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, ____, ( 10/11/01 anada469 ,
/ \ ,_____ (--|_\_,,_, _ _| _ __________ ,-.______ _,---._ __ _/ \
/ \+------ _| ) | |(_|(_|(_|_ .net------/ )----.-' `./-/ \
/ / ( |__, ( ( ,' `/ /|
\ / "Somebody Somewhere \ `-" \'\ / |
\ / Thinks You're a Shit" `. , \ \ / |
Y-------- ----------/`. ,'-`----Y |
/ by Peter Bennett ( ; mEoW!@/| '
i________________________________________________| ,-. ,-'_______/ | /
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|____________________ Anada is cat-friendly! __) |__\ `.___________|/
`--' `--'
The message came in the mail and it wasn't news to me. As an art and
theatre critic I'm acutely aware that the same sentiment is shared by whole
busloads of people. What was new, was the novel way in which the message
was enforced. It came wrapped around a jar of dried kangaroo excrement with
a label attesting to its authenticity as "gift poo".
Now, when one receives a jar of dried kangaroo excrement in the mail
what should one do, what's the protocol? The first thing that struck me was
that it weighed almost nothing, but I had no idea of the specific gravity of
any other kind of poo with which to make comparisons. Does wildebeest poo
float; does elephant poo make good Frisbees?
I peered into the jar, shook it, examined it from all angles and then
did the obvious ñ I unscrewed the lid and smelled it. Strange stuff
kangaroo poo, it was like marble sized horse poos with seeds and pieces of
grass protruding from it. And it didn't smell. Aha, I thought, it's fake.
Somebody's taken a few scats from Australia's national icon, made molds of
them and now they're knocking out plastic poo by the ton in some Nike-like
Pakistani sweatshop using child labor. It certainly seemed like it could be
the real thing and according to the label on the jar it was from Down Under.
Down Under, come to think of it, is the region from which most poo
originates with the possible exception of flying fox poo when evacuated at
rest. I threw a nugget of it into the john. It floated.
The next thing to ricochet off the outer reaches of my thinking
apparatus was "who is it that thinks I'm so much of a sót that they
reinforce the message by sending all the way to Australia for a jar of
kangaroo crap just to tell me about it?"
The next day I took the stuff into the office. Everybody there
thought it was "a scream a hoot, a giggle." My editor ñ born 15 years
before Jumpin' Jack Flash was recorded - said it was a gas. "No," said the
features editor, "it's definitely a solid." Amid a barrage of wisecracks of
the Thunder from Down Under variety I headed for the newsroom and asked the
crew if anyone else had received a jar of marsupial fertilizer. Nobody had,
but in the 80s our investigative journalist had had a whole load of horse
manure dumped in his parking spot by someone he'd written a not too
complimentary article about.
At home that evening I did a little investigative journalism myself.
I sat down at the computer determined to find, on the net, an Australian
Company purveying kangaroo poo. Surely it couldn't be too difficult to find
an animal poo purveyor? How many could there be?
Well, animal poo, of one kind or another, seems to be in fashion
these days. I found a company in the good ol USA called Inajar selling not
only bull but chicken product and another company called DogDoo selling just
that. Then there was a gift shop in Fairbanks Alaska selling genuine Moose
poo products together with kids candy and swizzle sticks in look-alike
sugary moose poo. There's ZooDoo who sell zoo animal poo made into a
variety of animal shapes which you place in your garden and watch as they
slowly dissolve in the rain and there's even some outfit in Montana selling
fossilized dinosaur dung.
I decided to qualify my search by asking the search engines for
Kangaroo Poo. In return I got a company in London England called The
Kangaroo Poo Clothing Company. They sold all kinds of kids apparel but
didn't sell the genuine article. When I finally tracked down the firm in
Australia who'd sold the jar of poo to whoever sent it to me, I was
disappointed. It only cost them $20! At twenty bucks it was the cheapest
poo on the net. My detractor was a cheapskate. Original maybe, but a
cheapskate nevertheless.
If he/she had gone to INAJAR it would have set them back $59 and
DogDoo or ZooDoo would have set him/her back a packet. But twenty bucks,
twenty lousy bucks. Did this person expect to be taken seriously?
The True Blue Roo Poo Company www.roopooco.com was interesting
though. Their site kept my partner and I entertained throughout 15 minutes
of our regular nightly TV news. The quality was just as good and it was a
helluva lot more interesting. While others sat in front of their TV sets
watching yet another reprisal killing in the Middle East, and how Nicole
Kidman is coping with her separation; we were educating ourselves on the
toilet habits of Australian marsupials.
Until then we didn't know that young Tasmanian devils only relieve
themselves 5 times a week or that kangaroos live in such a dry climate that
they drain all the moisture out of their feces before evacuating them. Nor
were we aware that koala bears evacuated their bowels whilst sleeping and
that their turds are torpedo shaped "to stop their buttocks closing with a
bangÖ". There was even a photograph of a copulating kangaroo accepting a
viagra tablet from a "trainee roo poo inspector" named Jason. All stirring
stuff!
Before I went offline I wound up buying a pair of koala bear poo
earrings for the person I suspect sent me the jar of kangaroo poo. The
label said "Guaranteed to be absolute sót or your money back."
The True Blue Roo Poo Company certainly present the most "tasteful"
of the poo sites and, speaking now as an art critic, they offer the most
visually appealing products. The gilded Tasmanian devil poo paperweights
are way past post modernism and wouldn't be out of place at the Guggenheim
or the new Tate gallery. I can imagine a whole pyramid of them a la
Pompidou Center glinting in the sun outside the offices of Microsoft. What
could be more appropriate?
The gilded koala poo earrings slot comfortably into both baroque and
rococo periods and would complement perfectly the chandeliers of the
Hermitage in St. Petersburg tinkling above the Dutch masters in their
hideously overworked gilt frames.
As for the kangaroo poo, I'd let the art students have their way with
it but I'd suggest some kind of installation with a marine theme ñ the piece
I threw down the john has so far proved unsinkable!
But strange people these Aussies. They were also selling cell phone
cases and baseball caps made from frog leather!
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`-.^.-' (c) 2001 Anada e'zine by Peter Bennett `-.^.-'
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