7 Reasons

Tag: penguins

  • 7 Reasons The Zoo Is My Habitat

    7 Reasons The Zoo Is My Habitat

    Last week I did something I hadn’t done since I was a boy. I went to the zoo. I’m not going to lie, I immediately felt at home. Here’s why:

    7 Reasons The Zoo Is My Habitat
    Zoolympics Challlenge 1: Stick Your Head Through A Set Of Shark Dentures And Look Sexy

    1.  Playground. As I may have expressed before, I am a boy trapped in a man’s body. Though whose it is, I am yet to establish. I have never grown up and I don’t intend to. I like being silly. Silly is good. I also like swinging from things while being silly. I saw monkeys at the zoo. They were being silly. And swinging. And picking their noses. It looked awesome. Well, maybe not the picking the nose bit. That made me a little bit sick. But the silliness and the swinging was definitely for me. I want to do that.

    2.  Sleep. Generally, after I’ve had a day of being silly and swinging around the clothes line, I like to have a sleep. Unfortunately I am prevented in this pursuit by one of two things. Either Claire arrives home or, as sometimes happens, Claire is already at home. Such appearances from my future wife make it very hard to sleep when there are important things to do such as make dinner, plan weddings* or – and the notion still makes me shiver – talk. At the zoo, there was silliness, swinging and sleeping. A whole lot of sleeping.

    3.  Talk. As previously indicated, I’m not a big fan of talking. I absolutely loathe small-talk. And, as for big-talk, I would rather do a naked lap of St. Andrews. (The football ground, not the golf course. My embarrassment does not need enhancing by the cold Scottish winds). It’s not that I’m uninterested in what you have to say, it’s more that The Tremeloes said Silence Is Golden and I have never stopped listening to them. The thing I noticed at the zoo was that animals don’t talk. Not even a little bit. They make weird noises occasionally – which is nice – but there’s no talking. And no animals asking other animals to talk to them either. Which means more time for silliness, swinging and sleeping. They’ve got it sorted.

    4.  Feeding. Some of the animals are fed upwards of four times a day. And I’m not talking about snacks here, I am talking proper meals. Four proper meals. Each day. That’s my kind of feeding.

    5.  Chores. With the exception of the ants who seemingly work all day and all night carrying bits of leaf over logs, non of the animals at the zoo have to work. Or go to school. Or get the shopping in. Or iron their trousers. (In fact, many of the animals I saw were naked). Animals, from what I have seen, don’t do any of the boring stuff at all. They’ve never had to write essays on Pride & Prejudice. They’ve never had to stand in a queue at the bank. They’ve never experienced an episode of Time Team. Their work-life balance is perfect. No work, all life. And life, as I’m sure we can all agree, is for living. It is not for spending in Barclays.

    6.  Vanity. It’s an alarming statistic, but if I was to walk down the entire length of Regent Street ten times in a row, only on seven of those would someone stop and take a photo of me. For someone who fancies themselves quite as much as I do and does their very best to live up to the meaning of their name – Gift Of God – it’s rather upsetting when someone just walks past without even so much as a raise of the eyebrow. In the zoo though, everyone would be taking photos of me. I’d probably even appear on postcards and desktop backgrounds and t-shirts. And that is the way it should be.

    7.  Olympic Qualities. As I was walking around the zoo I was challenged to a number of Olympic contests. The Zoolympics they called it. A name that made me chuckle uncontrollably for at least twenty-two seconds. From what I experienced the Zoolympics were designed to belittle me. In less than three hours I discovered that my reaction time was slower than the Blue Dart Frog, my wingspan was shorter than the Wandering Albatros and my backside wasn’t as stripy as Okapi. Which all leads me to believe that if I want to win Gold at anything, anytime soon, I need to move to the zoo to be pumped full of whichever Performance Enhancing Drugs the zookeepers have access to. I felt stupid being outwitted by a frog. Really, really stupid. But at least I beat my Dad.

