The Epic Conclusion to Ocean Week

You may or may not have noticed, there was a decided nautical theme to this week. There's a reason for that.

See, the last few times I deliberately did theme weeks, they kinda fell short at the end, or I otherwise had to scrape bits together and had difficulties. So I figured, hey, this time I just won't announce it, and maybe it'll turn out I can figure out something else to finish the week if I can't quite follow through.

It worked, I guess; after all, my first theme week, "unofficial robot week," didn't have any pressure on it until the last two or three days of it, and I had no trouble with it.

But now I can't think of a thing! Oh, no!

Leave me alone!



...

Wait a minute. There we go, something to blog about.

If ever some disaster strikes, and wipes out that mass of ugly thin-haired monkeys we affectionately call "us," well, things wouldn't be looking too good for the future of intelligent life on planet Earth.

See, a lot of the things that might possibly give rise, given time and improvement in intelligence, to what we like to call "civilization," are animals in deep trouble. All the other monkeys? Not likely to last as long as us, much less outlive us. Some kind of whale or dolphin? Well, they're not doing much better. Elephants? While many people have sorely underrated their intelligence, they're not likely to survive without our help, so they're out.

More likely as I see it would be ravens, probably followed by raccoons. Both are smart scavengers who can adapt to a huge range of environments (the raven's mobility is what gives it an edge of sorts over the raccoon).

Somewhere behind them are a number of far less clever animals, such as cats, dogs, and possibly bears. By no means stupid animals, these strike me as rather likely candidates for, way down the line, succeeding an extinct humanity, and they're likelier to live through the cataclysm that would kill us because of their diversity, range, and sheer numbers. And of course, the line continues down in this wise all the way to the fishes, if you split enough times.

But what if all the vertebrates were gone? All the vertebrates of consequence, anyway. Then, the likeliest candidates, as a broad family, to grope their way out of the primitive impulses of Wild and become a Kind of thinking being are certainly the cephalopods.

The cephalopods are probably far closer to monkeys than any other creature living in the ocean, even whales. Whales are something like giant birds by the standards of the marine ecosystem, while the lifestyle of many cephalopods parallels that of monkeys on land-they're tricky, thieving little devils who sneak around getting into other people's nests and the like, while avoiding bigger, stronger creatures with their wits and maneuverability. Cuttlefish, squid, and octopodes especially all show signs of considerable smarts (cuttlefish and octopodes moreso than squids).

The fearsome and unsettling hypnotic abilities of one cuttlefish (sadly, the name of the species isn't coming to me and the results of Google searches have been supremely unhelpful-it was on NOVA, though) that it uses to apparently paralyze its prey are incredible. Possibly more incredible are the abilities of the Indonesian Mimic Octopus, well-summarized in this video:



It's kind of remarkable to think that this particular species may be the progenitor of something far more incredible, some distant way down the road.

Of course, octopodes have only limited mobility on land, and will continue to be so unless and until they can develop sturdy internal supports. Some have suggested that, in order to build civilization, one must live on land.

So what would be an alternative invertebrate intelligence to cephalopods if they never made it all the way out of the water?

Come back Monday evening (or Tuesday morning, or if you live in a different time zone your entirely different time period), and I'll have my answer for you. (No accounting for the answers of "experts," after all.) It might surprise you just a smidgen. (Here's a hint: They're little.)

-Signing off.

The Sea's Little Killers

Of course, all my joking yesterday aside, the ocean is a terrifying place. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the lovely little creatures of the sea that kill for their suppers (which is the vast majority of them).

Take the mantis shrimp, which I mentioned some time ago (there's a tag, which I have added to this post, that will let you look if you're curious-though YouTube removed a bunch of the videos I embedded since then). These little creatures are popular in home aquariums for their energy and... well...



...let's be frank-their sheer viciousness and apparent glee at killing other things you put in the tank. Even (especially?) cute things, such as clown fish (the video above to the contrary).



The person who took this video no longer visits the pet shop it occurred at.

Of course, keeping a mantis shrimp as a pet is a tricky proposition. You see...



...they have claws that strike with the force of a small-caliber bullet (fishermen call them by the wonderfully evocative term thumbsplitter), meaning that they can shatter the glass of many aquariums.

Then there's the flamboyant cuttlefish, one of the oddest creatures in the entirety of Earth's oceans, if for no other reason than it likes to walk rather than swim. It's also a poisonous little son of a gun, and can catch the itty-bitty shrimp of its environment faster than the eye can see.



It's merely lucky coincidence I found this video, since I was looking particularly for mantis shrimp.

Then there's this little devil, the pistol shrimp.



(Gotta love all those cinematic gun sound effects they added.)

It's no wonder our little tetrapod ancestors wanted the heck out of a neighborhood like that, huh?

-Signing off.

The Perils of Beachcombing

You know, one place I'd never want to visit is a beach in Victorian/Edwardian England in a fiction story. Weird, giant, and most importantly deadly sea animals are apparently always showing up there.

For instance, in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Lion's Mane, the lion's mane jellyfish, the biggest darned jellyfish in the world, just washes into a tidal pool and randomly kills somebody. (Sherlock Holmes takes care of it [with a rock], thankfully, but still...)

Worse than that is the case of The Sea-Raiders. In this H. G. Wells short story, a bunch of huge (well, huge by some standards) squid (of a fictional species) attack a bunch of people vacationing. It was stated they were deep-sea creatures, but Haploteuthis ferox (this fictional species name could be taken to mean "single ferocious squid" or "simple ferocious squid") was not only able to survive the shallows, but was highly mobile on land. It also hunted in packs, and it seemed they could somehow signal each other.

