Carnivorous Cow

... as they say in the Classics.

The Cow was having a hard time getting to Oz (for the gory details, read her TravBuddy blog) and was starting to doubt that she'd ever actually get there.

Still, she'd finally checked in on a flight to Sydney after lonnnnnnnnngg hours spent in various SA airports, and the prospect of actually boarding a plane that might just go somewhere seemed a little too good to be true.

"You see," Gramsci crackled down the phone as her cellphone battery sputtered its last. "You got excited too soon! The Ozzies are cleverer than the Yanks - they don't bounce you at the outset, they just make sure you don't get there via other means!"

The Cow was beside herself with joy. Her visa had finally been issued! Gramsci was deafened by her shrieks of delight as she passed on the news. In an instant, all misery about the waterlogged city, the gloom of budgets, thick strangulation of renovation fumes was set aside and blue sky gleamed through the clouds.

Gramsci was a little bemused by the transformation. "You don't have it in your hand, yet," he cautioned, although the Cow had greater faith in the local couriers than the ones that had promised "three days max" from Lancaster and then taken eight days to deliver.

Nor did the Cow seem overduly fazed at the prospect of rattling around Singapore Airport for most of a day. "Better than rattling around here", she shrugged. She was sure the airport wifi would be infinitely speedier, too.

"Well," conceded Gramsci, "just don't blow it at passport control in Sydney by mentioning the rugby..."

The Cow felt that the Universe was conspiring against her. Quite aside from visa delays, her past was peering over her shoulder a little too close for comfort. Twice, within a single day, her attention was flung at the awkward issue of: how many lovers is The Right Number?

The first incident occured with the casual picking up of an old notebook en route to a meeting, and flicking through to find a blank page on which to make notes. A puzzling list of initials and pseudonyms presented itself on one of the pages until she realised - it was an attempt at reconstruction! Somewhere along the line, whilst on the phone no doubt, she'd tried to recall the parade of lovers past to ascertain whether they numbered too many, too few, or too right to be for real.

The second incident arose from a report on Health24 concerning an American survey into the number of sex partners of a sample of 6000-odd people, aged from 20 - 59, which found that 29% of men and 9% of women had had at least 15 partners during their lives.

"Gmf!" snorted Gramsci. "Either a significant proportion of the males sampled were gay, or not everyone is telling the truth! That gender discrepancy is a little large!"

"Or," countered the Cow, "the 9% of women have had wayyyyyy in excess of 15 partners, while the men are hovering at 15 or 16 each. Or, of course, the women - being American - are not the preferred partners of the men sampled: perhaps if they sampled women from some nationality where sex enjoyed at much attention as shopping, they'd get a better sense of balance?"

"Guess that puts the spotlight back on Africa," beamed Gramsci. "So, how many names were listed in your notebook?"

The Cow was feeling very frustrated. Her trip to kangaroo land had been frustrated by hitches and hold-ups throughout, and the visa she needed for her weekend flight was not going to arrive in time.

Gramsci shook his head sadly. "It's your own fault," he muttered. "The Ozzies are military allies of the Yanks, and you've irked the Yanks in your earlier blog posts!"

The Cow looked up, bemused. "Surely not," she countered. "Ozzies must have a sense of humour. How else could they ordain Shane Warne or Steve Irwin as cultural heroes?"

Gramsci flinched. "Well, you'd best hope they've already made up their minds one way or other on the visa," he cautioned. "If they read this, chances are the passport will emerge next week 'Application Denied'..."

Having been diagnosed on a Facebook Brainfall test as Pocahontas, the Cow was quite keen to try the Princess Gums when presented to her as a choice in the chocolate machine.

She was sorely disappointed. Instead of the Disneyfied Princess on the package, the contents were... well, pretty arb, as she grumbled later to Gramsci.

"Not a single Pocahontas! No Princess Jasmines, or Ariels. No Cinderellas! It was all just flowers and hearts and shells... and handbags! Handbags! Since when was Maggie Thatcher a princess?"

Gramsci bit what would have been his tongue had he not been a spider. He thought it unwise to point out to the Cow that that other great icon of the handbag world, while no longer a princess, was a Queen...