    *You do only have one wedding don’t you? It’s just that having booked both the church and the reception venue there is apparently so much still to do. How? I would like to know how?

  • 7 Reasons Not To Have Sex With A Penguin

    7 Reasons Not To Have Sex With A Penguin

    Yesterday, we showed you some of the search terms that people have used to find our website but, as is often the case, no sooner had we posted that piece, someone discovered our website in a new, and not entirely unalarming way.  Someone in the Netherlands (thus confirming at least one national stereotype about the Dutch) found our website by entering the search term “what to do if I had sex with a penguin”; a search for which we rank number one on Google.  Now, we have no idea why we rank so high for this search term, it’s not as if the team spend their days thinking about – or writing about – having sex with penguins (until today) but, seeing as we rank so highly, we feel it is our duty to tell people not to have sex with penguins and to point out that it is wrong.  Here are seven reasons why.

    A road sign prohibiting sex with a penguin

    1.  They’re Hard To Get Hold Of.  I’m not thinking of the technical difficulties of having a dalliance with a penguin, you’ll be pleased to note – though they do look slippery – but more about their scarcity.  In the UK, they are rarely seen in our waters which means that, for the casual penguin-fucker, the most likely place to find a partner is a zoo.  Because of this, if you wanted to have sex with a penguin, you’d have to break into a zoo at night.  If successful, you’d run the risk of being eaten by a lion and if unsuccessful, you’d face a very interesting conversation with the police, a series of eye-grabbing headlines in the local paper and a rather high level of public opprobrium.

     

    This would be bad.

    2.  They’re Hard To Get Hold Of II. Or, you might decide to save yourself a breaking and entering charge by committing the act at a time when the zoo is open.  Now, as a new father, I’ve recently begun to develop a fear of answering difficult questions from a growing son with an enquiring mind but, I have to admit that nothing I have thought of so far fills me with as much dread as the question, “Daddy, what’s that man doing to that penguin?”  That’s the sort of question I definitely intend passing on to my wife.  And I’d also prefer to be addressed as Father, but most of all, I’d prefer not to be put through it in the first place.

    3.  It Would Be A Backward Move.  Penguins – though they might be confused with fish by the unaware and…well…me*  – to the rest of humanity, are birds.  But surely (and I’m sure we’re all grateful for this) no one in this country has had sex with a bird since the heyday of On The Buses in the mid-1970s.  There’s no way we should start doing that again, that would be a backward step.  Nor we should we address anyone as “Love”, though that’s a different post.

    4.  You Are A Man.  Men shouldn’t have sex with penguins because if, as a result of your inappropriate interspetial intercourse, you should sire any progeny, you are in for a big shock: While fathers of human babies can usually get away with changing about one in three nappies and don’t have the equipment to feed a human baby (so can be pretty hands-off) as the father of a penguin you’ll be expected to go to the South Pole and balance your offspring on your feet for months.  That looks tedious and you’ll miss a lot of cricket as you stand there with all the other penguins hoping not to get eaten by a polar bear and looking at the snow.

    5.  You Are A Woman.  As a woman, should you end up bearing the child of a penguin you’ll…actually, I don’t believe that any woman has, at any point, ever considered having sex with a penguin.  I just refuse to believe that women are that weird.  Obviously I’m still open minded though so, if you are a woman that has considered having sex with a penguin, please let us know via the comments section.  We want to hear from you.

    6.  Black And White.  Penguins are in black and white and – for the most part – no one has sex in black and white, that’s just not the British way of doing things.  Look at Brief Encounter: a mannered depiction of repression, subsumed emotion, inhibition and tea at railway stations.  That’s in black and white, is there any sex in it?  Hell, no.  Want to take a penguin for tea at a railway station?  Fine, that’s your business.  Want to have sex with a penguin?  Well you can’t.  It’s not how we do things.

