Ask The Dandy (Fish)

Right, we're having a bit of a format change today, let me know what you think.

We've had a letter at Dandy Towers... Well, I say letter, it wasn't a letter, obviously, this is the twenty-first century.  I mean, no-one sends letters any more... It was a bunch of electrons, sent over the aether via the medium of social networking.  And it read thusly:

Nicki who lives in an Oak Tree somewhere in Greater Manchestershire asks...

Dear Mr Dandy,

Please can you cast your mind onto fish... Sole look depressed, Angler Fish, what are they all about?? It's been buzzing round my head now and I think it's a subject that needs addressing.
Thank you

Yours sincerely

Nicki
(Aged forty mumble)

-oOo-

Well, what a great question... What are fish all about?

First of all, let's define fish.  A fish is a thing, measuring anywhere from less than an inch up to about seventy feet long or something.  They exclusively breathe the oxygen that is dissolved in water through gills - which are a sort of inside-out lung affairs inside the fish's head, where any right-minded animal would keep its ears.  Through sheer laziness they have allowed their webbed hands and feet to devolve into fins, which although, by some happy accident allows them to 'swim' in the 'water', makes them completely rubbish at climbing stairs.

There are of course exceptions to the gill thing, it seems that there are many kinds of fish that have the audacity to have lungs.  These are called lung-fish, which just goes to show that on the evolutionary ladder, 'growing lungs' comes a long way before 'being able to think of an interesting name for yourself'  Many types of lung-fish also have rudimentary legs, presumably to make up for the stair climbing inadequacies of their less evolved brethren.  But nobody really knows the answer to that if they're being honest.

Another thing that characterises fish is that they all have scales, except the ones that don't.  Blennies (or to give them their Latin name, Blennioidei - I'm not going to give you every fish I mention's Latin name, I just thought that one was great...) Have skin, covered in slime instead - A bit like Eels and Hagfish.

Ooh-ooh.. Hagfish, they're great too, not only do they have slime-producing skin, but they've also only gone and lost their backbones... Their skeleton is pretty much the top half of the skull and some bits of cartilage... They have no discernible brain and three hearts - Their teeth are on their tongues, not in their jaws... BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE JAWS!

And don't get me started on sharks, their skin is made of teeth... No, seriously, it is, they're called Dermal Denticles - Which, to me, sounds like a crappy alien in a badly written sci-fi story.  They're just an extension of the, like, bajillion rows of teeth that a shark has. Can you imagine the design meeting for that one?

-oOo-

Shark God (SG): So, I thought i's go with covering this Mo-Fo in a layer of tiny teeth, innit?

Fish Project Manager (FPM): Teeth?  Like... Teeth? Not scales, or skin, or snot?  Teeth?

SG: Yeah Man, scales has been done to death, we need somefink new, yah get me?

FPM: But wouldn't they sort of, fall out?  Teeth do that don't they? Wouldn't it leave a hole?

SG:  Nah mate, the next one in line would take it's place.  Move up into dah breach an' t'ing.

FPM: Just that one? Not the whole row surely, how would that work?

SG: [Thinks] Now that you come to mention it Brah, I's not entirely sure, I'll get that guy what did da Wombat to take a look... Safe!

FPM: Wombat God? You know that he made their poop cubic right?  You're going to him for design hints?

SG:  Ha! Yeah Bruv, square poop is da shiznit! They makes some wikkid sounds when you get a few together, all da howlin' an' da strainin' and such [Makes flicking noises by moving his hand up and down quite briskly]

FPM: Ok, give it a go and let us know how it goes.  Has to be better than those slimy things with the teeth on their tongues.  Hey! Wasn't that your idea too?

SG: [Grins and gives a thumbs-up] Aiii!

-oOo-

But, our askee had a couple of specific points.  Number one was 'Sole look depressed'.  Well, I guess they would.  The whole flatfish thing is a bit peculiar, imagine you're a baby sole, just hatched and full of the joys of the ocean. At this point, you're not a flatfish, you're a normal uppey-downey fish with fins on the top and a tail that points uppey and downey, not leftey and rightey like those nasty Dolphins.  They you look at your Mum.

She's lying there, on her side, panting.  OK, so maybe the stress of being a new mother has taken it out of her a bit, so you swim over and hold out your lucky fin to tell her that everything's going to be OK, and she should just have a bit of a rest whilst.... Oh My Neptune! both of her eyes are on the same side of her head! - She must have been so tired after the spawning that she became unconscious and hit the seabed so hard that it knocked her left eye onto the right side of her head... You instantly brand yourself a bad child until you start to mature... And your left eye starts to move... Slowly... onto the right hand side of your head and you start to favour your left-hand side, which goes white.  You realise that it wasn't your fault - You're finally free from guilt... Huzzah!  Then you happen to catch your reflection in a submarine porthole, and see that you're ugly...

