“Almost everybody in the fishing business has had sex with a manta at some point,” Makeburu asserts.
What!!! A manta??? You mean one of those enormous, intimidating winged things with a stinger on their tail that looks like an aquatic Batman?
Yep. After all, fisherman out on ships spend a loooonggg time at sea without ever encountering a woman, and, well, let’s face it, they can get pretty horny. No, dammit, let’s make that incredibly horny. Even desperate enough to do it with a manta. Right?
“Nah,” shrugs Makeburu. “Coastal fishermen poke them too.”
The ship went down in a storm on November 10, 1975. The ship had been in grave trouble, and in constant radio and visual contact with a fellow ship, for many hours when it vanished in a sudden squall. No trace of the ship has surfaced…until now.
Now, from exotic Conklin, Michigan comes news that bits of the wreckage have begun to wash up on the shores of Lake Superior. Well, 20 feet up from the water line, about as high as the waves were the night she went down. Unfortunately, the constituent parts of a Great Lakes shipping vessel are not exactly the glamorous New World equivalent of the gold of Spanish galleons.
Joe, an apple farmer from Conklin, Mich., was agate hunting with his family midway between Horse Shoe Harbor and High Rock Bay in Keweenaw County Friday when he discovered a life ring off to the side of a blown-down tree. The ring was found 100 feet from the waters edge, up a rocky slope, 20 feet higher than the lake level, three feet into the trees, Joe said. The ring was not visible until he went up the bank, he said. Thinking nothing of it, Joe rolled the ring down the hill to his daughters. Joe’s youngest daughter Elizabeth, 10, caught the ring in her hands and turned it over. What was printed on the ring, they had never imagined: Edmund Fitzgerald.
“It sent a chill down my spine,” Joe said. “It’s the last thing I thought it was.”
A study released Friday by the US Geological Survey found the radioactive isotope in 24 private wells and one public well around Fallon, about 60 miles east of Reno. Polonium-210 is known to cause cancer in humans.
All dairies around Fallon sell their milk to the Dairy Farmers of America cooperative, which in turn markets the milk to a dairy in Reno and plants in northern California.
…Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security agent, was killed in London last year with a dose of polonium-210
I am sure that I speak for many when I say I miss those endless Saturday afternoon nature shows that came on between the sports. Take thirteen minutes and climb with me back into the cosy, cowboy-printed sleepingbag of your childhood as we watch The Search for the Giant Squid!
from the YouTube notes:
For centuries, sailors have told tales of sea monsters with massive tentacles. But it was only recently that a giant squid was actually filmed. One man has spent his life tracking the elusive creatures.
When his large, powerful yacht slowed to a virtual stop, Olivier de Kersauson knew he had a problem. “I saw two arms, twice the size of my arm, grabbing the rudder.” A giant squid had got caught in the propeller. “It had a lot of power and started to shake the boat.” It was a sight Dr Steve O’Shea would love to have witnessed. For over 30 years he’s been chasing the rare creatures. But recently, he’s become aware of a disturbing trend. “Squids are incredibly good barometers of environmental health”, he explains. “If I go back 10 years, I had 23 giant squids in one year. Now, because of the intensity of fishing, it’s tailed down to one a year.”
And here is the requisite wistful portrait demonstrating the futility and the beauty of human hopes and dreams, from the New Yorker.
As constant readers know, we at the ol’ raincoaster blog just can’t get enough of the gigantic, icky Jellyfish thang. I think (we thinks?) we’ve been traumatized ever since we went kayaking during the Great Indian Arm Jellyfish Migration and ended up accidently scooping them onto the paddles with every stroke, wherefrom they would sliiiiiiiiiide down the handle and onto our hands YUCJYUCKYIKUGH and then plop onto the spray skirt, where we’d have to flick them off with the back of our hand encased in a plastic bag, ew!
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All the Polonium-210 in 
raincoaster 