9 replies »

1. Where did you get a photo of my girlfriends pink, smelly…roll of garbage bags.

2. A roll of plastic kitchen trash bags.

3. Yep, garbage bags.

4. I don’t know if I can compete with what’s going on over in the weekly carbo…but this clearly isn’t a picture of plastic bags. Not even close. IT is actually intestines. Let me explain.

   On Oscar’s End, there’s an enormous aquatic reptile known to roam the deepest depths of the planet’s ocean. These so called zyxonites resemble a plesiosaur except that their skin is shell-like in most places. This dermal layer has evolved into a pseudo-exo skeleton that both supports the primary internal skeleton and protects softer tissues from the high acidity of the End’s oceans.

   Roughly 400 years ago, the oceans of the End were so polluted with industrial waste that the entire planet had become virtually uninhabitable outside environmentally contained pods. Thousands of species were becoming extinct daily. However, the vast metal resources at the planets core along with a ubiquitous manufacturing infrastructure made abandoning the planet impossible.

   The zyxonites turned out to be one of the hardier species, quickly adapting to the increasingly acidic environment. Some research seems to indicate this was actually just a simple reactivation of genes first evolved hundreds of thousands of years previously when the planets oceans were equally, if naturally, acidic.

   Industrial scientists decided to genetically modify the enteric bacteria that were already in the gut of xyxonite to more efficiently remove some of the pollutants from the oceans. As zyxonites eat much like Earth’s whales (filtering plankton), the thought was these animals could just filter the water as they swam. Much to the surprise of the rest of the scientific community, this actually worked and acidity levels have been decreasing ever since.

   However, about 100 years ago, it was discovered that the process had a very strange consequence. The intestines of the zyxonite taste very sweat, very much like what we on Earth would recognize as the sponge cake part of Twinkies. In fact, in recent years, fried zyxonite intestine has become a delicacy and a growing export industry. So much so that zyxonite populations are declining due to over fishing.

   The image in the picture was taken on one of the ships which hunt and harpoon these animals, processing the intestines at sea. As the intestines can be up to 100 meters in length, they are often just rolled up for transport.

5. Ubertramp – I just had the chance to sit and read your wonderful story. Can you imagine how hungry you’d have had to be to eat that??? I mean Twinkies are terrifying!

6. It’s a tribal thing. Kinda like the eskimoes hunting whales here. It’s a right of passage.

7. Er…obviously, i meant “rite.” Jesh. All the long haired hippy pinko commies hanging around here must be getting to me.

8. You gotta watch out for those pinko commies… 🙂

   Your comment reminded me about the whaling done by the Makah Nation on the Washington coast. They had a successful whale hunt in 1999. You can read their own account of the whaling here.

   My recollection of the coverage included plenty of Makah children being down right grossed out by the whale blubber. I also wondered how many of those whale bones “disappeared” into the cargo holds of of Asian bound carriers…

   Different strokes for different folks. Is there a whaling tradition in Hawaii?

9. Not as far as I know.