Look at this card a reader wrote me about. It’s a sweet, cute, innocent card, perfect for Cephalopodmas.
On the other hand—O Great Old Ones, this is so horrid I shudder to mention it—another reader sent me an ad. An ad so ghastly, I won’t put it on the front page here…you’ll have to click through to see it. If you’re squeamish or delicate of constitution, do not read the rest of this post. The War on Cephalopodmas is on.
People send me pretty pictures all the time…they’re almost always of molluscs, of course. I’ve put the latest below the fold.
Japanese researchers prepare the first enlistee in the robot cephalopod legion. If we could only bring together robot cuttlefish and zombie cyborg squid, we could rule the world! Prepare to be subjugated, flimsy, limb-deficient hu-mans.
No, no…it’s cephalopodmas madness. Only 38 days to go!
Mark your calendars—Cephalopodmas is on the 22nd day of December, and you need to start rehearsing those Cephalopodmas carols.
I have to say, though, that the continuing neglect of this important holiday by the media is another sign of the War on Cephalopodmas. Don’t believe me? Walk into your local Wal-Mart, and I promise you that the greeter won’t say “Merry Cephalopodmas!” to you. You won’t see any civic displays draped with tentacles. The school pageants won’t be full of songs about squid. The smell of kelp won’t be in the air, nor will you be hearing the mournful, melodious tones of the foghorn. Outrageous, isn’t it?
I want everyone this year to give their best Bill O’Reilly glare to anyone you meet who doesn’t affirm your personal beliefs with a verbal recognition of the validity of Cephalopodmas. Temper tantrums are good, too. Of course, it should go without saying that you shouldn’t have to explain why you’re walking around always looking so pissed-off; truth be told, when you have to explain that you’re upset because people aren’t reciting some ritualized formal greeting at you, you sound a bit like a pinhead. So don’t.
Several people have brought this cartoon to my attention. I don’t get it.
So Bush and Rummy are being rewarded for their incompetence by getting to hang out with the octopuses? Or does the cartoonist just hate cephalopods, and is illustrating their torment? (They do look kind of pissed).
Now Shelley gets in the game with a friday cephalopod post—but I’m not going to complain. Let’s have squid on every blog, every day!
Also, finding out that there is such a profession as octopus stylist is good news, just in case I ever have to switch professions.
Maybe with a little butter and garlic.
This article makes a troubling point: if cephalopods are so smart, shouldn’t we feel some guilt about eating them?
I think I actually agree with some of the ethical issues raised, and probably should hesitate to kill and eat something like the octopus. However, it also commits the sin of lumping an extraordinarily diverse clade like the Cephalopoda into one poorly characterized gemisch. Yes, the Pacific octopus is a very clever beastie, but those schools of small, fast-breeding squid that get netted and chopped up for calamari? Not so much. The article makes a mistake comparable to highlighting the brilliance of Homo sapiens, and then arguing that we shouldn’t eat cows for fear of losing the next Shakespeare. If you want to make an ethical argument against the consumption of squid, that’s fair…but don’t do it by falsely concatenating all cephalopod species into an inaccurate classification of ‘smart, tool-using problem solvers’. It just isn’t true.
I also find this weird:
This evidence has so convinced officials on the Animal Procedures Committee (APC), the experimentation watchdog in the UK, that it has recommended to ministers that the law governing animal testing be amended so all cephalopods are given the same protection as animals.
So what have cephalopods been considered until now, mushrooms?
