This article is classified "Real"
Fish are a carbon based life form which inhabit the fresh and salty waters
of the planet Earth. The most distinguished feature of a fish is that it
can breathe right where it lives, in water, which is not very common to
other species inhabiting this planet. To sustain this sort of living, fish
have developed a unique apparatus which takes dissolved oxygen from
surrounding water.
Fish, as has been stated, live in salty and fresh water, practically
everywhere on Earth, and hence they differ much in size, form and habits. A
common thing for all, normal, fish is that they have neither legs nor ears;
fish covered with fur have been reported a couple of times, but as the
authors of these reports moved to psychiatric wards soon after, these
reports have been ignored.
All fish may be divided into the following groups:
a) useful fish, which can be used by a hitchhiker or a stragg in
some way; and
b) useless fish, which can not be used anyway.
Useful fish
===========
Fish is most commonly used as food. This sort of fish can be obtained in
two ways: either a hitchhiker may catch the fish in water, or he may get it
from nearest fishmonger or supermarket. In the latter case, the fish may
look not exactly like fish, but rather a lump of something, sometimes
frozen, smoked or processed in some other way, or even in a tin can. As
most people on Earth eat fish [1], and have therefore developed different
methods for its preparation, there are numerous known ways to cook or
process it. Fish may be eaten raw and fresh, it may be salted, salted and
dried, dried, smoked, boiled, fried, left in a specially dug hole until it
gets rotten a little, made into soup, and so on.
One can also use fish for aesthetic purposes. Some people care to make
glass boxes of different forms and sizes, fill them with water, install some
devices -- compressors, thermometers, lights, etcetera -- and let some nice
looking, or/and rare, or/and friendly, or/and expensive fish live there.
Other people stuff fish and put them in their working studio, a bar or some
other place where they may be seen by others, and admired.
Some fish are powerful weapons used to destroy enemies, or yourself. Sharks
and piranhas are carnivores and they are eager to eat everything soft and
pink, including people. Some fish, like the legendary fugu, are safe to eat
if properly cooked, but may be extremely poisonous. Some fish carry
poisonous spikes, and if a person steps on such fish he gets hurt, and
sometimes may even die.
In addition, some useful substances can be extracted from fish. Impotence
curing medicine produced of sharks and cod liver oil are probably the best
known.
Of course, there are some exotic uses of fish: wrestling in small rotten
fish, sending fish by post to a member of mafia in order to let him know
that he is out of favour and soon will be killed, having sex with fish and
so on, but all these can not be regarded as basic uses of fish.
Useless fish
============
Useless fish are none of the described above. Most of them are useless,
because it is impossible to catch and make any use of them. Some of them
are useless because they are very small. Dead fish washed ashore are mostly
useless. Fish eaten by another fish instantly becomes useless. Generally,
any previously used fish becomes useless.
Not fish
========
Remember that dolphins and whales are not fish. Any fish-like man-made
thing is also not fish. In case someone calls you a fish he is, of course,
wrong.
[1] Sometimes they eat mostly fish or, in extreme cases, only fish.