What did you have for breakfast this morning? Who cares! It was not more amazing that what I ate. Not even if you ate nachos and beer, which would otherwise be the coolest breakfast since leftover pizza. I win, because I ate real… genuine… dinosaur eggs!
I’m not bragging. YOU have eaten dinosaur eggs, too! Come to that, unless you are one of those vegans who doesn’t believe in eating, you have probably chowed down on an actual dinosaur!
These claims are not fabrications made up by me in my boyhood when I breathed, drank, and—without knowing it—ate dinosaurs. This is the real world, people. Dinosaurs are not extinct. They live among us, only most of you call them “birds.”
“Ha ha, you coot,” I can hear you say. “You’re pulling one of those tricks where you correlate two completely unrelated things in an attempt to make some obscure point.” NOT THIS TIME. Birds, such as coots—which I just learned are also birds and not simply crazy old men—did not merely evolve from dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs. Newsweek.com says so, and it (the news, not Newsweek.com) is awesome, so it must be true.
Now I’m no scientist, so I am the ideal person to explain this evolution thing to you. Dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years before God came along and created it in seven days. Because the dinosaurs did not have Planned Parenthood clinics, their babies came out with all kinds of strange mutations that they passed on to THEIR children, and so on. Back plates, tail spikes, ugly toenails, you name it.
Then, Something Bad happened. It nearly destroyed life on this planet. We don’t know what happened exactly, because we’re more interested in the Apple Watch. Maybe an asteroid collided with Earth? Maybe volcanoes belched more garbage into the air than all sports radio talk shows combined? Maybe aliens needed to clear space for all the pyramids they wanted to build? Your scientific theory is as valid as any scientist’s.
Nonetheless, Something Bad smeared out all the really badass dinosaurs, and the freakazoid ones who evolved feathers and hollow bones and tasty wings pulled through. Humans were not yet around to hard boil all their eggs, so now we coexist with the kakapo, which smells like honey and is reproductionally stunted.
If I had known before college that birds equal dinos, you would not be reading this column, as I would now be a professional ostrich farmer. But what does this bird-revelation mean to you, specifically?
It means that you have dinosaurs hurtling themselves at your freshly spring-cleaned windows. But the real significance runs even deeper. If the dinosaurs—who invented the words “mass extinction”—survived to the present day, then certainly we can survive whatever doomsday debacle dangles in the balance of gay marriage or steroids in baseball, but definitely not of global climate change.
Whoops! I said the Dangerous Words sure to sic intellectuals and environmentalists on my case. Allow me to preempt their passionate arguments by stating that I feel completely assured that climate change presents us no immediate threat. For instance, I read a recent headline in The Durango (Colorado) Herald that indicates we have—and I quote verbatim—“Plenty of Water.” Furthermore, by venturing deep into the article’s first sentence, I gathered that “In the southwest corner of the state, there should be enough water to serve the population through 2050.”
Those with the greatest stakes in the matter—obviously, the manufacturers of daily desk calendars—have not yet calculated just how far away 2050 is. Until they do, I choose to live peacefully with the knowledge that I could die any day before 2050, so why stress myself into an early grave?
I selected the Herald article completely at random because it discusses the geographic portion of the United States where I live, and because it makes me feel okay about my foreseeable survival. But I could have selected any number of other sources from other places where the media fulfills its sacred duty to simultaneously inform and calm the general public.
In the interest of balance, though, let’s hypothesize that one of these totally unpredictable cataclysmic events comes to pass, like a freak meteor collision or the oceans absorbing ninety percent of the heat of the supposed global warming. What happens?
Heck if I know! If it happens, we can just blame the scientists for not fixing the problem before it escalated out of control. I have more pressing matters at hand, such as trademarking my very own brand of Kentucky Fried Dino.
(Photos: Chicken head by Jena Fuller / CC; chicken claws by David Davies / CC)
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