Maybe I should just change the name of Byzantium’s Shores to Stuff About Whales.

:: Apparently the big blob o’tissue that washed up on Chile’s shores is what’s left of a sperm whale.

According to experts, what happens is this: when a sperm whale dies, its body just sort-of bobs along while it decomposes. At a certain point, its skin can no longer maintain enough tensile strength to, well, hold the bones inside, and they literally fall out the bottom, leaving…well, you get the idea.

Oh well, I still prefer my blancmange theory. (And right now the Ray Bradbury story “Skeleton” is playing over in my mind….)

:: And according to Newsweek, commercial whaling is still an issue. It was somewhat to be expected: after all, the “endangered species” argument was the main justification of whaling embargoes, and now that a number of whale species are on the rebound, the countries that want to kill whales are saying, “Hey, there’s more whales now! Let us hunt ’em!”

I’ve never understood whaling; as a rule, I find arguments that appeal to “cultural tradition” unconvincing in just about every scenario in which they are employed, which basically leaves pro-whaling countries left with, as far as I’m concerned, “Whales is yummy!” as an argument. And that doesn’t hold water, either. To paraphrase Jules Winfield in Pulp Fiction: “Hey, a sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’ll never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy mother******.” There’s a lot of yummy stuff in this world, so if we all stop eating one particular set of yummy things, well, who cares?

But there is one cute quote in the article, from a Japanese person who wants to start whaling again: “How would you feel if someone else from a different culture tells you that you should give up eating turkey for Thanksgiving?” Well, first of all, we’re right back onto “It’s our culture” argumentation here, which is pretty-much bogus. What gets me here is the analogy between a whale (animals with huge brains, documented “cultural” behavior, and at least the beginnings of linguistic communication) and a turkey (animals which are so dumb they can quite literally drown in a rain storm, because they gaze up into the rain with their mouths open). Great analogy there, fella.

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I just don’t know about this:

This fellow is planning to apply for his 9-cm eyebrow hair to be listed in the Guiness Book. Apparently he’s been growing his eyebrow hair for eight years. I had no idea those hairs could grow that long.

Yes, I’m desperate for material.

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This weekend brings one of our favorite events in these parts: Taste of Buffalo, the huge annual food festival where something like 45 local restaurants and food vendors provide small samples of their wares, along with all manner of other street entertainment and whatnot. It’s always a blast, although for various reasons I’m not looking forward to attending this year as much as in the past. But still, I’m sure we’ll have a good time.

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It appears that DestiNY USA is dead, at least as far as Syracuse in concerned.

I’ve written about this before, the huge shopping/entertainment/amusement/hotel complex that’s been percolating on the drawing boards in Syracuse for several years now. A few weeks ago, things came to a head when the New York State Legislature failed to enact legislation that would have given the Pyramid Company (the folks behind DestiNY) the tax breaks that they insisted were necessary to the securing of funding from investors, and thus to actual construction. The legislation was scuttled, pretty much singlehandedly, by a single State Senator from Syracuse, John DeFrancisco, who happens to represent the very district where DestiNY was to have been built.

The debate was pretty rancorous, but I’ve come to think that DeFrancisco was probably right on one very important point: Pyramid never really came clean with just what it was they were going to do. In the six months that we lived in Syracuse, the plans seemed to change almost daily. When we arrived, the project’s opening was billed for 2004; then it was moved to 2006. While we were there, a big groundbreaking ceremony — complete with an appearance by Governor Pataki — was held for the big hotel that was to kick off the project; the construction was halted almost immediately and never restarted. Disputes as to just what land surrounding Carousel Center (the current shopping mall that was to be expanded into DestiNY) was to be used for the big project went on. And so on. Even the DestiNY website never showed any images of what the thing was supposed to eventually look like. Sure, they had some generic “This is what it will resemble” stuff, but never an actual set of architect-drawings of the finished project. In fact, I found it hard to escape the impression, as time went on, that there was no idea of the “finished project”.

I suspect that, if the Pyramid Company really was serious about this project, then they’ll probably look to build it elsewhere. That’s not really a surprise, and while I liked the idea — if they’d have built the whole thing, instead of just adding piecemeal here and there, which was the way they seemed to be planning to operate — I was never sure if Syracuse was really the right place for it. The city just isn’t big. But then, neither was Las Vegas, before all the building happened there.

So, who knows. Maybe DestiNY USA will end up someplace else — outside Philadelphia, maybe, or near Boston, or maybe Cleveland or some such place. Or maybe it was all just a series of trial-balloons, and now that they’ve all vanished into the stratosphere, Pyramid will get back to operating the malls it already owns. Ah well….

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Lately, blogging has been playing the role of preserving my sanity. So I’d just like to thank all of you who read this stuff day after day, and also offer that as a partial mea culpa if I’ve been more obtuse, rambling, and generally incomprehensible in the last couple of weeks.

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Via Pandagon, I see that Howard Kurtz has this to say about the whole business about the Niger uranium reports and whatnot:

The left is now up in arms about one sentence in George Bush’s last State of the Union speech.

Well, all sentences are not created equal, obviously. Starlog Magazine once had a cartoon where a Star Wars fan in 1980 was being tormented by his best friend, who had seen The Empire Strikes Back while the fan had not. The friend begs to tell the fan just one sentence from the movie, and the fan relents. The sentence? “I am your father.” For that matter, the Presidential Oath of Office is just one sentence, so in a sense, the left is generally up in arms over one sentence President Bush said on Inauguration Day, 2001.

