Thursday, November 10, 2005

Alley Oop: Expert Horticulturist



This prison/fortress is some engineering feat for one stone-aged guy in a monkey suit to have pulled off. When you get that high up in the mountains the tree line shrinks back considerably. That is why mountain peaks are bald. And the trees that you do find are short and scraggly. So to build such an enormous fortress out of wood would have required hauling tons of lumber up from somewhere else. Quite remarkable that the mountain people didn’t even notice while this construction extravaganza was under way.
How did King Tunk build the prison anyway? Hammer and nails? Now that we are getting a closer look from outside it seems that all the timbers are strapped together with vines. That would be more consistent with stone age construction knowledge, but it would also make it much easier to tear down, poison vines or not.
And that brings us to the revelation today that the vines are chock full of poisonous thorns, according to our resident expert horticulturist Alley Oop. But why would Oop know this when Mountain and Puny did not? Imagine how many vines you would have to gather to build a fortress like this? You would assume the vines are growing all over the place in that case, so why would Oop, a non-native, know they are poisonous while Mountain and Puny are clueless? Did Tunk import all the hundreds of yards of poisonous vines along with the tons of lumber?