Take two people who can walk on pairs of stilts, but only give them three stilts, with the "middle one" being shared. Now place them inside the front end of a giraffe costume.
This is no ordinary giraffe. This one has six legs. Three at the front and three at the tail end, where the second pair of operators reside.
There's probably enough room inside the outfit to accommodate a dwarf, controlling the neck, head, and articulating tongue.
You now have created the Extra Tall, SIx Legged ManGiraffe, the purpose of which is as yet unknown, but definitely dubious. Servicing street-lamps is one obvious possibility.-- xenzag, Jun 17 2012 Although there's this... http://www.youtube....watch?v=eC-7gzGL2ZM [Phrontistery, Jun 19 2012] Actually, somebody has done some giraffe light bulb changing work already... http://www.amazon.c...ystem/dp/B001G8HLJ8 [normzone, Jun 19 2012] I find it hard to believe that this has not already been done.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 17 2012 I agree - thorough searches revealed no rivals, to my great surprise.-- xenzag, Jun 17 2012 It always amazes me - penicillin, the paperclip, frozen food, and now the human cameleopard - things that seem so inevitably obvious and yet mankind had to scrape by without them for endless millennia until one guiding light showed us the way.
Mark my words, by the end of the century every major city will have one of these.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 17 2012 Of course women are included. That goes without saying. It's ManGiraffe as in the generic meaning of Man, from mankind.-- xenzag, Jun 17 2012 The 6-legged Man Giraffe sounds like a natural foe of my Accretion acrobat superhero. I love the idea of costumes completely concealing people on stilts.-- bungston, Jun 18 2012 Go for it, I'm still trying to promote my two person arctic survival suit..-- not_morrison_rm, Jun 19 2012 BTW, Did you know that the giraffe is a clear demonstration of Evolution over Intelligent Design. "Recurrent laryngeal nerve", there is no way any creator would have planned this frankly halfbaked design.-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 19 2012 I'm surprised nobody has asked "How many people inside an Extra Tall, SIx Legged ManGiraffe does it take to change a light bulb?"...-- Canuck, Jun 19 2012 True inventiveness is asking questions no one has ever asked before. [Canuck], I'm nearly certain you're onto one of those.-- lurch, Jun 19 2012 I'm surprised nobody has ever trained a giraffe to change a lightbulb.-- Phrontistery, Jun 19 2012 It's a little known fact that a giraffe can peel a banana with its tongue.-- xenzag, Jun 19 2012 The giraffe light bulb changer has already been invented (link)-- normzone, Jun 19 2012 //It's a little known fact that a giraffe can peel a banana with its tongue.//
It's an even lesser known fact that one banana can kill an adult giraffe. Bananas contain an ester (or acetate - I forget) which is a neurotoxin to both giraffes and tapirs. (Oddly, they can eat banana skins; perhaps that is the reason why they have developed labial peeling aptitudes.)-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 19 2012 Apparently lots of things that the Tapirs eat is poisonous to them. They way they get around this, is by only nibbling small amounts of each toxic plant/fruit leaf so they only get "slightly poisoned". While I respect their strategy and ingenuity, it does seem like a difficult way to get a meal (sorry for going off topic there with Tapirs)-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 19 2012 Tapering off?-- normzone, Jun 19 2012 They planted cameras in the teeth of sedated giraffes, backed this up with gps data broadcast from neck collars, and cross referenced the results from stool sample analysis.-- xenzag, Jun 20 2012 //cameras in the teeth of sedated giraffes//
Ah - slight error on my part. I meant "cashew" instead of "banana". And "mongoose" instead of "giraffe".
Oh, and "bewilder" rather than "kill".
Apologies for any confusion.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 20 2012 When giraffes sleep, they often dream that they are cashew chewing mongooses. This phenomena is only fully understand in the dreams of researchers who imagine themselves to be spectrographic devices that have somehow become self aware.-- xenzag, Jun 20 2012 random, halfbakery