"Brooker says it reminds him of the orcas who have recently been spotted wearing salmon on their heads like a hat — a behaviour last reported in the '70s."

From "Chimps are sticking grass and sticks in their butts, seemingly as a fashion trend/The new phenomenon appears to be a fresh spin on an old fad of wearing grass in the ear" (CBC).

ADDED: This story made me ask ChatGPT "What is the origin and history of the phrase 'Your ass is grass'?" It couldn't pinpoint the origin, but this part of the answer was amusingly AI:

🔹 Linguistic Features:

• Ass: A longstanding vulgar slang term for a person, especially in a demeaning or aggressive context.

• Grass: Used metaphorically here as something easily cut down, disposable, or unresisting.

"Researchers are unsure... but theories include that it is a playful manifestation of the mammals’ curiosity, a social fad or..."

"... the intentional targeting of what they perceive as competitors for their favourite prey, the local bluefin tuna."

From "Yacht sinks after latest incident involving orcas in strait of Gibraltar/Vessel measuring 15 metres in length sank after encounter with the animals, Spain’s maritime rescue service reports" (The Guardian). 

Also: "Experts believe them to involve a subpopulation of about 15 individuals given the designation 'Gladis.'"

From last year in The Guardian: "The orca uprising: whales are ramming boats – but are they inspired by revenge, grief or memory?" That's a much more interesting article....

"I turned into a dolphin/I rang Maud, told her the latest...."

Book’s out now. Link in bio. This sort of thing. 🐬 pic.twitter.com/JrB0PduW7F

— Tim Key (@timkeyperson) November 6, 2023

I don't think you can buy "Chapters" in the U.S. yet, but you can read just about everything at Instagram, here, including this:

"The female orca, whom scientists named White Gladis, appears to have taught the aggressive behavior to other adult orcas, whose children have begun imitating the behavior...."

"In most of the interactions, the orcas strike the rudder or hull, the underbody, of the boat.... Orcas are known to be extremely intelligent and capable of teaching one another certain behaviors, including actions that could be interpreted as violent....."

 
From "Revenge of the orcas? Killer whales have sunk 3 boats in unusual attacks" (WaPo).

This post gets the "dolphin" tag, not the "whale" tag.

"I want to write a story about whale research"/"That is boring"/"What if I insinuate misogyny in the headline?"/"What does that have to do with the research? And how would you manage that?"/"Oh... I have a plan."

A conversation between the reporter and the editor is imagined by the most-liked commenter on the WaPo article, "Young women are criticized for this vocal tic — but it helps whales survive/A new study in the journal Science finds many of the marine mammals vocalize in a strikingly similar way to humans."

The "tic" is vocal fry, AKA "creaky voice."

The whales and dolphins are engaging in echolocation. I'd listen with delight to young women doing vocal fry if I thought it was helping them find their way in the darkness. Well, but... be creative: "the darkness" is a metaphor. It can symbolize the cruel and ignorant world. Who is to say that women are not navigating through the use of those wacky throat vibrations as they speak? They sound more masculine — and more annoying too. Clear the path, they're coming through!

Anthropomorphism — "a fast route to empathy" is rejected by many scientists but maybe it's "exactly the right response."

Writes Susan Casey —  author  of “Voices in the Ocean: A Journey Into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins” — "The Orca, Her Dead Calf and Us."

... Tahlequah, also known as J35, a 20-year-old female orca... gave birth to a female calf, who lived for just 30 minutes... Tahlequah kept the body at the surface, supporting it on her head or holding it in her mouth... [for] 10 days and counting, on what social media observers and orca researchers call a “tour of grief.” ....

While we can never hope to fully grasp another species’ experiences, orca behavior and neuroanatomy point to a complex inner life.... So orcas feel emotions, however exotically, which in turn strikes an emotional chord in us.....

