Let Them Eat Whale

The subjects of the TV show “Whale Wars” are idiots.

Chief dope among the crew of the Steve Erwin is captain Paul Watson, one of the founders of Greenpeace who got kicked out for being too radical. In the show, Watson leads a band of land-lubbing sailors into battle against a fleet of Japanese whaling ships, intent on throwing enough stink bombs at them to stop their rape of the seas (this show runs on Animal Planet).

Only here’s the thing—they’re not really raping the seas. The Japanese fleet takes a total of about 935 Minke Whales and 50 Fin Whales each year. The International Whaling Commission estimated there are as many as 45,000 Fin and over a million Minke Whales in the sea (Correction below). Compare that tiny harvest to humans’ ability to decimate stocks of Atlantic Cod, Salmon, or Blue Fin Tuna, and what the Japanese are doing looks like a study in sustainable fishing.

I’m not saying it should be open season on whales just because they’re not about to go extinct—far from it. I think the IWC should continue to strictly police whaling habits. But ban it? Why bother?

“But whales are intelligent, defenseless creatures!” you say. Well, you’re right. But so are pigs and octopuses. Unfortunately those animals also taste good. So the Japanese think whale meat tastes delicious? Fine, let them eat whale. It’s their funeral.

Whale meat is essentially poison. Human activity spews tons of industrial chemicals into the sea that slowly make their way up the food chain, concentrating PCBs, DDT, mercury and other compounds in the tissue of the biggest predator. In this case, that means whale meat.

This is not news—just ask people living in the Faroe Islands. Their kids’ immune systems are shot and many have developmental disorders brought on by mercury poisoning that came from eating whale meat. That makes Japanese people just as dumb for eating the stuff as the crew of the Steve Erwin is for trying to stop them. And after mercury-laden shellfish killed thousands of Japanese people in the 1950’s and 60’s, you think they’d know better.

As for the inept sailors of the Steve Erwin (if you think I’m being harsh, watch the first episode of “Whale Wars”), ever hear of climate change? The global water crisis? Polar bears?? There are better ways to spend millions of dollars towards conservation. -Michael Reilly

Image: JapanSugoi

Correction: The IWC numbers are outdated, as my colleague Kieran Mulvaney has informed me. While no reliable numbers for these whale populations exist, a more correct figure for Minke Whales is in the neighborhood of 500,000, with a less likely possibility that they number as few as 250,000.

The difficult I’ll do right now

Here is a clip that I’ve been loving for quite a few months now. When Fallout 3 hit at the end of October, I was completely hypnotized by the licensed tracks that your character can listen to being broadcast from the heart of the DC Wasteland, relayed through a radio antenna at the top of the Washington Monument. Some of these songs are appreciated ironically, what with the retrograde gender and racial politics of their lyrics resting on beds of chipper accompaniment. But one song always genuinely broke my heart, particularly when it came on at night as my character trekked lonesomely from one blasted-out building to another

James Jamerson

James Jamerson is the finest bass player in the history of recorded music. I know that sort of declaration is usually pretty absurd, but I can’t listen to the first half of Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On without almost crying, and I think it’s Jamerson’s fault. Oh I guess the singing and the hand percussion and the sweeping strings might be the culpable too, but its that endlessly swirling, syncopated bassline that burrows right into my spine and rides the nerves right out to my hands and feet and fingers and toes.

Carrot / Cheese

Falling in love was a habit I’d kicked for while. It has always been too messy and uncomfortable; for me, falling in love was about as productive and harmless as falling down the stairs. And then I met somebody, and I decided to forget everything I’d learned from this history of bruising experiences. I chose to want her. And it felt really good to succumb to the old pattern of liking someone for no good reason and thinking about them all the time, investing them with a lot of unearned hope and high expectations.

Let me tell you a story about the girl I’m falling far.

I’m in trouble again…

Pursuant with our goals to improve the caliber this thing and heighten its beneficence for the culture of humanity, here is a clip of Joni Mitchell singing Help Me, one of her biggest hits, I think, but also the perfect marriage between her early ’70s pop sensibilities and the slippery melodies and unexpected harmonies that characterize her best works. Plus, her singing is remarkable, delicate, but with commanding control.

I’m sick and tired…

of emily gould. Seriously, who gives a shit about some obnoxious brat who wrote for some ridiculous blog? These things don’t matter. But most of all, I’m pretty fed up with having to look at her flip me off from the front of my blog every time and I come here to remind myself that I have nothing to say. Your rebelliousness is not edgy or transgressive, it isn’t impressive, it isn’t cool, it isn’t funny and it isn’t even cute. It’s stupid.

