Don't call mlis a whale, that's so cruel!

We're blaming mlis for this? Good to know.

Last week I was walking to the store and a group of college boys were sitting in their driveway drinking. No big deal. But one of them was aiming a BB gun across the street. I looked over to see what he was pointing it at, and it was a scrub jay. (It may or may not be relevant to note that I've tamed my own backyard scrub jay to take peanuts from my hand.)

Anyway, I stopped and turned to the guy and said, "You're not going to shoot that bird, are you?"

He blushed and put the gun down, shook his head No. One of his friends pointed up into a tree and said "But it just took that other bird's egg!"

I said, "So? That's what they do. They're territorial. That doesn't mean you should kill it."

"Aw, we weren't going to kill it," the kid said.

"So you were just going to maim it a little?" I asked him. "You think that's better? Look, the bird was just being a bird. What are you being?"

And I walked off.

File under College Boys Are Stupid.

Not blaming mlis; it's just that we've recently been discussing the difficulty of showing provenance for sperm whale teeth. Due to clowns like this.

I've mentioned this before, but a few years ago a few colleagues and I got to see a sperm whale skeleton that's now in a whaling museum as it was being dried for exhibit (this guy). It was a few years old when we saw it, resting in pieces on cardboard in an outbuilding, and it was still oozing oil daily. And man, it smelled like a skunk. It had beached itself and died, and they got permission to preserve its bones as an educational display. The staff let us touch some spermaceti, which was the most frictionless sensation imaginable.

Miko, that's so cool! And kind of gross!

pup, good on you!

Let he has not tried to hammer the teeth off a beached whale cast the first stone.

There. I said my piece.

Actually, I had to look up mlis because all I could think of was "Master's Degree in Library and Information Science."

I think that's how he got his name.

mudpuppie's my hero.