A fishy character!!

Thanks PS for enligtening me about Richard Parker today! Apparently my pet possum is NOT the only other Richard Parker around!!!! With no futher ado here goes....

In one my best loved fishy tales of all time, Yann Martel goes to sea with quite an unlikely school of characters - Pi, a hyena, a zebra, uhmm oh and how can I forget OJ the orangutan and my personal favourite - introducing Richard Parker, a royal Bengal Tiger. :):) in "Life of Pi". If you haven't read the book you ought to read it - you'll fall in love with it as soon as you meet up with the three-toed sloth in the equatorial jungles of Brazil.

Let's get back to the fishy 450 pound weighing Richard Paker, who was accidently named so by a shipping clerk who mistook "Thirsty" for his captor. As the story ebbs on, Parker - the hunted turned hunter successfully finishes off the hyena and the blind French man on board before the Monsieur could cannebelise Pi.

Apparently in a story from over a century ago, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" written by Edgar Alan Poe, there featured the first of the ship wrecked Richard Parkers - a mutinous sailor who had set sail on a whaling ship whose brilliant idea literally got him in a stew when he was ship wrecked with three other surviors. Parker (the hunter turned hunted) fuelled his fate by suggesting that his fellow crew draw lots among themselves to decide on the victim of their next feast.

Weird but true, the novel comes to life in 1884, when Richard Parker (the second!!), the cabin boy of the Migninette et drifter at sea followed the course of Richard Parker the first and fell a victim to cannibalism.

(Talking of fishy tales and shipwrecks and novels resurfacing to reality - another is the novela Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan written byMorgan Robertson that was Titanic back to the future!!)

And that solves the mystery as to why my beloved Richard Parker ran away from the backyard - suspecting cannebelism around the corner me thinks ;) , as i ponder over what I could possibly write into the future.