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Daring rescue of whale off Farallones
On the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, the amazing story (by the excellent Peter Fimrite) of a brave humanitarian act.
A humpback whale was discovered by fishermen trapped in a tangle of crab pot lines and struggling for her life. A rescue party cut her loose – and the whale, obviously understanding what they were doing, held still while they worked and then made what appear to be several gestures of gratitude.

At least 12 crab traps, weighing 90 pounds each, hung off the whale, the divers said. The combined weight was pulling the whale downward, forcing it to struggle mightily to keep its blow-hole out of the water…. Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special curved knife. The whale floated passively in the water the whole time, he said, giving off a strange kind of vibration.
“When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me,” Moskito said. “It was an epic moment of my life.”

“It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it,” James Moskito, one of the rescue divers, said Tuesday. “It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun.”

Read the whole story, please. And look at the photos.

After two weeks of getting nothing done due to illness, I got my energy back
in a major way and I’ve been on a cleaning and throwing-away binge for days.
It started with the t-shirts in my bedroom closet. They’re on shelves,
and the shelves were just a jumble of knotted, crumpled fabric. So I
pulled every damn shirt down and tossed out more than a hundred of
them. I also reduced by stash of sweatshirts from a dozen to four,
deleted a few shirt-type shirts, threw away a pair of jeans w/ a loose
button that I’ll never get replaced, and tossed several pairs of shorts
and some worn-out socks.
Then I went into my office, aka entropy city. I’ve been at it for days
in there. I have been accumulating sheets of cardboard and corrugated
paper for decades, just in case I needed to mail something. I’ve got
letterhead from jobs I left 25 years ago and magazines I wrote for 20
years ago; magazines with Something About Me in ’em that I needed
multiple copies of (why? elephino!); computer cables for interfaces
that have been obsolete for a decade; nonfunctional digital tape
recorders; documentation for software I replaced years ago; software
I haven’t used since I had a black and white monitor; a basket full
of rubebr stamps that my dear deceased business manager loved to use
but which i haven’t touched since she went on sick leave and never came
back.
I’ve had books stuffed into shelves all over the place, in among the
cassettes and VHS tapes, with no rhyme or reason; CD racks that hold
two dozen disc, whose contents would all be more appropriately stored
with the larger collections; little wire baskets full of nothing in
particular; a couple hundred Priority mail labels with my return
address printed on them, which I haven’t used in years; a stash of
labels for the postage meter I returned two years ago; a
big cardboard rack with 32 compartments – designed to hold stacks of
letter-size paper – more than half of which were filled with nothing in
particular.
For twenty years now I have been printing extra copies of the cue
sheets for my radio show and storing them in one or more of those
compartments. Once or twice a year I’d take a hundred or so of the
oldest sheets and move them over into the compartment that held
printed-on-one-side paper that I can use for printing nonessential
documents (e.g. WELL topics to read in the bathtub). I’ve got reels of
tape that belong to other people, the contents of which I’ve already
digitized and burned to CD for them, but for some reason I haven’t
returned the reels.
I found an ancient box containing the floppy discs and documentation
for Microsoft Excel, which I haven’t used on any of my computers in
probably five years.
You get the picture?
I have already filled up the trash can and the recycling bin, and we
took half a cubic yard of t-shirts, sweaters, etc. to various charitable outlets on Sunday.
I now have a thousand sheets of printed-on-one-side paper ready to
reuse. I will from now on only print enough cue sheets to meet my
needs; it occurs to me that this computer I have in my lap has the
entire 20-year run of the show for on-demand printing should the need
arise.
I have collected all the books from all four corners of the office and
stacked them on top of the filing cabinets, where the behemoth paper-
compartment thingie dominated the room for a decade. I will organize
the books by various appropriate criteria and take about a third of
them over to KPFA when I go in to do my show; I will leave them in the
lobby, and most of them will be gone by the time I leave the building
two hours later. I will put some of the bound galleys of Grateful
Dead-related books up for sale on eBay and give some of the proceeds to
Rock the Earth
and to a friend of mine who lost her job and her
health insurance just as she began being treated for cancer.
I’m in the process of retrievinng all the posters and photos from their
dusty sanctuaries behind bookcases, in closets, and over there by the
printer. I may try to sell some of the David Lance Goines posters I
bought in the ’80s. I may try to sell some of the Herb Greene and Jim
Marshall photos I have accumulated over the years. I’ve put up a few collectibles on eBay, and there will be many more in the weeks to come.
There’s more.
I haven’t said a word about the CDs, which are far and away the biggest problem.