And besides, I seem to recall the Right in this country getting pretty hot-under-the-collar after a single sentence spoken by President Clinton, more than a couple of times.

So if you want to defend the Administration’s reliance on faulty information in making its case for war, please don’t use the “It was just one sentence” tactic, OK? That dog won’t hunt.

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The Department of Weird Convergences filed a small report this morning. Years ago, I worked for Pizza Hut. (Not long enough ago, but….) Anyway, early in my career there, Pizza Hut came up with a commercial where a kid is attending a brand new school on his first day, and he’s scared witless. So his mother calls the local Pizza Hut and asks them to deliver him two large pizzas for lunch. Of course, the kid — who still hasn’t made any new friends by lunchtime — morphs into Mr. Popular once the pizzas arrive, with one cute little girl saying “Hi” to him. The child-actor in the commercial was a red-headed kid with freckles and big ears; he later appeared on the TV show Picket Fences. (I’d look up his name, but I don’t care that much.)

So the other night I’m watching TV, and the latest Pizza Hut commercial comes on, with that same kid — now playing a Delivery Driver.

I guess this means that Wil Wheaton might get to someday play the Captain of the Enterprise-H.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A map of the Spanish Main, once on the world’s hotbeds of maritime piracy.

:: I don’t know when I’ll be able to see Pirates of the Caribbean, but I do love pirate-stuff. And I haven’t swiped anything from MeFi in a while, so here’s an incredibly nifty gallery of images pertaining to privateers. (Some of the images are a bit gruesome.)

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Courtesy Michael Lopez comes a report of boring playgrounds.

I don’t like “dumbing things down”, any more than the next person. And “dumbing down” is a problem. But the thing with the playgrounds is, I’m not convinced that today’s playgrounds are all that boring.

There is a wonderful playground a few minutes’ drive away from our house, on the site of a small nature park (whose grounds will soon be stopped being lovingly tended by AmeriCorps volunteers, unless….well, that’s another issue). It’s the type of thing the article bashes: no teeter-totters, no jungle-gym, no merry-go-round. There is a cluster of slides of differing heights (eight in all, I think) and climbing-apparati of different types (regular ladders, sloping and curving ladders, etc), along with two faux-rockwalls. The grounds are too heavily wooded to allow swings, but just about every park in the area has swings, and that particular lack is made up for by the nature trails that go down to the side of one of the local streams, where there are rocks a-plenty for throwing and skipping.

This playground is always busy: there are always at least five or six families there, on slow days, and on holidays the place is virtually packed. And the kids are all having a blast. With all of those slides and climbing doohickeys, there is little waiting involved — the kids just go onto the next thing, there is plenty of room for parents to wander around and watch, and so on. And best of all, the slides are made of plastic, so even in the hot summer sun they don’t reach tremendous temperatures the way the metal slides of my youth always did.

I don’t get the desire to romanticize big assemblages of metal pipes that rose from the un-padded asphalt; nor did I ever find teeter-totters particularly compelling. I mean, Bobby and Cindy Brady’s desire to set a world record aside, going up-and-down while watching the same person going down-and-up kind of loses a bit of cachet after a few minutes, didn’t it? I thought it did, anyway. Merry-go-rounds were fun, I admit. But quite frankly, I don’t think kids are really missing out on much if they’re not getting the experience of spinning on one of those things until sick.

Plus, I think people are misremembering things a bit. Scaling a metal teepee that’s twenty feet high? Come on. Twenty feet doesn’t sound like much, I know, but it’s higher than we think. That’s three Shaquille O’Neals, standing on each other’s shoulders. The house I grew up in wasn’t even twenty feet high, and I know nothing I ever climbed on a playground was higher than my house.

I think people are mistaking the reason for the good times they had on those deathtrap playgrounds. They remember the fun, the games with their friends, the good times — but then they assume that because the objects on which they played those games aren’t around anymore, that the kids of today are missing out somehow. Well, my daughter and I were at one of those new-fangled playgrounds today, and the sounds of kids laughing are still the same now as they were when I was getting hurt by falling off a lattice of Miss Scarlet’s murder weapons. Maybe what’s important is not if we find these playgrounds boring. Maybe what matters is if the kids find them boring. It’s anecdotal evidence, I know, but the fact of my experience is this: I’ve long since lost count of the number of times my daughter has complained, begged to stay and go down just one more big plastic slide, or even cried when I told her it was time to go home. I can only remember a handful of times when she asked to leave…and those were because she had to go to the bathroom.

The playgrounds are fine. Let the kids play on ’em. And let’s stop assuming that our own childhoods were, by default, happier.

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My baseball team is the Pittsburgh Pirates, the old and storied franchise that’s seen the likes of Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Dock Ellis (he of the LSD-enhanced no-hitter), Honus Wagner, the early years of Barry Bonds, Harvey Haddix’s twelve perfect innings only to lose the game in the 13th, Bill Mazeroski’s homer in the bottom of the 9th in Game Seven to win the series, and…oh, that’s right — a guy taking a bat to some eighteen-year-old kid dressed up as a giant bratwurst.

I wish I knew what to say….

(CORRECTION: Since this took place in Wisconsin, I assumed she was a bratwurst. Apparently, though, she was actually an Italian sausage. Reports that the big-ass chorizo was carrying a rifle, and thus avoided molestation, are unconfirmed.)

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