look, it's moby's dick

Couple of further cetacean observations: firstly that there was a bit about the whale strandings on the Today programme this morning which included the claim that the sperm whale's brain is the largest of any animal that has ever lived. I'm not disputing the claim, since it's true, but it does seem to be begging a flippant response along the lines of: well, that's as may be, but they're not very fucking bright, are they? The big blubbery cretins. Harsh? Perhaps.

"Sperm whales have the largest brain of any animal that has ever lived" Podcast: https://t.co/xVQwC4c6z2 pic.twitter.com/2hhAjFbUfA

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) January 27, 2016

Secondly, there seems to be a bit of a journalistic thing of calling sperm whales "gentle giants". I'm not sure where this comes from, but while you could argue for the description being appropriate for the big filter-feeding rorquals like the blue whale, sperm whales are actually some bad-ass motherfuckers. For one thing, they eat squid, including the big ones, and they have been rumoured to attack and sink ships, though there's some doubt as to how likely that is. It hasn't stopped Hollywood basing the plot of the new movie In The Heart Of The Sea around it, though. The film is a fictionalised version of the story of the ill-fated whaling ship Essex as previously mentioned here - I couldn't speak for the whole film but the trailers are heavy on the whale-wrangling and boat-smashing and light on the murder and cannibalism.

Lastly, most of the news stories about the recent strandings mention that the whales were all male - as it happens you ought to be able to work this out just by looking at the pictures of the corpses. Honestly, you don't know where to look. Gentle giants? More like genital giants, amirite?

whale meat again

I've noticed a bit of a flurry of sea monster stories in the Daily Mail recently, and by "a flurry" I mean "two": this one about a mysterious thing washed up on a beach in China, and this one about a slightly smaller but equally mysterious thing washed up on a beach in Scotland.

The first (and indeed only) rule of mysterious dead things either washed up on beaches or hauled up by boats is that they are always the badly (or extremely well, depending on how you look at it) decomposed remains of some perfectly well known and documented creature, however freaky and weird they may look. Just as the bizarre-looking thing hauled in by the Zuiyō Maru is just a basking shark, it's equally clear that the Chinese sea monster is a dead rorqual (i.e. a large-ish whale) of some sort, and that the Aberdeen sea monster is some sort of smaller toothed whale or porpoise, probably a pilot whale, since these great big blubbery cretins are getting themselves stranded on beaches all the time.

I will admit, even knowing all this, to a certain fascination with mysterious stuff washing up from the murky deep - if you feel the same way then the cryptozoology section of Darren Naish's excellent Tetrapod Zoology blog is the place for you - lots of excellent stuff on the two Montauk monsters (aka a couple of dead raccoons), the Lake Champlain monster (probably a funny-shaped log), the Hook Island monster (an elaborate hoax) and many more (including some land-based stuff). The coelacanth really has a lot to answer for here - because it managed to skulk around undetected for 65 million years without having the decency to evolve into something different and start wearing digital watches and entering into complex hire purchase agreements we now have to put up with the constant chorus of "well, you don't know there aren't a colony of plesiosaurs in Loch Ness, do you? Remember the coelacanth!".

One last word on this subject: if you do find yourself with a large dead whale on your beach in a state of decomposition and need to get rid of it pronto as it's putting the beachgoers off their ice cream, then on no account should you attempt to blow it up. On the other hand it may just blow up anyway; you never know.

tuneful as all get out

I was listening to the iPod in the car earlier, as you do, and I was singing along with Big Star's Dony, as you do, and one particular lyric stuck in my ear:

bright as star shine
hot as daylight
yeah and streamlined
as all get out

Couple of points to raise here. Firstly, the answer to the "wait, who?" question is: Big Star were a group from Memphis, Tennessee who released a couple of albums in the early 1970s that didn't sell but remain massively influential - the famous saying about the Velvet Underground attributed to Brian Eno ("only about 1,000 people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every one of them formed a rock and roll band") could just as well have been applied to Big Star. The CD you absolutely must have is the one with both their first two albums #1 Record and Radio City on it, available absurdly cheaply from Amazon. Dony is from their unexpected comeback album In Space from 2005. The song for which they're most famous is probably September Gurls which was covered by, among others, The Bangles.

Secondly, note the last line of the lyrical fragment above ("as all get out") - that's a quintessentially American expression. A quick Google reveals more examples than you can shake a stick at, from an article about cuddly squid-shaped USB pen drives to photos of ugly dogs to live-blogged Perl coding tips to rock bands to rubbish films to dodgy builders. Interestingly the last one is Australian, so maybe they say it too. I couldn't find anything on the origin of the phrase, apart from this deeply unconvincing explanation which, slightly bizarrely, purports to be from a letter to Time magazine in 1939.

go and get stuffed

Flicking though a collection of mondegreens on MSN a while back I came across this one featuring Billy Ocean - nothing very remarkable about the lyric bit, but look at the hair! At some point in the past 20 or so years his head seems to have evolved into a squid, kind of like Kevin Costner evolving gills in about the same amount of time in Waterworld.

So I thought he'd be a lot happier in his natural habitat. And with a bit of very rudimentary image-editing I've been able to make it happen. Check it out!

berry nice

Couple of quick links for you:

I haven't done a squid post for quite a while, so here's one for you: the colossal squid caught off New Zealand just over a year ago has been defrosted and dissected by an international team of scientists at the Te Papa Tongarewa museum in Wellington. A brief photographic summary can be found here; more details are available at the Te Papa blog. Nice to see that they've done the taste test and confirmed that it tastes of piss.