Heartbreak for Tahlequah is an appropriate starting point. In a way, it’s the easy part. What’s harder is turning our shared sense of grief for this mother into an impetus to solve the problems plaguing the dwindling southern resident orca population....

Is Casey saying that anthropomorphism is "right" because  it's useful in winning support for doing something that needs to be done for reasons disconnected from the animal's resemblance to a human being? If anthropomorphism is a substituted false reason that works in one case, what will you do about other things that need to be done that do not happen to make sentimental humans think that animal is like me?

What if another orca was so smart that it made noises that translate to "I'll never let go, I promise"...



... and then let the baby drop down into the depths of the waters because it understood that never letting go means never letting go of the memory of the life that no longer exists? That more human Tahlequah would not create a heart-tugging visual of its similarity to humans. The orca must showboat its resemblance to us — to our idea of who we are — to get the anthropomorphism. It's so inaccurate. And yet, ironically, it's this absurd inaccuracy that make us human.

Speaking of inaccuracy, an orca is not a whale. It's a dolphin. I wonder if the author of a book about the "Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins" is troubled that at one point the phrase "These whales" is substituted for "orcas." I presume the editor is to blame, and my heart goes out to Susan Casey... but my heart will go on.

ADDED: The oldest meaning of "anthropomorphism" is imagining God with human characteristics. The OED gives an example from 1668: "To say a man is the express image of the Person of God the Father, is to depress the glory of God by Anthropomorphism." Using the word to mean seeing human characteristics in animals only goes back to the mid-19th century.

"In Jiangxi and some other parts of China, people buy their coffins and store them in their homes."

"To meet a target of having all dead be cremated starting Sept. 1, officials in some rural parts of Jiangxi confiscated and destroyed coffins that many older people had long saved to buy. Videos posted on social media showed the police raiding houses, excavators crushing piles of empty coffins and workers dismantling elaborate tombs. Such methods shocked many in China and were criticized in national media outlets. 'To crudely implement a 100 percent cremation rate, these methods are inhuman, unlawful and should stop immediately,' The Procuratorate Daily, a state-run legal newspaper, said on Tuesday.... Four years ago, when one city in neighboring Anhui Province began seizing coffins, six older people killed themselves...."

From "Thousands of Confiscated Coffins and an Exhumed Corpse Stoke Fury in China" (NYT).

ADDED: Based on the comments, I think many people are experiencing this story as funny. Is it because China is so far away? Here are these people who have cared so much about burial that they've sacrificed to be able to afford the kind of coffin that meets needs that they must feel very strongly. Now, this valuable property is confiscated and destroyed, and they are also told that their dead bodies cannot be buried at all, but must be disposed of by a method that is completely different from what they have cared so much about and found so meaningful. Maybe you think that human beings are ridiculous to give any mind to what happens to corpses, but have you noticed that your fellow Americans have been dwelling on the story of an orca that has been carrying its dead baby around for days?

What the new editor of Vanity Fair — Radhika Jones — wore to her first meeting with staff.

A navy blue dress that Women's Wear Daily described as "strewn with zippers" and tights "covered with illustrated, cartoon foxes."

WWD retreats into quoting Anna Wintour (who is not only the editor of Vogue editor but also the artistic Director of Condé Nast of which Vanity Fair is a part). Wintour only made a gentle gibe, "I’m not sure if I should include a new pair of tights in her welcome basket."

I'm more interested in interpreting the metaphors. What can you say about a navy blue dress strewn with zippers? It says women have the power now. The zipper's strongest association is with the fly on a man's pants. We might say a man with uncontrolled sexual compulsions has a "zipper problem," as in "Jackie Collins Knew Bill Clinton Had A ‘Zipper Problem’" (HuffPo, 2011)("I remember, before Clinton was president, I was sitting at a dinner in Beverly Hills and one of his aides was there and told me that he was definitely going to be president, except for one problem: the zipper problem.... They knew way before he was elected!").

And then a navy blue dress... I think of Monica Lewinsky.



