– – When an asteroid passes within a cosmic whisker of Earth and a meteorite smashes down in the former Soviet Union, one might not be totally surprised that small, plaque-mounted anthropomorphic fish are becoming more vocal than humans. In a variant of the McDonald’s Fish McBites commercial, we again visit with the young gentleman in the checked plaid shirt, this time in a beautiful, wood-paneled cabin.
Two young women enter the cabin through the door and see the young guy feeding his face. “Hey, what are those?,” asks one of the women, clearly no more of a Rhodes scholar than the guy. Fortunately, the fish themselves are well-able to answer her query, with one responding and then the group of mounted fish launching into a rhythmic cadence of “Fishy, fishy!- – Fish, fish McBites!- -McBites!” Soon all of the trio are munching away on the item, with the guy saying not a word during the whole commercial, even to the women…
…and I thought that fish were reputed to be “brain food!” 
– – Something’s fishy here! A few years back in 2009, McDonald’s produced an irritatingly memorable singing fish commercial, with the fish modeled after the singing “Billy Bass” novelty item, an electronic mounted fish that sang and moved about on its mounting. It was the kind of thing that you got tired of after seeing about twice. The earlier McDonald’s fish commercial could haunt you. “Gimme back that Filet of Fish, give me that fish!,” sang the McDonald’s spokes-fish. It took me some time to get that commercial out of my head…(shudders!) 
– – It may alarm some to hear that hundreds of blob-like squid are invading California; on the other hand, some might think that this was inevitable, or that they might just be assimilated to become Californians. The squid are big suckers known as Humboldt squid, who can reach up to six feet and weigh as much as 100 pounds. They normally live at depths of 660 to 2,300 feet in the eastern Pacific.
– – Hundreds of Humboldt squid beached themselves this past weekend near Santa Cruz, California. Attempts to save the squid by placing them back into the water were futile; the squid simply swam back onto the shore!
– – Too often, fish are regarded as dumber than a sack of hammers. This may not be true of all of our finned friends, however. In France, researchers at the University of Toulouse have observed catfish hunting pigeons as prey in a development scientists are calling evidence of adaptive behavior. 
– – We all know that parrots and mynah birds can mimic human speech. A memorable Far Side cartoon depicted a carload of cows driving past a field of wandering humans, one cow leaning out the window and mocking the “yackety-yack” speech of people. Well, it seems that we can add another species to the short list of those now know to be capable of speech mimicry..the beluga whale!
– – I’m always glad when giant eyeballs wash up on beaches, bringing to mind as they do such vintage sci-fi classics as 1958’s The Crawling Eye. Eyeballs by nature tend to make people squeamish, especially disembodied ones…and in time for Halloween, too!- -What a gift from the sea!
– – They sound like the perfect subject for a Saturday night original movie on the Syfy Channel: The Vampire Squid from Hell (Vampyroteuthis infernalis). They rather look like a bad movie monster, too, having a type of cloak-like webbing, unusually large deep blue or red eyes, and light-producing organs covering its entire body which it can flash! 
FOXSYLVANIA 
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