The Sand Flea

This is an artist's rendering of a custom Sand Flea ukulele. What the heck is that, you may ask? Well, a while back, the fine folks at the excellent Ukulelia blog, citing anonymous sources, reported that the Halliburton corporation, in an effort to improve their public image, was sending thousands of "Care Packages" to the troops in Iraq and that, in addition to the usual socks and underwear and candy bars, those 50,000 packages would also contain special, custom-made "Sand Flea" ukuleles decorated with desert camo tops and olive-drab plastic parts!

Now, bear in mind, absolutely no one has ever seen one of these, and, other than that article mentioned above, there's no other reference to this anywhere on the entire interweb, so, we guess the whole thing really must be just a fun April Fool's Day prank, after all!

There is a legitimate group, however, that really is sending real ukuleles to our troops, so, if you'd like to contribute, or get involved in some other way, or maybe you just want to see some cool pics of our soldiers happily playing ukuleles, definitely go check out the Ukes For Troops website.

Of course, on the other hand, if THIS is what they do with ukuleles when they get them, maybe sending ukes over there isn't such a great idea after all? •