That dress was strewn with Bill Clinton's genetic material.

Therefore I interpret Radhika Jones's dress as wry political commentary: the end of the political subjugation of women, the end of silencing — zip your lip, not mine — and a new era of female domination.

Now, let's consider the item of clothing that was even more attention-getting and metaphor-pushing than a blue dress strewn with zippers: tights covered in foxes.

What do foxes mean? When the political website FiveThirtyEight chose a fox as its corporate logo, Nate Silver quoted the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

So there were many zippers on the dress and many foxes on the tights, which is a message of multiplicity already. But each of the many foxes is also a symbol of knowing many things.

There is, of course, the idea of women as "foxes," which was already laughably sexist when Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin played Festrunk Brothers in 1978 (and Garrett Morris had to explain that you can't talk about American women like that):



I'd say the foxes on Radhika Jones's tights represent a reclaiming of an old diminishment, amplified and multiplied, and complicated by zippers. Foxes run around, finding out about everything, uncovering what is hidden, and zippers enclose while suggesting a sudden, perhaps shocking disclosure. That's all very apt as a message about journalism, and it's an exciting way to say that a woman is now in charge.

ADDED: Also consider that the top-rated meaning for "zipper" at Urban Dictionary is: "A death trap for your dick."

And I created a "zippers" tag and went back and applied it to old posts. I was amused by how many times over the years I've talked about the Brian Regan comedy bit about Zipper, the bad dolphin (in contrast to Flipper) — "Zipper's surly. He is uncaring."

Meade, reading this post, said his first association with zipper was the "zipless fuck" (in Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"). I had to do some additional retroactive tagging, because I'd only searched for "zipper." Searching for "zipless," I found places where I'd talked about Erica Jong's idea, including one in the context Trump's "Access Hollywood" remarks, from October 8, 2016 (the day after the sudden, shocking disclosure of the tape):

[I]f you watch the whole video, you see him winning with another woman, Arianne Zucker, the one who, in Trump's words, is "hot as shit, in the purple." Zucker is the one who inspired him to say "I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

And in fact, you see the female version of that power trip: The woman plays on the man's sexual interest. Grab them by the crotch. Zucker looks entirely pleased with herself, demands to walk in the center and grabs the arms of both men. If that is what is expected and that is the norm in your workplace, how can you be the cold one who keeps her sexuality to herself?

I invite you to contemplate why this got me thinking about Erica Jong's concept of the "zipless fuck":

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one. 

"It took me three or four times to understand what was happening, that the birds would dive after they heard the dolphins."

"After that, I knew what to expect and could photograph the birds as they dove.... With remarkable eyesight, the gannets follow the dolphins before diving in a free fall from a hundred feet high, piercing the surface of the water headfirst at a speed of 50 miles an hour. They dive as deep as 30 feet to get their fill of sardines before returning to the surface. This type of sardine is the best to photograph because, when confronted by predators, they don’t move. Their instinct is to swim down as a group, but the dolphins keep them at the surface."

Said Greg  Lecoeur, who took the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photograph of the Year.

The federal government is about to end the tourist fun of swimming with dolphins...

... at least with Hawaiian spinner dolphins.

Dolphins typically forage offshore in the night for fish, shrimp and squid, then return toward land during the day to relax. They swim even when they are sleeping. But officials say the presence of boats and swimmers is disrupting their habits, causing “a departure from natural behavioral patterns that support the animal’s health and fitness,” according to the proposed guidelines....

The rule would require people to stay at least 50 yards away.

“It would be the end of legitimate dolphin swimming,” said Kevin Merrill, an owner of Dolphin Discoveries in Kona, on the island of Hawaii. “We couldn’t offer the people the quality interaction that they expect.”...

Roberta Goodman, the owner of Wild Dolphin Swims Hawaii in Holualoa... said she did not see signs that they were disturbed by the tour groups. “We watch them nurse, and make love, and play, and travel and sleep,” she said. “They continue with their natural behaviors while they’re in the water with us. They’ve accepted us into their environment with them.”

