discovered member of Mother
Nature’s menagerie has taken up residence in Funsville…but more on that next
time.
While you’re
waiting (and who could wait for anything like that without something to pass
the time?), you can listen to another one of Mr. Feeble’s Fables. This one is
about a species at the other end of the “just been discovered” spectrum…to be
more specific, The Last Passenger Pigeon.
Uncle Fun
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