Do not envy who sees and plucks out his eyes

According to the Figures of Speech Regulation Act, Section 14 [Simile to Synecdoche], any metaphorical attempt to express the size of an animal's eyes must involve items of sports equipment. This may seem like heavy-handed nanny-state gubblement interference, but surely you feel more inclined towards healthy active team games for having learned that the eyes of the Colossal Squid Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni are about the size of a soccer ball while the Giant Squid has even bigger eyes like basketballs. Also, swordfish eyes and softballs.

Spidra is a wall-chart so eyes must
be compared to Monopoly pieces

Even larger species of squid have been discovered but remain unreported because the press statements that compared their eyes to "Swiss balls, you know, those whopping great spheres for sitting on in Pilates class" were just too long to read out between ad breaks.

Here at the Riddled Research Laboratory we have only just noticed the corollary... that the creation of new species of animal -- ones with eyes of unprecedented size or shape -- will require new games for use in comparison. Games so novel, in fact, that New Zealand teams will have a chance of winning.

Other investigators may follow the same approach but of course we have a head start, what with our substantial body of research into evolving eyes large enough to focus microwaves.

The resumption of that research did result in a minor hiccup but no-one's going to miss a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses.

A minor hiccup

Quickly followed by those two other popular
compositions, E Major Belch and B Natural Fart

After that we stopped using human subjects, not even Greenish Hugh. Neighbourhood children are beginning to wonder why many puppies have gone to live on a nice farm in the country, but look! Their sacrifices have not been in vain. After a long session in the Evolvamat, two of the dogs now have eyes large enough for good resolution in the millimeter EHF band, and lucrative careers await them in airport security screening.

Auditioning for Twisted Whiskers

Other images are reported in Feuilleton:


Rest assured that the reporter who compared the animals' eyes to a pair of tea-cups; to a pair of millstones; and to Brahe's Astronomy Tower -- none of them very sports-related -- has been punished with the full condign rigour of the law.