August 8, 2018

"This is the third year Louisiana crawfish have been seen in Berlin."

"City wildlife officer Derk Ehlert says when crawfish first appeared, the city released eels into the waterways, hoping they'd catch the crawfish and eat them. But then the next year, there were still 3,000 crawfish in the parks. This year there are 10 times as many and they seem to be spreading. At one point, hundreds of crawfish clambered out of the lake and ambled along the Tiergarten's shaded paths.... To the west of the Tiergarten, in the Spandau borough, Olaf Pelz cracked the shell of one of Hidde's red crawfish in his restaurant, called Fisch Frank... 'When we serve it here we make it with salad and bread and typical sauce,' he says. He puts dollops of mayonnaise and cocktail sauce on the plate, and tops the crawfish with a thin slice of lemon. Despite his efforts, customers are skeptical. Erika Klugert rises from her outdoor table to watch Pelz uncover the soft tail meat of the crawfish. 'This food requires too much work,' Klugert says."

From "For Berlin, Invasive Crustaceans Are A Tough Catch And A Tough Sell" (NPR).

I wanted to give this post a "crustaceans" tag, but I didn't want to create a new tag. So I started typing out the word in the place where I add my tags, and by the time I got to "crus-," there was only one tag the software was suggesting, and it wasn't "crustaceans," so that's it for the potential "crustaceans" tag.

I'm not creating a new tag, because I don't want to bother with adding it retroactively, searching for crustaceans in the 14-year archive. Sometimes I do create new tags and do that work. For example, I did it yesterday with Kathleen Turner. But that was a matter of doing a search for "Kathleen Turner."

"Crustaceans" would not be so easy. I'd have to look up which animals are crustaceans and search for them individually.

And I already have separate tags for some of them — lobsters (with 41 posts!) and crabs (with 17 posts!). But I don't have a "shrimp" tag. And I've mentioned shimp quite a few times.

Should I now create a "shrimp" tag and a "crawfish" tag? But today's post is only the second mention of crawfish in the history of the blog. The first was "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves" (from 2010). Excerpt:
In the end the story of Barack Obama will make perfect sense. It will all fit together. The lonely man — raised by wolves — swept up into our American psychosis.
“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”
What's weird is that I included that 2009 photo of myself that I also reused 3 days ago. It's funny how things cycle around in blogging. Leaving tags along the way can help tie things together, but some of the tagging just leads to weirdness. So, when I was starting to write "crustaceans," and there was only one suggestion left when I got to "crus-," can you imagine what it was? It was "husbands crushing their wives' aspirations"! As noted above, that tag had only one post. It was: "Anthony Weiner says he 'crushed the aspirations' of Huma Abedin."

That was just last September. What was I thinking? That it was funny to do that as a one-time tag or that the tag would cause me to notice this phenomenon and amass evidence of it? If the latter, it couldn't work unless I remembered the tag, which I didn't. Maybe now I'll remember it, and the aspiration-crushing husbands will be noticed and collected as they clamber out of the lake and amble along the shaded paths.

ADDED: On rereading this post, the one tag I'd like to create is "straw." Obama "can’t suck it up with a straw," there's the recent straw-related environmentalism, and I know I've blogged about not liking how people look sucking on straws.

37 comments:

Humperdink said...

'This food requires too much work,' Klugert says."

Why I never order crab legs. Not worth the effort.

Ralph L said...

Critter tag?

Dave Begley said...


“I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

Another reason to dislike Barack retroactively. How could he be so heartless? We must apply today’s morality to his ancient words.

Don’t bother with the new tag. Not optimal use of Ann’s time.

Quaestor said...

How about arthropods? Could be a very useful tag since it covers insects, arachnids, scorpions, centipedes, and a host of other less familiar critters.

Humperdink said...

“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” (Obama)

Not according to sycophant media:

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama's Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: "I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above - above the world, he's sort of God." (June 6, 2009)

Oso Negro said...

What the Berliners need to do is lay off the Muslims and import some Cajuns. They already have the beer to complement a crawfish boil. Once they try a crawfish etouffe, it will be difficult for them to go back to cheap kebabs.

Dave Begley said...

Isn’t it “pinch the heads and suck the tails?”

tim in vermont said...

Bill crushed Hillary’s aspirations. Of course that doesn’t really work because without Bill, her aspirations probably would have been to move on from ads on the city buses for her slip-and-fall legal practice to actual TV ads.

tim in vermont said...

”I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above - above the world, he's sort of God."

Kind of describes their view of Trump too. Except in the stead of lightening bolts, he throws down Tweets.

tim in vermont said...

We have invasive crawfish here too. The only answer for this kind of thing will be when everybody takes up Althouse’s dictum against travel. We all stay on the continents where we were born.

I can’t see eating the things, but then in a fine restaurant in London I once ordered and ate “whitebait” which it turns out was fried minnows and not bad. So I guess I will eat fish bait.

Ralph L said...

How well does the tag function work in the other direction?

Can you enter "shrimp" somewhere and see just the tags from all the posts with "shrimp" in them, or do you get all the posts and have to sort through their tags? I suspect they've stopped updating the functions on Blogger since the new social media took over.

You must have a few tags by now. Blogger should give out prizes.

Ann Althouse said...

"How about arthropods? Could be a very useful tag since it covers insects, arachnids, scorpions, centipedes, and a host of other less familiar critters."

Because I already have an arachnids tag. I don't like too many tags within tags. I like tags that will be amusing or valuable to click on. So a tag like "animals" is really too large to work. It's better to have specific animals, and really cool when something like, say, "foxes," collects a good number of posts.

