Oh for a parrot instead of Skywhale

Landlubbers’ favourite hot-air balloon at this year’s Canberra Balloon Spectacular is Pegleg Pete. Paul Gibbs was aloft in his partner’s balloon Duchess on Monday morning, on Canberra Day, and took exciting pictures of the brightly-plumaged visitor.

As you can see, Pete is a kind of part-pirate, part-parrot hybrid, made up of a Long John Silveresque pirate and of the traditional parrot that always used to decorate an authentic pirate’s shoulders. Pegleg Pete has a wooden leg. He was hatched in creative Brazil in 2012 and now belongs to Dave and Kathy Reineke of Champaign, Illinois in the United States.

Shiver me timbers! Readers, is it just this columnist or does a parrot balloon make one think, wistfully, of what we might have had as our centenary balloon instead of the nipple-festooned and unnecessarily meaningful Skywhale? A Gang-gang cockatoo balloon would have been a fitting thing, for the beloved species is the ACT’s faunal emblem, as well as being the name of and symbol for a world-renowned newspaper column.

via – Canberra Times