A science lesson about Earth's avian assholes.
By Bob Simpson (Writer)
If you’re like me, you spend hours every day trying to find animal comparisons to the irritating people you encounter every day. Some examples include: politicians are leeches because they suck you dry and when you pick them off and kill them they’re like “whatever, I don’t care…I’m an annelid and I don’t have feelings,” people from New Jersey are howler monkeys because they’re loud and don’t wear pants, and ballet dancers are swans because they spend the bulk of their three year-long careers convincing you that they are swans.
Dude, I get it.
I have struggled, however, with a douchebag analogy, and I’m not speaking of your run-of-the-mill douchebag that cuts you off in traffic or tells you to go back where you came from (see that story here). No, I’m talking about that guy you knew in college. The one that pledged Delta Tau…and I could stop there, but I’ll keep going. The one that pledged Delta Tau, thinks dark beers are un-American, and has a poster of Jim Morrison hanging on his wall even though he had no idea who he was, and when he listened to The Doors that one time his reaction was “this sucks” (which I can understand). Still, he keeps that poster on his wall because he figures girls will think he’s edgy or that he enjoys overrated poetry about a lizard, and she might let him touch her boob.
The kind of guy that screams “Whooooo!” a lot and buys rohypnol in bulk from CostCo (4,000 pills for $49.95), or has one of those stickers on his car of Calvin pissing on a Ford logo.
I’d struggled to find his animal kingdom equivalent, until I did a little Wikipedia search the other day and discovered this avian asshole.
The Cuckoo. Nature’s dickhead.
About 59 species of this bird, and I don’t know where they get off doing this, practice brood parasitism. If you don’t feel like clicking on the link, brood parasitism basically means that the cuckoo, all full up with eggs, will fly to another bird’s nest, which I’m sure took that bird days to make, and plop her eggs right down in that nest. While this is going on, the male cuckoo runs interference by yelling “Whoooo!” really loud or just pantsing the host bird. The host bird will go into the bathroom and cry for a few minutes, while the male cuckoo’s asshole wife drops an egg load in the hosts nest.
It doesn’t end there. The cuckoo eggs are designed to hatch first, and then, instead of the host bird realizing that he or she didn’t look like this when they were baby birds, will begin feeding the baby cuckoo because, you know, birds are stupid. While the poor host bird is out finding more worms for their huge, weird-looking baby, the baby cuckoo will push the rest of the bird’s eggs out of the nest, smashing them on the ground below.
Oh, and here’s further proof that the cuckoo is a species of douchebags: roadrunners are a type of cuckoo. Remember the Roadrunner Looney Tunes cartoon from back in the day? That poor coyote was always coming up with ingenious inventions to capture that cocky bird (pun intended), but the Roadrunner always escaped because…wait for it…it could run really fast. That’s it. Nothing else special about that dumb bird, and while it was running away from the Coyote that just had a shrimping boat dropped on its head, it would stick out it’s tongue and do a little hoppy “you suck” dance. It was like watching the world’s most obscene end-zone celebration.
So, there you go. Cuckoos aren’t just neat little clocks; they’re also nature’s biggest douchebags. Please feel free to use this comparison in your daily life.
BOB SIMPSON is a writer and lives in Los Angeles, where he works for an entertainment company that he'd prefer to keep anonymous, should he accidentally diss something they made. www.bobsimpsonblog.blogspot.com
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