Monday, February 29, 2016

DEXTER: The Series



This was recently brought to my attention by an operative whose transformation really started to pick up speed around the same time she got her TV privileges back from her parents, and she started renting season after season of a show called Dexter.  The show is entertaining, but absolutely ridiculous even by human standards -- it's about a serial killer who works for the police, spending his off hours killing the murderers the police aren't able to catch.  (Much as in real life.)

The reason for this is even more ridiculous.  Once upon a time Dexter, the beloved second child in a supportive family, was locked in a room with his mother and brother by drug dealers, who came in with a chainsaw and used it to kill mom.  Dexter, age 3, after sitting screaming in a pool of blood for who knows how long, was rescued by a kindly police officer who understood immediately that this was going to make the little boy into a recreational murderer.  He raised him, therefore, to be a GOOD serial killer who only dusted people who had it coming.  The brother, by the way, was sent straight to some sort of children's mental hospital.  For life.  The kindly police officer took one look at him, decided he was too damaged to save, and packed him off to the laughing academy.  Dexter, raised by a second loving and supportive family, comes out exactly the same as his brother -- a compulsive killer.

Wow.  Even I know human psychology doesn't work that way, AND I'M A CATFISH.  I'm also pretty sure you can't adopt a child you found at a crime scene like that, just off the cuff.  It even appears the adoptive dad knew who and where the father was all along.  I'm pretty sure the biological dad has some sort of rights in the matter, doesn't he?

...But I digress.  Here's what strikes me about this show.  Dexter is a remarkably piscatorial serial killer.  He lives on the water and gets his head together by going out on the ocean alone.  He suffers when he has to be away from the ocean too long, and sneaks away from the wife and kids to get close to the saltwater, coming home refreshed.  After a killing he invariably takes the remains of his victims out on his boat and drops them over the side, in pieces, to get rid of them.  When someone stumbles across his victims, he changes his tactics only so far as to take them to a better spot offshore, where they'll wash farther away and be harder to trace. 


Having been made by a bunch of humans, the show gets even this wrong.  Dexter packages the victims in tightly-wrapped plastic bags that make it impossible for the little lively things in the sand to EAT the body parts.  I love that when the human authorities start bringing them ashore, the pieces (which date back years) are not only still tidily wrapped, but fresh as daisies, with no decomposition, let alone nibbling by our Crab or Shark sisters.  Did he package them so well that even the bacteria couldn't get in?  That makes no scientific sense, but it does make piscatorial sense.  There are some people even WE don't want to recruit.  No fish is THAT weak on right and wrong.  The killers Dexter seeks are not our sort at all.   So Dexter wants them dead; he instinctively leaves them in the ocean; but the body parts are SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION.




And here's another thing:  When Dexter does deviate from his ridiculously tidy murder ritual (like nothing any real serial killer would do; he clearly gets no sexual charge from the murders at all), he kills the guy like this:




Yeah, he drowns him!  And that was right after he sat in on his first full-immersion baptism.  What did he comment to himself as this was going on?

"Go in for a swim!  Come out a new man!"




Who did he drown in the scene above?  The guy who got baptized.  INTERESTING, NO?
Oh, and the brother?  The brother who's also a serial killer?
Dexter calls him "Briny."




Sometimes life really is good...For a laugh.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

THE BLACK WAVE by John and Jean Silverwood


JUST FINISHED THIS ONE. 

This 2008 publication, ISBN 978-1400066551, is the true "disaster" tale of blue-water sailors Jean and John Silverwood, their four children and a catamaran named Emerald Jane.  The whole family was making their way to Australia in this boat, by way of Hell's Gate, the Spice Islands and Tahiti, when they hung up on a coral reef, going aground in such a way that the mast pinned John underneath it, pretty much slicing his leg off in the process. 

I know many of you have read and enjoyed this one, but the question that keeps coming in from all quarters NEVER LETS UP.  Fish operatives do not understand the subtitle of this book, "A Family's Adventure At Sea And The Disaster That Saved Them."  SAVED THEM FROM WHAT? is what everyone wants to know.  DIDN'T IT SAVE THEM FROM BEING RECRUITED?

