The seemingly limitless range of human stupidity never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps stupidity is not the right way to say this. The phrase “dumb as a post” comes to mind. I have both heard this phrase (or variations thereof) used to describe both individuals or the human species in general. Take Americans for example… no, Id better not say that. However, Americans seem to solve their problems using either firearms, or some momentous explosion of pyrotechnics. They like their solutions loud and noisy. I realize I am generalizing here.
But this is not the sort of discussion I had hoped for (my fingers have a mind of their own. Don’t go there. The real things that get on my nerves are the amount of people who don’t really seem to understand how things really work. I must remind you (as if I really need to SAY this…) that I am not pretending to know how things work. However, I would like to believe that I would have a more common sense approach to removing a dead whale than the Oregon State Highway Division. WHAT ?? A dead whale? I can hear you saying this now. Also, perhaps a better approach than that taken by the Vancouver Aquarium. Remember the whale Hyak? A fan favourite at the Aquarium for years. When he died, they towed his carcass out to sea. The next week it washed up on shore. So they cut up the publics beloved whale into little bits, and flushed those out to sea. Sure to be a public relations disaster eh?
At least this did not happen in the United States. Oh… but it did. While this was not an aquarium whale, it was a whale nonetheless. I think that the entire situation was best summed up by Dave Barry in the following article which brout my attention to this world stopping matter in the first place: