As I’ve shared with you before, I don’t like whales.
They are a fear of mine. They’re unnaturally large aquatic beasts moving in the great, horrifying deep and will one day arise from the oceans to be our overlords. True story. It’s, like, science.
So when I heard that a 40-ft., 40,000-lb. dead fin whale had washed up in Malibu, California, honestly I kind of felt like this.
Take THAT, evil beast of the sea.
Things started to get interesting because we’re not used to animals of that scale decomposing on dry land. So as the whale started to do it’s rot-thing, it became a question of what to do with the massive carcass.
Unfortunately I am not in LA this month, so I couldn’t go down to Malibu and say hello. And by “say hello” I mean feel ever-so-briefly superior to an animal that could easily eat/destroy/drown me if we were on his turf.
So I sent Order of the Good Death buddy Oliver Anderson (who designed the flying Ask a Mortician titles) to take pictures. Apparently there were two marine mammal rescue workers there because when they didn’t stand guard people were taking bones. Which I don’t totally blame them for doing.
(Whale eye!)
Alas, you can no longer view the whale, as the celebrities and rich folk that live on that stretch of Little Dume beach in Malibu (including Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan) had the whale towed back into the ocean where it can no longer offend their highbrow sensibilities.