Fish on friday

Yellop! That's 'hello' in Timmish, by the way. I'm just going to do a short one tonight because I'm excited about all the Hallow's Eve I'm going to be doing tonight, and also because I have some sausages with my name on them in the fridge (which is really why I bought them. You don't see your full name on a sausage every day).

Incidentally, it struck me that I might have offended some vegetarians with my very meat-centred bollog yesterday. Let me just say that if you are a vegetarian and you were offended, you can shove it in your carrot-hole. Yeah, that's right you with the humous. You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler. Nuff said.

Anyway, for the last post of animal week I want to deal with an animal that is very close to my heart. It neatly branches the gap between warthog and catfish. It's called a dugong.

I love the dugong for many reasons. Here are a few.

• It's called a dugong.

Well, I say a few. One really. The word dugong comes from the Malay word 'lady of the sea', which is nice, because for a lady it really is a bit of a minger. Dugongs are very similar to manatees (the name manatee comes from an old central american language and means 'breast'. This too is brilliant), in that they both look like they've swum headlong into the back of a bus which was reversing along the seabed.

You may now be thinking 'Gosh, this handsome and erudite man sure knows a lot about dugongs'. If you are thinking that, then that's because I do. In my line of work you have to. Now stop thinking and listen. Read. Whatever.

The dugong's closest living relative is the elephant. That's pretty messed up, right? I mean, it's a swimming thing. And an elephant is a huge land thing. So at some point either this swimming thing got a bit cold and decided to get out, and then turned into an elephant, or an elephant fancied a dip, decided the water was lovely, and turned into a dugong. That's how evolution works, kids.

Elephants are cool. Have you ever ridden one? It's brilliant.

Dugongs used to be mistaken for mermaids by sailors. This is true, and pretty implausible. I reckon I would have had to be at sea for a pretty long time before i thought that this:

...looked like this:

Either that or all the sailors were so bored of going hilt-deep into the cabin boy every night that anything with curvy hips and a come-hither pout (and a dugong definitely has these) was worth a poke.

Anyway, that's all from animal week. Come back on monday when I will be grappling with a completely different hot sea-potato.

Enjoy halloween everyone!

This blog is produced in association with the awesome indie megagroup Buried in Pompeii, who are recording their first EP on Sunday. It is written by Dan, and is by no means a way of shamelessly promoting the scandalously brilliant indie thrustfest that is Buried in Pompeii.