BYBS: Fresh Air at Sea

This past week a ran into a couple of podcasts that were both on NPR's Fresh Air; one was titled "Sex, Drugs and Sea Slime" while the other was called "Moby-Duck".

The NPR story on the wild and slimy life of undersea critters can be found via this link, while the story on Moby-Duck can be found to via this link.

The pictures lead to links where the books can be obtained on Amazon.

The title and subject matter are reasons enough to create a blog entry for the book, but another reason is that she used to be the chief science officer/whatever of the Aquarius underwater habitat.  Aquarius is a habitat that sits off the Florida keys under around 60 feet of water.

Apart from anything else that various free-living underwater critters might be doing down there having what amounts to an underwater base sounds like the coolest job one could ask for.

Now mind you, after 4 weeks of the same knock-knock jokes and losing yet another thumb wrestling match to your fellow diver could begin to get on your nerves, this could explain my interest in the second book: Moby-Duck.

Some people might hear about a bunch of rubber (plastic?) ducks being thrown overboard and conclude that the ducks had done something to merit walking the plank.

Other people might spend a fairly long period of time tracking down where the ducks came from, how they got from the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean and generally make any of my own time-wasting activities seem trivial by comparison.

In addition to shoring up the self-esteem of anyone with a strange obsession, the book also talks about the problems with plastic sea junk that is accumulating in the Earth's various oceans.  This adds an instant air of seriousness that one cannot get from a book that goes into the mechanics of, say, lobster sex.

I haven't read either book --- we'll see if I get around to it, but in the mean time I can relax with the notion that if I met either of these people, I'd no longer be the strangest person in the room.