So even though I have nothing to say (evidenced by the month between posts), I’m just gonna keep typing here until I feel like there might be enough words to drive that fantastically obnoxious picture right below the figurative fold. Who shot that piece of crap anyway? Was it some special team of NASA scientists committed to condensing self-satisfied arrogance into a space-shuttle worthy mini-packet of mission-suitable awful? Was it some alien life form attempting to catalogue with a single image the most important reason to steer the flying saucer right around this solar system? Was it an idiot man / chimp hybrid desperately flailing at the buttons of a digital camera that he fears and will never understand? Was it your mom? What the fuck?! Who told this woman that those sunglasses looked good? She looks like the most obnoxious girl in your high school drawing class. Why didn’t the photographer feel some sense of duty toward all humanity and just push this obnoxious Internet non-celebrity right off that building into the throngs below? Doesn’t he understand that the only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing?

Did Emily Gould ever win a Quadfecta Trivia Tournament of Champions? Even if she did, did she look deep into her heart and realize that—no matter how many bar trivia tournaments she sweeps—she is still a disgusting, self-absorbed narcissist. (It’s not redundant to put those two together when either “self-absorbed” and “narcissist” alone would fail to convey the true scale of the massive, putrid, unbridled ego on display.) I did win a Quadfecta Trivia Tournament of Champions, but none of you knew that, because I didn’t make a big goddamned fuss about it, on this blog or anywhere, even though it’s arguably a greater achievement than getting evicted from the Gawker Blog Sweatshop for being too smug for even the Internet. I’ve gotten better achievements than that just from looking at an Xbox 360 from across the room. Remember, not 2 months ago, when you could come to this site and see the ebullient faces of Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Sly Stone and Brit Winterknee smiling up at you? You’d listen to their music and absorb their joy and then muster the strength to make it through another day? Yeah, well, I promise, those days are coming back. And the first step is to drive that self-satisfied smirk deeper into the shit-can of the web, back with the imbedded midis, gif animations and the rest of the waste from another more obnoxious Internet era. Say goodbye, Emily Gould, you’ve been flushed.

The Ballad of Emily Gould,

…or How Being a Blogger Can Chew You Up and Spit You Out

Emily Gould, former editor of Gawker.com has an interestingly self-indulgent piece in this Sunday’s NYT Magazine. I have never and probably will never ascend to the levels of blogging celebrity that she has, as former editor of Gawker Media’s flagship blog Gawker. But I blog twice a day (for money. Not here, obviously) and I can say this: much of what she writes in the article is true — blogging has a way of consuming some portion of your brain. After you do it long enough, firing up your computer and spitting out a post becomes as reflexive as that little kick your leg gives when a doctor hits your knee.

Gould’s a good writer for being just 27 years old, and she does a handy job of being a fly on the wall of her own panic-stricken existence during her time as blogging celebrity and gossip extraordinaire (Gawker’s like US Weekly, except snarkier). But she never said whether she thought being a blogger was a good thing or bad — simply that it happened.

Ah, the name is Bootsy…

This is a clip of the man who, anecdotally, gets called the funkiest player alive. They say, give him a stick and some ground to stamp on, and he could make that funky.

Yeah, yeah, uh huh, Lord, Lord…

The following are the names of the members of one of the best funk combos of all time: “Master” Henry Gibson (percussion), Joseph “Lucky” Scott (bass), Craig McMullen (guitar) and Tyrone McCullen (drums). You probably never have heard of them, although watch them in this clip below from 1973 and you’ll probably recognize both the song they’re playing and the singer they’re fronting:

I’m Brit Winterknee… I’ll tell ya the story

Not too many people today remember Clementine Rubarb from Corn Tree Bluff, New Hampsher, but residents of Corn Tree Bluff certainly do. They remember the day she played hooky from the one-room school house down on Tricklepee Creek and invented the recumbent hobby horse in a field out behind the old Nickelkettle farm. 100 years latah, that invention would become the backbone of the Apollo Space progrum. I’m Brit Winterknee, and I’ll tell ya the story tonight on New England Chronicles…

Behind me is an old outhouse, pretty similar to any of the outhouses that dot the New Hampsher wilderness like musciphalias robustial—the vibrant and virulently poisonous Weeweecap Toadstool.