What The...?

Says here there's a Facebook community specifically devoted to BANNING GEFILTE FISH AS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. 

Just when I think I understand the species I used to belong to, they pull something like this and I'm back at Square One. 

A couple of points to ponder:

>> Gefilte fish is a traditional way of getting fish down the gullets of people who might not ordinarily eat us.  You really wouldn't believe how many people we have recruited this way.  Ask your chapter leader for the stats.

>> Thousands of people LOVE gefilte fish.  There are so many recipes for this delicacy, and the tradition has been carried on so long, that Gefilte is no longer Gefilte and hasn't been for many years.  Naked Apes often fail to realize that gefilte means "stuffed," describing the original version of this holiday favorite -- a Carp stuffed with, well, various morsels of this and that to bring out the flavor and increase the transfer of the fish essences into the human host. 

>> RECRUITS LOVE IT SO MUCH, AND HAVE FIXED IT SO MANY TIMES, that it's evolved into what you see today -- usually fish balls, served in soup, in a stack on a tray, and all kinds of other creative methods limited only by the chef's imagination:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Facebook page does not mention the ordeal faced by any Carp volunteering for Gefilte duty.  If it's a crime against humanity to ask people to eat us, what about the crime against the operative who gets her head chopped off just for starters?  Is there no room in their philosophy for THAT?  We volunteer gladly, because it is all for the Cause.  THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE THINK IT TICKLES. 

 I noted with satisfaction that after someone created this Facebook page -- on November 14, 2012 -- NOBODY RESPONDED IN ANY WAY.

 

That's what I like to see!

THE NEPTUNE FACTOR

WHAT AN INTERESTING LITTLE FILM THIS WAS, LADIES!

Lensed in 1973, starring Ben Gazzara, Ernest Borgnine and Yvette Mimieux, the story concerns an ultra-modern undersea Shaved Monkey invasion of our home, fought off by OUR OPERATIVES in a way that makes my two-chambered heart swell with hope.  An experimental undersea habitat for THEM is shaken loose from its moorings by an earthquake.  (ENGINEERED BY WHOM, YOU ASK?)  A regular submarine fails to find the dislodged Oceanlab, as they call it, and with only a couple of days of air left in the tin can (assuming it hasn't been crushed beyond recognition), they call in the newly-refitted Neptune, an ultra-modern submersible that can go where the bigger sub couldn't.  THE CLOCK IS TICKING.  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS CINEMATIC DELIGHT:

>> Before it is tossed into an ocean trench by the quake, the Oceanlab is surrounded by a peculiar grid of pipes that is apparently supposed to mark off some sort of undersea gardening project.  Borgnine even talks in this one about selling undersea real estate.  Shudder!

>> It is hard to see the danger in this story at any point, when it comes to endangering the landscum, that is.  While the topographical map on board the Triton, the surface ship keeping an eye on things, shows the lab teetering on top of a mountain that overlooks a bottomless deep-sea trench, when you see the actual set they used, the Oceanlab is placed on a flat and featureless plain with MORE OF THE SAME around it as far as the camera can see.  What does the lab fall off of...and into?

>> The danger to US is totally ignored.  This is a Shaved Monkey movie filmed for Shaved Monkey movie patrons.

>>  Magically, the large sub and then the Neptune both find the invisible trench and go into it as far as they can.  Even more magically, they find traces of the Oceanlab.  Far more magically, in my opinion, no matter what the unprecedented depth of the exploration, divers can just leave the Neptune whenever they want, and swim around without being crushed like so many beercans under the weight of a falling bank building.  AMAZING!

>> At the bottom of the trench, what do they find?  US.  ENLARGED.  This is where the movie gets really hysterical.  After forking over Scrod knows how many dollars to make sets like nothing seen before in moviedom -- the artificial undersea lab, the sub, the ultra-high-tech submersible, you name it -- all they can manage for the deep-trench scenes is having a Matchbox-sized toy Neptune travel around inside a good-sized saltwater aquarium stoked with the most familiar and decorative ocean operatives you'd see in any pet store.  This is supposed to be TERRIFYING.  If a Catfish could laugh...

>> I really hated the ending of this movie, frankly.  Not enough of the humans were killed, in NONE of the right ways except for the one guy at the very end, and what did the humans learn?  I DON'T KNOW.  Nobody said ANYTHING about whether they thought it was a good idea to keep invading and farming the ocean floor.

