211-mile Ambler Road Project Through Gates of the Arctic National Park Gets Approval

Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies

Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project is a reversal for the federal government. Only last year, the Bureau of Land Management released its Record of Decision selecting “No Action” on Ambler Road, in cooperation with Alaska tribal councils, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and many others.

In the document, the impact on fish habitat, water and air quality, disruption of groundwater flow, hazardous materials from spills, and the negative impact on the Western Arctic caribou herd, which has been steadily declining since 2017, were all cited as reasons for denial. The Record of Decision also stated that the Ambler Road Project would forever alter the culture and traditional practices of Alaska Native communities, who have lived and thrived in the region for centuries.

by Gavin Feek, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

[ed. I used to permit/mitigate mine development in Alaska. Imagine what a 211-mile gravel road, 30+ years of year-round maintenance, and relentless heavy truck/support traffic will do to the area, its wildlife and nearby native communities (not to mention blasting a massive mining crater, constructing sprawling support facilities, airstrip(s), and discharging millions of gallons of wastewater (from somewhere, to... somewhere).]

Sony Goes for Peanuts

It wasn’t so long ago that purchases of American institutions by Japanese companies sparked outrage in the United States. When Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center in 1989, a local auto dealership ran a TV spot that invited Americans to “imagine a few years from now. It’s December, and the whole family’s going to see the big Christmas tree at Hirohito Center… Enough already.” Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures that same year caused such unease that chairman Akio Morita felt the need to declare “this is not a Japanese invasion.” A Newsweek poll of the era revealed that 54% of Americans saw Japan as a bigger threat to America than the Soviet Union. Many exploited this fear of Japan for their own ends. Politicians grandstanded by smashing Japanese products and demanding investigations into purchases. Predictably, Donald Trump’s first public foray into politics was a jeremiad against Japan in a 1989 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Contrast this to yesterday, when Sony announced that it had paid nearly half a billion dollars for another American icon: Peanuts Holding LLC, the company that administers the rights to the Peanuts franchise. Talk about A Charlie Brown Christmas for shareholders! The reaction to this Japanese acquisition of a cultural institution? Crickets. This speaks to how dramatically the relationship between the US and Japan has changed. It also speaks to how dramatically Peanuts changed, how Peanuts changed Japan, and how that in turn changed all of us. But perhaps most of all, it illustrates (pun intended) how stories need products, and products need stories.

There are countless stories out there, and countless products. But crossing these streams — giving stories products in the form of merchandise, or products stories to make them more than just commodities, can supercharge both. It can create international empires. Peanuts is a perfect case in point.

When Charles Shultz’ Peanuts debuted in October of 1950, it was utterly unlike any cartoon Americans had seen in the funny pages. The very first strip’s punchline involved an adorable tyke declaring his hatred for Charlie Brown. Li’l Abner creator Al Capp described the cast as “good mean little bastards eager to hurt each other.” Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame recalled being “excited by the casual cruelty and offhand humiliations at the heart of the strip.” To Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury, it “vibrated with fifties alienation.”

A hint of darkness made Peanuts stick out in a crowded comics page. But it’s hard to square these comments with the Happiness Is a Warm Puppy-era Peanuts I remember from my childhood. By that time Schultz had sanded the rough edges off those “little bastards,” distilling them into cute and lovable archetypes. More to the point, he de-centered the kids to focus on Snoopy, who had morphed from his origins as a four-legged canine into a bipedal, anthropomorphic creature with a bulbous head and a penchant for tap-dancing and flying biplanes.

The vibe shift seems to date to 1966, when the animated It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown devoted roughly a quarter of its screen time to Snoopy’s solo flights of fancy. Schultz was already lauded for his short-form social satire: his characters had graced the cover of Time the year before. But he seems to have grasped that the way to riches would be only found by looking at the brighter side of life.

This new Peanuts, less mean, less casually cruel, less alienated, was arguably also less interesting. But there was no question that it was way, way more marketable. You might have identified with one or another of the human characters, with their all too human foibles, but anthropomorphic Snoopy was someone anyone and everyone could inhabit. Kids in particular. You didn’t even have to be American to get him.

