Tales of the Table Topics Bunny and the Jackalope

Folk tales often come from attempting to craft explanations to questions posed by children. (The Table Topics Bunny first appeared in a June 30 post on this blog).

1) Daddy, where do Table Topics questions come from?
The simple answer is that the Table Topics Bunny (TTB) brings them.

2) When does the TTB arrive?
Every year he hops by on February 22nd and leaves a stack of questions. He visits many Toastmasters on that day in memory of the birthday of their founder, Dr. Ralph C. Smedley.

3) Is he related to any other famous bunnies?
The TTB recently was interviewed by a supermarket tabloid late one night in the Geisel Library at UCSD. Harvey revealed that his daughter, who actually is the famous Energizer Bunny (EB), possibly has “stimulant abuse issues” and currently is in rehab at an undisclosed location “near St. Louis”.

She learned to play the drum for junior high band. The “sandals, shades, and attitude” came later in high school when she started to “hang with the bad beach bunnies”, began taking diet pills, and then headed to LA to become a singer or actress.

Her name really is Miley, and her 3 pink sisters are Britney, Lindsey, and Amy. She also has 4 blue brothers: Clem, Leroy, Brad, and Ethan. Clem (Clement) originally was going to be the battery company mascot. Then an ice cream manufacturer objected that they already had long used a Blue Bunny as a trademark on their packaging. So, Clem suggested that they use his sister instead. She got the job, but due to an oversight the ad copy never was corrected to “she just keeps on going”. Harvey and Barbie are proud of all eight of their their children.

Right now the TTB is much more obscure than the mighty Jackalope (a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope), which is a mythic horned creature from Wyoming. The jackalope’s legend reportedly began with Douglas Herrick, a taxidermist from Douglas.

An entire tourist industry soon developed selling stuffed jackalopes, etc. Videos of jackalopes are rare, but you can glimpse one on Youtube in the song Creepy Jackalope Eye by the Supersuckers. If you can’t understand the lyrics, you can just read them at Steve Earle’s web site.