Our Friend, The Lion's Mane Jellyfish

To be fair to the jellyfish, I think this is an edited image. A Lion's Mane Jellyfish is less wide and much longer.

Humans of this era are bred to fear sharks. While sharks are a good thing to be afraid of, they are not the only beasts from the deep who could come up and say hello.

New England, and Massachusetts in particular, have recently had sightings of Lion's Mane Jellyfish. The LMJ is perhaps the longest creature in the world, topping out among 36 meters or so. That jellyfish was measured off of Massachusetts, if that enhances the story for you somewhat.

His only rival is the Bootlace Worm, which owns the (disputed) record via a 55 meter monster who washed up on a beach in Scotland. The Blue Whale, which maxes out around 25 meters, is the heaviest thing on the planet, ever, at 400,000 pounds. That is equal to 20-40 bull elephants, or 2,000 Amy Schumers.

The LMJ is also poisonous. It most likely won't kill you, unless you are allergic or the pain debilitates your swim game to the point where you drown. It will, however, bring the pain.

It doesn't hunt humans. Like some whales, it favors plankton. It also eats small fish and other jellyfish. It stuns them with poison, then feeds them into the mouth. They digest food very quickly.

It has 1200 stingers, about 150 per lobe. It would be hard to get stung 1200 times, but you only need a few to be hurting. The stingers work for quite some time after being removed from the main body, a theme we will return to in time.

They only live a year, which is amazing for something that can push 120 feet. That's some fast growth. Primarily pelagic and dependent on currents to move great distances, they generally are pretty large by the time they near coastlines.

This monster isn't really monstrous. It won't sneak up on you, snap out a tentacle, seize you, drag you into a maw full of teeth and make you watch it eat your liver.

Your big threat with this is running into the surf and splashing into one. This will release stingers everywhere, so not only do you get it, anyone nearby gets it.

This is exactly what happened in Rye, New Hampshire in 2010. Some poor SOB jumped right into one and got stung. Officials sent out a guy to kill the jellyfish. A lifeguard dragged it ashore with a pitchfork, not knowing that the tentacles release the stingers on contact. The water filled with near-microscopic stingers , and 150 people were injured. They say it was just one jellyfish that did this.

Unfortunately, they are now turning up off of local beaches. Nahant closed the beaches after one was seen in the surf. Hull and Duxbury both had sightings. A jellyfish 5 feet wide washed up in Maine at the end of May. The one off Nantasket was 5 feet across, tentacle length unknown, and yes, my phone did try to autocorrect that into "testicle."

The 120 foot jellyfish measured off Massachusetts (I can't find out which town holds this distinction, every source I check says "off Massachusetts" or "Massachusetts Bay," which would imply Cape Ann and is thus some other writer's problem) was 7 feet across. The five footers we're seeing now would have remarkable tentacle length.

The one in Maine was longer than three children laid head to toe next to it, which sounds like 12 to 15 feet... unless the family in question was Shaquille O'Neal's family, or the Klitschko brothers. We'd be talking 18 to 21 feet, then.

If you lose the sea water lottery and get stung, rinse the afflicted area with vinegar for 30 seconds... because everybody brings a gallon of vinegar to the beach.

Here is a map of currents around Massachusetts. These benthic beasts travel with the currents. See you at the beach!

Duxbury Beach Seawall, One Last Good Look

Duxbury Beach is getting a new seawall, which means that we have to say adios to the old wall.

Partly due to winsome nostalgia and partly so we have something to compare the new wall to, we gathered photographic and video footage of the entire Duxbury Beach seawall.

We also have the remix version, below:

"slamming MCs on cement..."

Part II of the remix, below:

Wareham BLM, 6/6/20

Wareham had a Black Lives Matter protest Saturday.

The rally involved protesters marching on the Wareham police station.

There was also a kneeling section of protest with a moment of silence.

The WPD substation took no chances. To be fair, it reverts back to the Water Department on July 1st, and what odds would you set on two plate glass windows with WAREHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT painted on them surviving a police brutality March?

This dude was just regular paranoid. The march was peaceful. To be fair to this guy, and as someone who boarded up my beach house a few times for what turned out to be a minor nor'easter, I can say with some confidence that it is better to board up unnecessarily than it is to be sweeping up glass on a Sunday morning.

Heavy

Police

Presence

Bourne may have had 5 cops at their rally, which had almost 5 times as many people. Sturgis kids organized it, and Sturgis kids are efficient AF.

