Saturday, May 30, 2015

A lot of "stuff" is happening out there today. I can't keep up. There are some interesting trends, maybe I will run through them later. I talked about some of them in the previous post. A woman with a t-shirt with "Drink Wine. Save Animals. D Vine Wine. Grapevine, Texas" on the back just got her cup of Starbucks.

The t-shirt, "drink wine, save animals," reminded me of the inarguable truism (oxymoron, redundant) that Rockefeller and Standard Oil single-handedly saved the whales from extinction. I probably know as much about whales as the average Texan having visited the whaling capital and whaling museum in Bedford, Massachusetts, on many occasions. My favorite whaling books (the ones on my bookshelves):

• The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America: Together With an Account of the American Whale-Fishery (California Legacy Book), Charles Melville Scammon, 1874, foreword of current printing, 2007 
• The Whale: In Search of The Giants of the Sea, Philip Hoare, c. 2010 
• Eye of the Whale: Lyric Passage from Baja to Siberia, Dick Russell, c. 2004 

At the time the whales were being decimated and Standard Oil was being founded, there was no Greenpeace to save the whales. Had Standard Oil not come along, humans would have killed off the whales, if not all whale species, certainly several of the most impressive species. Forbes once had an article on that story. Google it; easy to find.

More later. I need to get home to start preparing for our older granddaughter's birthday party, later this afternoon.