As we write this on Friday, we’re kind of cold and a little cranky. So, what do you say we go right to the items? The Electoral College votes yes.
Ghost sharks. Something else to fear
There was a very interesting story in the New York Times last week about ghost sharks. Or perhaps it was a very terrifying story. Hard to know which way to go on this one.
As we may have mentioned, we’re not big on things swimming around us that we have no shot at spotting. We wrote a while back about “ultra-black” fish that absorb 99.9% of the light that hits their skin, making them almost impossible to see. Honestly, who wants to deal with that? Don’t we have enough on our plates at the moment?
Now we have ghost sharks to worry about. We worry we might encounter one. Marine researchers now fear they might not.
“Over the past few decades, scientists learned that these cartilaginous fishes, also known as ratfish or Chimaeras, have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and that they have venomous spines in front of their dorsal fins and “fly” through the water by flapping their pectoral fins,” the Times story stated. “They even learned that most male ghost sharks have a retractable sex organ on their foreheads that resembles a medieval mace.”
OK, quick aside: We don’t have any idea what to say about that. So, in a rare display of discretion, we will not say anything, except to say it’s probably a good thing it’s retractable.
The central question in the piece was whether some of the known 52 species of ghost sharks might disappear before scientists have a chance to study them properly.
“Scientists from the Shark Specialist Group, a division of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, recently assessed the extinction risk of all confirmed ghost shark species and determined that 16% are ‘threatened’ or ‘near threatened,’” the story stated. “The assessment, which was published this month in the journal Fish and Fisheries, also found that 15% of ghost shark species are so understudied that their extinction risk cannot be determined. Now experts are concerned that certain ghost shark species might go extinct before scientists have a chance to study them.”
Apparently, they’re not much in the looks department. Not that that’s everything a young ghost shark would be interested in.
““They’ve got a face only a mother or a researcher could love,” said David Ebert, director of the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California and co-author of the assessment.
Marine research comedy. What a stitch.
FishOn winter baseball quiz question
In honor of our first legit snow storm of the season last week, we offer this special winterized version of the weekly quiz. How many players with the surname “Snow” have appeared in a major league baseball game? The answer is down below, digging out the bullpen cart.
People. They’re everywhere
Last week, we wrote about our old UMass journalism mentor Howard Ziff in an anecdote related to our shocking acceptance to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, back in the previous century.
Pleasantly enough, the item prompted some old journalism classmates, Massachusetts Daily Collegian colleagues and Ziffophiles everywhere to reach out to catch up. And we will do that. We also heard from the Osceola County sheriff’s department looking to catch up in a different way. We will not be doing that.
Locally, two nice notes came in. The first was from longtime Gloucester Daily Times reader Kari Gunn Gale, who seems eager to reprise her own past as a news hawk.
“My name is Kari Gale and I’ve been a faithful reader of the GDT for nearly 50 years,” she wrote in an email. “Happily today I saw your article with the news of your having been at Medill! Imagine, Northwestern and Evanston on the front page!”
Turns out, her father taught history at Evanston High School and at Northwestern. She took a journalism course her junior year at Evanston High.
“Our teacher was from Medill and we put out a weekly newspaper — and became the staff of same as seniors if we were chosen. It’s in my blood!”
The other note came from former City Councilor Bill Fonvielle of Gloucester, who enjoyed the reference to the immortal Billy Goat Tavern from his days as a graduate student at Northwestern:
“Your bit on Billy Goat Tavern brought back fond memories,” he wrote in an email. “I was a frequent patron in the mid-to-late-sixties and was enough of a regular to merit an occasional bop on the head delivered by Billy’s toy squeaky hammer.”
Fonvielle worked in advertising in the Wrigley Building, located on Michigan Avenue above the subterranean tavern. He referred to himself as “at the time as one of the first Black “Mad Men.” He also founded the Northwestern Students for Civil Rights in late 1963, about which he has produced a video.
FishOn winter baseball quiz answer
Of the more than 15,200 players who have appeared in a major league game, only two have been named Snow. The best-known of the two is first baseman J.T. Snow, who had a fine career over 16 years, including his forgettable 2006 season with the Red Sox. The other is Charlie Snow, who played in one game with the Brooklyn Atlantics of the National Association in 1874. Snow, born in Lowell, singled in his one trip to the plate. He never played in another major league game, thus one of the 81 players who left the majors with a lifetime batting average of 1.000. Of course, Snow made errors on each of his three defensive chances that day to close his career with a lifetime fielding percentage of .000. Nice symmetry, that.
As always, no fish were harmed in the making of this column.
Contact Sean Horgan at 978-675-2714, or shorgan@gloucestertimes.com. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanGDT
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