A tuna transport floating tank being towed from the fishing grounds off Libya to tuna ranches off Sicily, Italy. Photograph: AFP/Gavin Newman

The future of our seas has never been more precarious. Ninety years of
industrial-scale overfishing has brought us to the brink of an
ecological catastrophe and deprived millions of their livelihoods. As
scientific guidelines are ignored and catches become ever bigger.

Is there anyone not aware that wild fish are in deep trouble? That
three-quarters of commercially caught species are over-exploited or
exploited to their maximum? Industrial fishing is
so inefficient that a third of the catch, some 32 million tonnes a
year, is thrown away. For every ocean prawn you eat, fish weighing
10-20 times as much have been thrown overboard.

These figures all come
from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which
also claims that, of all the world’s natural resources, fish are being
depleted the fastest. With even the most abundant commercial species,
we eat smaller and smaller amounts of fish every year, basically, we eat the babies before
they can breed.

North Atlantic fish stocks have been in decline for well
over a century.Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock
collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in
agreement since the 1950s.

The Newfoundland cod fishery, for 500 years
the world’s greatest, was exhausted and closed in 1992, and there’s
still no evidence of any return of the fish. Once stocks dip below a
certain critical level, the scientists believe, they can never recover
because the entire ecosystem has changed.

“I am a white woman, a blond, blue-eyed white woman, and I have a first name
strongly associated with black women. My mother, a southerner by birth, never
stopped telling me she made the name up. The fact that she truly could not
remember ever hearing the name before, is a testament to the strength of
southern segregation. It is likely she heard it once or twice, and simply forgot
it until later. And so, even at 50 years old, I have a name that makes people do
a double-take. “You’re _____?” is something I have heard all my life. “Yes, that
would be me,” is what I say, as they look confused. I have upset the social
order. Names, I have learned, are a big, big part of it.”

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Police in the Congo have arrested 13 individuals suspected of stealing, or
shrinking, their victims’ penises. It seems that the accused practitioners of
black magic were nabbed for their own protection. A dozen years ago, mobs killed
a group of men rumored to be penis snatchers. From Reuters:

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa,
Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants.
They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of
fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported
victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply
touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents
said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure…

“But
when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell
you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent, (said Kinshasa’s
police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.) To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if
you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

One of the best songs ever combined with one of the most whimsical roadside
advertising gimmicks equals a video of pure joy.

I drive a 12 year old Pontiac convertible to my place of work, so I
get quite the panoramic view. I was waiting for the light to change across from
a storage complex, when I noticed how the end of Cream’s “Glad” matched so
beautifully with the tube man on top of the storage complex’s roof as he waved
his pneumatic arms and whipped his pneumatic head back in an unbridled
expression of glee and air-filled pride.

Sure enough, it’s a kid’s book about grass. But the book is actually
a lot more thoughtful than the provocative premise might seem to be at first
glance.

“It’s Just a Plant” is a children’s book that takes a similar approach to sex
education in talking about another difficult topic. That is, the book explains
that marijuana can be a positive and healthy thing for adults, but it’s not for
children. In twenty years I haven’t seen anything quite like this in how it
approaches the topic.

The folks at Purgatory
Iron Works are making a series of 10-minute how-to videos for beginning
blacksmiths. Current introductory topics include anvils, building a forge (part 2), and making charcoal (part 2); if there are
topics you’d particularly like to see, the host is taking requests.

Crazy, But good news…

What if we told you that a guy with no background
in science or medicine-not even a college degree-has come up with what may be
one of the most promising breakthroughs in cancer research in years?

Well it’s true, and if you think it sounds improbable, consider this: he
did it with his wife’s pie pans and hot dogs.

His name is John Kanzius,
and he’s a former businessman and radio technician who built a radio wave
machine that has cancer researchers so enthusiastic about its potential they’re
pouring money and effort into testing it out.

Here’s the important part:
if clinical trials pan out-and there’s still a long way to go-the Kanzius
machine will zap cancer cells all through your body without the need for drugs
or surgery and without side effects. None at all. At least that’s the idea.