Bourne trended younger, whiter, fewer people arriving from taverns... more of a Pep Rally. Wareham, 33% black, was a much angrier BLM crowd. Watching this crowd come up the street was like watching a thunderstorm forming.

However, aside from some shouting, it was less menacing than I thought it would be.

The organizers did a good job, and the people were there for a good cause. No heads needed to get busted.

There were about 200 of us, but there was great potential energy.

The crowd was white enough that I didn't feel like Mr. Kurtz.

Good kids at both rallies I attended.

I had a protest crush on the girl in the dress, and she did say hi at one point. My game has actually been improved with the rioting. I have a cool job that puts me in wild scenes, and I have a thrice-bitchin' USA plague mask, which covers up my worst feature... my face. I'm a towering man, genuinely ugly, and I look somewhat like the Frankenstein monster. I will miss these days of pandemics, masks and rioting.

It took a while to get people kneeling, but once they Kaepernicked, all went well.

The kneeling was the evening's centerpiece.

Extra points for the functioning inland Gateway lighthouse.

Two straight protests where I forgot to wear black. I did have black running pants for this one, but my FAIRHAVEN BLUE DEVILS t-shirt was grey/blue. I didn't think of the Farrakhanian implications of "blue devils" at a BLM police brutality rally, I just collect local town shirts.

This rally was cooler than Bourne's because the old dudes in the crowd would yell at the younger ones if they started doing something stupid. This guy didn't tell at anyone, he was just photogenic 

"It was Saturday night in America, and I felt like a native son."

The angrier folks were upfront, with nothing between them and some ice-grill cops was Oxygen.

These kids social distanced well, but most of the crowd was jammed together like a Chinese subway.

Officers Baptiste and Declas, I believe. This got a pop from the crowd, although some girl behind me, with impressive lung power, kept telling "Token" over and over. The chief, who has a whole squad of other cops to deal with, declined any offers to Kaepernick or even Tebow.

The organizers did a good job, and it wasn't easy. There was a great deal of animus.

You don't gotta go home, but you can't stay here.

Bourne BLM Protest

Buzzards Bay was the host for Thursday's Black Lives Matter protest rally.

The event was organized by 2 activists from Sturgis.

The audience trended young. It was like a slightly ominous pep rally.

Exemplary motivation, however....

The rally was based in Buzzards Bay Park.

There were hundreds of kids. I want to say a thousand, but amateurs always overestimate, and I'm an amateur.

The crowd wasn't all kids.

When a rioter at a BLM rally has to smash MLK's words to get into your store, the paint is mightier than the plywood.

Please note that these cops aren't beating anyone down or anything. I walked the grounds constantly, and saw not one moment of a Bourne cop being anything but nice to the kids.

It seemed like a good bunch of kids, especially this one handing out free water.

Attempts to estimate crowd size should note there were dozens of cars full of kids repeatedly circumnavigating the protest.

To the children's credit, the cars I observed had the passenger cheerleading while the driver was concentrating. I look for stuff like that, reporters are ghouls. One moment's distracted kid driving through a protest can become the next moment's accidental Chancellorsville, and I like to have the camera aiming the right way when sh*t like that goes down.

There is some irony in rolling through the BLM Protest about oppression while you and the other white Cape Cod rich kids cram into a 2020 BMW Thanksdad,...but they do seem to have their hearts in the right place, and I did not take up this vocation to make fun of good kids.

Bourne PD was the only law I saw, and the Statie barracks were 300 yards away. I thought this was a sniper, but it got less sinister when I zoomed in later below.

They did a 8:23 moment of kneeling silence, although I'd have whittled away the kneeling part, considering that whole Minneapolis thing.

See? Much less sinister... unless some sniper is celebrating Take Your Daughter To Work Day, at which point it becomes considerably more sinister.

Cute kids

The moment of silence was part George Floyd, part Colin Kaepernick and part Smith/Carlos. It was as silent as I have ever seen that many kids be, and I was a high school teacher for a while. You could hear thoughts.

Poster board companies, crippled by Coronavirus school closings, saw a brief comeback yesterday.

I may be wrong, but this may be one of the event organizers.

Our photographer lands a selfie.

Chief Woodside was out among the protesters, shaking hands and helping de-escalate things.

Main Street was blocked off.

The kids did march to the police station, but no rioting happened.