TheBanyanTree: Some Muvvers really DO have em!!

[Peter Macinnis]

The missing bits problem is little understood, so pay attention, class, 
as I outline the root cause.  If bits go missing, you and your house are 
suffering from an outbreak of part eaters.

You can find part eaters both on land and in the sea. They vary in size, 
appearance and the noises they make. About the only thing they have in 
common is that they all eat parts of things. If you ever wondered why 
spare parts for cars are so expensive, this is the reason. Most spare 
parts emporia are infested by part eaters which are always eating, so 
that for every part that is sold, three or four more are eaten by the 
part eaters.

When you see fruit on the tree that has had a small bite taken out of 
it, you know that a little part eater has been up in the tree, grazing 
on the fruit. If there is a collection of magazines in a binder, there 
will always be one part missing, and that is always the fault of a part 
eater as well.  They take the older and more tattered ones and leave 
them in barber shops and doctors' waiting rooms.

To be fair, mechanical part eaters are usually ashamed of what they do, 
and when they see somebody putting something back together, they will 
often bring you some spare bits and pieces, just in case a less 
responsible part eater has taken some away. Most of the time, these 
extras don’t fit, so you end up with the thing back together and 
working, and a few parts over.

The giant part eater of the western deserts is absolutely huge, and 
never found inside houses, while the marine part eaters only live where 
there are sharks for them to bite pieces out of, because they are one of 
the few animals able to keep down uncooked flesh from cartilaginous 
fish. Taxonomists who work in this area are all familiar with (and 
reliant on) the raw shark test.

Regrettably, part eaters are so variable that they are almost impossible 
to describe without going to pieces (and risking being inadvertently 
eaten), but the one thing that all breeds have in common is their habit 
of eating parts. They eat band parts, spare parts, even stage parts. Not 
many people know it, but most monologues were created when particularly 
hungry part eaters ate all of the parts in a play except one.

For marine part eaters, see J. S. Bach, 'The Part Eater in Sea', while 
the giant land ones are described in W. A. Mozart’s 'The Grand Part Eater'.

-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral word herder, & science gossip.
/     \  Inexplicable events coordinator and former designer
\.--._*  of medium & large-scale mistaken identity matrixes.
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm