Monday 11 December 2006

Pic of the day: On Earth, we have the amazing Coco-de-Mer palm. (And still people say there is no Creator!) The fruit can be half a meter across. Unfortunately it is hard as bone: It is basically an equivalent of the coconut. Still it has managed to shock many a sailor through the ages when found floating in the sea. Picture from Wikipedia here. I remembered this plant first after I wrote the entire entry, of course. Alas, butts don't grow on trees here in Chaosnodeland...

Butts & plants

Looking at my 7 years ago entry, I notice that even over these few years my backside has become visibly flatter. (Not fatter.) It is still as broad, of course, this is a feature of the skeleton after all. And my skeleton got its current form largely at a time when my body somewhat confusedly was trying to grow into a woman, something it later decided was a misunderstanding when it discovered my Y chromosomes hidden somewhere in the ball of yarn that is my genetic code. Back in high school I had a lot less fat than later, but what little there was, was mostly gathered on my pudgy thighs. Contrast this with now, where I have oh so slowly regained part of my weight after last years long weight loss. And pretty near every ounce I have now, is on my guts. As is good and proper for a man, and dangerous for our health. We who die on average five years younger, salute you!

Sometimes I think that it might have been a good idea to chew some female sex hormones as food supplement. It would probably be enough with a fraction of what you girls take more or less daily in birth control pills. Just enough to redirect some of the surplus fat from the less healthy storage on the stomach to the more healthy storage on the thighs. And breasts, I guess. Now one might wonder how I would ever get anything done if I had breasts to play with, but another side effect of female sex hormones is supposedly a reduced sex drive. (In men, at least!) They even give them to sex offenders. By the grace of God I'm not actually one of those, but... just to give you an idea, let me tell you the story about the imaginary butt bush.

***

It all began somewhere between 20 and 15 years ago, I think. It was back in the time when I wrote science fiction in New Norwegian. I wrote mostly for my own amusement, though I did share some of my writing. Not this, which may be just as well, since my friends probably already thought I was pretty weird.

This particular story, which was one of my better as far as characters go, took place on a human colony where mankind had terraformed the planet and put Earth life on it. But at some point a war had broken out, or perhaps it was an act of terror, I have forgotten now. A virus was let loose that cut random pretty large pieces out of the genome and inserted it in some other random place, including other species. In addition to decimating the human population, it also broke down the walls between species and resulted in many new halfbreed species. This included some animals with more or less human intelligence, and some humans with animal traits. For some reason I avoided the typical mythological ones, like mermaids and centaurs and minotaurs. One of the supporting cast was an intelligent billy-goat, I remember, and some stupid talking birds were also part of the plot.

Not only animals but even some plants were infected. Thus we got hairy lianes, and the memorable butt bush, one of my greatest inventions ever. Now that we have genetic engineering, perhaps it is time to create one, especially in nations where population boom is still a problem.

The butt bush was an otherwise unremarkable bush with dense foliage that lived in the forests around the villages. It had only few fruits but they grew unusually large and took the shape of a human ass, implied to be of vaguely female shape. As the fruit matured it first grew larger and softer and lost its green color in favor of a more yellowish hue.

I am pretty sure that I wrote this some time after I had seen a picture in a scientific magazine of a flower that looked amazingly like a certain species of fly. When the fly tries to mate, it actually helps the flower to breed instead. Although in my sci-fi story, the imitation was not a flower but rather a fruit. Without going into excessive detail, let us just say that it was not a flesh-eating plant, and for that the hapless human males should be thankful. When the fruit matured, it loosened from the plant and could be carried around, thus spreading the seeds.

It still seems a great symbiosis to me. The plant got its seeds spread around, and probably some degree of protection and favorable treatment, while the men got some ass without having to deal with snooty women and watch Titanic, or its equivalent in a post-apocalyptic world. (Not that I've ever watched Titanic so I would know how bad it is.)