Meet the spamster. He is native to small islands in the south Pacific, including Hawaii. The spamster is a cute little fellow who starts out without ears, and then grows little pointy ones, the better to hear the commands of his master when its time to stand up, roll over, play dead, or in general, look cute. When he is fully grown the spamster tends to be somewhat long and lanky, a sort of skinnier version of the chihuahua. The spamster is a carnivor who loves to eat chicken, ham, barbecue, but not beef. The cows in the Chick-Fil-A commercial think he’s cool and are thinking of starring him in a future episode. Because the spamster only eats chicken and lean pork products, he is svelt and has very flexible muscle tissue produces a wonderfully flexible chewy meat product—- called SPAM. And you thought that spam was simply bad email. Wrong. Its a whole food group. Perhaps whilst perambulating through the grocery store you have come across a can of SPAM.

Little did you realize how many spamsters had to be slaughtered to produce just one can of bright pink, chewy spam. One estimate puts it at 13. Yikes. Now spam is a truly versatile food. So versatile that there are whole Spam cookbooks, and indeed Spam creation contests. For example, here below you will find an Ipod Shuffle created out of spam! Who knew!

Spam is especially popular in Hawaii, and anthropologists hypothesize this is because the natives hunted the spamster to near extinction for many centuries on the island of Molokai. Not surprisingly, the spamster jumped on some steamers heading west to the Orient, only to discover that their tasty meat was even more popular in places like Hong Kong where you can get Spam-musabi— no lie, see below.

But that is hardly all. Spam has become not only the breakfast of champions, but the inspiration of poets in Japan, so it is no surprise at all that we have Spam Haiku. You think I jest??? Take a look.

It is hardly a surprise then that those latter day saints of comedy, the Monty Python troop picked up on the legendary potential of this food, and created a suitable epic to memorialize it— SPAMALOT of course. I can hear them singing now– “A law was made a distant moon ago here. July and August shall not be too hot, and there’s a legal limit to the snow here… in SPAMALOT.”

All of this attention of course has led to a comeback in America of SPAM after a brief lull. In hard economic times SPAM is very useful, as it has a shelf life of a millenium, even if the can is open 🙂 And for harried housewives or househusbands, the answer to the call, what’s for dinner, has increasingly been— fried or pickled, or baked SPAM, or SPAM sandwiches. Notice the following ad.

But take a moment to have some pity on the poor spamster. These days their meat is in so much demand,especially the female meat which is chewier, that there are hardly any spamster spinsters in the known world. This is a sad irony, because the truth is– there is no content to SPAM. Its filling because its all made of filler. The truth is that SPAM in a can contains only 10% actual spamster meat. The rest is unmentionable, undesirable, and unconsumable filler. Rather like the spam you get on your computer. So once more, please write Pres. Obama and ask him, not least since he is a native of Hawaii, to put the spamster on the endangered species list. Unfortunately I gather he is not all that sympathetic to this cause, judging from what was served at a recent White House lawn picnic for under-privileged children (see below).

Speaking of children, Suzie from Sagebrush Gulch in Wyoming has written asking for an explanation as to why sheep are so dumb. Well Suzie its a sad, and even sexist tale. It appears that female sheep are smarter than rams, so some smart scientists decided to take what little gray matter a sheep could spare and inject it into the brain of the ram, so he would have more ram memory, and would stop butting things he had just butted five seconds before. The goal was to create less senior moments in rams, but like all such messing with God’s creation and creatures, this experiment went terribly awry. Unfortunately what happened is that it made the ram remember how much it enjoyed mating with sheep, whilst the sheep forgot what happened to her the last time this occured, and so there has become a bumper crop of dumb sheep being bred, and appearing now all over the world. Its gotten so bad that in the Lake District in England sheep won’t get out of the road even if being bitten by the sheep dog. Sad, just sad.

In our next episode of Fractured Fairy Tales from the Farm, we must turn our attention a holiday creation— John Madden’s Turduckin.