Secondly, I've set up a YouTube account to post occasional amusing stuff to. I've got a couple of things lying around to post, one of which I've uploaded just as a test. It's a short film shot and directed by Andy and starring me. The subject matter is the slightly odd loganberry-flavoured beer we were drinking at the legendary Square & Compasses pub in Worth Matravers on our last Swanage trip. It's called Logan's Berry (you see what they did there) and it appears to be brewed by Downton's in Salisbury. I couldn't honestly say I'd recommend it, but then I don't really like beer that's been mucked around with, which rules out things like Young's Waggledance and Chocolate Stout as well.

SquidWatch continues

This is what Bill Oddie ought to be doing, not fannying about by a lake with Kate Humble. Not that I'd be averse to a bit of fannying about by a lake with.....well, you get the idea. I think it's the "sensible outdoor science-y types in practical shoes and a fleecy gilet" thing that does it. I always had a bit of a thing for Kathy Sykes as well. And (like Dr. Alice Roberts) she's based in Bristol, which does make the whole stalking thing a lot less problematic.

Well, I seem to have wandered a bit, so back to more serious cephalopodic matters. Firstly, Father's Day is coming up, and you'll be wanting to get something nice for Dad. So how about one of these? I think technically it's a cuttlefish rather than a squid, and their brains don't really look like that, but the eyes have a nice baleful krakenesque look about them. Plus, when our squishy-bodied overlords slurp forth from the abyss and claim their rightful place on dry land with all of humanity as their slaves, you can flash the tie at them and they might treat you a bit more kindly.

And it could be any day now, judging by the shocking footage in this clip from The Colbert Report:


The last two items (i.e. the cephalopod-related stuff, not the lurid sexual fantasies about BBC TV presenters) are shamelessly "borrowed" from PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog. Plenty more good stuff there as well, as long as you aren't offended by creationists being described as "scumbag wingnuts" occasionally.

I, for one, welcome our new cephalopodic overlords

While I'm here I must just plug one more Tim Kreider cartoon - this one. The man even shares my obsession with giant squids! He really is my new best friend. It's almost certainly racially suspect, but just try saying the line from the first frame ("He say he want brack rady! He say Japanese girr too RITTRE!") in the appropriate stereotypical accent, without pissing yourself. If you can manage it your humour-resistant bladder control is better than mine.

There's a link in the comments to some appropriate T-shirts, but it doesn't work. The ones you want are here and here.

told you!

This just in on MSN News: New Zealand fishermen catch Colossal Squid. That link is of the type that will either cease to work or point to a completely unconnected story before long, if so I'll try and update it with a proper one. Strange coincidence, though, isn't it? Or maybe not.....maybe this is it and they're building up numbers for a big squelchy revolution whereby they blind us by squirting us with ink and then nibble us to death with their pointy beaks.

Note that the quip about calamari being the size of tractor tyres seems to be obligatory in all squid-based articles now. This particular one doesn't mention them being piss-flavoured, but they would be, broadly speaking anyway, because giant squid use ammonia as a buoyancy mechanism (as they don't have swimbladders). Probably just a little bit tough and chewy as well, I would guess.

colossal squid calamari: like piss-flavoured tractor tyres

Giant cephalopod article of the day can be found on the BBC website. Fascinating in its own right, as the whole business of how big these big rubbery monsters actually get is a vexed one, and the source of much myth and speculation (the mythical kraken, squid wrestling sperm whales, Kirk Douglas fighting off great disembodied rubber tentacles being waved at him by the props guy, etc. etc.), and it raises the question of what else might be lurking down there, as yet undiscovered by man (remember the coelecanth and the megamouth shark), just waiting to rise up shrieking from its watery resting place and wreak its dank and soggy revenge on the land-dwellers. Maybe I've been reading too much H.P. Lovecraft.

Anyway, large cephalopods apparently come in two flavours: GIANT and COLOSSAL. I can't help feeling those responsible might have peaked a bit early with the naming - what if we find 2 or 3 species which are bigger (maximum size for both seems to be of the order of about 45 feet, including tentacles)? Once you've cashed in GARGANTUAN, what's left that's bigger? UNIMAGINABLY GARGANTUAN? BOWEL-LIQUEFYINGLY COLOSSALLY ENORMOUS? I look forward to finding out. I reckon there could be a Nobel Prize in it for me.

Anyway, getting to the point at last (everything between "fascinating in its own right" and here was just an aside): the BBC article comes with a classic layman's size guide to squids which I reproduce here. It's actually a bit misleading as it portrays the colossal squid as being appreciably bigger (50% or so, judging by the picture) then the giant one, whereas in fact the difference in size is no more than a metre or two. It's interesting in that it also perpetuates the practice of using the London Bus as the standard non-SI unit of length for comparison of medium-sized things, presumably as part of the same measurement system that uses the Football Pitch as a unit for comparison of large things. By my calculations (assuming the bus measurement here is correct, and a standardised 100-metre pitch) 1 FP = 12.5 LB, though of course the LB abbreviation conflicts with that used for the Imperial pound, so we might need to rethink that one. Ironically the London Bus portrayed when these measurements are used is invariably a Routemaster, which have now been withdrawn from all but a couple of "heritage" tourist routes in London. Then again it's no more ridiculous as a basis for measurements than a 39mm-high* lump of platinum-iridium alloy kept in a locked room somewhere near Paris.

* or 4.9 milliRoutemasters, if you prefer.