Skip to main content

Thames Whale Post-mortem


A (not always in good taste) spoof of the BBC News webpage.

In the latest twist to what was already a fairly ridiculous situation, the results of the post-mortem carried out on the whale spotted in the Thames last firday, tell us that the animal died of...erm... dehydration!

For some reason I can not begin to fathom, the tidbit of worthless news took the imaginations to the extent that hundreds of people gathered to watch the animal being dragged back to the sea. Bloggers, some of them, usually dealing with specific (and totally unrelated) themes blogged about it and I watched, amased as the whale story cropped up in the most unlikely locations of me feed gatherer. The Evening Standard (not exactly renowned for the high standard of its journalism, I have to admit) even published "picture souvenirs" of the event. I, myself find myself blogging about it now.

Call my cynical and cold-hearted (which Slightly would probably (rightly) say I am) but as I said, I don't get what the fuss is all about. There are hundreds if not thousands of whales that get killed every year. Even though this is a protected species, Japan actually hunts them, going against international treaties. No public outcry there, no multitudes demonstrationg. No multitudes either rushing to protest against the ENTIRE SPECIES that get wiped off the face of the planet each year.

It is a sad comment on our media driven society that a story picked up by journalists on a slow day for news should be given such a prominent place while so many other more worthwhile stories don't see the light of day.

Tags: , , , , .
Labels:

Comments

  1. TM1/25/2006 12:06 pm

    cynical, cold hearted, weird, creepy, odd, "going to turn into a bitter old queen" (did i say turn into), miserable, pathetic, strange looking, random, erm, probably a few more I could add.

    WHY CAN'T YOU JUST GO "AWWWWWW" AT THE WHALE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE?

    ReplyDelete
  2. zefrog1/25/2006 12:16 pm

    Cause I am not like everyone else: am VERY special (as you know)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown1/25/2006 1:09 pm

    I went, "mmm, whale!" and looked forward to the pie. But isn't this all a bit of not in my backyard thinking?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous1/25/2006 1:28 pm

    Huge public outcry at Japanese evil doings for 'scientific purposes' in this half of the world. massive news at the moment. Makes the daily news every day for past few weeks

    ReplyDelete
  5. Career Break Guru1/26/2006 4:02 pm

    No, the spoof wasn't always in good taste, but I did make the point that it was getting just a little bit too much media attention.

    Just done a spoof in a similar vein about the Lib Dems (again). It's almost too easy...

    (On my blog if you're interested.)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
19 comments
Read more

pink sauce | life, with a pink seasoning

As of tonight, my blog Aimless Ramblings of Zefrog , that "place where I can vent my frustration, express ideas and generally open my big gob without bothering too many people" which will be 6 in a couple of months, becomes Pink Sauce . While the URLs zefrog.blogspot.com and www.zefrog.eu are still valid to access this page, the main URL now becomes www.pinksauce.co.uk. There is a vague plan to create a proper website for www.zefrog.eu to which the blog would be linked. Why Pink Sauce , you may ask. It is both simple and complicated. For several years, I have grown out of love for the name of the blog. It felt a bit cumbersome and clumsy. That said, I never really looked into changing it, seriously. Tonight, for dinner, I had pasta with a special pink sauce of my concoction ; single cream and ketchup. I know most people while feel nauseous at the very though of the mixture but trust me, it's gorgeous. Don't knock it till you've tried it. After having had my platte...
4 comments
Read more

Tick, Tick... BOOM! - review

Tick, Tick... BOOM! (by and on Netflix), titled after one of its hero's musicals, is the film directorial debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the acclaimed creator of Hamilton . Perhaps appropriately, it is about musical theatre and, itself, turns into a musical; covering the few days, in early 1990, leading to star-crossed composer Jonathan Larson's 30 birthday.  At that time, Larson, who went on to write Rent , was in the throes of completing his first musical, on which he had been working for eight years, before a crucial showcase in front major players in the industry. With social puritanism and the AIDS epidemic as background – with close friends getting infected, or sick; some of them dying, Larson, a straight man, struggles to write a final key song for his show, while confronting existential questions about creativity, his life choices, and his priorities. The film features numerous examples of Larson's work meshed into the narrative of those few days. Some are part o...
Post a Comment
Read more