Whale Wars is a TV series about a bunch of save-the-whales types throwing stink bombs at the Japanese whaling fleet down in the Southern Ocean. Stink bombs ruin meat. The whalers could have a perfectly good dead whale on deck, and one stink bomb later, nobody wants to eat it. The Japanese whaling fleet consists of a factory ship, a few harpoon vessels and two cruisers there to intimidate the do-gooders. The do-good attack task force is manned by modern day hippies scowling in a remarkably polite way who smell like gerbils because you don’t shower when you’re running out of water, and the Japanese whaling fleet won‘t slow down long enough to let you chop up icebergs for any. Their fleet includes one ship, the Stu Erwin, which is rated for some ice, another, the Bob Barker, that isn’t rated for any, and this totally awesome new trimaran with a fiberglass hull that probably belongs in Biscayne Bay and will surely sink if the cruisers have their way. Last year’s equally breathtaking trimaran got rammed, and now lies on the bottom of the Southern Ocean, God rest her fiberglass soul. The whalers also have a helicopter and two big Zodiacs.
Bob Barker likes the show so much he gave the gerbils money, and they bought the other ship last season and named it after him, which should serve as a warning to philanthropists everywhere.
The gerbils started out tossing their stink bombs by hand, and boarding the factory ship like in capture-the-flag, but the whalers responded by zinging sizeable metal objects back at them and installed water cannons, so this season the gerbils have a stink bomb cannon which they smuggled past Australian customs, taking it along unassembled as miscellaneous naval parts. The whalers keep the rubber boaters at bay with their water cannons and this sonic device that gives you headaches unless you go back to your Stu Erwin or Bob Barker and pronto. The war keeps escalating.
The do-good operation is run by Paul Watson, this Greenpeace founder who quit them because everybody disagreed with his tactics. Paul got shot in the badge one season, and the Japanese whalers said they didn’t do it, and I never figured out who did because there’s nobody else down there in the Southern Ocean other than the Japanese whalers and Paul and his gerbils. I don’t remember what the badge was for. He is Marshall in those parts, or acts like he is anyway, so maybe that was it.
The gerbils keep saying they want to die for one whale, or something like that, but after last years ramming when it looked like six trimaraners had gotten their wish, the do-gooders were about ready to split back to Australia, only the six lived, and they were the only gerbils who actually wanted off the boat after all was said and done with the ramming, so the gerbils will to die for one whale wasn't really tested, and hasn't been yet.
One good kamikaze attack ought to do it, but we haven't seen a single Jap Zero on the show so far.
Over the winter the Japanese announced that they gave up whaling, but Whale Wars hasn’t said anything about winning the whale wars yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. Last year the guy who owned and captained the sunken trimaran boarded the factory ship and got arrested, which was pretty cool, but another Japanese surrender sounds better, especially if they hold in on the deck of this season's trimaran out in the middle of Tokyo Bay like last time. The trimaran owner captain spent three months in jail until some pro anti-whaling group in Japan sprung him. He had two daughters and a wife who were really proud of him for sinking the family trimaran and going to jail, but he isn’t back this year for some reason.
I hope 2011 isn’t going to be the final season. Maybe Paul can throw stink bombs at rhinoceros poachers or something in 2012. There was a picture of a baby seal in this season’s premier, so maybe that‘s who they’ll be saving next year. I don’t know how that’s going to go over with the P.C. police though, throwing stink bombs at Eskimos, or Inuits or whoever they are these days. Seem like there’d be some serious affirmative action issues with throwing stink bombs at Eskimos.
Finding Bigfoot just aired, and I watch every Loch Ness Bigfoot Bermuda Triangle Area 51 show that makes it to my TV screen. Nobody ever found anything, but that must be what’s so much fun about these shows because I can‘t seem to get enough of the stuff. Anyway the latest is pretty good. They had this Georgia woodsman on who went fishing with his buddy, but before they even got there, Squatch threw a tree at them. That’s how cool the guys on this show are. They call Bigfoot, Squatch, and themselves, bigfooters. One bigfooter is named Bo-Bo, and he’s six foot six and they ask eyewitnesses to look at Bo-Bo holding up a yardstick at the site and eyeball how big their Squatch was, and the first one came in at nine foot six or whatever.
That was our Georgia, by the way. Not Russia’s. The one next to Alabama. I drive through both of them on the way to Florida from Tennessee, or used to before I heard about bigfoots throwing trees at people in our Georgia. Diameter of that tree was the size of a truck tire, the woodsman demonstrated
On the first show, the bigfooters found two right footprints with toes on them, and one guy said it was the greatest thing that ever happened to him, and that was only the first show. You could see where Squatch didn’t have any insteps, so we knew they were real Bigfoot right feet. A lady on the second show said Squatch came up and started banging on her house with a tree, but I haven’t seen that episode yet. Finding Bigfoot airs right at my bedtime, so I catch the following week’s rerun an hour or so before the new one comes on.
We truckers (see Ford F-150) love Ice Road Truckers because it’s all about trucks and ice, which means skidding and going off the road and sometimes there aren’t any roads at all on this show, which makes it more than you can even hope for from the title. These truckers haul pipe and heavy equipment and like that right across frozen rivers and lakes and actually drive for miles and miles on the open frozen Arctic sea. It’s always been set in Alaska, but this year two of their star truckers are down in Manitoba trucking over a couple hundred miles of Canadian marshland. From all the bouncing you can tell there really isn’t any road there. Just Canadian marshland, like they say.
This girl trucker, Lisa, has been so popular they hired another girl trucker, and we’ll have to see how that works out for them. The two females have been cordial so far, but the guy who came up with this idea must’ve been in the Bush Administration. About the time we’re going to find out how you really pay for three wars with tax cuts, TV is turning my Ice Road Truckers into Icy Trucker Girl Catfight, and I find myself watching another formerly great show with remote in hand.
Anyway, these three shows started their new seasons last week, and I'm in, so if you don’t get any topical financial crime news in these pages for a couple of months, this is why. Between Herman’s Gym and the summer TV season we’re pretty well booked down here.
Give us an email if the market tanks or whatever, and we miss it, and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, get ready for stuff we've already written but didn't get in because something else came up.
Something else always keeps coming up with these moneysucking thieves. That's the dang problem.
That and the SEC.
