Dear Giant Squid,

Are dolphins really the masters of the universe?

Signed,
Dan Bury

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Dearest Dan (though that is not your name, I recognize, but like so many who petition me you have failed to include your true and actual nomenclature and I grow weary of always addressing nameless unsigned petitioners, so in this case I have assigned you the name "Dan Bury" for reasons known only to me.)

When one asserts a question with the adverbial "really" there is an implicit truth that it is claimed that this thing—this claim—is a well-believed fact. It is a "loaded question," and it keeps greasy company in ill-fitted suits bought off the rack:

"Mr. Smith, when did you cease in beating your wife?"

"Admirable Republican Voter: Would you continue to support John McCain of the Clan of McCain were you to confirm that he had fathered an illegitimate child actor of color?"

"Do you support our Founding Fathers' Christian ideals?"

"Where is the birth certificate?"

. . . and so forth. Slyly secreted within such questions are claims, and your claim is this, the notion that some well-meaning and sentient beings really and truly, without bias or jest, might believe dolphins to be "masters of the universe." Let me assure you, Dan Bury: No one believes this. Not the wise, not the foolish; not the priggish, nor the strumpetest; neither the savant, nor the idiot savant, nor the idiot, nor the well-meaning buffoon, nor the ill-meaning buffoon, nor yet even the hedge fund manager, his account, their legal representative, or any of their ugly, privileged offspring. No one. None.

Were I a fellow given to bouts of stuporous laziness, like so many of those under my employ objectively are, I would slap my tentacles together in a miming of dust being slapped from hard-worked handmeat and say something to the effect of, "I have answered this question by engaging in a reading so narrow that a newsman would blush in shame if he read it, and so my day is done. I shall relax upon a settee, drink of the alcoholic fluids, and partake of some light masturbation."

But, Dan Bury, I am no lazy ape content to defecate, minimally cleanse my posterior, and fondle myself with the same hand.

On this Internet where we converse there are a multitude of cults and cult-like groupings. There are the 4chans, the Freepers, the Rotarians, the Scientologists, the Elitist Jerks, the Goons,—the list could stretch ad infinitum, and in the case of the /b/tards and their ilk, often ad nauseam. There are also the Dolphin Worshippers. These are the only beings—save self-important dolphins themselves—who believe that dolphins are worth "a damn," or any fractional part there-of.

(NOTA BENE: My occasional assistant, Rob, has informed me—betwixt the bong's hits, one must imagine—that there is only one being worthy of the title "Master of the Universe," and it is not his heathen Hebraic deity. This claim remains unverified, as neither the Zionist Occupational Government International nor Mattel had replied to queries as of press time.)

It is well known that octopuses are heinous beings adept only at incest, graft, indulgence, ignorance, and baking. And yet even they get more respect than the lowly dolphin.

Here is the truth, Dan Bury, of what my people—and truly all educated and tasteful people, the kind who traverse to the bestest clubs and drink liquors distilled in dream cabinets by the celebrities of tomorrow, are my people—think of dolphins. An analogy, if you will: When you settle down in front of your teevee with your pedestrian beverages and favorite masturbation oils and you turn on the program Lancelot Link, The Secretive Chimp, do you look upon the sad little monkey, watching as he cavorts and does his Bogart impression and doffs his fedora, do you look upon him and say, "This Lancelot Link is nearly as wise and able as a human child, clearly his is the intellect most superior and lo, were he to run for the regional political office against Mark Boughton I would vote time and again for Lancelot Link, Secretive Chimp!"

No, Dan Bury, you would not. (Excepting the fact you may be disillusioned and consider voting for a chimp or a ficus tree to be an act of political dissidence.)

You recognize that the chimp—though talented—is a sad impostor who can never sit at the Human table, unless he does so while wearing a diaper under his suit, and is carefully monitored by a trained and arméd minder. You find his pantomimes amusing, but never would let him marry your daughters or sons, let alone master your—or any directly adjacent—universe.

Thus, the dolphin: Eternal pretender to the sea. He dives deep to socialize amongst the fishes but every seven minutes he must needs return to the surface to breathe, for he is a mammal and does not belong. And yet amongst mammals his behavior is even more egregious as he leaps through hoops and balances the primary-hued toys of children upon his nose, as his desperate and lonely heart begs for applause, for attention, for some sign of acceptance and yet never will he find it. The dolphin is Aesop's Fable of the Bat writ anew.

There is but one master of the universe, Dan Bury, and it was from he that you sought clarity.

Good Tidings,
Editor-in-Chief of this humble Almanac(k),
The Giant Squid