Whale log: Entry 1
BBC News reports that the whale in the Thames is the first bottle-nosed whale sighted in the Thames “since records began nearly a century ago”.
Records of what?! Whales in the Thames? What tremendous foresight on the part of our forefathers to start such a register!
Is there a man specially commissioned to record these things who has today seen his first action in one hundred years on the job?
Or is there just a special column in some more general Thames events record marked “whales”? “They laughed when I recommended we include that column. ‘You never know,’ I said, ‘Maybe it’s worth dismissing the column about giant white domes costing the taxpayer billions being built near the waterside, but keep the bottle-nosed whales one. Please?’ Four thousand pages of blank column later, we’ve got a whale. They’re not laughing now.”
Why do I get the feeling that historians in the future are going to be overwhelmed with the meticulous nature of early 21st-century recording?
January 24th, 2006 at 03:17
The whale has jumped the shark.
January 30th, 2006 at 17:17
It took Clym and I a while to get to the bottom of Paw’s comment.
Here’s an explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_the_shark