Althouse

"In fact, wild orcas have never been seen treating people as prey. They do, however, have a thing for 'fads,' where they take up behaviour that has no obvious benefit. One famous example involved a female in the Pacific northwest who, in 1987, was seen wearing a dead salmon on her head. The trend spread. Other orcas across Puget Sound were soon spotted with their own 'salmon hats.' And then, as abruptly and as mysteriously as it started, the fashion fizzled out. Other orcas have been seen draping kelp over their backs or heads.... To scientists, the behaviour with the boat rudders looks similar. After wrenching one free, Gladis and her companions tend to bat it around for a while, then lose interest and swim off.... One [researcher] believes the orcas see the yachts, with their long detachable rudders, as 'giant toy dispensers.'"

From "Orcas blamed for yacht attacks are speaking their own language/Scientists studying killer whales linked to hundreds of encounters with boats near Gibraltar have discovered that the pod communicates using a unique dialect" (London Times).

"... for a big net or a blast of dynamite.... Nguyen, whose day job is as a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, contrasts the delightful thrill of playing games like basketball, The Legend of Zelda and Dungeons & Dragons with the demoralizing pursuit of university rankings, page views and social media likes: 'Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?'... Nguyen, 48... brought out various toys...yo-yos, spin tops, a Japanese ball-and-cup thingumajig known as a kendama.... 'All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,' Nguyen said at one point. 'Every time you’re yo-yoing, you’re like, If I change my angle this much, or if I pull a little bit here, or if I drop it, oh, then it works!' The fact that the stakes are so low is not a deficit of the yo-yo (or the kendama, or D&D, or fly-fishing); low stakes are part of the point, allowing us to move from one game to another. Nguyen argues that problems emerge when the stakes become all-consuming, taking over our sense of self and dictating what we should value...."

I'm reading "Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore/In a new book, C. Thi Nguyen looks to his personal passions — from video games to yo-yoing — to illuminate the downside of our increasingly gamified world" by Jennifer Szalai (NYT)(gift link).

"... TikTok, YouTube, sports, games, books and even taking a walk. This is a standard tactic: Define the market so broadly that dominance becomes mathematically impossible.... A Netflix merger with Warner Bros. would create a monopsony problem: too few buyers with too much bargaining power. Writers, directors, actors, showrunners, puppeteers, visual effects artists — all are suppliers. The fewer buyers competing to hire them, the lower their compensation and the narrower their opportunities.... "

Writes Roy Price, chief executive of an entertainment studio and former head of Amazon Studios, in "If Netflix Eats Warner Bros., It Will Be the End of Hollywood" (NYT).

From "Monopsony" (Wikipedia): "The term 'monopsony' (from Greek μόνος (mónos) "single" and ὀψωνεῖν (opsōneîn) "'to purchase fish") was first introduced by the British economist Joan Robinson in her influential book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933)...."

Fish, eh? It has been noted that the word was miscoined. But is the coinage really fishy? The OED describes the etymology this way: "< mono- comb. form + ancient Greek ὀψωνία purchase of provisions (< ὀψωνεῖν to buy provisions (see opsonation n.) + ‑ία ‑y suffix), after monopoly n."

"Opsonation" is a new one for me. It's archaic. It's supposedly a feast, a catering, or a buying of provisions, according to the OED, which does not mention fish.

But back to the big merger — perhaps we will get more fish movies. Like this Warner Brothers classic:

From "Frank O. Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Is Dead at 96/He burst onto the scene with an attention-getting renovation of his Southern California home before going on to design some of the world’s most recognizable buildings" (NYT).

Like many Angelenos, he was drawn to the laid-back, anything-goes atmosphere of the city, whose mix of garish mansions, flimsy bungalows, vacant lots, Googie coffee shops and colorful billboards was the antithesis of East Coast architectural academicism. And he became close to a generation of Los Angeles artists... whose surfboard-inspired aesthetic and raw work spaces suggested an alternative to the chilly austerity of late Modernism and the reactionary tendencies of postmodernism.... “I was trying to use the dumb, normal materials of the neighborhood,” Mr. Gehry said years later. “There must have been half a dozen cars in various states of deconstruction sitting around on the lawns; there was chain link in people’s backyards. They thought that was normal.”

For more about the fish, see "Frank Gehry, Fish Lamps/Paul Goldberger traces the history of the fish form throughout Frank Gehry’s career" (Gagosian.com).

Said Garvin Watson, as he kissed the orange shark and let it go.

“Officials say a flying osprey dropped its catch, which then struck power lines, causing sparks that ignited dry grass.”

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).

🔹 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.

"Bravo on the clever turn of phrase, Miss Wexler. Impressive use of your Ivy League education to bash polycules.... Would Wexler prefer cheating as an alternative to polyamory? Wexler, per The Post, would delete her Instagram slurs about polyamorists, the WNBA ('welfare for tall lesbians') and other targets if only she could find a husband and kids.... Let’s stop othering and demonizing relationships that are based on consent, communication and affection. Fear, loathing and misinformation aren’t a route to happiness for anyone."

