Day 2 How to cope with having a mouth (part 1)

Dear Mak’ achi-lun b6.3.1,

1. Basic survival

A white adult's mouth.

Humans use their mouth in conjunction with the nose for breathing. They breath in oxygen and breath out CO2. Remember this, now, don’t suddenly swap over, especially in public. Don’t be tempted, either, to breath in or breath out anything different, humans a quick to judge and slow to forget. Europeans get up tight about receiving hydrogen from casual strangers while Canadians kick up a storm about a faceful of nitrogen. For methane emissions, you should let them out silently from between your legs. It’s then customary to say that the dog needs to be let out, so make sure you’ve got one standing by. Many countries have environmental health officers, so the amount of methane or CO2 you’re allowed to discharge per day has a maximum limit of 2kgs. Beyond that, there are various payment plans which vary from country to country.

Areas in blue have the most expensive plans for CO2 emissions, areas in orange have better priced plans but the best places in the world to let off high amounts of cheap emissions are labelled in red

For eating and drinking humans can only use their mouth.  This comes as a surprise when you discover how effectively some humans can do this while still managing to breathe. It’s a more satisfying system than the one we saw in Species 214-7b who, if you remember, swallowed food and ejected faeces with the same orifice, often simultaneously.  Humans possess neither a very strong suction ability nor great strength to break things up inside their mouths so they have to use their hands.

The richer the humans are, the more accessories they need for eating.  It’s hardly surprising, then, that the most advanced computer ever invented exists only to analyse what all the accessories on tables of the world’s best restaurants are for.  So far it has managed to identify uses for 6000 accessories, half of what the average millionaire will find on the table before him at lunch. The most absurd eating accessories in the entire universe are used on Earth.  They are known as chopsticks and they are the equivalent of using your left nipple to direct a freight spaceship through an asteroid storm. The chopsticks were introduced to a group of humans by species 45zb2 as a practical joke. The humans, believing them to be a sign of great intelligence and efficiency, adopted them without hesitation. This is the same species that jokingly created a planet entirely populated with real estate salespeople right on intersection 24 of the thirteen nomadic species of sector 71.

The infamous chopsticks in use

A high-class restaurant table in Los Angeles set for lunch

A word of warning: Never try eating, drinking and breathing at the same time, the human brain can’t cope with sorting out what goes where.  It usually results in a showdown between the respiratory and digestive systems and sounds exactly like the pop music we discovered on Andarva 6.  If you feel like choking in an expensive restaurant you may find the pressure required to suppress it forces sudden loud and vibrant methane emissions from down below.  Be careful here because dogs aren’t usually allowed in restaurants.  I find that, if you're about to choke, it's much better to try to work out which fork you're supposed to be using.  If you’re lucky, you won’t have to pay for the meal or hail a cab afterwards because you are being escorted from the restaurant on a comfortable stretcher.

I miss you , my son,

Sha*-lun b6.3.7