Michael Palin Is Full of Bull

Michael Palin admits he has eaten bull testicles but the former Monty Python funnyman says he isn't by any means the ultimate authority on the deviant delicacy.

Palin, who spends a lot of his time these days traveling to exotic locales and sampling the local cultures for A&E and British TV, tells Playboy that he once sampled a bull's nether region and it tastes "a bit like a slightly aging pâté.

"It's hard to compare them with anything else, because when I sampled bulls' testicles they had been cooked several hours before and had gotten rather cold," he explains. The worldly Palin, who's had his share of weird food, advises would-be travelers to be less finicky when dining abroad. "Don't get squeamish about eating testicles or snakes or grasshoppers, if that's what's around, because generally that'll mean that this is what they cook best.

"I think one of the liberating things about travel is that food and health and sanitary facilities in other countries are always very different from what you've just left," he says. "Go order lamb in China and they'll say, 'You vicious bastard, how could you? What's wrong with our snakes?' "