In the magical land of Bisho, there was a beautiful lake.  It was an enormous body of crystal clear blue water.  Lake Scand. It smelled like Jasmine.

And on this lake…. Lake Scand…. there was simply one type of water fowl.  It was, of course, the amazing and wonderful Kubo Bird.  The Kubo was a swan-like goose.  Charming, and handsome, and prepossessing was this bird.

Now there were two types of Kubo’s.  The Red Kubo and the Blue Kubo.  They didn’t much care for one another.  And while they had to share Lake Scand with one another, they did it begrudgingly.

Yes, they ate the same fish, peed in the same water, and walked on the same banks.  Yet… in their bird brains…. they were different.  They all came out of their eggs…. exactly the same.  But as they grew older they began to sport different colored feathers…. you see.

Well one day, a great wind came across the land.  It smelled like vinegar, and Vicks Vapor Rub, mixed together.  The wind was hot and it roared.  It blew the leaves off the trees.  It turned the water brown.

And when the wind finally left, all was quiet again in Bisho.  But Lake Scand remained as  brown as could be.  As a result of the rusty waters…. and before they knew it … the Kubo’s began to molt and lose their feathers.  First they lost their tail feathers, and the rest followed.  Yes.  Both the Red Kubo’s and the Blue Kubo’s had become as bald as ping pong balls.

However … something very strange happened.  As they began to look around at one another… they noticed something very peculiar.  They were all the exact same color underneath.  No Red.  No Blue.  Just a beautiful shade of Gold.

And then… all at once … they realized….  they couldn’t tell who had been the Red Kubo’s and who had been the Blues.

They began to talk to one another.  They found out they ate the same fish…. and peed in the same exact way…. in the lake…. where their food source lived.

Which is kind of gross.  Really.  (But I digress.)

So the Kubo’s were now….. just Golden Kubo’s.  More beautiful than they had ever been before.  All alike… underneath.

Oh yeah.  They figured out a way to clean up the water too.  It turned back to crystal clear blue.  Except when they would pee in it.  You could always tell when someone was peeing in the lake.

“By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart”
– Confucius