So terribly ugly.

And tasty, deliciously tasty

Yes, I'd say that that would make me depressed.  I'll give you that one.

-oOo-

And Angler Fish... They're pretty odd too.  Let's see what the average man in the street knows about them.

• They're dog-ugly
• They live in the dark
• Some of them light up
• They have a fishing rod jammed into their forehead
• The males are tiny compared to the females

Well, yeah, that sounds about right but there are some even stranger things about them.  The fishing rod type lure thing is actually part of their dorsal fin which has done a bit of lone migrating to the top of their heads, leaving the rest of its dorsal finny buddies on the fish's back as is normal.

And you know how, if you're needy, you might say to someone 'I literally can't live without you'?  Well, in the case of certain male Angler Fish this is true.  Many of them are born without a fully formed gut, or even jaws, so they can only be fed by the female, who may be up to hundreds of times bigger than they are.

But she doesn't do that wonderful chewing and spitting out thing that lots of other animals do... Anglers are the hipsters of the seabed, and that would be too mainstream.  For the male Angler Fish, there is only one choice - To bond with the female by clamping onto her soft underbelly and waiting for her skin to absorb him whilst drinking her bodily fluids.

Yeah... Ewww right?

Well, that's not the end of it, over time, he almost completely disappears... Except for his testicles which stay firmly attached to the little bump that remains and fully functional.  So every time Mrs Angler Fish decides to pop out some tiddlers,  she can fertilize them herself... Kinda.

Oh, and another thing?  Ever had Monkfish Tails in a posh restaurant?  That's Angler Fish butt you're eating right there...

-oOo-

To recap:

Fish are small or huge, breathe air or water, covered in scales, skin, slime or teeth, have fins or legs, lay eggs or give birth to live young, eat other fish, plants, microscopic creatures or people and generally float about in the sea without a care in the world like a fat bloke from Halifax on Wakes Week...

Except when they're flying, or walking, or making a little mud igloo for themselves to survive an arid winter, or swimming up a stream of urine to lodge themselves in the end of your penis with their spiky fins.

Best thing to do, in my opinion, is to steer well clear.  A lot of them are bitey, even more are poisonous, those that aren't are slimy or will try to kill you even after you've eaten them by lodging their tiny bones in you epiglottis.

But I didnae dye my beard purple

So, if you were to spend £2 on a lottery ticket today, and you matched all seven numbers numbers AND you were the only person to do so... You'd win £157 Million. ($242 Million)

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SEVEN!... MILLION!... POUNDS!

ZED-OH-EM-EFF-GEE!!!1!!!!!11!!1!1111!!!Eleven

What could you do with that amount of money? Well, I guess you could do pretty much anything you wanted - I know I'd go mental, buying black market badgers and teaching them to sing showtunes and suchlike, but I think you'll agree that it's a proper game-changing amount of money.

You could do a lot of good - You could pay the wages for a nurse (Pay band 5, point 1 - for my NHS chums) for nearly seven and a half thousand years. Or, conversely, you could pay Wayne Rooney's wages for ten years. (Feel sick about how our sad society thinks that balding Granny-shaggers that play a child's game for an hour and a half a week are somehow seven hundred and fifty times more important than people who actually save lives yet? I certainly do.)

It's higher than the Gross National Product of the entirety of Micronesia (A chain of island-states just north of Australia) and you could possibly therefore buy it and pronounce yourself King, or Emperor or some other high muck-a-muck and find yourself owning a potential fortune in High-Quality Phosphates - You'd need a big wallet though, especially if you decided to live on the island of Yap, where the local currency consists of carved stone disks, up to twelve feet in diameter.  You could introduce some sort of credit system, the islands chiropractors would then worship you as their God. (or possibly kill you and eat you as you'd have taken away all their business).

You could buy four, brand new, AH-64D Apache Longbow Attack Helicopters, one for each member of the family perhaps, and make parking worries a thing of the past.  You might even have enough left over to teach you how to fly them. (It seems that there's a bit more to flying one of these buggers than it shows you on the XBox - It's like balancing a tea-tray on an oily ball bearing, in a high wind, or so I'm reliably informed.)

But all the mad things aside, what would you actually do?

If you were sat at home tonight and my very good and close friend, Mr Nick Knowles (or whoever presents it nowadays) reads out those seven numbers and you look at the screen, then look at your ticket, then back at the screen, ticket, screen, ticket.  Once the screaming and the explosive defecation had subsided, you'd check the numbers again and then read the back of your ticket to see what to do next.  So you ring Camelot and (I don't know because obviously it's never happened to me, but I assume...) They ask you some questions, maybe where you bought the ticket, if you'd like publicity or not, did you want to come to London to collect a cheque, or shall they put it straight into your Post Office savings account?