Yeah, I'm sure they love you. They're still smiling, right?

“You don’t swim with the dolphins,” [Merrill] said. “The dolphins choose to swim with us.”

And the humans choose to soak in narcissistic self-deception.

"From the time I was 11, it was, 'You're a pop star!' That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair..."

"... and you have to put on some glittery tight thing.' Meanwhile, I'm this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras. I had fucking flippers.... I was told for so long what a girl is supposed to be from being on that show. I was made to look like someone that I wasn't, which probably caused some body dysmorphia because I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn't on that show, it was like, Who the fuck am I?

Said Miley Cyrus.

What does "I had fucking flippers" mean? Flippers like people who redo homes and sell them? Flippers like the children with birth defects? Flippers like faster than lightning... a world full of wonder... under the sea?



Hey, I wonder how Luke Halpin is doing. Was he told you're a pop star, that means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair and and you have to put on some glittery tight thing?

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on..."

"... whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons."

— Douglas Adams ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)"), quoted by sunsong in the comments to "Polar bears are eating dolphins."

Polar bears are eating dolphins.

But don't hate the polar bear. Hate yourself, because it's global warming — global warming trapping the dolphins in the fjords.

ADDED: If you care about dolphins trapped in fjords, murdered by polar bears, I offer my old advice, originally printed here in 2010:

"Ex Miami Dolphin Player Falls Overboard, Swims 9 Miles to Shore."

Wow! I love stories like that.

And he was a Dolphin.

2 of my favorite topics — 2 of my oft-used tags — survival and metaphor.

If "yes means yes," the nonhuman animal never says yes.

So don't swim with dolphins and tickle their bellies. And quit petting those beasts you call "pets."

I want to connect the previous post about the dolphins to the post from a few days ago about emotional support animals. The latter post links to a New Yorker article that is very critical of people who weasel — I know, not fair to weasels — around rules against animals in restaurants, shops, museums, and public transport by presenting their pets as "emotional support animals." That's mostly about what an imposition on other human beings this is. But consider the animals themselves.

The author, Patricia Marx, says "No animals were harmed during the writing of this article," but she took a turkey into a crowded NYC deli, where he "lay immobile, on his side with his feet splayed as if he’d conked out on the sofa," and then his "head had turned purple," which signaled to his handlers that he was "too stressed" and needed to leave. And the alpaca in the museum began "intently humming a distress signal" and had to leave.

Nonhuman animals cannot talk. We look into their faces and see enough human likeness to stir up our thoughts of what they might be saying, and we tend to flatter ourselves and serve our own interests by imagining them projecting the thoughts we want them to have. There's a lot of talk these days about establishing a "yes means yes" standard for intelligent, verbal human adults on college campuses. The concern is that free citizens might go along with sexual activities and fail to convey their unwillingness in spoken words. Sexual intercourse, in this view, is so intimately and deeply invasive on the body that a spoken "yes" is a necessary step.

You might agree or disagree about the importance of hearing the affirmative spoken message of permission to become intimate with another human being's body, but I want to talk about what we do to the bodies of our pets who have no capacity to say "yes" or "no" and who are trapped in our space and cannot walk away but must submit to our self-serving petting.

Yes, the animal you're confining at home or controlling outdoors may seem to accept or enjoy your physical intrusions, but think how you would adapt if you were completely controlled and dependent like that. Then complicate that thought with the reality that as a human being, you have no way to know how the nonhuman mind works, what fears and confusion and gnawing needs roil inside that head with the eyes that give you the look that makes you feel you should be kind and give food.

"That evening, this woman was tickling Dusty’s tummy and it just looked so inviting...."

