According to Fox News, a drunk Oregon State football player is pulled over, and there is a gay sheep in the back of his pick up. So where do you get gay sheep in Corvallis, Oregon? Why at the Oregon State University "Sheep Center", of course:
The 200-pound ram lives at the university's Sheep Center, and is part of a study on homosexuality in sheep, said Sheep Center manager Tom Nichols.
The people at Fox News treated this story as a big joke, but I think there are some important questions that they failed to address. For example:
- Are they really studying homosexual sheep at Oregon State University?
- Why, for Heaven's sake?
- Is Oregon State the only university where homosexual sheep are being studied, or is there a vast network of research institutions studying homosexual sheep, which the American people only find out about when one is purloined?
- Speaking of the American people, should we suppose that, as usual, we are picking up the tab for all this studying of homosexual sheep?
- And how do you know whether a sheep is homosexual? And doesn't the word "homo" refer to "man" and so if you have sheep that like sheep of the same gender should we call them "sheeposexuals" or some fancy Latin name that no one has made up yet?
Anyway, I expect that Fox reporter to head right back to Corvallis and get some answers.
Update: The things you learn. After writing this post, I did a Google search for "'homosexual sheep'" with the phrase in quotation marks, so I would only get hits on sites actually talking about "homosexual sheep" and not sites where that say things like "Gregg was a homosexual, but he really liked having roast sheep for dinner". I got over 1300 hits. So apparently I am way behind the curve on this issue.
Nope, Homo doesn't just mean man. It's a prefix that means 'the same'. Like homogenized milk.
Posted by: Kat | July 22, 2005 at 02:18 AM
Kat: According to dictionary.com, "homo" means "[a] member of the genus Homo, which includes the extinct and extant species of humans." How that fits in with homogenized milk beats the hell out of me.
Posted by: Roscoe | July 22, 2005 at 07:50 AM