POST YOUR COLOSSAL SQUID QUESTIONS HERE

[monty]

The blog is reporting (and I added US times):

Sunday 3pm (Sat 8pm Pacific US, 11pm Eastern US): giant squid removal from freezer

Monday morning (Sun Afternoon US): small colossal squid removal from freezer; Monday afternoon at 3pm(Sun 8-11pm US): large colossal squid removal from freezer.

Tuesday morning (Mon Afternoon US): examination of giant squid specimen; afternoon: examination of small colossal specimen.

Wednesday 10 am - 2 pm (Mon 3pm-7pm Pacific, 6pm-10pm East): examination of large colossal specimen; 2 pm fixation of specimens in formalin

I also noticed that I was wrong, and the animal on camera now is Architeuthis, and also that the lectures will not be live, but will be podcast later...

[monty]

Hey all you "there in person" folks, could you see the condition of the eyes when looking at the unwrapped squid-cube?

And when you open your Christmas presents, do you sometimes re-wrap them so you can experience it all over on New Years?

[monty]

Is there supposed to be meaningful sound? I'm hearing background noise, like maybe the water circulating in the thawing tank, but no voices...

[tonmo]

For those following along, here are the direct links to the camemas, courtesy of the Te Papa Webcast:

> Wide angle camera
http://www.r2.co.nz/20080427/camera-4.asx

> Dissection table
http://www.r2.co.nz/20080427/camera-2.asx

> Thawing bath - fixed camera
http://www.r2.co.nz/20080427/camera-3.asx

> Thawing bath - scanning camera
http://www.r2.co.nz/20080427/camera-1.asx

[sorseress]

I'm not getting any sound at all, or maybe it's just incredibly faint and being drowned out by Dave's TV.

[esquid]

i'm watching the wide angle camera and am getting no sound

[tonmo]

Me neither, so I am just running some keystone cops / Benny Hill music to fill the void.

[esquid]

i was thinking of asking people what soundtrack they had chosen for this. I like the idea of happy sax playing during the walk-in reorganizing. But as I don't have that i'm listening to middle-eastern dance ambient.

[sorseress]

Damn! I'm jealous!

[monty]

since Steve appears to be otherwise occupied, I'll fill in and say that he'd likely recommend Neil Diamond.

this is not to be taken as a personal endorsement from me, however.

I'm listening to Joe Jackson, myself.

[tonmo]

decent coverage on Camera 3 right now:

> Thawing bath - fixed camera
http://www.r2.co.nz/20080427/camera-3.asx

[sorseress]

Looks like they're off for a while.

[monty]

In case anyone else is using linux and wants to view all 4 cameras at once (if they fit on your screen) the command I'm using so totem doesn't replace the old cam with the new one is:

totem-xine --no-existing-session http://www.r2.co.nz/20080427/camera-4.asx &

(change "4" to the other numbers for the other 3, of course.)

on the off chance it helps anyone (since all linux distros are different), this is amd64 debian sid using the totem-xine package GNOME totem 2.22.2.

corrected: I found that totem-xine is far, far better than totem-gstreamer.

[Clem]

This is fun.

I am in text message contact with one of the white coats, who says he just ate a piece of a Colossal.

No, really.

Clem

[sorseress]

Ob wouldn't really do that, would he? I mean, he's such a gourmet, and ammonia, doesn't fit into that category.

[sorseress]

Ask him what wine he would choose.

[Clem]

Hi Sorseress,

Oh yes he would [eat one]. Besides, Colossals don't have ammoniacal flesh like Architeuthis does, so eating Mesonychoteuthis probably wasn't too unpleasant. (I recall that eating a bit of Archi has long been a rite of passage among its researchers.)

[I'll ask about pairing wine with Meso.]

At one point the white coats made several runs through removing the Meso cube from the freezer and putting it back in. Unless they were practicing their moves, it looked like they were trying to give the film crew lots of coverage for the documentary. Everyone looked wiped afterwards.

Clem

[esquid]

activity on camera 2

[sorseress]

[QUOTE=Clem;116262]Hi Sorseress,

Oh yes he would [eat one]. Besides, Colossals don't have ammoniacal flesh like Architeuthis does, so eating Mesonychoteuthis probably wasn't too unpleasant. (I recall that eating a bit of Archi has long been a rite of passage among its researchers.)

Guess I should be reading more of the articles and stuff, because I thought they too were ammoniacal. Surprising the fishing crews don't take them back and harvest the flesh instead of presenting it to researchers,, or would it deteriorate too quickly for that?

[monty]

apparently, there's some question about the ammoniacal or not issue: Steve's preliminary fixing notes says "should the colossal squid prove to be ammoniacal"-- of course, maybe that's a cut-and-paste error from a document before he'd examined the 2003 specimen.

I've seen Ob eat sushi, but not such... exotic sushi....