Well, NO, it didn't.  Anyone reading this book can see that it is a true epic of Piscatorial Love, first to last.  NOTHING EVER GETS IN THE WAY OF THAT LOVE.  Jean and John are hardcore tropical-island and deep-sea buffs, and Jean expresses regret at the years they were forced to live on dry land, building houses and selling insurance, until they had finally saved up enough to buy and refit the Emerald Jean.  At the first opportunity they take the kids out of school, fill the boat with canned goods and KISS DRY LAND GOODBYE, stopping off only to refuel and make repairs.  They spend hours daily in the water, surfing, swimming, scuba-diving, and of course FISHING.  Both the Silverwoods were in love with the sea before they ever met; their life's dream was to buy a sailboat and go on this trip.  Even when John Silverwood was learning how to walk again on an artificial leg, he was planning how to get back on board a sailboat.  After the frightening disaster that traumatized everyone in the family, not just John, Jean talks about how it was all worth it because of all the time they've spent larking about with Dolphins and Sharks, laughing it up with the Morays, catching Octopi and Mahimahi, and running on the beach had in hand.  RECRUITMENT COMPLETE!

I want you to compare this one to the similar sailboat epic, ISBN 978-0393327960, And The Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson:


Mac and Muff Graham, the blue-water sailors in this story, go even father than the Silverwoods in sacrificing everything to be at sea.  Where the Silverwoods keep their house on dry land and plan to go back there some day, the Grahams liquidate (chuckle) everything they own to go live on the Sea Wind.  This is Mac Graham's ONLY dream -- to live full-time on a boat with no place on land to call home.  So you would think he was more fully recruited than the Silverwoods, right?

Wrong!  Look who he brought with him -- his wife Muff, who hates the whole idea of sea life and describes life on board the Sea Wind as "lousy, lousy, lousy."  She goes along with it, despite a clear premonition of doom, only because she loves Mac so much.  And the authors of this book go ON AND ON about how careful, how detail-oriented, how prepared Mac Graham was to handle ANY emergency at sea.  Where the Silverwoods make it sound like a happy fluke that they had a strong enough emergency beacon and enough dry flares to attract help before John bled out and died, Mac had the Sea Wind  fitted out so completely that he could machine new parts from scratch if anything broke down on their trip.  No danger was overlooked; no threat unprepared for.  In short, they go to great lengths to STAY DRY.  And when Muff's premonition comes true, are they recruited THEN?  Nope.  They're sealed in boxes and sunk in a lagoon where DOZENS of frisky Blacktips are unable to reach or recycle them.

I want you to remember Mac and Muff Graham with the sadness I feel whenever I read this book.  They were SO CLOSE, AND YET SO FAR... 

Contrast them with the Silverwoods, who are back on dry land but waiting for their moment to get back on the high seas, and to that end (all unwitting) wrote us a nifty recruiting manual!!!
    DON'T GET ME WRONG.  I continue to regret EVERY DAY that so many deep-sea recruits are PRIVILEGED PREPPY TYPES like these.  Look at those polo shirts and Docksiders!  But remember, there are no Docksides, no Lacoste alligator shirts where these humans are going...

Where the Grahams were saved FROM the sea, the Silverwoods are being saved FOR the sea.

This Leviticus Nonsense...





A local operative has once again pointed out to me that IRRITATING passage in the Book of Leviticus disrespecting the majesty, AND EDIBILITY, of our hard-shelled sisters:

"WHATSOEVER HATH NO FINS OR SCALES IN THE WATERS, THAT SHALL BE AN ABOMINATION UNTO YOU."

(Leviticus 11)

This is just another typical example of how the Homo saps OVERGENERALIZE.  One frikkin' Jewish patriarch recognizes his erstwhile grandmother after her transformation -- and to set the rumors to rest, she turned into a Shrimp, not an Oyster or Mussel or whatever else you've heard -- AFTER he's put his fork into her; he freaks out; and the rest, as the Naked Apes say, is history.  Nobody in their whole civilization is ever allowed another Shrimp, Lobster, Crawdad, Clam or Conch. Several whole classes of recruiting operatives had to be redeployed to accommodate the new dietary restriction that came out of this accident, and we've needed to work around it for ALL THE MILLENNIA since.

One saving grace is that even though this pernicious NONSENSE leaked through the Vatican editorial staff to be read by Christians -- a much larger and more invasive group than the Jews, who offer us many more recruits -- hardly any Christian pays attention to this passage, even the literalists who want to believe for some reason I, personally, can't find in there, that the planet is only 9,000 years old.  They go right ahead and suck down the live, screaming, struggling Oysters like there's no tomorrow.  And the coconut Shrimp.  And the Mussels in wine.

But the object lesson is important.  Humans don't act the way they used to.  They do not feel honored, in this day and age, to be presented with the chance to eat an ancestor.  So, in a society of mostly strangers, your best option is to RECRUIT STRANGERS.  It's very awkward and unnatural, positively counter-intuitive, to ANY sort of fish, but there it is.