Posted by Juliet Linderman

Greetings and salutations, Dick lovers! Step right up: It’s Thursday and you know what that means: It’s Dick-watching time. Without further ado, here they are: Your weekly Dick links.

1.       Holy Mackerel! Or more specifically, holy 25-foot-whale! In Oakland! As a San Francisco girl myself I find this whale-related news item particularly interesting/disturbing/disgusting: An inbound ship struck a whale, and dragged it all the way into the Port of Oakland this morning. The whale got stuck on the ship’s bow. Unfortunately nobody knows what kind of whale this is, or whether or not it was dead before being dragged in a most undignified manner into harbor. Either way: poor guy, that’s pretty brutal.

2. Over at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer has a simultaneously fascinating and horrifying preview of the Values Voter Summit, the premier Christian-right political gathering in Washington, DC. Mencimer dedicates a generous chunk of space here to the notoriously anti-gay, anti-muslim–even anti-killer whale!–Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis at the American Family Association. He’s a huge bigot, he’s got a filthy mouth, he’s chock full of right-wing-insane, knee-jerk reactionary sound bites. But what, you may wonder, is Mr. Fischer doing on your beloved Dick Watching weekly list? Thanks for asking, I’ll tell you. In her article Mencimer jogs our collective memory about the time Fischer took to his website to suggest that Tillikum–you know, that Orca that killed the trainer at SeaWorld in Florida?–be stoned to death. You know, because that’s what the bible says, obvz. SeaWorld has since added barriers to the trainer pools, in case you’re wondering about that.

3. Wowowowww! Just because Moby Dick was, as we all know, a Sperm Whale doesn’t mean that this photo of an albino Southern Right Whale spotted off the coast of Argentina isn’t really cool. I might even go as far as to say that this guy is almost…cute?

4. In other whale-related “not cool, dude”-news, the state of Alaska is not only responsible for producing people like Sarah Palin and her supporters, it is also home to this guy,  Kevin B. Carle, who pleaded guilty of intentionally ramming into whales with his motorboat. But not only did this guy hit the whales, he actually spotted them breaching in the distance and proceeded to repeatedly run them down. Not. Cool. But thankfully, all of our whale friends can rest assured: He’s being charged with “with a federal misdemeanor in violation of the Endangered Species Act for ‘knowingly harassing, pursuing and harming whales,’ according to prosecutors.” This happened a couple of months ago, but I just found out about it and I think it’s newsworthy. So there.