No kidding…

Sometimes as a family we find ourselves having pretty ludicrous conversations.  Yesterday at lunch, we found ourselves talking about what would happen if two different creatures of similar species managed to procreate together.  You know, like when a male donkey mates with a female horse.

  Eventually, out comes a mule.

How this conversation came about is that Carrie was trying to recall the acronym for remembering biological classifications.   And how that thread started, I can’t dredge out of my grey matter.  I would need more than acronym to summon that from the recesses.

Anyhow, the acronym for remembering biological classifications usually starts with the words “King Phillip.”  For example, King Philip Came Over For Good Soup (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.)  Another one Evan found on the Interweb was “King Philip Can Often Find Good Sex.”  King Philip was quite the guy, apparently, rather a randy gourmand.

So one thing led to another and we found ourselves wondering what would happen if a human mated with a chimpanzee, since chimps are our closest relatives in the animal world.  Apparently, according to some website or another, we Hales weren’t the first to think of that possibility and the offspring has been named even though it has not yet existed that we know of.  A Human/Chimpanzee is apparently going to be a Manpanzee once someone manages to get man and chimp together.  Then, letting our imaginations go wild, we decided that if Olive, the pug, fell in love with a chimp, she would have a Pugpanzee.  Personally, I think it is a good thing that Olive has been spayed.

We decided that though it would be very tall, the Giraffe/Human variation wouldn’t really make a good basketball player because they would be more neck than leg.  But we liked the name:  Girman.

Then there’s the Manoose, that is Man with Moose and the Manilla, that is Man with Gorilla.  One of those could also be called a Gorman.  My particular favorite is the Humantelope – Human and Antelope, of course.  And there’s the Mankey – Human and Monkey.

Oh!  (I almost forgot) the Humanatee!  That is the Human and the Manatee together at last.  Greg’s contribution.

Well, it’s a good thing we finished eating because it could go on and on and on…   But when you really think about it, we humans, as “intelligent” beings, will probably possess the ability to make some of those combinations possible in the future.  It will kind of make the question about what came first, the chicken or the egg, rather irrelevant.

But speaking of eggs, we got home on Wednesday afternoon to find a dozen eggs on our doormat, a gift from our neighbors the Caldwells who raise and nurture chickens.  We have some great neighbors of the purely human variety!