The Dodo Blog

This was the best April Fools’ joke I’ve ever seen, with dodos: Dodo: Web-based time machine! by Aviary.

We’ve been working feverishly around the clock on this new tool which will allow you to age and de-age people, places and things from any browser with Flash 9 enabled.

Here’s a video of Dodo in action:

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Smart: Dodo: Open your mind. >>Smart limited two. Extremely rare to see.

From Zazzle: Dodo University T-shirt, designed by Ryan. Price: starting at $24.20, but it would cost much more for me (taxes + customs + shipping).

The dodo bird was in the main page of Desciclopédia, the Portuguese version of Uncyclopedia (a funny, and not trustful for sure, version of Wikipedia). It says: “December 1st – Dodô, endangered.”

There is no article for the dodo bird, just the main page for the word Dodô, which says about the dodo bird: Pássaro Dodô, um pombo anabolizado já extinto e ninguém se importa com ele, porque era feio e cagava pra caramba. (”Dodo bird, an anabolized extinct pigeon and nobody cares about him, because he was ugly and he used to s**t a lot.”)

Not nice or good enough, however the Uncyclopedia has an article about the Dodo bird, following the same funny-bizarre line:

Thought to be extinct, the Dodo was one of the most vicious bird ever to walk the face of the earth. When the first european settlers came to the Mauritius, they brought along with them livestocks like pigs, chicken and dogs. The pigs was quickly to find the dodo bird’s eggs to be very tasty.

This prompted the Dodo Attack of 1598 that killed all of the settler’s livestock but one chicken. Which was then auctioned and sold to Oscar Wilde’s great great grandfather for $5. The nutrition from that one chicken singlehandedly brought him back from the brink of death. Starving, the first settlers were then resorted to cannibalism, and ate their colleagues in this order: Teachers, pianists then peasants. The officials were spared to coordinate the killings.

When the next ship arrived in Mauritania, they were quickly besieged by the settlers, and were quickly defeated. They were up for the boilers until the captain suggested that the settlers hunt the dodo birds instead. It prompted the D’oh D’oh Act of 1601. In which the captain of the ship HMS Mauritanian Death was appointed leader of the settler and was given the task to eliminate the threat of the Dodo.

The Empire Strikes Back under the leadership of the captain, whose name was lost to the ages but the nickname Dundee. Unbeknownst to him, the dodos, who walks on land most of the time owns a secret X-Wing capabilities to fly of in a moment’s notice and divebombs any direct offensive the Empire’s men execute. The first and second waves resulted in 75% loss of troops on the HMS Mauritanian Death. Captain Dundee then escaped to the ship along with all the rest of the settlers and resorted to carpet bombing the mauritanian island, killing most of the dodo’s population, and decimating a large part of the forest which was then used by the French to conduct nuclear weapons demonstrations to sell bombs to the Arabs in 1975. Captain Dundee then commanding the roasting of every dodo beast left on the island and stuffed their skins with wood fillings. Two is known to survive to modern times. One of them was destroyed in order to conduct a DNA test. The only stuffed dodo left in this world was stolen in December 2005 from the Louvre and has not yet been recovered.

Today, the dodos are regarded to be extinct. And because the D’oh D’oh Act of 1601 is still in effect across the British empire, every found dodos are to be extinguished promptly to preserve the unity of the empire.

And that’s not the whole article, there are more if you are brave enough to read it.

Do-Do Bird by Tattoo Andy. BTW, that’s not the first dodo tattoo I found. There are more dodo fans that we can image. Maybe I need to have my own dodo tattoo.

Through those years I learnt that dodos also inspired an expression for things that are going to disappear: “the way of the dodo”. The says the expression “way of the Dodo” means: Something that is pass or is no longer seen or used. Not bad for a dictionary that usually suggests the alternative meanings. According to Wikipedia:

The dodo’s significance as one of the best-known extinct animals and its singular appearance has led to its use in literature and popular culture to symbolize a concept or object that will or has become out of date, as in the expression “dead as a dodo” or “gone the way of the dodo”.

The Way of the Dodo is also a LA based rock band formed by Ben Zenk, Gerry Hirschfeld, Jake Riggle, Dylan Durboraw and Jesse Bivona. The band has a MySpace page with songs and videos, and a Facebook page (where I discovered it).

Dodos Are Forever is a musical for children in the 8-14 age range. It is based on the book, of the same title, by Dick King-Smith. Mr. King-Smith very kindly gave his permission for the piece to be premiered by the pupils of Comberton Middle School, Kidderminster in June 1999. There is a “Dodos’ Song” midi version on the page.

The dodos drink too! Ok, they don’t (didn’t), but they are they are in the logo of a beer from Réunion Bière Bourbon, also known as “La Dodo”. It’s a “blonde beer” (sorry if I’m wrong but I don’t know about beers, specially in English) produced and commercialized in Réunion by Bourbon breweries, where it’s the first product, the most known and the most bribed. Bière Bourbon has this nick/ surname, La Dodo, in reference to the bird from Mauritius island which is extinct and appears in the logo, as a smiling dodo. (From the Wikipedia article, and sorry about any problems on this translation)

From the English article:

The Brasseries de Bourbon (”Breweries of Bourbon”) is the only major producer of beer on Réunion Island, a French oversea department in the Indian Ocean formerly known as Bourbon Island.

The group was founded in 1962. The first product of the brasseries, and by far now their most sold and widely known, is the blonde lager Dodo, named after the now extinct bird (its official name is simply “Bourbon”). This beer is widely known because of its emblem of a smiling dodo, and the creole slogan La dodo lé la (The Dodo is here!), both displayed in colourful wall paintings on shops, snacks etc. selling the beer.

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Primeval is a British science fiction drama television programme produced by Impossible Pictures for ITV. [...] The series follows a team of scientists who investigate anomalies in time and deal with the ancient creatures that come through, although they are not always prehistoric. The fantastic creatures on the Episode 4 of the series are Dodos!

The Dodos created for this episode are super cute and for a while you can almost forget they aren’t real. The series production did a great work “recreating” an animal that few people saw and that we have few registries. Remember that almost all those old paintings of dodos were made after the dodos were already extinct. Super cute dodos, but The dodos were depicted as fat and clumsy, as those bought to by sailors for zoos were due to overfeeding in captivity; real wild dodos would have been somewhat slimmer than shown in the show. That means the dodos of the episode are based on dodo paintings made in Europe.

There is a video excerpt of that Primeval episode with scenes with those dodos on YouTube. The video quality isn’t the best, but it worth. Bellow, the video and more dodo images from that episode.

Update: the original video was removed, but for you keep enjoying the dodos, I updated the embed bellow with the BBC’s excerpt (3:46min) of that episode.

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Occasionally the neanderthal would go off and paint. That’s a carved wood dodo bird in the foreground.

Dodo bird as religious icon.

The Dodo bird as religious icon are from the set Jesus Reads to A Neanderthal by Daren Rabinovich (I think) at the Low Gallery, photographed by Christina.