Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Uh oh


It's a "family emergency" kinda day, so I'm having coffee and trying to get a few things done before I leave town. This picture will hopefully tide you over.

They're manatees.

Question: could it REALLY be possible these are the origin of the legend of the mermaid? If so, what kind of women did the early explorers date, fer chrissake?

3 comments:

Chris Cope said...

Someone once told me that the whole manatee-mermaid thing came in part because sailors had particularly bad eyes -- the glare coming off the water and the jaundice and all that fun stuff.

If that's the case, it means that Columbus' men likely didn't spot land until they were about to run into it. They may very well have spent weeks hugging the coasts of what are now Canada and the United States and Mexico before finally making landfall in modern-day Republica Dominica. They just didn't see it. Boneheads.

OldHorsetailSnake said...

I know a lot about Columbus's men:

"They spied a whore upon the shore,
"Off came shirts and collars.
"Twas 15 minutes by the clock,
"She made ten thousand dollars."

Weary Hag said...

I don't think they had time to date. They were too busy trying to figure out which towns in England they would steal names from - and which areas of New England to assign them to; not a terribly imaginative group, were they?