Somewhere along the line, the Cow's discussion with Mr Timberland about covering bases in his department became a discussion about size. Thinking back, she couldn't quite recall how it had happened, but it had featured one of his female colleagues, and wandered on to "women on the shelf", and whether women shop for men these days in the same way men traditionally shop for women.

And the Cow had made the mistake of mentioning the graphic on Health24. And which countries were best endowed. Mr Timberland's ears pricked up. A huge smile crossed his face. He confessed gloatingly that he held citizenship of both countries, and wondered if this was something he should advertise more broadly.

Or at greater length, mused the Cow...?

The Cow fended off hyperthermia by clutching her hotwater bottle a little closer. "Ha!" snorted Mr Timberland. "The lady of the nipple pink hotwater bottle!"

"What?" gasped the Cow. She removed the offending item from underneath her coat and held it up to the light.

"Nipple pink??" she spluttered. "Wherever did you see a nipple this colour?"

Mr Timberland blushed slightly and muttered about a lifetime of many nipples, about backstage at the Lido, about confidentiality, and dived back into his office.

"Gmf!" harrumphed the Cow, unimpressed. Even a rainbow nation of nipples, she suspected, would fail to deliver specimens of the colour under discussion. Even beta-carotene overdoses. Even, she suspected, flame-haired people, who'd been markedly absent from her own experience.

"There's always the internet?" suggested Gramsci. "But you'll need to set Safe Search to off, or Google might not deliver the lurid spectrum you want."

"Hmm..." mused the Cow. "Not sure that will work - if the semiotic web relies on tagging, and people can't even agree as to what constitutes a nipple!"

"Then again," chuckled Gramsci, holding up the Cow's hotwater bottle. "Take a closer look. Doesn't the pixellated texture remind you of something?"

Of course! It struck the Cow forcibly between the eyes. Mr Timberland had gotten his idea of what nipples looked like from - the Page 3 Girls in the Daily Vice!

"Sad," she sighed. "Some people really do need to get out more."

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The Cow was most perplexed. She read that the NG Kerk is to debate whether the Devil exists.

"Hmm..." Gramsci mused. "I could understand them debating whether racism exists, or whether crime exists, or even whether Thabo Mbeki exists, but the devil? Seems a bit self-evident to me!"

The Cow concurred. After all, someone as heroic as Hansie Cronje couldn't be wrong.... Could he?

Gramsci chuckled. "Well," he said, "you need look no further than the Grauniad's blogs - it seems the debate's already happened there! Perhaps the NG Kerk could save themselves the bother?"

The Cow chuttered with amusement. "Look!" she called to Gramsci. "Celia's post on Al-Jazeera has almost 800 hits! Even posts on penis size get nowhere near that!!"

Gramsci looked up in amazement. "Wow!" he conceded. "That must be an all-time blogspot record! UCT staff and students must be really hungry for a more moderate news perspective!"

"If only!" sighed the Cow. "I suspect it's more likely bots than humans. Did you notice how, when I mentioned wanting to bomb the US Embassy, both my hit count and the blogspot activity emanating from US Military IP addresses spiked?"

Gramsci hadn't, but then he was distracted by other possibilities. "Do you think," he ventured, his arachnoidal eyes twinkling brightly, "if they send spiders to investigate, there might be some sexy females among them?"

The Cow was most intrigued. It seemed The Sun put our local tabloids in the shade when it came to knowing what its readers wanted to know. Apparently they'd published an article on penis size, and with it a handy graphic against which readers - presumably male ones, or their owners - could measure up.

"Gmf!" retorted Gramsci. "News24 did that ages ago. Complete with national averages to compare!"

The Cow remembered that well. She wasn't planning on visiting Korea anytime soon, as a result.

"Ah, but!" she argued, "there's a big difference between a health site, shrouded in cyberspeak about self-image and insecurity, putting an animation on the web, and a gritty, smudgey-inked life-size print-out in the newspaper. While I don't imagine too many men kneeling against their monitors to check, the newsprint version serves a very practical purpose!"

Gramsci blanched. The thought of all those MAMAs, buying the Daily Vice for "research".... ogling the Page 3 Girl and then measuring the result over coffee in the Leslie was too scary too contemplate.

The Cow chuckled. "Well, that might be the one thing that manages to scare away all the scavenging birds!" she suggested.

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