WIGGUM DAILY

 

In Spain the rain stays mainly on the plain… Well apparently NOT according to the folks who’ve built this amazing working full scale, production solar power tower to generate electricity near the city of Seville.  You can click on the pics below to get a look at this marvel of modern engineering, but you need to watch the video to get a true appreciation for the enormous scale of it all.

 

        

 

This is some content created on my beach walk Sunday 27th May. Would have taken more but the batteries on the digicam decided to die suddenly. So this was all I got. This first one is your garden variety panorama pic. Nothing spectacular. The wrong time of the day for that kind of thing. It was interesting to note how the recent rains have greened up the dune vegetation considerably in the last few weeks. And the winter seaweed has started to arrive also. As always here on WD, you can Click The Pic to view the larger version.

 

 

 

The next item below is a short one minute video of a duck that was swimming about and "fishing" amongst the seaweed in the shallows a bit further along the beach. I’ve seen these ducks swimming at this beach many times, but this was the first time I had a digicam with me to capture the action.  You can click HERE to view a map of the area showing the exact spots where this all took place. 

 

 

 

 

I came across this fellow on my Sunday beach walk. A dead adult CAPE FUR SEAL washed up on the beach. I could not tell if it’s head was missing or just buried under the sand. There were no obvious injuries that I could see. Seemed to be fairly much intact. Was a long way from the water. Looked "fresh" so I reckon it washed up on the high tide the night before. It was a long way up the sand, only 4-5m from the highest tide mark on this beach.

 

            

 

Was a lot bigger than I thought they were. I’d estimate the body to be 120cm long, with another 30-40cm for the "feet" at the back. Very round and big in the body. I couldn’t have wrapped my arms around it. Estimate weight at 80-100kg.  I’ve seen these seals washed up these beaches before, but mostly younger ones about 1/3 the size of this specimen. I tried to include my foot in one picture for scale. Somehow it was bigger in real life than came out in the photo.

 

These fur seals breed just a few km’s from this very spot on the aptly named SEAL ROCKS off the coast of PHILLIP ISLAND.  This is the largest fur seal colony in the southern hemisphere. In fact you can just see Seal Rocks on the horizon of the photos that have the open water in them. The rest of the land on the horizon is Phillip Island. 

 

You can CLICK HERE to view a map of the area and marker pins showing the exact locations of the dead seal in these photos and Seal Rocks where I guarantee this fellow was living happily on until recently. 

 

 

 

Another awesome day for an afternoon beach walk and to snap some

phonecam pics to slowly simmer over the electronic stove,

into a panorama pic for the WD readers to view.

 

 

Hope you enjoy it. As always, click to view larger version.

The same stretch of coast line, but a different beach to last weeks pics. 

 

 

Just a quick sunrise snap out the side window this morning, timed to a certain level of perfection at 92km/h. And another pic taken just minutes after, only a few km’s further down the same road.

 

     

 

Not bad for B.C. (before coffee)

 

The good folk over at NASA’s always interesting APoD have a real visual gem today. This photo of an AURORA taken near BEAR LAKE by US Airforce Senior Airman Joshua Strang in 2005 while stationed in ALASKA is visually stunning.  

 

 

 

This is the yang part of today’s Yin-and-Yang of whale related posts.  Designed to balance out the destruction and gory’ness of the previous posts in our triumvirate whale series.

 

 

This is the first in a three-part FEATURE on WHALES. Sort of a yin-yang-yin thing really. The two "yin" pieces are from the archives of the internet. In fact item #2 was one of the first videos I ever saw on the internet, back in 1995 when it took the best part of a whole day to download over a 28.8Kbps dial-up modem. Remember dial-up…    Anyway, I digress.

 

 

Back on Saturday January 17th, 2004 a 17m SPERM WHALE weighing about 60,000kg beached itself for no apparent reason on the southwest coastal shores of the Tawainese island of TAINAN.  Marine biologists from nearby NATIONAL CHENG KUNG UNIVERSITY  decided that they would like to make the most of this rare zoological specimen that had presented itself to them.  So they organised for it to be transported by truck from the beach to their research facility where they could do there work. 

