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The last time I was at Bosque del Apache I noticed a new phenomenon amongst some of the ducks there. I had always wondered if ducks had nerves or any feeling at all in their feet as they could stand on ice or in ice cold water and act as if they didn’t feel any cold whatsoever. How do they do that I would wonder. Finally when my curiosity got the better of me I called on our resident duckologist, Dr. Bils Orange, from our Oslo affiliate, to answer my questions.

The Institute of Regained Knowledge or IRK as it is known throughout the academic world, has affiliate branches in nearly every backward country in the known world, like France ( the Sorbonne calls us ) England (Oxford, we’ve stopped taking their calls because they always call collect) and so on ad nauseam. We have a wealth of talent that we can draw from to get the information we need instantaneously. The Worldwide Headquarters of our media Empire sits like a fat, but ugly, spider in the exact center of this web of information, controlling its flow and deciding with all possible fairness and at what price, who gets this information. We may run the show but we glory in it. It is a little known fact that what we know as the world-wide web was actually invented here (regardless what Al Gore says)  at the Institute of Regained Knowledge, or IRK, back in 1926 way before the introduction of the computer. We’re very proud of that.

It turns out that the answer to my question was something I never could have imagined. Ducks have been fooling us for sometime. They feel the cold, I mean Duh, its ice, what we see as indifference on their part is actually a numbness that spreads up to their little tiny brains and freezes them solid. Recently though some enterprising members of the Duckus Aquaticus, (Latin for birds with flat feet) have begun showing up with the ability to actually stand on that freezing ice and be as warm and toasty as you or I would be standing on the cooktop in our own kitchens. The answer is as simple as it is mysterious but that is usually the case when you make things up, I mean, search for new facts. Ducks feet have secretly been fitted with a new form of thermoplastic outer covering made from the same stuff that didn’t make it onto the last shuttle flight.  Where could they have obtained this stuff we asked. We thought maybe Cabela’s but after checking both their print and online catalog found that even they had nothing like this. Finally after an exhaustive search we were told by an unnamed source that this procedure was done at a secret clinic in Mexico. It’s orange, the foot covering not the clinic, it looks like a duck foot, it has those little bumps that ducks have on their feet, and the average or even below average person cannot tell it from a real ducks foot. The properties of this material appear to be nearly mind bending. All the duck has to do is stand on the ice where the sun can shine on it and within moments the solar produced heat begins to flow and literally melts the ice below them. They simply stand there until they melt through the ice and then being in open water they can begin feeding much quicker than the non-footwear wearing ducks can even move, hence their robust and chubby appearance. Dr. Bils Orange is presently taking a crash course in Mayan which he mistaken thought was still spoken widely in Mexico, and will then track down the clinic where this procedure is practiced, find out the straight skinny and we will then spill the beans, I mean, share this information with the world. We need to get our IBM Selectric fixed so that we can publish this startling new information and soon you will see it in major sources of academic excellence everywhere. Meanwhile you, our loyal readers, get a first hand preview of this incredible new finding. That’s it, mystery solved. Chalk up one more successful research project from IRK and we’re on to the next. Watch for us at strange events everywhere.