VSI Episode 49

My kid had one of these, which I found at a game convention. I can only assume Lovecraft would be incensed to find his favorite fish/frog hybrids reduced to children’s novelties. Plus he never made any money off them. Photo from this store, which says they are out of stock. I thought from the tag on ours that it was made in Corbin, KY, not far from where I used to live.

Original Blog Blurb from 2012

Sort of like a consulting detective, but not.

I can’t completely explain where all the castaway references came from, although likely it had something to do with the adventures of Louis de Rougemont, which is still playing downtown at Triad Stage, and which my kid and I are going to see as a matinee this Sunday.

There’s a theme running through the play about the tension between Louis’s fantastic adventures and the expertise of the academic poindexter scientists at the Royal Society. You’ll hear some of the opposite of that today, where the scientists are actually right, but they don’t have Louis’s gift for storytelling, and so the farmers refuse to listen to them. Also in Gerald Pottern's description of the North American Native Fish Society, which sounds like the opposite of deRougemont's description of the Royal Society.

REFERENCES

Gerald Pottern's profile on LinkedIn

North American Native Fish Society

Raleigh Aquarium Society

Updates from 2022

NC supposedly has 234 species of freshwater fish, 57 of which are threatened or endangered. Another more detailed geographical atlas of NC fish is here.

Corbin Jones, who was in three episodes of the first decade of this show, kept a bluegill he called Fluffy in a ten-gallon tank in our apartment. It was pretty hilarious to watch Fluffy ram into the walls of the tank in order to cut giant night crawler worms into smaller pieces for swallowing. His teeth were evolved into little needle shapes for holding, not shark like blades for cutting. Over the course of six years he grew a couple of inches. Knowing Corbin, I fully expected him to eat Fluffy, but on his graduation he returned the little fish to the wild.

My dad never did come around on erosion. He took the state’s money to fence off our farm creeks to create a riparian buffer, but as soon as the contract was over, he turned the cattle back into the woods to "clean them up.” I won’t even go into the whole beaver dispute. I should say never has come around, since he is still alive. Actually, he is supposed to be going home today from rehab, where he was recovering from surgery to replace a hip after a fall. Now both my parents are titanium cyborgs.

Our 50th episode had nothing to do with resurrecting the dead, but I did write this TED-Ed animation on the subject. When I showed it to the middle-school students in my Alien Ecosystems course this summer, one of them asked me, “Are you famous?”

“In this room I am,” is what I should have said. I never think of those comebacks until later, though, which is why I’m a writer and not a stand-up comedian.