Yikes. Remind me never to go to any Victorian/Edwardian English beaches anytime soon.

-Signing off.

Cartoon Profiles: Sushi Pack

Hm... A cartoon that is still on the air... (Until this Saturday, at least.)



(There's a better intro for this show, but YouTube doesn't have it.)

Unlike a number of the cartoons I've profiled here, this is definitely a kids' show through and through, and most adults wouldn't find anything to enjoy about it at all. Unless, of course, you're me. (Or one of a few other probably select individuals, by which I mean *ahem* unusual people.)

Sushi Pack is a hyperkinetic anime-influenced show which is pretty much a typical moral cartoon a la He-Man. It even, if I am not mistaken, hired the same psychological consultant as He-Man. No joke.

And it's the kind of cartoon that broadcast television really could use more of. It's not quite at the level of the classics, but it'll do if you want something new.

The Sushi Pack are a group of superheroes literally made of sushi. Since they're sushi, they're, shall we say, vertically challenged. They live in a donut shop (what), and their mentor is the donut shop's owner. They fight various comical cartoony badguys. And they have fun doing it.

Most of the little guys are vulnerable to heat, as they're uncooked fish who don't want to be cooked. Brilliantly, the tiniest member of the team is Wasabi, who as hot mustard is not vulnerable to even tremendous heat; his weakness is ice for some reason. (Wasabi is one of the best characters in the show. First off, he speaks only in burbles provided by Scott McNeil.* Second, despite his teeny tiny size, he seems to be the strongest member of the team. Third and finally, he does what he wants, such as stretching out his legs to crazy proportions with no explanation and banning littering on penalty of life sentences.)

The others are a little less brilliantly entertaining, but then there's the villains, who include Paradoxter ("It's a good thing I'm taping myself, or I'd just be some crazy man-ox talking to myself!"), the Titanium Chef (whose book of Chum Chop sounds like it's quite a nasty recipe book indeed), Sir Darkly (who is only happy when everyone else around him is sad-literally), and Apex (the awesomest of the lot, I believe another Scott McNeil voice and the craziest and smartest [sorta] of the villains-he's an alien four-armed samurai guy).

I'd write more if I could, but there really isn't a whole lot more to say-it's fun for fun's sake that any kid could watch.

*The others understand Wasabi's burbles-here's an actual quote in response to something he said which involved a broken boat and mortal peril: "Thanks, Wasabi, but I don't think a loaf of pumpernickel bread will help."

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Reviews: Treasure of the Black Falcon

Treasure of the Black Falcon is a novel by John Coleman Burroughs. If that name sounds familiar, it should: John Coleman Burroughs was the son of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and others.

Like his father, the author's work (of which this is actually apparently the only example) is highly imaginative and original, if not especially scientific or rich in meaning. In effect: I love it.

Not that it's a masterwork of plotting or anything-TotBF is a pretty basic sort of plot, and I have a notion that if J.C. had ever had the kind of output E.R. did, similar repetitive patterns would have arisen. (Although there was a reasonably clever frame story such as was used by E.R., it seems likely he picked the idea up from his father.)

The story centers initially on the adventures of a deep-sea salvage sub that was invented by its owner, and which has truly remarkable abilities for exploration, such as cannot be found in many vessels even today. Unfortunately for it and its crew, it gets caught in a huge undersea current and sucked into a deep sea cave, where it comes out in a mysteriously low-pressure zone that basically defies all laws of physics. There, the world-building skills of the author come into play.

They find an impossible giant underwater bubble, which is inhabited by very strange creatures-animals who are white, and which, upon examination, have no internal organs. But they look a whole lot like familiar animals, such as fish and pelicans.

It turns out, as the reader eventually discovers, that these are Jogulars, bizarre, improbable lifeforms probably from outer space, who infect and replace other creatures, turning into duplicates of them. (Human-form Jogulars, because of peculiarities of the process, often have the appearance of clothes molded onto themselves.) Jogulars have no bones, no internal organs, and do not need to eat food in the normal fashion-instead, they absorb microorganisms from their environments for nourishment. (Their bonelessness gives them a gait that sounds as if it probably belongs to a cartoon character.) They also retain mental characteristics of the creatures they mimic: Human-form Jogulars think like humans, act like humans, and even need to pretend to eat like humans. Jogulars are further gifted with powerful telepathy. There is a second type of Jogular: A creature that is essentially "trapped" in a sort of "larval" shape that can never change (they look like brains with single pink eyes), which is minimally mobile but has an incredible power to compensate-mind control. All Jogulars also, in addition to being white, lack normal organs such as eyes; they rely on their telepathy and upon the single pink Jogular eye for their use. Jogulars also do not age, and thus are nearly immortal.

The Jogulars, in a word, are insanely awesome. Okay, two words.

Of course, they defy all known laws of biology, but that's okay.

There are plenty of other things to love about this bizarre undersea world. There are other undersea monsters, although few of them are especially iconic or interesting; the characters have rifles that, in a footnote, are connected to a fictional invasion of Los Angeles or San Diego or someplace by association of the way they operate; and the Jogular human community is being ruled by a guy who thinks he's a Roman emperor. No joke.

All in all, it's a decent piece of pulp fiction, and if you like John Carter of Mars, or some of the other books I have belatedly reviewed, I would suppose you'd like this plenty.

-Signing off.