Codcast

This Thanksgiving weekend, I drove for about 23 hours, all told, and listened to two audiobooks. The first, for those of you keeping track, was Christopher Moore's Practical Demonkeeping. It was a good audiobook-- the reader, Oliver Wyman, did a good job handling different characters and narration.

The really fantastic book, the book that I listened to for almost eight hours, basically straight through, is Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World.

I dubbed my experience with this book the Codcast.

Photo: Hans-Petter Fjeld (CC-BY-SA)

The audiobook was interesting, not least because the book was interesting. The narrator, Richard M. Davidson, initially sounded exactly like Steve Inskeep of NPR. I got really excited, and it was kind of a letdown when it turned out not to be him. Davidson seems to be a master at the not-quite-an-accent: enough of a lilt to know we're talking to someone from Iceland/Newfoundland/Wales, but not a jarring full-on accent by any means. 

And this book. Oh, this book. To listen to this book, you could come to the following conclusions:

• Cod is responsible for the discovery of America.
• Cod is responsible for the American Revolution.
• Cod is responsible for bringing Iceland out of the middle ages during World War II.
• Cod is responsible for most of Canada.
• Cod is not really responsible for slavery, but cod did keep it profitable by providing a cheap protein source.
• Without cod, life as we know it will end.
• Especially because fishermen are our nation's greatest natural resource.
• (Aside from cod.)

Now, many of these claims are mostly true. But, like any history that just focuses on a single topic, kind of incomplete. It's true that Massachusetts wouldn't have had the middle class that it did in the 1700s without cod. It's true that cod fishing was so successful that England found colonial trade difficult to regulate. But it's a bit of a stretch (note to self: do not edit to say "a bit fishy") to say that cod is absolutely responsible for the American Revolution. Srsly.


(Aside: Googling "Fish in costume" will really only get you pictures of people wearing fish costumes and no costumed fish. I am imagining a picture of a fish wearing a red coat, like the Redcoats wore, and staring out with glassy eyes, to accompany this passage. The internet did not provide. The closest things I could find was a dog in a fish costume (at least it wasn't a human?) and this picture: 

YES)

In other fish-related news, here are the Top 10 Coelacanth Stories of 2011. 

Please pay special attention to number 8, which features a hulu depicting how Coelacanth were almost fished to extinction and it is GLORIOUS. An obscure government agency promoting conservation through dance? Women in purple jangle dresses, men miming fishing, dancing, a happy little tune that at times turns sinister... I literally cannot ask for more from a youtube video. Here, just watch it for yourself:

I repeat: GLORIOUS. But, as a commenter pointed out, the "fishing to near extinction" probably happened millions and millions of years ago. He was not properly watching the jangle dresses, methinks.

Oh, what's that? You want a disturbing fish picture that I ran across while trying to find "fish wearing shirts?" Okay.

You're welcome.