Shuma - Singing Camel

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Ten days ago, my coworker and I arrived at my house at 4:00am after a marathon of late nights/early mornings in the office and flipped open the Taipei Times to find this article: Vice president moved to tears by 'Shuma the Singing Camel.' Perhaps you were also lucky enough to read of the world-famous SHUMA, one of a group of "female Arab racing camels that have been trained to perform." The article covered half a page and featured a quote by Taiwanese vice president Lu.

I was amazed to hear a camel sing and after the initial surprise the performance moved me to tears. I will certainly be attending the show with our visitors from Egypt.

As we read, the contents were more and more amazing:

For the upcoming show, one camel has been trained for over a year to chant The Grand old Duke of York, while punctuating the nursery rhyme with flatulent blasts that are said to resemble the sound of a bass drum, or cannon exploding.

This was no more incredible than the fact that Shuma and her gang had also purportedly learned a few ballroom dance steps, could dance hip hop and planned to end the recital with a "stirring version of Georg Friedrich Handel's Messiah". At 4 in the morning, we had no choice in our state of incredulous disbelief, but to go online to search for Shuma.

The weekend following the article, we had occasion to have lunch with someone from our Hong Kong office and the story of Shuma the Singing Camel camel up. "Ha ha! What a great April Fool's joke," she said immediately without even a suggestion of hesitation. (We sort of had thought that, too... but it was just too long, too detialed, too bizarre... We are still waiting for the story to have been taken up by another paper... or for the Taipei Times to make mention of the "fools" who showed up at the Chiang Hai Shek Memorial Hall or wrote in for free tickets. (Thank God we weren't among them.)