Hairy Humour

Who would win if various legendary creatures squared off in battle? Fairy v Mermaid? Nessie v Mermaid? Nessie v Bigfoot? It’s all good fun…

Naturally, I supported Bigfoot:

Turning the concept on it's head, I then pondered what the fights would look like from a skeptical point of view (ie assuming the legendary creatures didn't exist). Fairy v Mermaid becomes:

The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 10. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, but others believed they had been faked.

In a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television's Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet." In the same interview Frances said: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in."

The term "submarine races" was used as a humorous way to convey the message that a couple was or would be going somewhere to park, probably to make out. Here's the thinking. If submarines are underway cloaked in their element, they cannot be seen (whether they are racing or not). So if someone is going to the submarine races, what's this person going to see? Nothing.

Just like a Nessie v Mermaid battle.

The first I heard of "submarine races" was from watching re-runs of Happy Days as a child of the 70's but it wasn't until about a decade later, when I had become a hormone-infused teenager, that I understood what it meant and was able to put it into practice with limited success.

My personal favourite. There's something about the thought of some "dude in a costume" vigorously wrestling with a log in shallow water that brings back positive memories of early British comedies like Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Benny Hill Show, and The Goodies which I find irresistible.

The mystery of the "unknown animal," given such prominence in the "Daily News" recently, was solved when a curiously shaped tree trunk was washed up on the south side of Loch Ness.