F ³: the Ballad of Wicomico County?

Today’s blog is brought to you by an old, old joke. Here’s one version:

Cop:

Do you know you were doing fifty in a twenty five miles per hour zone?

Elvira:

No, but if you hum a few bars, I'll fake it.

And that’s exactly where my mind went when I saw the title of a piece in the Baltimore Banner yesterday.

There’s an emu on the loose on the Eastern Shore, Julie Scharper, Baltimore Banner

Reporter:

Do you know there’s an emu on the loose on the Eastern Shore?

Me:

No, but if you hum a few bars, I’ll fake it.

(Insert rim shot here.)

This got me wondering about other songs which begin “There’s a…” but the only one that came to mind immediately was “There’s a green hill far away.” An impulsive Google search yielded questionable results.

After refining my search I did turn up the following on Quora:

No song about our missing emu - - yet. I somehow feel this could be a country-western themed lament. Right after your woman leaves you and you wreck your truck, your emu gets away. That kind of song.

Newspaper stories about animals on the loose are a part of any local journalist’s beat. I often wonder if they provide a kind of novelty or relief from the same old, same old. Baltmore had a bull on the loose, rogue turkeys roamed Towson, and who could forget the elusive Maryland zebras? And then there are reported but unsubstantiated sightings: recent examples include a lion and a red panda. (They weren’t.)

Reporter Julia Scharper does a fine job with this piece, although I would have appreciated a brief explanation of why on earth people on the Eastern Shore own emus at all. They’re not native to the U.S. and there’s not an enormous market for emu meat that I know of. That’s as big a mystery to me as how this particular bird made a break for it.

In the meantime, if you want a song you’ll need to write it yourself. Or there’s always that old standby from The Wiggles. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

Have a great Friday!

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