This later, kinder, gentler incarnation of Peanuts, and Snoopy in particular, would charm Japanese audiences, thanks to the efforts of a serial entrepreneur named Shintaro Tsuji. He was a would-be poet turned wartime chemist, then a postwar black-market bootlegger of moonshine, and an inveterate hatcher of business schemes ranging from silks to produce to kitchenware. You are undoubtedly familiar with the most successful of his ventures. It is called Sanrio — the home of Hello Kitty.

Tsuji, long interested in American trends, played a key role in importing many of them to Japan. He forged a relationship with Hallmark to translate their greeting cards, and negotiated with Mattel for the rights to Barbie. He acquired the license to Peanuts in 1968, when his company, then known as the Yamanashi Silk Center, was at a low. Snoopy-branded merchandise proved so popular that it put his struggling company back in the black within a year. Snoopy wasn’t the first cute animal to hit big in Japan; Tsuji himself had scored a big hit in the mid-sixties with merchandise featuring Mii-tan, a cute cat designed by the artist Ado Mizumori. But Snoopy’s runaway success seems to have sparked an epiphany in Tsuji.

As he later put it, Japan was “a world in which ‘making money’ meant ‘making things.’ I desperately wanted to leapfrog the ‘things’—the ‘hardware’—and make a business out of the intellectual property—the ‘software.’ I suspect everyone around me thought I was nuts.”

He was nuts. Merchandising characters from hit stories was common sense, then as now. Many Japanese companies did that sort of thing. Creating hit characters without stories was fiendishly difficult, bordering on impossible. Stories breathe life into characters, bestowing them with an authenticity that standalone designs simply do not possess (or need to earn in other ways). Yet Tsuji would not be deterred. In 1971, he launched an in-house art department, staffing it with young women straight out of art school. In the wake of Peanuts’ continuing success, he gave the team a singular directive: “Draw cats and bears. If a dog hit this big, one of those two is sure to follow.”

Two years later, he renamed the Yamanashi Silk Center “Sanrio.” (There’s a whole story about how that came to be, which you can read in my book, if you’re so inclined.) The year after that, in 1974, one of Sanrio’s designers struck gold, in the form of an anthropomorphic cat with a bulbous head and a penchant for hugging: Hello Kitty. Soon, Kitty products were a full-blown fiiba (fever) in Japan. And this time, Tsuji didn’t have to split the proceeds with anyone, because Sanrio owned the character outright. Schultz needed decades of narrative to make stars of Peanuts’ menagerie of characters. Tsuji upended this process by making characters stars without any story at all.

Sanrio famously insists that Hello Kitty isn’t really a cat; she’s a little girl who happens to look like a cat. I take no particular stance on this globally divisive issue. But I think you can make the case that she wouldn’t exist at all, if it hadn’t been for the trail Schultz blazed with Peanuts, shifting away from social satire to make an anthropomorphic dog the star of the show. Tsuji’s genius was realizing that you could make a star without a show — provided you had the ability to print it on countless school supplies, kitchenware, and accessories. That was the trick up his sleeve. The medium is the message, as they say. In essence, Kitty products, ubiquitous to the point of absurdity, became her story.

by Matt Alt, Pure Invention |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Super Galapagos (PI):]

***

Once the West feared Japan’s supposed technological superiority. Then came the schadenfreude over Japan’s supposed fall. Now a new generation is projecting upon the country an almost desperate longing for comfort. And is it any wonder? The meme centers on companies producing products that make the lives of consumers easier. That must feel like a dreamy fantasy to young folks who’ve only known life in an attention economy, where corporations are the consumers and they’re the products.

To them, Japan isn’t in the past or the future. It’s a very real place — a place where things haven’t gone haywire. This is Japan as a kind of Galapagos, but not in a pejorative sense. Rather, it’s a superlative, asking, a little plaintively: Why can’t we have nice things like this in our country?...

I agree that Japan is a kind of Galapagos, in the sense that it can be oblivious to global trends. But I disagree that this is a weakness. The reason being that nearly everything the planet loves from Japan was made for by Japanese, for Japanese in the first place.