Ann Althouse said...

I like that I have lobsters, crabs, insects, and arachnids. And I don't know why I began with arachnids, but it's caused me never to add spiders. See my thinking there?

Danno said...

Blogger tim in vermont said...I can’t see eating the things, but then in a fine restaurant in London I once ordered and ate “whitebait” which it turns out was fried minnows and not bad. So I guess I will eat fish bait.

Wow. Should we call you Chumly or the guy with baited breath?

Phil 314 said...

If you don’t have a crawfish tag how did you find the only other time you mentioned crawfish?

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

"I can’t see eating the things, but then in a fine restaurant in London I once ordered and ate “whitebait” which it turns out was fried minnows and not bad."

Squirrel is on the menus of London restaurants. The UK is now plagued by gray North American squirrels. The grays are pushing the much beloved red squirrels out of their native habitat and threatening to make the reds extinct. The British government has recognized the threat of 4 legged, if not 2 legged invaders and has encouraged people to trap and eat the grays. Fancy chefs are coming up with squirrel recipes which are, presumably, more sophisticated than Grannie Champlett's. I like venison, but tree rats would be a hard sell with me.

Ann Althouse said...

"If you don’t have a crawfish tag how did you find the only other time you mentioned crawfish?"

I used the search box. Upper left corner of the blog.

It's often useful even when there is a tag, because what if you're not looking at a post with the tag?

Fernandinande said...

I recently made the unpleasant discovery that a "Rock Lobster" is a crayfish rather than a type of big scary lobster, and that John Lennon, whose post-Beatles music career had been on hiatus for nearly five years while he helped raise his son Sean, was prompted to record again after hearing "Rock Lobster".

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

"...there are crawfish on the streets of Berlin..."

--from Wim Wender's "Claws of Desire"

MadisonMan said...

It's very interesting when you write down your thought process.

I wonder what current tag was last used the longest time ago. Tags must age out, I suppose.

Ralph L said...

MM, don't let daylight in on magic, or sausage making.

Raphael OrdoƱez said...

The crabs tag once got used for horseshoe crabs. I remember that because of a 2012 Althouse post about horseshoe crabs that inspired me to write a story about horseshoe crab sex. (Well, there were other influences, too, like Rachel Carson and my Puerto Rican grandmother.) Horseshoe crabs aren't true crabs, or even crustaceans, but why should tags reflect modern taxonomy? "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me."

Seeing Red said...

The UK is now plagued by gray North American squirrels.

They should send them to Russia. Russia wanted to repopulate. They were all eaten.

Seeing Red said...

Send them to our bases. Our troops would love having crawfish for dinner.

JAORE said...

Call out the Cajun Army.

Crawdaddies? Them's eatin' words.

Full disclosure, our youngest could clear a pond or two worth at a single sitting.

Stephen Taylor said...

Crawfish. One of God's foods. A pound of frozen crawfish from Ville Platte, Louisiana is fetching $12.99 a pound in Austin as of this morning. It's the good stuff. There's Chinese crawfish, but they're grey, not authenticly red, and probably full of chemicals, so I avoid those. The Germans have been given a great gift, and they don't even know it.

Yancey Ward said...

The crawfish are fleeing their homeland.

PM said...

Introducing a foreign species to handle a local problem reminds me of the old gag.
"What's a redneck's last words?"
"Watch this."

Tyrone Slothrop said...

Crawdads iss nix. I've got your crustacean attack right here, starring The Professor.

gahrie said...

Somebody needs to teach them how to do a decent crawfish boil.

Mr. Fabulous said...

(World Famous Lurker says....)

Respectfully, I would have thought that "Shellfish" would work well in place of "Crustaceans" as a tag. Reminds me of a crossword clue.

DavidD said...

“...slip-and-fall legal practice....”

Oh. You meant the clients.

kwenzel said...

My schnapsidee is that a schlammwanze tag is sorely needed (indicating both species *and* region!).

chuck said...

From "The Struggle for Existence", G.F. Gause


(11) Another example of competition is the replacing of one species of crayfish
by another in certain waters of Middle Russia. Some observations on this
were made by Kessler ('75) and recently by Birstein and Vinogradov ('34).
Two species of cray-fish inhabit the waters of European Russia: the broadlegged
(Potamobius astacus L.) and long-legged (Potamobius leptodactylus
Esch.). The broad-legged cray-fish is distributed in the western part, and the
long-legged in the south-eastern one, but the areas of their distribution largely
overlap one another. It is observed that the long-legged cray-fish displaces the
broad-legged one and spreads gradually more and more to the west. It has
been possible to establish this replacement with particular distinctness in
White Russia (in the western part of U. S. S. R.). The cray-fish are found there
in lakes isolated from each other, and most of the lakes are inhabited only by
the broad-legged cray-fish. In some cases long-legged cray-fish were put into
such lakes from other waters. As a result the broad-legged cray-fish began to
decrease, and finally disappeared completely leaving the lake populated
exclusively by the long-legged species. The following examples can be given.
(I) Black lake (White Russia) was populated only by the broad-legged crayfish.
In 1906, 500 specimens of long-legged cray-fish were introduced, and
now (1930) only this species remains. (II) Forest lake (same region). Up to
1920 there were no long-legged cray-fish there. Later on they were
introduced, and at present (1930) there is a considerable number of this
species. The causes why one species of cray-fish is replaced by another have
scarcely been studied.

n.n said...
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n.n said...
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n.n said...

Illegal aliens, and, according to NPR, an invasive specie. Berlin needs to improve border control and vetting processes to protect its native populations.