The Blog for Tooth Walking Sea-Horse Enthusiasts
admin Here’s s a link to the excellent Walrus photo gallery at National Geographic.com
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/photos/walruses
National Geographic has been the gold standard of wildlife photography pretty much my whole life, and these photos are no exception.
So last night my son and I were at his school carnival, which is a crazy, far-too-crowded affair at which every kid in the school and their parents and scored of other people all jam themselves into the elementary school gym and play carnival games in order to win candy and donated stuffed animals. My son was frantically searching for any donated Pokemon plush, but at this one game we found a true score as he won a walrus! This is an “official” picture, the one we won doesn’t have the “Ty” tag, but he does have a small label reading “Paul”. I chuckled at the joke, saying to my 9 year old son, “Turns out Paul was the walrus after all”. Of course he had no idea what I was talking about.
I don’t know anything about Beanie Babies – my sum total of knowledge would be just an awareness of the crazy antics surrounding them when they were popular. I’ve never had any, or course, and they were “over” long before my son was on the scene. I thought that the Beatles reference on the label was just a sly in-joke, until I looked up Paul the Walrus on Amazon. That’s when I found out that it was not so much a sly reference to the Beatles, as a full-on exploitation of the whole Walrus/Beatles thing. I guess every Beanie Baby has a poem, and Paul’s is:
Traveling the ocean in a submarine
Singing and playing a tambourine
One day hoping to lead a band
First he needs to find dry land!
The description goes on to describe another Beanie Baby called “Ringo the Raccoon” and this is where I decide to stop investigating before I find out what they’ve done to John.
http://www.amazon.com/Ty-Beanies-Babies-Paul-Walrus/dp/B00000JTER
The $1 aisle at Target, contributing to the American educational experience…
What’s wrong with this picture?
So as I mentioned in the original post (Royce Cobblepot: Incredible Walrus “Furry†Costume) Royce himself commented on the blog at random prior to my posting about his costume. I asked if he’d be willing to do a short interview and talk about his costume and love of the walrus for our readers, and he agreed!
I wasn’t expecting more than an email response, and would have been very grateful for just that, but Royce greatly exceeded my expectations by creating an incredible interview video just for the site! Here it is:
Royce also provided some additional links in his original email response, including a link to his YouTube channel which is here:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E7698DB86425895B
Thanks Royce! You’re officially a “friend of the blog!”
I had to link to it sooner or later. No search for the word Walrus on any web search engine, Twitter or anything else will fail to turn up a link to this song. So for you Beatles fans, here’s the psychedelic cartoon video:
So what does it mean to dream of a walrus? Funny you should ask, since according to the The Dream Moods Dictionary, to see a walrus in your dreams means the following:
To see a walrus in your dream, represents your display of dominance in some situation or relationship. You are always on the lookout for anybody who is trying to out-maneuver, out-rank, or out-wit you. Alternatively, the walrus represents your protective shell and thick-skin. You do not let the comments/criticism of others get to you.
For Eskimos and Native Americans in the North, the walrus symbolizes supernatural ability and power.
Now you know.
More dream interpretation can be found at The Dream Moods Dictionary.
You have to check out this gallery of amazing underwater walrus photography by Goran Ehlme via the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_beasts_of_the_deep/html/1.stm
Here’s the link. This is amazing stuff. I’m going to do some research on Goran’s work, and I’ll post a followup.
I’ve started a Twitter account for the blog at: http://twitter.com/walrusweb
Mostly notifications of new posts and retweets of amusing or informative walrus-related Twitter updates. It’s Twitter, so of course Justin Bieber is already referenced in the stream. Come follow us, if you’re on Twitter.
The “Tweet Button” will eventually be added to posts here, but it’s not playing well with my WordPress theme, and I don’t have time to troubleshoot it right now, stay tuned.
“Tweet!” said the walrus.
As part of my ongoing quest to make you readers aware of walruses in popular culture, I give you Rotor the Walrus, a character in the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series. I became aware of Rotor by accident, I’m too old to have watched the Sonic cartoons and never played the games, but my young son has been very into Sonic for some time. One night when I had half an eye on the TV, I noticed Rotor! So here he is. Not as well known as other popular cartoon walruses (like Chumley, which is the most popular search term that brings viewers to this site). Rotor is the mechanical genius of Sonic’s team of “freedom fighters”. He is self-described as a nerd, and this quote appears on his fanclub site (linked below). “If I spend my time working on this, I don’t have to face other people”, which I suppose is a very walrusy sentiment.
Here’s a link to an info page about Rotor:
http://info.sonicretro.org/Rotor_Walrus
Here’s his wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_the_Walrus#Rotor
Rotor even has a fanclub site:
http://sonicsatam.com/thewalrusfanclub/