Would the paranoia set in now do you think? Would you start thinking that every person in the world wanted your ticket?  What would you do with it whilst you slept? What if someone breaks in and steals it? What if your wife slits your throat and makes off with it? What if the dog eats it? What if the wind blows through your draughty double-glazing and blows it into the oven, that was still warm from when you reheated a plate of leftovers from yesterday and the cat walks over the button that sends the spark to relight it and it catches on fire?

Then you try to calm down, because you realise that you're about to have a debilitating brain aneurysm - which would be ironic, according to Alanis Morrisette at least.

Then you think... A nice holiday whilst you take it all in, perhaps a couple of months in America.  DisneyWorld, Route 66, Hollywood, Californian beaches, maybe even a beachfront house (You can get something quite nice with five bedrooms and eight bathrooms for $20 Million on Laguna beach)  where you can spend the summers.

And then maybe a new car, you imagine walking into the Audi dealership, dressed in your pyjamas and your old dressing gown that your Auntie Edith bought you for Christmas in 1987, walk up the the salesman and say, 'I'd like a matching pair of R8 V10 Spyders please, and what's your price for cash?' Then you open the aluminium suitcase full of stacks of £50 notes and watch as he does a sex-wee and crumples to the floor with his eyes rolling back into his head and his arms and legs spasming uncontrollably.

But you'd need somewhere to live, you wouldn't emigrate, because you're staunchly British and you realise that foreign lands are all very well to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there (there are usually flies, and the distinct possibility of poor people, who in all likelihood sweat all over the place and make it look untidy.) So you'd buy some land, and engage some hardworking and artistic people to build you a stately pile.  It'd be a castle though wouldn't it, really?  From the outside it would look like something that could repel an invasion from an unwashed medieval horde for six months.  You'd have a high wall, and possibly a moat, with hammerhead sharks (because my wife says I can't have killer whales), because even though the initial paranoia has worn off, you still know that there're a list of people as long as your arm that think they deserve what you've got and are willing to take it by force.

Your castle would have a cinema, because going to the cinema is great, you might have a nightclub for having parties in, and a gym, obviously.  Perhaps you could cultivate the friendship of everyone's favourite 'Dragon', Duncan Bannatyne and he could get you a good deal on some decent equipment.  I'd personally supplement all this with a games room, the normal stuff like pool and snooker tables maybe even Ski-ball... And also a number of high-end gaming computers with 50" HD Monitors.  Maybe a bowling alley, but definitely a shooting range for guns and bows.

Other possibilities include one of those Wacky Warehouse type places, but adult sized.  A swimming pool with built in jaccuzi and water-slides coming from each bedroom.  You'd probably have bought some woodland too, then you could get some of those crusty type new-age chaps to build you a completely awesome tree-house / suspended walkway / Ewok habitats where you can sit in the autumn, drinking Fortnum and Mason hot chocolate whilst you take potshots, with your air-rifle, at people poaching rabbits on your land.

I'd have a cave too, built in the cellar, where all the walls have been sculpted out of something that looks like solid rock, but not that Star-Trek expanded foam stuff, painted to look like rock, something solid that you could bang a nail into to hold up a picture or something, should the mood take you.  It would have my writing computer, which would be like the gaming computers, but with twin, A4 sized monitors side by side... And I'd be able to dictate stuff to it and it would tell me if it was rubbish or not.  It would also have a dumbwaiter that led to the kitchen (that was big enough for me to fit in, because I've always wanted to do that.) And a soundproofed mini cinema, because occasionally you want to watch films in private, with the door locked, on a heated and Scotchguarded La-Z-boy. *Cough*

I guess I'd put a massive wodge of cash in the bank for the kids futures, maybe share it out a Little too, pay my close friends and families debts off, give em a million or so on top.  Actually, that's a point... If it were you, would you give everyone the same amount, to save on arguments, or would you employ a 'sliding scale' process?  Something like - 'I like you, but you borrowed my George Foreman grill last year and broke it, so I'm taking £100,000 off your award' or 'Actually, even though I've only really known you for a couple of months, you've been quite cool about the time you caught me staring down your top when you bent over, so have another £250,000.'

It's a proper minefield isn't it?

Is it all worth the hassle?

Could you cope with the constant worry about yourself or your family being kidnapped and held for ransom, the deluge of begging letters when people you haven't seen for years find out and come crawling out of the woodwork?

All you'd have in return is everything you've ever dreamed of?

It's a difficult question and no mistake, but as I sit here, riding around my personal skating rink made from ice from Jupiter's moon Europa, on the back of my platinum plated narwhal, I would say yes, it jolly well is worth it and I would repeatedly shoot anyone who says different.

That reminds me, I really must put an advert for a new chef in next month's Country Life.