Looking back, this has always been the case. Whether the woodblock prints that wowed the world in the 19th century, or the Walkmans and Nintendo Entertainment Systems that were must-haves in the Eighties, or the Pokémania that seized the planet at the turn of the Millenium, or the life-changing cleaning magic of the 2010s, or the anime blockbusters Japan keeps unleashing in the 2020s – they hit us in the feels, so we assumed that they were made just for us. But they weren’t.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Illustrations: Felicia Bond

[ed. For future reference. Wish I'd known about this book (and series) when my grandaughter was a bit younger, but maybe it's not too late (still seven, but she's growing up fast).]

Floreat Britannia (in the Era of AI)

Reflections on 2025: The Compute Theory of Everything, grading the homework of a minor deity, and the acoustic preferences of Atlantic salmon.

***

May Britain flourish. I mean this unironically.

To say this in late 2025, however, is to mark oneself out as a dangerous contrarian, or perhaps just someone whose internet service provider has been down since the Platinum Jubilee. I say this with the stubborn affection of a developer trying to run Doom on a smart fridge: the hardware is eccentric, the display is glitchy, but deep down, I believe the architecture is solid. (...)

Britain is not currently flourishing. It is a country that has suffered catastrophic forgetting of its “Industrial Strategy” while overfitting deeply on “Artisanal Sourdough” and “Risk Assessment.” I will now establish this through the standard literary method of listing increasingly dispiriting statistics until the reader either agrees or leaves.

Real wages grew by 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007. Since 2007 they have grown by approximately nothing, representing the longest wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, though in fairness to the current era, Napoleon was eventually defeated and exiled to St Helena, whereas the causes of British wage stagnation remain at large and are frequently invited to speak on panels. (...)

Our industrial electricity prices are the highest in Europe. Hinkley Point C will cost £46 billion, making it the most expensive power station ever built, with a price tag suggesting that the reactor core is being hand-carved by Jony Ive. We’re SotA on cost. South Korea builds equivalent reactors for one-quarter the cost. The Fingleton Report analyses why, citing capital structures and safety frameworks across 162 pages of sober text. But the detail that reached my heart this year, concerns the fish.

Hinkley’s fish protection measures will cost approximately £700 million. This includes an acoustic fish deterrent system referred to, apparently without irony, as the “fish disco”. Based on the developer’s own modelling, this nightclub for aquatic life is expected to save 0.083 Atlantic salmon per year. At £700 million amortised over the system’s life, this values a single salmon at roughly £140 million. This is approximately 700 times the fish’s weight in cocaine.

The stagnation of British growth is a sunk cost. We cannot unstagnate the 2010s. But what I want, as a citizen, is a system going forward where the primary constraint on energy is not the acoustic preferences of 0.083 salmon.

by Samuel Albanie, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Pretty funny 2025 summary. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Britain, its economy, or AI "compute" issues at cocktail parties, but this little factoid caught my attention.]

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The Day the Dinosaurs Died

A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark."

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.

Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species.

On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call...

DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants.

Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills. (...)

Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space. In 2012, while looking for a new pond deposit, he heard that a private collector had stumbled upon an unusual site on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The collector felt that the site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. In July, 2012, the collector showed DePalma the site and told him that he was welcome to it. (...)

The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Micro­tektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain micro­tektites by the million.

As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.

by Douglas Preston, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Richard Barnes

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Cheryl Medow (American, b. 1944), Secretarybirds, 2020
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Mark Yoshizumi, "MYNA" and “MYNA II”

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An Incredible Privilege and a Daunting Task

Darkness had fallen and the tide was rolling in, lapping at the heels of the team of people who were quickly disassembling the big whale, piece by piece, bone by bone.

The young humpback, 26 feet long and 20,000 pounds in all (roughly the size of a small school bus), had become entangled in crabbing gear and had beached itself along the central Oregon coast over the weekend. After two days of efforts to save the whale failed, it was euthanized. After that, it was up to the Siletz tribe to take the whale carcass apart.

