Cucumber Dinosaur

You'd think after that monkey misunderstanding last week I'd start taking more care in reading newspaper headlines, wouldn't you? But no, yesterday I did it again. This time I was leafing through the Guardian's Media section when I thought I saw the headline "We are not a cucumber dinosaur". Once again, my imagination raced off in top gear. There's no denying that a cucumber dinosaur is an intriguing concept. Did they mean a model dinosaur made from a cucumber, or cucumbers? Perhaps, I thought, this is some kind of esoteric media term - just like you sometimes hear the term "about as useful as a chocolate teapot" bandied about, maybe in the world of media, they say "about as much use as a cucumber dinosaur". I mean, let's be honest, a dinosaur made from cucumbers would be pretty useless. It really wouldn't be frightening, would it? You could easily take care of any potential threat by slicing it up and putting it in a sandwich. Unless, of course, it was very big. Then it struck me - I'd misunderstood! It wasn't referring to a cucumber-sized and shaped dinosaur, rather a dinosaur-sized cucumber!

Now, there's a thought - a huge cucumber lumbering across the land, crushing cars and destroying buildings. Obviously, any damage it did would be accidental, simply a result of its huge size, as it stands to reason that a dinosaur version of a vegetable is highly unlikely to be carnivorous. So I doubt very much that we'd see people being pursued and eaten by it. In fact, I envisaged it to be a bit like a long-necked sauropod in appearance - part of the giant cucumber arcing upwards to form the neck, with the lower part widening out to form the body. The whole thing would trot around on four sturdy legs. Perhaps that was what the headline meant - 'they' were big and cumbersome, but ultimately harmless. Just like a cucumber dinosaur. Then I had another thought - what else are cucumbers famous for (allegedly) being used for? That's right - a cucumber dinosaur could be some kind of huge dildo! In which case the headline could be saying that someone didn't consider themselves to be a 'spare prick', or a 'huge (green) knob'. Excited by all of these possibilities, I eagerly turned back to the headline, which, of course, actually read: "We are not a cumbersome dinosaur". Very disappointing.