Of Exploding Whales

From the "What the hell?" department...

Yesterday was the infamous 40-year anniversary of perhaps the lowest of low points for grey whales everywhere. Shortly before November 12, 1970, near Florence, Oregon, an already-deceased whale had washed up on shore. Unfortunately, no one really knew what to do with the massive, decomposing, 8-ton sea mammal.

You can't exactly bury it, you can't really haul it away, and you can't just let it rot, significantly decreasing the land value of at least a 5-mile downwind radius. So the next logical solution? Explode the carcass using a half-ton of dynamite.

On the surface, it sounds awful, but it actually makes a lot of sense: disintegrate the whale's leftovers with the explosion, and let scavenging seagulls take care of the rest.

If nothing else, it provided golden material for columnist Dave Barry, a website dedicated to the incident (www.theexplodingwhale.com), and for alliterative one-liners by television reporters like Paul Linnman, who coined the timeless phrase, "The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."

The video? I thought you'd never ask: