A Secant Discussion

    If you were to take out your intestines and stretch them out across a football field, you would die. Similarly, most animals will die if disemboweled, a notable exception being the sea cucumber, which will regurgitate its innards to deter predators in an annoying fashion. There are times in a sea cucumber’s lonely life in which it asks itself “What purpose do I serve here, in this big boundless blue ocean, if not to spew my intestines upon curious crabs and crustaceans or cuttlefish who consume my kind continuously and callously throughout the countless centuries?” The response is usually something along the lines of “Oh silly me, I’m an sea cucumber and that is my only means of defense because I can’t do much else except wiggle away at approximately one centimeter per second in which time any remotely intelligent sea creature will quickly devour me and savor my delicious cucumberness.” Most sea creatures do not prey on sea cucumbers, however, because sea cucumber intestines are a major strangulation hazard, instead choosing to prey on less repulsive animals such as krill or small fishes, which in turn eat smaller plankton which eat algae, which doesn’t really care what eats it because it’s general abundance guarantees its survival.

Survival is a very important concern amongst animals, because if they did not make more animals, their species would go extinct, which apparently does not fare well for most species. Giant Pandas (as opposed to their diminutive relatives, small Red Pandas) apparently have no concern for the continuation of their species, and do not mind becoming extinct. Their digestive systems evolved to digest meat like other ursines, but Giant Pandas insist on consuming solely bamboo, causing them to spend 12 hours a day eating bamboo, digesting less than half of what they consume. Giant Pandas also do not actively mate in captivity, preferring to abstain from continuing their species, much to the exasperation of their caretakers.

Zoos in China and other hosts of Giant Pandas earn exorbitant profits in the display of the obdurate species driving itself in a metaphorical boat on the road to extinction. Boats don’t often drive on roads, unless the roads are flooded, but in that case they would still be floating above the road; some boats are fitted with wheels and motors that allow them to drive on land but rendering them completely useless in water, defeating their purpose as anything other than novelty cars with really bad fuel economies. Sometimes people make ridiculous modifications to their property, such as adding wheels to boats, but most sensible members of society prefer to keep their outlandish ideas to themselves for fear of criticism. Some great thinkers (and some not-so-great thinkers) expressed their then-outlandish ideas and revolutionized the world: Alexander Graham Bell would never have dreamed his telephone would be globally recognized as an indispensable means of communication.

The telephone (and telephone wires) eventually led to the invention of fiber optic cables, (magical) glass filaments that transferred information as light at the speed of light (surprisingly not the speed of sea cucumbers) around the world to computers and servers, a massive international information exchange that allows people to upload, download, load, unload, reload, and do all sorts of things to loads of data, even read blogs about silly things like intestines and disembowelment.