>>  But the sight of all those colossal Eels converging on the cowering divers?  Good stuff, baby.  The Crab operative, gnashing her mandibles in rage as she shoves the submersible across the sand?  BEAUTIFUL.  The assorted immense finfish, who for some reason terrified the explorers more than anything else in this movie, TOTALLY IGNORING THE SHAVED MONKEYS IN THEIR TIN CAN?  Priceless.

>> By the way, did anyone but ME and THEE notice the misplaced giant Goldfish gulped down by the giant Lionfish?  The only Sacred Scribe of Dagon's Will I know who even addressed the possibility of fresh- and salt-water fish comingling in this egregious manner is, of course, Lovecraft, and he was all about the infernal blending of incompatible races.  Gazzara and Borgnine didn't bat an eye when they saw this happen in their viewscreen.  Incredible!

>> Similarly, nobody appears to have noticed the prescient quality of this entire film.  Someone finally explores a deep-ocean trench on film, and what do they find?  ALMOST EXACTLY WHAT THEY FOUND IN REAL LIFE when they tried it for real:  immense sea life (no Goldfish, sorry) who treated them as THE IRRELEVANCIES THEY ARE.

>> I especially liked the trailers and ads I found in the disc extras.  "Man is the smallest thing in the ocean," they all said, in all the different versions.  YEAH, BABY.  YOU ARE.  AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT.

Thanks To The Operative Who Connected Us To THIS Gem

 

 

Wow.  Just...Wow.

From the Gospel of St. Bruce

 

"And lo, He stretched forth His fin, and the seas were filled with seals and surfers. And He said unto His followers, 'Feast and be happy.' And the Ocean did run red with blood, and it was good."- Gospel of Saint Bruce 4:25-27

Greenpeace Submarine Attack on Our Operatives Blows Over

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, as it turns out.

A Greenpeace-owned 2-monkey submersible attacked some of our operatives out of nowhere earlier this week, and the fight was UGLY but BRIEF.  If you are still sufficiently human to watch the TV news, you are probably familiar with the recent shootings and other intra-landscum altercations caught on people's cellphones, police dashboard cameras and closed-circuit TV tapes.  Well, this is MORE OF THE SAME -- except that instead of a police officer shooting an unarmed man for obeying orders during a routine traffic stop, or a neighborhood watch patrolman pistol-whipping a stranger to death because he looked suspicious, this time the dashboard camera makes it look as if a mob of angry Squid are taking Greenpeace to task.  In fact, AS YOU ALL KNOW ALREADY, the "attack" was merely an inkscreen to conceal certain activities I AM NOT ABOUT TO POST ON THE INTERNET.

The sad thing about this incident is that it underlines the monkey tendency to see this species as rough trade -- Shaved Monkeys call these ladies Jumbo Squid, Humboldt Squid and even -- in a TV special I keep meaning to review for you here -- Killer Squid.  Can you believe it?  They have this funny hang-up on the color RED and, when on alert, these ladies do indeed LIGHT UP RED.  (They IGNORE the fact that in other circumstances, they light up in other colors -- as when they turn WHITE WITH RAGE.)  To a human in the USA red tends to mean DANGER.  WARNING.  TROUBLE.  STOP.  That doesn't prevent them from seeing a group of red Squid in flight and PLOWING STRAIGHT INTO THEM, the way these idiots did, and PISSING US OFF.

There's another connection they keep missing.  Many shaved monkeys have commented on the smell of ammonia emitted by Squid.  They forget that it is the smell of URINE.  The smell of being PISSED.  And they never figure out that when you snag one of us on a hook and drag us, fighting and screaming, out of the water to be sliced up and stuffed in a cat-food can, hey, that PISSES US OFF.

Morons.

At least none of our secrets were revealed this week, ladies.  Let them keep their dumb ideas about the Jumbo Killer Humboldt Squid.  THE STEREOTYPES ONLY OFFER US ANOTHER LAYER OF PROTECTIVE COLORATION.

Even Those Scary Killer Carp Just Want Love!

PACIFIC RIM

Well, what to make of this one?

PACIFIC RIM is one of the brainchildren of Guillermo del Toro, a 2013 theatrical release, SUPPOSEDLY ABOUT SEA MONSTERS AND THE BATTLE AGAINST THEM.

I don't really have much to say about this movie because WE NEVER GET TO SEE the sea monsters.  We didn't get to see where they came from.  We didn't get to see them wade ashore and really recruit en masse, the way only a giant sea monster can.  We didn't even get to see them really settle in up on dry land, or -- as I was frankly hoping -- taking some good-sized hunks of dry land under the sea with them, like the parts of 2012 I enjoyed best.