 

All sounds fine and dandy so far.  What could go wrong ?  Well, like most dead mammals, whales decompose and a by product of this natural  decomposition are a number of gases that build up inside the body cavity. This is the bloating we see in dead things at the side of the road as we whizz by at 100km/h, thankful it wasn’t our car that ended the life of that kangaroo, wombat or European backpacker.

 

So they loaded the whale carcass onto the truck.  Details of this part are sketchy at best. Presumabley it required large amounts of grunting and "one.. two.. three.. LIFT !!!"  The problem for the people of Tainan island occurred when the whale laden truck was travelling through the busy streets of the downtown districts.  Why plot a route that goes through a built up urban environment you might ask ? Well I did some further research and there are reasons.

 

Firstly, the whale washed up on the south-west coast of the island. The university is on the eastern side of the island. So in order to get from A to B you have to go through some towns. Also, unconfirmed reports indicate that the truck was only rented for the day by the university and they had to get it back before 5pm or risk losing the $50 deposit. Further unconfirmed sources say the driver of the truck had just recently purchased a fancy new Navman GPS Navigation device and it also told him the fastest way to get a whale from A to B was through the streets of the commercial district.

 

Whatever the reasons are, and were not here to condemn any Wan, you can click on the pics below to see just what happens when the pressure of decompositional gases inside a dead whale overcomes the structural integrity of the rotting carcass… 

 

  

 

If you missed PART #1 then click HERE.

 

 

Our second item is of interest both for the story itself and the origins of it’s arrival into cyberspace. Possibly the first ever internet VIRAL VIDEO, the clip first appeared in 1991 on the computer BULLETIN BOARDS that were a pre-cursor to the WORLD WIDE WEB that we know today. The events it reports on actually took place some 21 years earlier in November 1970 on a beach near the pacific north-west coastal town of FLORENCE, OREGON in the USA.

 

For many years stories and rumours of an exploding whale were thought to be an urban legend, until the video news footage below surfaced in 1991 after first being reported on in a 1990 article by syndicated humour columnist DAVE BARRY in the MIAMI HERALD newspaper, which in turn brought the events to widespread public attention.  From here it continued to float around cyberspace, finding it’s way onto the WWW, once that was invented in the mid 1900’s.  Flash forward to the present day,  where fast internet connections and the emergence of online video sharing services have ensured that the "exploding whale video" is more prevalent today than ever before.

 

Now to the meat of our story. (pun intended)  A large dead whale washed up on the local beach. Originally reported as being a GREY WHALE, but later determined by marine biologists to be a SPERM WHALE about 14m long.  It was also decided that disposal and clean up of the giant mammal came under the umbrella of the OREGON HIGHWAY DIVISION.  Here’s where the problem starts as I see it.  Dale Allen, the departments Chief Engineer was away on a hunting trip at the time, so the operation was entrusted to a young deputy engineer George Thornton, featured in the video.

 

George, after consulting with some sources in the US Navy, possibly from the "Large Missiles Dept", decided it would be best to EXPLODE the whale into millions of tiny pieces, which would in turn be further processed and redistributed back into nature by seagulls and other such scavenger birds. Sounds good so far right.  Well, call it neivety, or just youthful enthusiasm on the part of George, but I reckon there’s a certain look in his eyes when interviewed in the video that says to me  "Yeah, I’m gonna BLOW the HECK out of this whale… show him who’s boss…  and there ain’t a darn thing Dale can do to stop me". That’s just my reading of the situation.  Either that or Georges brother was the local dynamite distributor.

 

In fact, I’m going to as far as to speculate that George and his brother Rory (actual existence to be confirmed) got together over a few beers early in the week, when the whale first appeared and thought "Yup…. reckon we could totally blow that thing up man… it’d be COOL"  I mean think about it.  Why else was the state’s HIGHWAY DIVISION getting involved in something happening on a BEACH.  Surely the mater of a dead whale on a beach comes under the jurisdiction of the Dept of Nature, The Parks Dept or at very least the local chapter of BayWatch.  I know it was 1970 and they’re all still getting over the hazy effects of the 60’s, but seriously, what were these guys smoking back then to leave George in charge. 

 

So anywhoo…. they rigged up the explosives, stood back,

pressed the plunger…. and you can see the rest for yourself…