Lisa Norton, who works as the chief administrative officer for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and who is also an experienced elk hunter, helped organize the harvest and has been speaking on behalf of the team who worked for nearly 12 hours on the beach Tuesday.

This was the first time in generations that the Siletz tribe has harvested a whale, she said. Nobody in the tribe had ever done it before, and nobody could remember the last time it happened. Ancestors of some of the 30 bands that make up the tribe were prolific whalers, but those cultural practices had long been suppressed by the U.S. government. The Siletz tribe has only recently regained its fishing and hunting rights (the tribe still needed a special permit to harvest the humpback).

“We recognized the importance of what could be with this,” Norton said. “I prefer to think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we can learn from.”

It was also an enormous undertaking.

“Exhausting would be an understatement,” she said.

The young humpback whale came ashore north of Yachats on Saturday afternoon. Over the next 48 hours, people flocked to the beach to help the still-living whale, despite urges from the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network not to do so. Online, thousands watched a livestream of the event, pouring out their sympathies for the animal in Facebook comments.

Meanwhile, 50 miles up the coast, Siletz tribal members were gathered at the Chinook Winds Casino Resort for the tribe’s annual Restoration Powwow, which celebrates the restoration of the tribe’s federal recognition in 1977. Word about the whale spread around the powwow, where some prayed and danced for the whale, Norton said.

On Monday, when it was clear the humpback would not survive and would ultimately need to be euthanized, Oregon State Police (who had previously worked with Siletz hunters) reached out to the tribe about the possibility of harvesting the animal. The tribe rushed to secure the proper permits and assembled a team of hunters to take apart the whale.

“What an incredible privilege and a daunting task,” Norton said. “The folks that stood up and said ‘We could do this’ were very brave. And what they did was a very important piece to the next chapter of this whale.” (...)

Before anyone cut into the animal, they smudged and prayed over its body. They honored the animal for its sacrifice. They offered thanks to the bounty it provided. They asked Creator to guide their hands.

“That is what you do,” Norton said. “As experienced hunters we always give thanks to what has been provided.”

Some members of the team had stayed up late Monday night, researching the bone structure of humpback whales, which parts should be taken, how to cut into the animal. Once on the beach, they also relied on their own instinct as hunters. But the whale was very different from an elk, Norton said, and not just because it was 30 times as big.

The team already knew that unlike the tribe’s ancestors, they wouldn’t harvest any meat from the whale. Since the animal had been chemically sedated and euthanized, everyone was concerned the meat wouldn’t be safe for human consumption. But there was still plenty to harvest. The team took all the whale’s blubber, thousands of pounds of it, as well as virtually all its bones. They also separated the head so they could later harvest the baleen, the keratin structure that helps the whale filter feed in the ocean.

As they worked into the night, the tribe got a helping hand from Tru-North Construction, local contractors who were on site with heavy equipment. The contractors used an excavator to dig a trench for the whale meat and organs that wouldn’t be used and helped maneuver the animal around for the team of harvesters. The company also provided a flatbed truck so tribal members wouldn’t have to transport the blubber and bones in their own cars — a godsend, Norton said. (...)

When the sun rose over the beach the next morning, the spot where people had spent days trying to save the dying whale was now a mess of meat and skin — food for the foragers that would clean it all up.

To some, it may seem like a gruesome end to a tragic story, Norton said, but for the tribe it was a heartfelt experience that honored the life so many had tried to save.

“As we were processing and collecting these materials, folks were telling us the stories of how strong this whale was,” Norton said. “That story will stay with each of those pieces that are then put back out in the world.”

The tribe has not yet decided what, exactly, they’re going to do with the animal parts. They plan to render the blubber down to oil, but they’re first going to check to make sure it isn’t toxic. Whale bones have historically been used to make tools or art, which are possibilities, Norton said, and baleen can be used to decorate regalia. One elder told her that a large whale vertebra makes a nice stool, but she said it probably wouldn’t go with her home décor.

