h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Listen, if you think monkeys are overused as conversation starters, why don't you write about kinkajous? Of course, I have a reputation for being a bit obsessed with kinkajous. Actually, I don't really have a reputation at all, but if I did, I'm sure that it would involve my frequent mentioning of kinkajous in my writings. I'm not actually obsessed, though. I just went for the wierdest animal name I could think of.

yeah, i guess you're right. all together though, i find birds to be better then anything else. i think that they have some special power, and i am convinced that if i had that power, taking over the world woud be a breeze. think about it. birds build those nests, they're all woven together and they stay up in the trees in bad weather...AND THEY DON"T HAVE HANDS!!!! how do they do that?

Well, I suppose that there are two ways that they could build a nest without hands. Method #1 would be that the birds use their beaks. That's Occam's razor. It's boring, logical, and supported by evidence. But because I am an annoyingly contrarian kind of person, I would say that these are excellent reasons for rejecting the "beak" theory. It's just too perfect. Obviously, birds' tiny skulls must house some kind of potent telekinetic-brain-attachtment-thing. When a bird knows it's under observation, it grabs a stick in its beak and fools around with it, only building its nest via its amazing mind powers when no-one's looking. Think about it. You may have seen birds PRETEND to be IN THE PROCESS of building a nest with their beaks, but have you ever seen a bird build one start-to-finish with only its beak?

By the way, you were right about the birds being good conversation starters. I've gotten sucked right in.

i'm glad you agree and don't think im nuts. i figured this out when i was watching some birds outside my apartment, and i thought, wow, it must be hard for birds to live in the city. then i watched a show and it said something about places that birds build their nests. then i saw the movie Ghost Dog: Way of the Samauri. Ghost Dog trains a pidgeon to carry messages to his retainer. so that got me thinking, and after all that thinking, my best friend and i decided that maybe this needed a little more investigation. lots of eating bacon and large fires resulted, but still no insight into what powers birds have and how we can harness them. next step: buy a parakeet.

How to harness bird powers? Well, I don't know...You could try to make a bird-powered generator by rotating pigeon around inside a spool of wire. That's how an electric generator works, except that they use magents instead of pigeons...

Oh, and if that doesn't work, try an emu.

i wonder what would happen if we cross bred birds with monkeys? something like those flying monkeys from the wizard of oz i guess. but maybe if they had a little more bird and a little less monkey in them... like birds with arms or something. we could call them bonkeys, or mirds.