 

Weirdest of all, the story made the monsters into differently-shaped, differently-abled, differently-challenging creatures ALL MADE FROM IDENTICAL GENETIC MATERIAL.  It betrays a rather shaky knowledge of DNA on del Toro's part.  But maybe he just found it too scary an idea to use in his movie that ALL OF US, OF ALL DNA CONFIGURATIONS, ARE AGAINST YOU LANDSCUM.  One thing this guy does constantly is tame down really scary movie concepts into something a lot more child-friendly.

And how does he do it in this one?  Aside from making the menace from the sea into basically something UNRELATED to our sort of sea life and ESCAPING FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION TO MESS WITH THE FEATHERLESS BIPEDS FOR NO REASON, he focuses the whole story on these people in giant robo-suits who wade into the ocean to get into fistfights with the monsters.  Imagine a potentially great story like this turning into a landscum coming-of-age, fight-team-fight-until-we-win-the-day sort of story and there you have it.

If you're looking for a sea-monster recruitment drama, let me suggest something from Toho Studios, or one of the analogues from American film studios...

 

 

False Alarm, Ladies...

The live Mermaid exhibit at the Newport Aquarium in Cincinnatti, Ohio turns out to be just the Weeki Wachee kind.  Not the real thing.

Might be fun to check out, though, and it's guaranteed to be a DELIGHTFUL recruiting event.  We can never have too many little girls enamoured of Mermaids signing up to become members of the Fish Nation. 

And for obvious reasons, real Mermaids will NOT BE ALLOWED BY ME on the Weeki Wachee tour:

 

We don't want it to get TOO REAL for the tykes TOO SOON.

MOBY DICK 2010

WELL, LADIES, THIS ONE WAS CERTAINLY INTERESTING!

This straight-to-video release was the brainchild of a Naked Ape director named Trey Stokes.  I watched it last week along with all the "disc extras" that the Homo saps always make so much fuss about.  Needless to say, this film -- which currently scores 2.4 stars out of a possible 10 at the Internet Movie Database -- has a complete "making of" documentary attached to it.  IT REVEALS FAR TOO MUCH.  I am not talking about piscatorial security leaks.  It reveals the thinking process of the people who put this movie together, and frankly I can hardly believe that they take this movie seriously themselves, but there it is on the disc for all to see...I guess that's human nature in a nutshell, isn't it?  If I did this it is a work of art, not a baffling clusterfunk, because I mean it to be powerful and moving.  So it must be.  Because we humans are the masters of that sort of thing.  NEVER MIND that we didn't really put any thought into this at all, for all our vaunted intelligence, and the results we got would make a cat laugh...

...Onwards.

PLOT SUMMARY:  This may be familiar to a few of you, especially those who were first drawn to Piscatorial Love by reading Melville's Moby-Dick.  A half-mad sea captain named Ahab chases the great white Whale that took his leg years ago.   The crew of his ship, the Pequod, gets distinctly nervous as their quarry gets closer, because dang, this is one big honker of a Whale.  Ahab -- a remarkable combination of planful and crazy, played wonderfully by Barry Bostwick -- cannot be swayed from his goal, and ultimately, well, IT ENDS ABOUT THE SAME WAY THE NOVEL DID.

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON HOW THEY BROUGHT THIS STORY INTO THE CURRENT CENTURY:

>> Ishmael from the novel is remade in this film adaptation into a pretty blonde marine biologist named Michelle.  She has an Odious Comic Relief sidekick named Pip.

>> In this movie, Pequod -- and the ship Ahab was working on when he lost his leg to the whale, Acushnet -- are nuclear submarines.  The crew involved are not supposed to be hunting Whales at all; they are strictly military guys.

>> All of these guys -- Starbuck, Queequeg, all the names you may remember from the book -- are pared down to bland background characters with hardly any lines and no real role in the story.  Michelle is no different.  She doesn't even have the role Ishmael had, of the lone survivor who needs to  sit down next to you, introduce herself, and tell you the terrible tale of what happened aboard the Pequod.

>> This story involves all kinds of specialized audio equipment and military secrets turned against OUR OPERATIVES, for PERSONAL REVENGE.  At least that's how Ahab sees it.  Michelle sees it as pretty much crazy.

