Greetings from Professor Inverbon on his return from a most dangerous archeological study of Paleolithic Pingo paintings in the Northwest territories of Canada. The question of everyone's lips today - along with how much does Oprah weigh, will the world end at midnight December 31,1999, and is Hillary Clinton a virgin - is, who will instruct the instructors in Greenland technique. I submit this is the wrong question. The proper question is who taught the Greenlanders? Consider - is proper Greenland technique a genetic thread passed on from generation to generation through passionate writhing in igloos or did they develop the technique and pass it along orally untainted by western influences, or did aliens beam Inuit gas station attendants up to their ships where they implanted tiny little BCU instructors in their heads who would in turn teach the Greenlanders how to paddle via voices much like Joan of Arc learned how to roast at the stake. I consider all three theories simplistic in the extreme. I have taken samples of genetic material from across the north and not yet found a single tiny paddle wrapped with DNA where as one can easily detect chains of beer cans woven among the DNA strands of rednecks in the South. As for passing the pure Greenland technique down from generation to generation via oral tradition and instruction, that must be discounted out of hand. We have ample evidence of the superiority of the Inuit and Aleut boats prior to the western invasion (see Brand, Dyson, et al) and there is no reason to believe that paddling technique would not have likewise suffered. Would technique not have suffered as boat design suffered? One could, of course, postulate that the Inuit technique of today is but a poor imitation of that of their elders but can we with any authority? . While the implanting of BCU coaches in Inuit brains has a credible ring, it could not have worked, for the Inuit, while having a surfeit of fish, had no chips or bangers and a Brit paddler cannot survive more than a few days without greasy chips and bangers wrapped in a British tabloid. Brits separated from their native diet soon go berserk and attack innocent soccer (football) fans interspersed with obscene sexual fantasies of Prince Charles and Camilla. No, the Inuit learned to paddle from ancient Mayan drug dealers that the Inuit met during their crotch dirigible explorations of the world. As they wafted across South America on giant Rossby waves in a caribou paunch induced haze they saw the Mayans escaping in their dugout canoes from Spanish DEA enforcement officers while using a unique paddling technique to attain extraordinary speeds despite their heavily laden canoes. Klohr (1969, Anthropology News) contends that the Mayan sacrificial virgins developed this stroke to enable them to escape Mayan priests and I must say this has a true ring to it for, had not some escaped there would have been no future generations of priest for the Spanish to kill. Mayan virgins must have predated Spanish DEA officers by at least few years for Conquistadors claim to have corrected the virginity of a number of Mayan women on their arrival. How did the Inuit transfer the techniques to their own population when they had no written language? By carving delicate ice sculptures of each step of the stroke which they encased in cocaine insulated bags and flew north to their homes thus becoming the first to unwittingly smuggle drugs into North America and paving the way for little old ladies to claim that they were "just taking a package to a friend of a man the met at the airport. He seemed like such a nice man with all those gold chains. Not all greasy like so many South Americans. I am not prejudiced of course but you know what I mean ". Once unpacked the Inuit would have to learn how to paddle quickly as the little delicate sculptures would melt. That, of course , is why we have no records of it today. As for the ACA, one has to ask if they have been to South America lately for maybe they have learned how to paddle from the source. In the final analyses it should not be the Greenlanders who take offense but the Mayans and every right thinking paddler should object to the Greenlanders claiming they invented the Greenland style when in fact all they did was rename the Mayan style. No doubt they learned this technique of cultural kidnapping from the Brits who assumed that, by giving a place a name (usually some English lord who got his title by killing his neighbor who supported a unsuccessful rival aspirant for the English throne) that they had discovered it. We are indebted to the Brits for this since, had they not discovered the places and named them, we would not have discovered the natives who lived there and had given the places unpronounceable names that prohibited their being printed on maps. Sincerely, Dr. Peregrine Inverbon, Ph.d., DD, LL.d, Ph.G Transcribed by Dr. Inverbon's humble servant John Winters *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Jul 14 1999 - 08:34:54 PDT
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