Spineless

Generally speaking, when someone is described as being "spineless", it's taken to be a bad thing. It means he's weak and lacks courage. There are, however, certain circumstances in which being spineless could be a good thing. I refer, of course, to tinned sardines.

At the moment, whenever I eat sardine sandwiches, I'm obliged to manually remove the spine from each sardine beforehand, lest it be overly crunchy in my lunch. This is a time-consuming, messy procedure. Surely it would be far better if we could find sardines that didn't have a spine in them in the first place. Spineless sardines, in other words; sardines that lack those essential, courageous, manly virtues we all hold so dear.

One could, I suppose, hang around until there's another major fish war, like the Cod War of the 1970s, when our Valiant Boys took on the godless cod and whipped their fucking arses. Then we could seek out the sardine conscientious objectors. I'd imagine they'd be easily identifiable. They would be the sardines carrying the "Troops out" placards, and the ones claiming to be homosexuals when having their army medicals. You'd simply target these with your fishing nets.

On the other hand, there could be a few disadvantages in targeting homosexual sardines. If other fish saw that you only went after the gay variety, they might think that you were gay yourself and "up for it", as it were. Consequently, men who kept tropical fish might suddenly find their guppies popping up from the tank, offering to blow them. Worse, you might be swimming in the sea one day and get buggered by a gay whale shark. I don't wish to be buggered by a gay whale shark, so I think some other way of identifying spineless sardines should be found. Perhaps sealing them in the tins while they're still alive. Then, you just listen out for the cries of "Help! Mummy! It's dark in here!" and you know those are the ones without a backbone.