You Don't Mess With The Orca

As a recreational writer with the occasional journalistic tendency (that is, I blog every now and then), I am often bothered by the way news is reported, whether in written form or on the six o'clock bulletin. In my opinion, the two biggest errors in journalism are over-sensationalisation of stories, and misleading headlines. Especially when the two are combined, usually with scientifically inaccurate statements and illogical assumptiosn from misunderstood statistical data. That's what really irks me. But anyway. I found an example of this on Thursday in the following article:

Whale makes meal of orca and calf

When I saw that headline, I was quite surprised. The accepted models of cetacean behaviour usually dictate that orca (Orcinus orca) prey on whales, not the other way around. The term "killer whale" for orca actually came from the name "whale killer", which arose from the fact that they... kill whales.  Groups of orca can take down blue whales, the world's largest animals, by working as a team and ripping out their tongues. There's not a lot that can stand up to an orca. Seals, sharks and dolphins are all fair game for them.

So I wondered what sort of whale would "make a meal" of an orca. I clicked the link to find out and was dissapointed by the opening sentence/paragraph:

"A boatload of tourists got to witness nature at its most brutal when a killer whale flicked a pseudo orca high into the air, broke its back and ate both it and its calf in the Bay of Islands yesterday."

Now, that headline said that a whale killed an orca.

No it didn't!

An orca killed a whale!

That's an important distinction!

Pseudo orca (Pseudorca crassidens, or false killer whales) are fairly average-looking porpoise-like critters, smaller than orca but bigger than dolphins. Sort of black in colour. Like real orca, they're members of the dolphin family (Delphinidae). No matter what you define a "whale" as, orca and pseudo orca have the same degree of whaleness. You can't refer to pseudo orca as "orca" if there are real orca in the same situation! That's like telling a story about a sea lion being attacked by a real lion, and saying that "a cat attacked a lion. Although lions are cats, sea lions are not lions, and pseudo orca are not orca.

The moral of the story is that I really, really dislike inaccurate, misleading or ambiguous reporting of facts. Not just in journalism. People do it all the time. My request to those of you that do: stop it.

There's one more lesson to be taken away from this though, and that is that orca (Orcinus orca) are quite good at killing stuff. Don't try to pick a fight with one.

Back to blogging!

Now, I'm determined not to become this guy (click to embiggen):

Welll, I'm sort of like that guy. I love to tell people about my dreams, but they tend not to mind, because I have cool dreams. People at school ask me about my dreams - "Hey Caitlin, been chased by anymore tigers recently?" I have terrifying dreams about tigers. I'll tell you them sometime.

But I've managed to post more than four times on my blog. And I can't speak French, but I'm pretty sure I can speak Spanish. And I'm about to leave high school, so if I can speak it beyond my high school years I'll have beaten him. I'd like to beat him. If I were uninteresting, it would be silly of me to write a blog called "Something Interesting To Read", wouldn't it? I like to think I'm interesting.

Anyway!

So here's back to blogging. No apologies. Just new and exciting posts. Well, maybe not exciting. But interesting, hopefully. There you go!

What time is it in Antarctica?

I noticed this today about settings on Blogger. You're meant to specify which time zone you're bloggging from, and they have multiple city options for each time zone. If you're in a narrow country like New Zealand, you just take the city they've got for New Zealand and shut up. If you're in a wide country like Australia, you pick the city you're closest to, I assume. For example my time zone, GMT + 12:00, has as options Auckland, Fiji, Funafuti and Kwajalein, as well as two very unexpected locations:

"Antarctica/South Pole"

Um, ay?

Soooo, apparently if you are at the South Pole, your watch should be set to New Zealand time.

I was incredulous at this suggestion, so I consulted the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

From "South Pole": In most places on Earth, local time is more-or-less synchronised to the position of the sun in the sky. This line of reasoning fails at the South Pole, which has 'days' lasting for a whole year. Another way of looking at it is to note that all time zones converge at the pole. There is no a priori reason for placing the South Pole in any particular time zone, but as a matter of practical convenience the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station keeps New Zealand time. This is because the US flies its resupply missions out of Christchurch, New Zealand.

Well. The South Pole is on New Zealand time. Fancy that.

Now I'm considering the possibilities of blogging from the South Pole. I read a book about blogging recently that featured on the front cover a man sitting in a snowy landscape, dressed like an (insert-politically-correct-term-for-Eskimo/Inuit/etc-here), with a laptop. And it was a photo, too. I inferred from this that he was meant to be somewhere near the North Pole.

Trouble is, I don't think the South Pole has wifi. But if it ever gets wifi, I'll go down there and blog.

And I won't even have to change my blog's time zone.