This Sounds Like It Should Be In “The Onion”

Sad.

The whole time I read this article, I was waiting for a clown to jump out of my computer screen and say, “Just kidding! This isn’t real. Come on!!!” That never happened and now I’m crying in my usual shame towards our species. What on earth is going on here?

An American organization claiming to defend the rights of mermaids is threatening to appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the Israeli city of Kiryat Yam, after its municipality offered a $1 million prize to whoever could provide proof for the existence of a mermaid off the northern city’s shores. The agency says the offer “badly and outrageously damages the legendary mermaid legacy.”

That sentence is like a frag grenade of preposterousness. Let’s think about this for a second.

1) There is an actual organization that defends the rights of an imaginary creature and thinks that something can badly and outrageously damage said imaginary creature’s legacy.

2) The International Courts in the Hague is somehow involved in this circus. Not the “Intergalactic Court of Jumanji”, but the same courts that dealt with Slobodon Milosevic. Seems like a logical use of time for them.

3) A municipality in Israel is offering real money to find an imaginary thing. Why not just offer up eleventy billion space bucks, and have some fun with it?

4) I just realized that the Israeli municipality actually believes that this mermaid might exist and that is why it only offered $1 million and not “All the money in the world.”

Do America and Israel really have it this good that we are entering legal battle over the existence and legacy of fictional organisms? Oh, wait a second. I just got this message from the third world. It reads… “WTF!”

I want to start an organization too. It’s called: “Anyone who thinks that a mermaid is real will have their head chopped off by a man riding a centaur, wielding Zeus’s lighting bolt.” And I dare anyone try to appeal that to the Castle in the Sky on grounds of animal cruelty towards the centaur. The majority of its body (muscularly speaking) is a horse, therefore de facto, it is a horse, and horses can carry men on their back wielding fiery lighting bolts, based on Unicorn law. Everyone knows that.