March 23, 2003

I was recently partaking in some March Madness when i came across a commerical that got me thinking. I'm referring to the Mountain Dew commercial where the guy in the kayak gets swallowed by a whale, and upon lighting a flare, finds himself among many other kayakers and surfers. Now i'm pretty sure you all see where i'm going with this. But no, tonight i will not delve into how they trained the whale not to actually digest the people, nor the probability that the aforementioned kayaker would have a flare on him. No, instead i ask, "Has anyone actually seen the inside of a live whale?"

People always talk about space as the final frontier, and still others the oceans; consequently, there have been many science fiction and fantasy stories told about such places. But never do they speak of the insides of a whale (with the obvious exception of Jonah, and let's be honest, it was not the best description in the world). What's really in there? How big is it? Is there air in there? Now i'm sure some whale-ologist can probably answer these questions, but the common man cannot. For all we know, there can be all sorts of cool stuff inside whales that we just don't know about. Maybe there's gold, or oil, or diamonds!! And if they're really empty, we can feed them all the stuff we don't want, like old tires, those pesky plastic six-pack rings, and France. So now i ask you, do you want to live in a world where our natural whale resources are left untapped and unexplored? I think not. So run out right now and jump into the ocean in the name of whale exploration.