    7.  There’s No Future In It.  When seeking prospective long-term partners, not smelling of fish is high up the list of things that people look for in a mate.  There are other things that are up there on the list of desirable attributes too: Not having a beak; not having flippers; not having webbed feet (except in Dorset); not walking like a penguin in fact, not being a penguin are all right up there.  In a game of Ideal Mates For Humans Top Trumps, the penguin card would be the one no one wanted to be saddled with.  And if you were dealt a hand that contained both the penguin and the Ryan Giggs cards, you could pretty much abandon all hope of victory.

    We don’t do eighth reasons around here but if we did, we would offer you this piece of information that comes to us courtesy of writer, solicitor, giant and friend of 7 Reasons, Richard O’Hagan.  He tells us that under (the rather brilliantly numbered) section 69 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, having sex with a penguin is against the law.  I briefly thought I’d found a loophole, but it seems that even though penguins can blow, that’s precluded in section 78.  So it’s not just logic that says you shouldn’t have sex with a penguin, it’s the law too.

     

    *They can’t fly, yet they do swim and they’re often chased by killer whales, how is that not a fish?

     

  • Russian Roulette Sunday: Make Do And Mend.

    Russian Roulette Sunday: Make Do And Mend.

    Russian Roulette Sunday

    Hello. It’s Sunday again. And Sundays come as Sundays do – after five days of hoping that the other 7 Reasons writer has come up with something for Sunday. They never have. Which is why Marc came to me yesterday, breathless and devoid of inspiration, and said, ‘We don’t have anything for Sunday do we?’

    ‘No,’ I replied, supping on a cup of tea and stroking my mirror.

    ‘Damn,’ was his silent reply.

    We sat in silence for a minute or twenty. Neither one of us prepared to say, ‘Let’s have a Sunday off’. Then, just as I was about to snap my gingerbread man at the neck, Marc leapt out of his chair and kicked the cat. ‘Let’s do some more advertising!’ he declared.

    ‘Marc,’ I began, my blood beginning to simmer at my colleagues scant disregard for our lack of money, ‘we don’t have any finances. You gave all our money away to Pearl & Dean and my masks have proved about as popular as Esther Rantzen in a…well about as popular as Esther Rantzen’.

    ‘You make a good point Jon,’ Marc said, taking off his pith helmet and vaulting over the desk, ‘but maybe we can just make do and mend.’

    I looked puzzled, Marc was using phrases from World War II again. ‘How do you mean, Marc?’

    ‘I mean, we just use a load of old adverts and pimp them to suit 7 Reasons. Then we can ask people to put them up in their windows and on the back of their cows.’

    ‘Genius!’ I shouted, sending tea all over my groinal department. And with that Marc left, leaving a waft of whisky and a cat stuck in my plant pot.

    Thirteen hours later we were finished. And so was the cat.

    So yes. Please choose your preferred poster and stick it up in your place of work, caravan, shed or personal telephone box. Then take a photo and send it to us. It’s not that we are an unbelieving duo, we just like to know our hard work has been worth it.


  • 7 Reasons That it Sucks to be a Psychedelic Penguin

    7 Reasons That it Sucks to be a Psychedelic Penguin

    1.  Ostracisation. The other penguins won’t play with you, because you’re different, and penguins can be mean.

    2.  Confectionery. The manufacturers of Penguin bars won’t like you, because your colours would increase their printing costs and their accountants are all about the bottom line and are mean.

    3.  Spectacle. People may capture you and imprison you in a zoo, because you’re different, and people are mean.

    4.  Movies. Black and white movie-makers will shun you.  This is because you eclipse their colourless show, and because they are mean.

    5.  Dinner. Killer whales will be able to see you more easily, and will eat you, because killer whales are mean (and greedy).

    6. Decor. Interior designers will detest you because you will ruin their carefully planned colour schemes, and because interior designers are mean.

    7.  Poo. No one will want to step on your psychedelic poo.  This is because poo -psychedelic or otherwise – is disgusting.  They’ll know it was you that did it too.

    Okay, who doesn’t want a psychedelic penguin?

    *7 Reasons for grown-ups will return tomorrow.