Posted by Juliet Linderman

Good day, dudes and dudettes and welcome to this week’s edition of Dick Watching. Won’t you climb up to the crow’s nest and come Dick Watching with me? You will? Fantastic! Let’s go!

1. Tommy Lee loves drugs, and sex, tasteless tattoos and women with fake boobs. Also, leather pants. He also really loves whales. He recently penned an astoundingly bizarre open letter to SeaWorld in Florida condemning their treatment of Tillikum, a killer whale that has killed three people, including two trainers. He indicted SeaWorld for treating the orca as a “sperm bank,” writing: “We know from SeaWorld’s own director of safety (as well as videos on the web) that the way you get his sperm is by having someone get into the pool and masturbate him.” It’s nice to see a rock star like Tommy Lee really taking a stand on a serious current events issue. Kudos to you.

2. This just in: Whales are fat. In each mouthful, a blue whale consumes roughly 470,000 calories, which is 240 times the calories they burn. According to a recently published scientific article, baleen whales are efficient eaters. And this, this is real news. “When they take a gulp of water, they are filling their mouths with the amount of water equal to their own body mass, so there is nothing that comes close to doing that.”

3. This week’s obligatory Not-Cool-Dude news item comes to you from Detroit, where a woman is suing the Salvation Army, claiming that one of their aid workers called her a “beached whale.” There are some other details, but that’s pretty much the kicker.

4. You guys. The word ‘whale’ rhymes with the word ‘fail.’ Google books had a whale fail, or fail whale, or whatever. They rhyme, get it?

5. And over at Thought  Catalogue, Tao Lin makes a list of people he imagines making whale noises.