Click HERE to return to Big Lou's Reviews To visit the Mass Graves, click HERE

A New Year's Allegory by Big Lou

Once upon a time, in a land hidden very deep in the jungles of some continent chosen carefully so as to be inoffensive to heightened 21st Century sensibilities, there lived a Lion whose diet consisted solely of the local tribesmen. He wasn't a particularly vicious Lion, and only ate when he was hungry, but when he did get hungry, nothing would satisfy him but human flesh.

The tribe had long since learned to put up with this inconvenience and simply had an extra 0.05 child per family so as to balance out the attrition stemming from the Lion's appetite.

Every time the Lion finished dining on a tribesman he would bury the skeletal remains and write a brief epitaph on a crude gravestone for the occasion. (If readers here say "Wait, Lions can't write!" I would hasten to point out that neither can most rock groups but that doesn't stop the constant flood of new CDs hitting the market. So it shouldn't stop our allegory, either.) The Lion obviously didn't know much about the person he'd just devoured, so he would limit himself to things he knew about. Thus, the epitaphs consisted of variations on the following theme:

	****	Tasted great (I had a ball!)
	***	Tasted pretty good
	**	I've had better
	*	Tasted awful
	0	Had to lick my bunghole afterwards to get the taste out of my mouth!

After several years of this, the Lion got pretty tired of having to dig separate graves for the average-to-lousy tasting tribesmen. Out of every 100 tribesmen the Lion ate, he found that 85 to 90 of them were in the "I've had better" or below epitaph category. (Get it? Lion? 'Cat'egory? Haw, haw, ah made a FUNNY!) Anyway, I digress. And being as he lacked an opposing thumb, scratching out those epitaphs was getting really tedious.

So, he hit upon a solution. He would henceforth drag ALL the skeletal remains of all the "I've had better" and below-tasting tribesmen into a mass grave, and give them all one big gravestone, cutting way down on the gravedigging and epitaph-writing time. (After all he was a VERY busy Lion.)

The tribal council would then send a representative over with a notebook every so often and make a list of all the lousy-tasting tribesmen the Lion had eaten. Their families never seemed to really miss them that much to begin with, and only the really GOOD-tasting tribesmen got individualized headstones after that. And they all lived happily ever after.

Click HERE to return to Big Lou's Reviews

All contents © Blue Highway Publishing, 1999-2008.