Marsupials

Marsupials? I'm against them.

I remember hearing in a class or maybe reading in a book of Stephen Jay Gould essays that there were once marsupial analogues out there to most normal, placental mammals. I just don't care for that idea ... it's kind of unheimlich. Know what I mean?

Marsupials are nasty. Those beady little possum eyes that catch your headlights from the ditch? Demonic. Man, I hate possums, with their insidious little possum teeth. (I refuse to call these rat-tailed gremlins by their proper name, which I consider to be some kind of obscure ethnic slur against the Irish.) I'm glad to live in a neighborhood with only one native marsupial.

So okay, you're saying, what about kangaroos? Kangaroos are interesting enough ... I guess they're the deer of the marsupial world? I don't know. But if you ask me, marsupials are kind of gross, period. Look, carry your young until they're ready to be born, and then pop them out. AND KEEP THEM OUT. I'm really glad people don't have little larval PEOPLE clinging to them for months after giving--or should I say "loaning"?--birth ... clinging to their fur and crawling in and out of their pouch at will. As my mother used to say if I couldn't make up my mind between going outside or playing indoors: "In or out."

I don't wish ill upon marsupials, mind you. I think extinction is pretty tragic, even if the animal itself is an abomination:


And there's something tragic about watching what might have been the last one of them wandering around in a zoo. But don't be lulled into too much sympathy ... these are marsupials we're talking about!

You can see where I'm going with this, right? Here's a scary headline for you: "Marsupials And Humans Share Same Genetic Imprinting That Evolved 150 Million Years Ago." If you ignore the article, you'll see why I'm afraid that marsupial people are living among us. I didn't make this up! More than twenty years ago, the visionaries who created the so-called fiction film Howling III predicted the same thing. What they didn't predict was that people weren't ready for this idea (hence the 2.4 star rating on IMDB). Look, it's got a Roman numeral in the title. Roman numerals, people ... that gives it a gravity that's almost Biblical, if you ask me.

I have a pretty strong opinion about sea horses, too ... remind me to tell you about it sometime.