"Just after I got into the water, Dusty left the woman she was with and went ballistic – I found out afterwards that she’s very territorial when she is with somebody. Her tail was flapping wildly, and at first I thought it was a display, but then something twigged: maybe she’s angry. I knew I had to get out of the water, so I swam towards the pier, but within microseconds Dusty had ploughed into me with her snout. It was very powerful and painful, and the speed was amazing. I went hurtling forwards....."

People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the "expression" you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is "smiling" because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone.

ADDED: I just read the last paragraph of the linked article:

After the man pulled me out of the water, Dusty swam away, but then she came back and was bobbing vertically next to me, looking at me. We locked eyes and I felt there was complete remorse in her. She was a totally different dolphin; the anger had gone. The people on the pier were in awe.

The people on the pier were fools. You felt there was complete remorse. Sheer nonsense. She was a totally different dolphin. But you were the same fool you have always been.

Tell me again about how people travel to broaden their minds and gain insight and understanding. And this is a travel story. That dolphin Dusty "starred in an Irish tourist board ad campaign." Oh, here is is:



Yeah, go to Ireland for the dolphins. And toss your tiny daughter in the water with a powerful, unpredictable beast. Because Ireland really wants a huge pile of your money, and what says Ireland more than dolphins? Good lord! Take your kids to a beach closer to home if you must inject excitement into their lives. I continue to believe that a soothing, calm environment is best for children. Give them a place to discover their own ways of having fun. That pleasant room where the girl in the ad sits in a chair and imagines where she could be is exactly where she belongs so she can imagine her own things, not some damned list dreamed up by the Irish tourist board.

"I like the guy… off in his human world, gesticulating about things un-dog."

Say I, commenting at Dogging Meade.

Elsewhere, there, I said this: "Zipper is surly. He is uncaring. Not Zipper the dog, of course. He's great. Zipper the dolphin!"

"U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy has tweeted her concern at the 'inhumaneness' of a Wakayama Prefecture village’s traditional dolphin hunt."

The tradition: "Every year the fishermen of Taiji corral hundreds of dolphins in a secluded bay, select a few dozen for sale to aquariums and marine parks and then stab the rest to death for meat."

How "traditional" can something about aquariums and marine parks be?



I mean aquariums large enough for dolphins (presuming that there is such a thing).

Also... should an ambassador tweet? And if the ambassador tweets about dolphins, what should we say if she uses social media to express concern about something the Japanese are doing do birds? I think tweet : bird :: click : dolphin, so — being a fan of parallelism, I'd like to see it said that she's clicking her concern about birds.

On Chatter. 

ADDED: What's wrong with eating dolphin meat?

"Al Gore made $200 million. Good for him!"

Said Meade. Acknowledging that I got the reference, I said, "But he didn't do it alone..."

Meade has his computer screen open to Drudge, the right 2/3 of which looks like this right now:



It's all about smiles, as the dolphin in the lower right corner makes clear. Meade says, "Wow, George P. Bush looks like Nixon," and I say, "And Obama too... strangely." The Gore smile is waxen. For all I know the pic is of a wax depiction of the GoreBot, the ManBearPig we've come to dread.

Meanwhile, there's Leo, our new Gatsby, apparently "vibrantly alive." The word "vibrant" appears only once in "The Great Gatsby":

He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

I think you know what to do with that sentence. And if not, my belief in the harmony of the universe — or the mystical shades and echoes of pink dolphins or the reliability of the Althouse commentariat — tells me that betamax3000 will show you the way.

Things I would only be willing to do only if I had gone deaf.

Go out on one of those boats that take you to look at dolphins or whales. Seriously, the human vocalizations on this video of people getting a look at a "super-pod" of dolphins — "a rare dolphin stampede" — are simply horrifying to me. Even if I were deaf, I would resist this activity, because I don't enjoy intruding on animals, but maybe if you paid me, I'd go along. But I'd rather listen to fingernails on a blackboard than hear human adults squeal over the dolphins and shout inane things like "They're coming over to us" and "I can't believe it."