>> That's not how I see it, however.  Ahab and Michelle argue about how much credit to give Moby-Dick for what looks like an ability to plan ahead, be sneaky, and so on -- they can't agree on whether this Whale is very smart or very dumb.  What every Shaved Monkey on board appears to miss is the way Moby-Dick uses the Pequod's technology against the crew, so that she can successfully complete the cycle of recruitment.  FOOLS!

>> You can sort of see why Ahab is so upset at Moby Dick, because they were JUST down there minding their own business, or rather the business of those dadblasted Communists who are trying to undermine the American way of life, when out of nowhere this ridonkulously huge Whale grabs them amidships, shoves them straight up through a solid sheet of ice into the open air, snaps them in half in mid-breach and then sinks back below the surface with half the sub still in its mouth.  The nerve!

>> You can sort of NOT see why Ahab is so upset.  One of the other survivors of the Acushnet  disaster, a guy named Boomer, was just as badly hurt and yet still has his head screwed on pretty straight.  In the time since half the Acushnet was stranded on an ice floe, Ahab has risen to the rank of submarine captain, designed the Pequod himself (which suggests he must have gotten a naval engineering degree under his belt at some point, probably at government expense), then clean got away with stealing his own ship to set off on the revenge trail.

>> In this movie you can very, very easily see the overlap between this plot and the one we remember from Jaws.  The Great White Shark, like the Great White Whale, and their human recruits find each other across countless miles and years to finish what they started together.  Now THAT is what I call good technique.  THIS IS THE MESSAGE OF THIS MOVIE, AS FAR AS YOU ARE CONCERNED:  for recruiters, the message is FINISH WHAT YOU START.  For recruits, the message is RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.  START LEARNING TO SWIM NOW.

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON WHAT REALLY FAILS TO MAKE SENSE IN THIS MOVIE:

>> How does anyone steal his own nuclear submarine...from himself? 

>> Isn't it kind of a rule in the Marines that if you lose a leg in action, they send you home with a disability pension?  Ahab has lost a leg and Boomer, we are told, got gangrene in his arm while they were waiting for rescue aboard the bisected Acushnet.  Why are they still in the Marines?  Odder still, Boomer seems to pretty much still have his arm.  At times.  Here and there he seems to try to tuck his hand up his sleeve and hide it that way.  But there's no hook or anything obvious like that to show he had an amputation.  And then his hand shows up again for a minute.  Oh, I don't know.

>> What species is Moby-Dick?  Basically the same shape as what the Naked Apes call a Sperm Whale, this operative is 500 feet long and big enough to eat a standard-issue Whale as an hors d'oeuvre.  OK, we know there are all kinds of species out there unknown to the Naked Apes, but isn't this one kind of hard to hide?

>> What kind of Whale not only hides, evades sonar, flies, and hovers on top of the water as long as desired like an inflatable raft, but ALSO roars like a dinosaur whether above or below the surface?  The abilities of this species are astounding.  I especially like the way the massive Whale slipped unnoticed through a 12-foot-deep channel too shallow to admit the Pequod.  I guess it's no more physically impossible than a Whale that flies.

>> And why is there only one?  When Ahab finds his quarry, it's not just any 500-foot-long Sperm Whale.  It's the same one that ate his leg.  Fifty years ago.  Definitely.  (And he knows this how???)

>> If this Whale is so elusive that she is only a legend -- to everyone but the crew of the Pequod -- how is she so easy for Ahab to find again and again?  You know and I know that they are drawn together by the natural progression of the recruitment process, but NO HOMO SAP UNDERSTANDS THAT.  They don't even try to explain that in terms a human can understand.

>> If this Whale is so elusive that she is only a legend -- to everyone but the crew of the Pequod -- what's with all the old harpoons embedded in the poor creature's head?  Don't they usually catch sight of a Whale before firing a harpoon into her?  That's what I thought.

>> I understand a nuclear sub needs more than one person to run it, but I think they wasted time introducing one character after another in this movie that had no real role in the events.  It was just between Ahab and his recruiting operative.  It should have been kept that way.

 Ultimately, the most believable factor in this story is the way Ahab, stricken with Piscatorial Love, looks crazier and crazier to his human observers as he becomes incapable of anything else on earth but getting between the jaws of that Whale.  But love finds a way.  That alone makes it worth seeing. 

An Operative Saw This Ad On A Bumper Sticker...

Honestly, the things Naked Apes find to put on a decal or a t-shirt. 

 

Just to keep you ladies caught up on developments -- there are no plans to convert the lakes to saltwater, but "Shark-Free"?  Stay tuned.  WE ARE TAKING CARE OF THE PROBLEM.