Animals Exist For My Amusement
Posted on | June 6, 2010 | 2 Comments
Simples
Look, look, he looks a bit like that Meerkat from the ad.
Go on, do it. Do the line. Say “simples.”
He’s not really him. He’s not even a meerkat. He’s a mongoose. I think. Actually, I’m not even certain he’s a male. What do you want from me? I’m not David Attenborough.
I recently visited the Natural History Museum for the first time in ages.
Dublin has a brilliant Natural History Museum. It’s housed in a big, old building on Kildare Street, right next to the Leinster House (where the Irish parliament sits and pretends to do something useful when they can be arsed). Apparently, the museum used to be bigger but the politicians needed more room to store their mistresses, rent-boys, brown envelopes and gout-inducing foods so they annexed some of it. It was built about 150 years ago and it and the exhibits had remained largely unchanged since then.
Slightly Startled Owl
A few years ago, a staircase collapsed in the museum and, in the interests of safety, the place was closed. This being the useless country it is, filled with pointless, lazy apparatchiks, the museum remained closed for years as various bureaucrats tried to find someone else on whom to offload responsibility. Some of the exhibits were moved (eventually) to a space provided by the National Museum of Ireland and, while this was a decent stopgap, it had only a small selection of the treasures of the actual museum and lacked the wonderful, olde, atmosphere of the original.
The museum has been open again for a little while and I stopped in recently. The brother and I had a bit of a nose around. There is still one section (the balconies) closed – at least on the day we visited – but, for the most part, things are back to splendid normality there.
Proboscis Monkey
I didn’t have as long as I’d have liked and only had my iPhone with me, so I confined myself to taking pictures of only a few animals – namely the ones that could be anthropomorphised into creatures displaying human emotions or those that just seemed a bit amusing. I realise that this is a particularly low-brow use of the splendours on show, but that’s the way it went down. I promise to visit again soon and share some better pictures.
In the meantime, feel free to point and snigger childishly at the amusingly phallic nose of the Proboscis Monkey.
Comments
Gerry Hayes
I mostly sit around all day and drink tea. Occasionally, I write stuff and send it to strangers so they can humiliate me and deride my efforts. Other than the self-harm to dull the shame of failure, it's not a bad life. Like I say, there's tea.
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lol. . .ahh poor mongoose. Not a bad stuff job. I must say. Funny enough I was up London Zoo this past Monday. Day out with my Dad. Took advantage of a one day travel card. The Mongoose in live breathing flesh was quite cute. . . Esp the babies.
I guess they cant stuff ’em lookin’ all happy and healthy looking. This one looks right sad and wants rescuing.
As much as I love my beautiful boys. . .Zapper and Benj (cats). I could never have em stuffed to hold onto them.
I’m not a cat person but I think I’d prefer a live cat to one that’s stuffed. The stuffed one won’t meowl when you kick it.
Ha!
Nah, just kidding. I don’t care for cats but rarely kick them. Mostly I just scowl at them.