There's love of life, then there's this
Sep. 24th, 2008 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
counterentropyMy friend C just married off her stepdaughter this weekend. This was one of those weddings you hear about but never get invited to. Many many many dollars were spent on this wedding and the festivities leading up to it. The rehearsal dinner was at C's house. The bride and groom flew in 40 lbs of crawfish from Louisiana to be boiled in big pots in the back yard and eaten by hoards of family. The crawfish arrived alive, in big coolers, tentacles waving and claws clicking and generally looking like nothing so much as boxes of aliens. Needless to say, there were leftovers. About 10 lbs of leftovers. Still uncooked. Still barely alive the next morning after a night buried in ice and sealed in plastic.
C's nephew J1 and his girlfriend J2 came over the next morning to help clean up after the party. These lovely young folk are Buddhist. They follow Asimov's first law of robotics, but not just for humans, for all living things -- You shall not harm a living thing, nor, through inaction, allow a living thing to come to harm. Somewhere in their backyard there are spider mamas telling wide-eyed spider babies stories about how they were saved from certain death and gently released by giants too big to see.
Do I need to tell you what happened?
J1 could not stand it. 10 lbs of weakly moving, practically frozen crawfish had him in tears. So yes, he took those mud-loving, slow river, Louisiana crawfish, and gave them a brand new home in the pristine, Class III, glacier-fed Sandy river.
They survived the flight. They survived the ice and plastic. They didn't get boiled alive like their brother crawfish. They might survive the Oregon low mountain winter. Maybe.
If twenty years from now crawfish replace salmon as a prime Northwest export, just remember -- you heard it here first.
C's nephew J1 and his girlfriend J2 came over the next morning to help clean up after the party. These lovely young folk are Buddhist. They follow Asimov's first law of robotics, but not just for humans, for all living things -- You shall not harm a living thing, nor, through inaction, allow a living thing to come to harm. Somewhere in their backyard there are spider mamas telling wide-eyed spider babies stories about how they were saved from certain death and gently released by giants too big to see.
Do I need to tell you what happened?
J1 could not stand it. 10 lbs of weakly moving, practically frozen crawfish had him in tears. So yes, he took those mud-loving, slow river, Louisiana crawfish, and gave them a brand new home in the pristine, Class III, glacier-fed Sandy river.
They survived the flight. They survived the ice and plastic. They didn't get boiled alive like their brother crawfish. They might survive the Oregon low mountain winter. Maybe.
If twenty years from now crawfish replace salmon as a prime Northwest export, just remember -- you heard it here first.
