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Word of the Every So Often
muricate: (adj.) (pronounced: mew-ra-ket) studded with short, rough points. A prickly pear is muricate.
Everyday History
It’s National Exploding Whale Day! On November 9, 1970, a dead, 45 foot, 8 ton sperm whale washed ashore in Florence, Oregon, where it festered for the next three days while the state decided just what, exactly, one does with a large dead whale. A large, dead, stinking whale. Engineers from the State Highway Department were eventually called in and tasked with getting rid of the overly-large rotting carcass. They couldn't bury it, because they feared it would just be uncovered. And besides, that's a really big hole. They couldn't cut it up, because nobody wanted to do it. I mean, would you want to take a chainsaw to a dead whale? And they couldn't burn it, which pretty much goes without saying. So they decided the most logical thing to do was to blow it up. Obviously they had a different definition of "logic" than I do, but I digress.
In order to blow the stinking, bloated carcass up, they packed in 20 cases of dynamite – a half ton of explosives. That's enough explosives to renovate your house. They packed the majority of the explosives on the landward side of the whale, hoping that the explosion would effectively blow the majority of the whale out to sea. So on November 13, 1970 (which, incidently, was a Friday), the Highway Department backed everybody up a quarter of a mile and lit the fuse. And it blew up. Boy, did it blow up. In retrospect, a quarter of mile wasn't nearly enough, and the end result was all the spectators running away in terror from a shower of cascading whale blubber. Nobody was seriously hurt, though everybody was showered with rotting whale parts, and one car was pretty much smashed flat by an exceptionally large hunk. To make matters even worse, the majority of the whale was still there, though it was now blown into pieces small enough to be buried.
If you've never seen the video, you really need to watch it: Boom! It took the event 20 years to get national recognition, when humourist Dave Barry found a copy of the video and wrote about it in his syndicated column. In 2020, the city of Florence dedicated a park to the event: The Exploding Whale Memorial Park. Since then, explosions have been used from time to time to dispose of dead whales, but the engineers apparently have learned their lesson. The whales are hauled out to sea before they're detonated. All told, though, blowing up whales probably should be filed under "Really Bad Ideas."
Cartoon of the Week
Flies Under the Radar
Stuff
The History of the Future: The End of Sagging
It was in the summer of 2032 that the dress fashion known as "sagging" came to an abrupt end. As one fashion critic stated, sagging, which featured wearing one’s trousers no higher than somewhere well below the crotch, “was just taken too far.” A group of young men in Detroit began the short-lived fad of “dragging,” which was simply putting only one foot through one’s trousers and then dragging them as one walked. The fad lasted a little over two weeks before others, seemingly all at once, came to the sudden realization of just how fantastically stupid that was. What followed was the equally sudden realization of just how stupid sagging was, as well. And that was followed by what became known as “neo retro anti-sagging,” where the trousers were increasingly worn higher and higher in an effort to prove that the wearers definitely were not sagging, and that anybody whose trousers were worn lower than theirs was considered sagging, and that person was therefore what one fashion pundit described as “dweebified.” Wearing a belt around one’s neck was briefly popular, and surprisingly very few people were asphyxiated. The fad peaked with the adherents wearing their trousers so high that they had to unzip their flies to see. A few purists, who became known as “those assholes who keep running into everything,” refused to peek out of the fly, stating that it was demeaning. The height of one’s trousers suddenly became irrelevant by the spring of 2034, when the craze of church hats – a miniaturized, sanctified steeple that one could wear on one’s head, and thus be in church always – captured the public whim. See Eldridge’s concise history of fashion, How Dumb Can We Get? (Holy Grail Press, 2034)
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