“We anticipate that this process is going to continue for a year or two until it’s done,” Norton said.

by Jamie Hale, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Graves via

[ed. Fortunately this whale was relatively fresh - old bloated ones can be barf-inducing. I can only imagine the frantic discussions and conflicted feelings many tribal members felt when suddenly given this opportunity and told ' have at it'. The tension between ancestral obligations and long forgotten skills, between 'hunters' and googlers, logistics. Some might have never seen a whale before. Panic at the casino!]

I Taught an Octopus to Play Piano in 6 Months

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[ed. It's been said that if there are intelligent aliens on earth, octopuses are probably the best candidates. Too bad they're so tasty.]

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[ed. Bluefin trevally (Caranx melampygus) aka 'papio'. A reel sizzling, nerve shredding bullet.]

Taylor Price

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Everything That’s Wrong About Raccoons

Too many people want you to dismiss a raccoon’s deal of “Oh they’re mischievous cat-dogs with friendly washed hands and a jewel-thief face” when it’s really an ALL-HANDS NO-FEET TRASH-CAT WITH A DOG’S STOMACH AND A POSSUM’S HEART.

It can put itself up in trees but it waddles on the ground, I can’t be in trustment of a beast that clambers and waddles both; either be graceful and lithe all of times, or be clumsy and relatable on the ground. Seals can barely pull off “limber in the water, silly on a rock” and raccoons, you are not seals, you do not have their wise old laugh-faces, you just seem creepy and duplicitous.

Once when my dog died a passel of raccoons showed up in the backyard as if to say “Now that he’s gone, we own the night,” and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it disrespectful to 1) me personally and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t disrespect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.

YOU SCRUBBLEMENT UP YOUR WITCH HANDS AND I DON’T TRUST IT, THAT IS A HUMAN ATTRIBUTE AND I WANT YOU TO LEAVE THAT TO US, STOP BEFORE-WASHING AND RUBBLE-SCRITCHING YOUR FUR-FINGERS, YOU MASHED-DOWN SMALLBEAR

They’re a dense badger lie

THEY CAN POINT THEIR FEET BACKWARDS TO CLIMB DOWN TREES, THEY CAN SWIM, THEY CAN SWEAT LIKE A YOU OR ME, A PERSON OR PANT LIKE A DOG TO COOL DOWN AS THEY CHOOSE, THEY IDLY AND INSOLENTLY SLIDE BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE HUMAN WORLD AND IF THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU TAUGHT ME NOTHING ELSE IT’S THAT THAT IS FUCKED UPWARDLY

I don’t like the word “chittering” and that is the only sound a raccoon makes

MAYBE THEY ARE AN ASSEMBLAGE OF VERY CONDENSED SQUIRRELS THAT POWERED UP INTO A MEDIUM-SIZED BEASTIE AND THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE, IF SQUIRRELS HAD DEVELOPED POWER-RANGER-LIKE ABILITIES

I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children

A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one

STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU RIVER-DABBLER

by Mallory Ortberg, Toast |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Still traveling so here's a repost of a perennial favorite. See also: So You've Decided to Drink More Water]

Clam Control

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David Littschwager, Seawater sample
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Monsters From the Deep

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA ~ Rebecca R. Helm

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"From the darkness of the deep, the mother rose slowly, her great body pulsing with effort, while the calf clung close to her side. The faint shimmer of the surface light caught on something twisting in her jaws—long pale arms, still trembling, a giant calamari dragged from the black abyss.

The calf pressed its head against the mother’s flank, curious, its small eye turning toward the strange, sprawling catch. Around them, the other whales gathered, a circle of giants, each click and creak of their voices carrying through the water like an ancient council.

The mother released a cloud of ink the squid had left behind, now dissipating in ghostly ribbons. She let the prey dangle for a moment before tearing a piece free with a practiced shake of her head. The calf tried to imitate, nudging the slack arms of the squid, but only managed to tangle its mouth in the trailing suckers. The adults rumbled with what could only be described as laughter.

High above, a shaft of sunlight pierced the water, illuminating the drifting arms of the squid like banners in the deep. The feast had begun, but it was also a lesson—the calf’s first glimpse of the abyss’s hidden monsters, and of the power its mother carried up from the dark world below."

via: here and here