Many years ago, there was this guinea pig. His name was "Simon" but we all called him "Pig". This is all true.

If you put Pig on the low end of a piano keyboard, and laid a lettuce leaf up higher, he would walk from bass to treble to get to the lettuce, playing keys as he walked, pretty much at random.

So far, not so good. The thing was, Pig's body was a more-or-less fixed interval from front to back, so as he walked, he effectively played a kind of counterpoint with himself, front legs on one part, back legs on another. If you helped him out by holding the pedal down, it really sounded like music. I remember a guy on the other end of the phone just did not believe that was really Pig playing the piano, he assumed it was Funky Bonnie pulling his leg.

Pig also had some exposure in multimedia, when I put him on a record turntable under black light.

I discovered decades later that there is a novel by Ludvik Vakulik, "The Guinea Pigs", in which the Kafkaesque narrator expresses his relationship to his Kafkaesque environment by doing the same weird things with guinea pigs, just like we used to do. The piano keyboard, check. Turntable, check – he even discovered, as I did quite independently, that the optimal speed is 45 RPM (78 sends the pig flying, 33 and it will walk off on its own.)