LAB1663.NET - Sam’s bit o’ the web

I’m up kind of late and a little bored. I’ve got some Rasputina piping through my headphones at the moment, and I thought that I might share with everyone why I find them so unbelievable swank.

Aside from the fact that they play cellos like mad fiends, that is.

Rats (an excerpt)

Many, many years ago
The Bolivians were starving so
They had rats as big as ponies there
They asked the Pope to declare them fish

We thank the Pope granting us this wish
When Friday comes, we’ll all call rats “fish”

If you didn’t catch on there, this particular song (off their 2002 album Cabin Fever), is about the capybara - a large rodent from South America. When Catholic colonists found themselves short on food, they looked at this rodent with hopeful eyes. Because it seemed to spend most of its time in the water, they rationalized that it must be a type of fish - which meant that they could eat it on Fridays. They asked the Vatican to declare them fish, which the Vatican did. To this day, the ruling has never been reversed. Every year during lent, thousands of capybara are killed for their meat in what’s become something of a tradition.

Why write a song about it? Because Rasputina is fsckin’ awesome, that’s why.