POTPOURRI PARA TI

Blog number 348 **** 29 November 2009

Yesterday I was watching a documentary about a killer whale catching a great white shark off the coast of California in 1997 . The story itself was interesting, with the people telling of what they saw and the film of the whale carrying the shark around in its mouth and the comments from the biologists about different pods of killer whales eating different foods, and the supposition that this whale learned how to kill great whites from a pod off the coast of Australia, or else he learned it on his own.

One thing curious to me was that none of the whale watching captains, the killer whale expert biologists, the narrator - none of them, ever referred to the whales as, "Orcas" but always as "killer whales." Wonder what that's all about.

Anyhow, the main curious thing to me was that a crew of fish biologists were at a group of barren islands off the coast of California - the Fallon or the Farron islands - I don't know which and I'm too lazy to look it up and it doesn't make any difference to my story anyhow, studying a group of about one hundred great white sharks that came there every year in October to feast on the sea lions that gathered there.

After the whale killed that shark - evidently a very unusual thing - never before seen anywhere outside of the Australian waters, no great white was ever seen that October in their gathering place in the Fallon or Farron islands. Over a hundred great whites disappeared immediately from the area after the killing of one of their own by a predator in that area. Think about that.
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On another program I watched that same day - a program called "Alaskan Patrol," one of the cops was saying that of the fourteen villages in that area, twelve of them were voted dry because alcohol caused so many problems. He said that there was a lot of unemployment in the villages so the villagers tended to drink out of despair and boredom.

Later on he says that the people could make an alcoholic beverage out of yeast, sugar and water, and it was ready to drink in 24 hours. (yech!) He then went on to say that a gallon of this stuff sold for $7. Then later he's talking about people buying a fifth of whisky in Nome for six dollars and then selling it in the villages for two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars a fifth.

Now I'm thinking, "these people are unemployed, so they buy whisky at three hundred dollars a fifth to get drunk so they don't have to think about not having any money."

Neat trick!