Saturday 1st July 2000
Ebony the Hamster reports on a strange new art form

Amongst the greatest of animal poetry has to be Dolphin rhyme which not only portrays the world as seen from the viewpoint of one of the world's most intelligent mammals (surpassing even man, it has to be said, when one considers what man is doing to the planet and how the dolphin has done it no harm), but presents to the reader a style and enigma which is unsurpassed even in Rodent art forms.

Although the average rodent has made it his duty to describe in human language and intellect the things which we ourselves experience and discover, creating articles which make perfectly good sense to the simplest of humans, the dolphin seems to have taken it upon himself to portray the world with imagery which is not easily coherent - even though its fluency remains unquestioned.

Most of you are probably already aware of the doggerel that scientists have been arguing over for years and which remains the subject of at least a dozen academic books and two documentaries on cable, and the various interpretative structures which have been proposed to come to terms with the creative composition of those two lines which run:

'My bum is numb and so's my tum
Because my thumb is something glum'

Some would see mention in the words of the existence of other life forms on planets within our own solar system (now extinct due to cataclysmic upheavals but which the dolphin communicated with before their sudden demise) while others, perhaps on something even stronger than valium, have tried to get behind the words into dolphin speak itself and crack the code which is supposed to lie at the very root of the utterance - needlesstosay, that Madonna will be installed as the new pope in two years' time is far from acceptable to most right-thinking people, though many societies have sprung up to substantiate the claims that the world is flat.

It's with somewhat an enthusiastic reception that I can now reveal that a new dolphin has emerged on the scene - one who has been lurking in the depths for around ten years - but who's burst onto the Art scene in recent days with an epic which, I'm sure the reader will appreciate, is every bit as enigmatic but full of meaning as the previous odes on record.

This dolphin - known simply as 'Oz' - is soon to release a compilation of his greatest compositions under the Tuna Free Dolphin Meat Book Company (shouldn't that be Dolphin Friendly Tuna Meat? - I don't know...) and it's with great honour that we have been selected from a list of hundreds of magazines to print the first poem as a precursor to the book's release. Entitled simply 'Dead Elephants', all of us here at the Weekly would encourage you to think deeply on these words and allow the puzzling symmetry and stylised adjectives to seep deep into the...er...sorry, I lost my train of thought, then.

Anyway, without further ado, here it is - once again, a note of thanks and appreciation is in order to the publishers.