They’re About As Big As You Thought They Would Be

OK. Just to be clear, the man on the left in the Featured Image is not a farmer and the other guy is not a farmer either. For some reason I thought the guy on the right might be a Park Ranger, like from Yosemite or maybe Yellowstone. I also thought he might be a cowboy because it looked like he was wearing leather chaps. In fact, I toyed with the notion that he might even be a Texas Ranger but his hat didn’t cut it.

The two guys in the Featured Image are actually whale fishermen. You probably figured that out already. And in addition, you probably also figured out that the thing they’re holding is not one of the whale’s flippers.

That revelation should cause this question to spring to mind: why the dickens (no pun intended) did a photo of two men holding a whale penis get inserted (no pun intended) into this post?

That is a great question!

Back in May of this year I came across an article that described an exciting discovery about what bees like do for fun. I fully intended to write about that for June but instead, I wrote about the Newfie who attacked an RCMP officer with a block of cheese. Then, because I felt guilty that I ran late in getting that post out, I wrote another, compensatory, post about Oobleck.

I had every intention of featuring the bee-related discovery for July’s post but then one of my sons sent me an article about an eel spill on the tarmac at the Vancouver International Airport, conveniently located in Vancouver, B.C. (An eel spill is fairly similar to an oil spill in that, like oil, eels can be black and slippery.)

I did a little delving into this eel situation. A cooler full of live eels came open and spilled while it was being offloaded from a plane. The question is: what were the eels doing on the plane? Like the whale penis question, this eel question is another great question.

Turns out that a shit-ton of eels are eaten all over the world, in sushi and other traditional dishes. We’re talking billions of dollars worth of eels. Nobody is giving these eels away, either. Baby eels, known as elvers, can run over $2000 per pound. Naturally, Organized Crime is involved. Elvers are being smuggled by airplane into illegal eel farms outside North America and Europe; the adults are then re-smuggled back into North America and many other countries. So quite possibly, those spilled eels in Vancouver could have been illegal: illegal eeliens if you will.

Somebody should make a movie about all this. It could be entitled: “Illegal Eels On A Plane, In A Suitcase, Or Possibly A YETI Cooler.” (In that case, YETI would stand for:”You’re Eating These Illegally.”)

So that was interesting, but meanwhile, you’re still in the dark about the whale penis. Here’s what happened:

Following the eel diversion, I was convinced that I was finally ready to start the bee-related post but for some reason I decided to quickly see if anything interesting had popped up on Dave Barry’s blog site: https://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/ . (Dave’s blog features links to oddball stuff that gets into the news every day.)

This little gem got top billing that fateful morning:

Last week, Hurricane Beryl, a Category Five storm, passed through Texas (see map):

Storms of this intensity often leave behind unusual debris including zoo animals, IRS investigators, mass spectrometers, tiny Karl Rove figurines, anacondas, etc., in oddball locations.

Sure enough, after Beryl headed northeast, toward the RNC, reports started coming in on July 8th saying that what appeared to be a juvenile offspring of the Loch Ness Monster had been deposited on the Texas I-45 interstate.

This could only have happened in Texas but Florida would be a close second.

The best thing about this sighting (which was most likely some kind of flightless, padded lounge chair) was the comments that rose up (no pun intended) from various quarters:

“That’s the Hot Mess Monster!”

“Looks like one of those ridiculous helmsman’s chairs from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Last but not least, this comment from one of Dave’s blog readers whose moniker is Bigfoot aka Yeti(!):

This led me astray on a quest for more information. Sadly, I found it.

If you don’t want to bone up (no pun intended) on whale penises, DO NOT and I repeat DO NOT go to this post featured on the Futurismo Blog. If you follow this advice you will, happily, never be tormented by the images of Pink Floyd, Free Willy and The Real Moby Dick (this latter courtesy of the Icelandic Phallological Museum).

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.