Amusing Children in Tasmania

 I stared at the missive in front of me trying to make some sort of sense of it.  Giving up I put in a call to my tech support.  They greeted me with their usual start of mild surprise.

"Oh hello," they said smiling oddly.  "How are you feeling?"

"Fine," I responded.

"You're not suffering from COVID at all?"

"No, as a matter of fact I'm disgustingly healthy."

"Well that was waste of bats."

"Why do you guys keep trying to kill me?"

"It's a hobby.  What can we do for you?"

"I've just got the latest report from my Tasmanian correspondent and I'm afraid she's going insane."

"So are we."

"You've read the report?"

"No."

I sent them the report and waited patiently while they scanned through the latest news from the most down under part of my country.  From somewhere behind them I could just hear the hysterical screams of one of their "research assistants" but before I could ask any questions they had finished.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"She's batshit crazy."

"What should I do about it?"

"How far away is she?"

"About sixteen hundred kilometres."

"That's a safe distance so why do anything?  Sit back and enjoy the show.  Besides if you don't publish that crap you're going to have to think of your own blog entries."

Sage advice from my tech support as always.  I thanked them profusely and promised to test their new batch of anthrax vaccine (at least I'm pretty sure they said vaccine) when it arrived and addressed the report in front of me.  The first sentence was "A sloth shits a third of its bodyweight" which should give you some indication of how this is going to go.

When she isn't pestering the local platypus for selfies my correspondent spends a lot of time trying to ensure her two daughters spend a lot of time.  This reduces the amount of time they have left to bother her.  Her well of daughter appropriate activities must be on the verge of drying up because the other weekend she took them to a blueberry farm.  The opportunity to go blueberry wrangling presented itself because a friend of my correspondent decided to take up blueberry farming as a hobby.  No, I don't understand it either but in the person's defence there really isn't a lot to do in Tasmania.  Apart from one's siblings of course.

My correspondent arrived at the farm with two mutinous offspring in tow just in time for (surprise surprise) harvest time.  Gleefully herding those too young to refuse out into the blueberry paddocks (or whatever) my correspondent idled on the balcony while her nearest and dearest sweated in the sun picking blueberries.  Of course being young and not entirely consensual their definition of "picking blueberries" frequently meant "ripping up the entire plant and stuffing it blueberries and all into the picking basket".  Shall we say a certain amount of quality control is going to have to be undertaken before those blueberries are fit to sit under a layer of dust beside the road in the hopes that a passing traveller might have an urge for a child mutilated fruit.

Still the work was done and my correspondent proudly announced the presence of fifteen kilograms of blueberries although that figure does shrink a little once you remove the branches and the roots.  If this keeps up Tasmania is going to have a child labour led economic recovery.  In time it will become known as the second Bangladesh but with a worse cricket team.

Possibly feeling a little guilty about hiring her daughters out as forced labour my correspondent decided to make it up to them by taking them to a shit show.  No, that isn't a comment on the quality of the show; she took them to the Museum of Excrement.  It is called, of course, The Pooseum.  It's website promises an interactive experience which I would have thought was sufficient to get it an adults only rating but apparently its terribly educational if you're interested in excrement.  This is where the random sloth fact above was sourced.

Sloths have on the whole a terrible bathroom experience.  Sloths live in trees but they crap on the ground I'm not sure why.  After all if you're clinging upside down to a branch is their any need to descend to the earth?  Just make sure nobody you're fond of is walking underneath.  Nevertheless descend to the earth the sloths do.  Whereupon they get eaten.  Things prey on sloths, these things can't climb trees so what they do is they wait until the sloth comes down for a crap and then they eat it.  Apparently fifty percent of all sloths die by being eaten when they pop downstairs for a shit.  The other fifty percent die of constipation.

However as noted above when a sloth shits it really shits.  Assuming it gets to the ground and assumes the position without becoming something else's lunch it doesn't stop until it could be the poster boy for a Weight Watchers ad.  It went down a sloth and came back up a ferret.  I suppose if every trip to the bathroom had a fatality rate higher than smallpox we'd probably hold it in as long as possible as well.

If the defecation cycle of the sloth isn't enough to attract you then there are all sorts of displays and 3-D models of various digestive systems which can apparently be taken apart.  Because it is never to soon to start teaching your kids the rudiments of vivisection.  They might be a science type person themselves one day and you don't want them standing in a room with a hacksaw and a chained up monkey without knowing what to do they've got to start early.  On an unrelated note if the person who stole the pictures of me holding a hacksaw next to a chained up monkey would return them I will pay any amount you ask.

Once she had sated her children's scatological interests there was nothing left to do but take them home for dinner.  On the menu; blueberries.  Possibly for the next six months.