The variety of life on this planet is truly wilder than anyone could imagine on his or her own.
Look now with us at this waterhole at the edge of a clouded hasbrook. The land here is neutral ground, and an uneasy truce ties predator and prey.
On the back, a lone gazelle sips with a delicate touch, ears flickering, eyes moving. It can drink, but it cannot rest, for gathering in the water are the hippos, sun reflecting off their colorful backs, all of them intent on being the first to get their fill of the gazelle.
Some say the hippos are in some sort of contest. While no evidence has yet answered this conclusively, explorers have recently unearthed ruins of an abandoned device, apparently some sort of mouse trap, hinting that animals do engage in life-or-death dominance behavior as a sort of fun. And is it so hard for us, a species that toys with mystery dates and battleships, to believe that hippos might destroy each others lives to kill a rainy sunday afternoon?
The gazelle has seen them now, and it turns to move. The red hippo is fast, but not fast enough. The gazelle is gone. She will not return today. The red hippo sinks back into the muck, to wait. Nearby, its relative chews on a tiny white ball. Again, the wetlands are serene.
Wear this shirt: to an all-you-can-eat buffet. And maybe buy it in a size or two larger than normal.
Don’t wear this shirt: to your class about the early Catholic church and how the Bishop of Rome had to defend his delicate position due to the manipulations of- yeah, see, all the regular people stopped reading ages ago. History jokes are really hard to do properly for just that very reason. Stick to airline peanuts, that’s our advice.
This shirt tells the world: “I call not the one who has to put everything back in the box.”
We call this color: H. Lem-phibi-on. Strictly speaking it should be H. Lem-phibi-us but Joel wouldn’t let us rename the color “Lemus” for the day so science has to suffer.
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