Natalie Davis, who runs the online publication Polyamory Today, writes in a letter to the Washington Post. 

A Washington Post headline that makes it seem as though it's a special thing to be able to access the contemporaneous reviews of an old movie. Obviously, it's not. It used to be.

And is there anything special about a movie being 50 years old (or some other round number)? It used to matter because it might make the movie suddenly more available.

As for "Jaws," I've never seen it. I've always imagined that it would bore me. I still feel that way. Waiting around for a shark to attack someone? I don't see the point. I don't have a tag for sharks. I have to give this post my "fish" tag. Have I ever seen a movie about fish? I don't think so.

A fish tale:

Says the headline at The Washington Post — free-access link. Your first thought might be: Scientists, leave those fish alone! But they're not just getting the drugs from scientists:

We’re turning our rivers, lakes and oceans into soups of pharmaceutical pollution.... Nearly 1,000 pharmaceuticals have been detected in waterways around the world.... 

"But a ban on animal welfare grounds drew protests over the weekend from traditionalists who wish to defend the custom. The Flemish town’s Krakelingen carnival celebrations were first recorded in 1413 and revolve around the throwing of ring-shaped bread crackers, or 'Mastellenworp,' by town worthies dressed as druids on the Oudenberg hill. Before the throwing of the breads, after a costumed procession from the town, the local church priest, the mayor and aldermen drink a sip of wine with a live fish from a 400-year-old silver cup...."

From "Animal welfare laws stop tradition of drinking live fishThe ban on the 600-year-old practice, which sipping wine from a goblet at Geraardsbergen’s carnival in Belgium, has prompted protests from locals" (London Times).

"... in the evening, and he ended his meal with a cup or two of excellent black coffee without sugar."

That was while writing a book. When he was done, “he sped to a restaurant, downed a hundred oysters as a starter, washing them down with four bottles of white wine, then ordered the rest of the meal: twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridge, a Normandy sole, not to mention extravagances like dessert and special fruit such as Comice pears, which he ate by the dozen. Once sated, he usually sent the bill to his publishers.”

From "A Hungry Little Boy/Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar)" (NYRB).

I found this because it's easy to find things tweeted by Elon Musk in the last 24 hours:

pic.twitter.com/VyFYXCDG9p

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2025

I am reminded of the old "Golden Fleece Award":

The Golden Fleece Award (1975–1988) was a tongue-in-cheek award given to public officials in the United States for squandering public money....

One man controlled this award: Senator William Proxmire. His idea of what sounded stupid ruled. You had to be careful about how your research project looked, at first glance, to a politician who wanted to make a general point about out-of-control federal spending.

"Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered. Dr. Near contends that early researchers 'squinted their eyes a bit' when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville. 'I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the "conservation species concept," where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,' Dr. Near said."

From "This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction/Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish" (NYT).

A discussion at the animal ID subreddit — "I found this fish in my box of frozen shrimp."

Someone links to the article at Wikipedia, which contains the statement, "The bony-eared assfish may have the smallest brain-to-body weight ratio of any vertebrate."

And somebody says "The amount of shaming on its Wikipedia page is harsh. They start by implying it’s stupid and go on to refer to it as 'flabby.' Who did it hurt?"

"... was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie.... Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her 'filet mignon.'... [O'Connor's biographer] told me that 'you wouldn’t want to eat what O’Connor ate' and described the cuisine she ate at home with her mother as a 'curdled, dry, dyspeptic kind of fare.' At home, O’Connor and her mother rarely had their meals in the dining room. Left to her own devices, O’Connor might eat a tin of sardines for lunch. Once, during the brief time in which O’Connor lived alone in New York City, she served her friend Lyman Fulton nothing but 'goat’s milk cheese and faucet water'—which later became a running joke between them.... [T]he restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie... looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy...."

"I’ve been disappointed on the reality of that part of it. And it’s just also astonishing. I can’t understand why there’s people that are willing to spend tens of millions of their own money to try to hold that office. ’Cause then you can get there and be like, Hmm, look at the glamour: I’m sitting in a 500-square-feet apartment, and I’m on Grubhub and watching bad TV on Netflix or whatever. I like to ask all of my colleagues, Hey, is there some kind of secret society or like a social life or something glamorous? Even [Mitt] Romney, I mean, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has a nice house, but I read that he sits on his nice chair and watches Netflix and eats salmon from his friend, and actually puts ketchup on it. So I haven’t met that one person that’s having that quintessential glamorous life. It’s been elusive for me, but it’s not one that would even appeal to me. I think people all think life is like 'The West Wing' or something, where it’s snappy dialogue. But a lot of it comes down to just really bad performance art."

"Stop cutting your toenails on your desk. Don’t bring a gun to the office.... H.R. knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, H.R. can almost hear the eye rolls."

From "So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable?/Get in line behind the H.R. managers themselves, who say that since the pandemic, the job has become an exasperating ordeal. 'People hate us,' one said" (NYT).