International Adventures

Nero's Coffee Shop has begun selling a new flavour smoothy, pineapple, banana and orange. This fact must be discussed at length!

Danny: Christ, that sounds awful.
SS: Actually, I think it sounds like some form of pseudo Um-Bongo.
Danny: Um Bongo! Um Bongo!
SS: They drink it, I believe, in the Congo.
Danny: Do you think that's true? Are there tribes deep in the rainforests around Kinshasa hunting for prey with stone-tipped spears who periodically whip Um Bongo cartons from their loincloths?
SS: You do know that the song is almost entirely ficticious, right?
Danny: You take that back!
SS: The jingle says that parrots paint the packets!
Danny: They could hold the paintbrushes in their claws!
SS: Danny, if anyone paints the packets manually, it'll be blind Congolese children trying not to smudge the pictures of cartoon animals with their hot salty tears. Where the Hell are all these amazingly artistic macaws hiding out, huh? Wouldn't someone stumble across their operation sooner or later?
Danny: They wouldn't do it on the ground, obviously.
SS: What, they paint it on the wing?
Danny: Don't be ridiculous. They'd just take all the relevant materials up into the treetops.
SS: Well, makes sense, I guess. They'd be safe from predators.
Danny: Absolutely. How annoying would it be if you were in the final stages of colouring in the mandarins when a lion lopes up and bites your head off.
SS: How the hell has a lion ended up in the jungles of a Congo?
Danny: Fine; a tiger then.
SS: A tiger? Fine, forget it, let's just say it's a lion.
Danny: And then it bounds up to this poor parrot, swallows him whole, and then drinks the Um Bongo.
SS: Why would a lion want to drink Um Bongo? Plus, how will its mighty paws manage to remove the straw from its plastic wrapper?
Danny: Think about it, Squid; it would just use one razor-sharp tooth to puncture the foil circle, and then suck out the innards with its massive lion chops.
SS: It is the ultimate insult, isn't it? Some big cat, presumably lost after being separated from its tour guide, eats your frail, feathery body, and then drinks your delicious fruit drink. Unless...
Danny: What?
SS: Maybe the parrots could bribe these horribly misplaced lions to allow them to live in exchange for a percentage of the weekly Um Bongo supply.
Danny: Dude! That's completely unacceptable!
SS: Yeah, you're right. The pythons would be furious over how many of the passion fruits they'd picked were being used to buy off lions that should all just fuck off back to the Serengetti anyway.
Danny: Isn't this getting pretty close to the Congolese wildlife equivalent of a BNP rally?
SS: Yeah, maybe.
Danny: I really do want to know whether they drink Um Bongo in the Congo, now.
SS: Well, we should find out. Hire a plane, assemble a crack team, and get ourselves over there. Obviously the very first thing we'll have to tell the locals is that we're in no way going to help them overthrow the tyrannical regime that rules their brutish lives with an iron fist. "Nuts to the local despot, Johnny Foreigner, do you by any chance drink a tropical fruit blend popular in the nineteen nineties?"
Danny: This is a strangely attractive plan.
SS: And why stop there? We could travel the entire world, seeking out the most troubled and miserable of countries to ask irrelevant questions about products that entered the cultural zeitgeist over a decade ago.
Danny: We could go to Mexico and quiz them about Kia-Ora!
SS: Well, we'd need a time machine rather than a plane, since I think you've confused Mexico with pre Civil War America, but I'm fine with it in principle. "Put down that cotton, boy, and tell me: is this drink too orangey for crows?"
Danny: Sold!

Our heroes leave, arguing the cost of chartering a plane versus the difficulty of lashing together a functioning time machine.