In which an exciting event befalls our hero, and nobody is excited for him, and he does his best to provide all of the being excited for himself and not feel deflated, which is totally par for the course in his life.
After this picture, I picked it up and the case was still intact! If it was floating on the surface long enough to have barnacles, can they still be viable? If found in October, can they still be viable? I read some months back on the web about baby skates having hatched out at an aquarium -- maybe it was the one here, but I'm not sure -- after somebody brought in a case.
Well, now I have visions in my head of them being pleased and excited -- plus it's probably nice to tell the people paying to look at your stuff how it's actual local stuff as opposed to getting all of your creatures shipped from somewhere or whatever -- and I called the aquarium people. The receptionist talks to someone and is like "You can bring it in if you want." Umm. Okay.
Anyway, I went up there and the visitor desk people of course don't care about creeatures because the visitor desk is just a job. But then some other person from "operations" -- whatever that is --was around. She asked me how long it'd been out of water, where I found it, and just took it off to points unknown.
So your hero was left to... go and buy some groceries. Update: I am angry. What, the bold tag, not merely the emphasis tag? Exactly.
I found another one today (the above portion occurring yesterday). I call them up and ask whether they would accept another one. The guy asks somebody, who gets on the phone and is like Oh Yes Absolutely!
I drive there -- and you know I dislike driving -- and they eventually get an aquarist, which seemed like a bit of a pompous name, but whatever. And he looks about 25 and he really relishes the expert role, and he starts saying how they'll take it, but people should leave things alone because they're an important food source for birds, etc., etc. And that they are not endangered and there are plenty out there.
Oh, well...how many objections to I have to this, overall? I'll probably forget some in my listing here...
I would accept "we actually have lots of skates". That would be understandable.
I would accept "we have space A, and creatures B through X of equal or greater coolness"
I see what is an important food source for the birds. The main one rhymes with "blungeness crabs", if you were wondering. There must be a billion crabs out there. And sometimes jellyfish wash up in profusion, but the birds don't show interest. The sand fleas swarm all over them, but I don't know whether they eat them.
There is a fundamental inequality between life and dinner. I even like the birds. I even talk to them because I'm getting even more eccentric in my old age. Sigh.
Few things do I despise more than somebody playing expert. And now I'm getting old enough to see what I regard as [shaky old-person-voice] punk kids doing it. Maybe he's ... let's call it Intellectually Limited... enough to think that going over to the state university (they have a big ag program and do forestry and oceanography stuff. And there's a weather stations and all kinds of thinga) and getting a marine bio is difficult in some way, but No. No.
[I'm not done yet. Just a minute. I have more.]
Well, I wrote more. Plenty more. A large portion of it focusing on ethical aspects. You know, how seals matter and have hotlines devoted to them because they are fuzzy. And so on. And then photography.edu timed me out, though I was doing my best to write quickly, and said that I do not have the rights to save this document or whatever. So, being in more than a bit of an Okay, to hell with all of it sort of mood here, fine.
