Giant Dead Sea Thing washes up on Seram island in Indonesia

<snigger>

We got lucky, I guess. The Category I Kaiju couldn’t survive in our atmosphere.

It’s hard to get enough traction in the water to overcome the friction of something with a hundred tons of force holding it down on land.

In the very first link, someone notes that it’s got bones, so it has to be a whale.

I’m now envisioning a few of my Boston relatives with tentacles and suckers.

Like, like.

LOL, was it in California that Barney Fife dynamited a rotten whale corpse and it rained giant chunks of rotten flesh all over observers and their cars?

Oregon; see here:

They finally found Nessie

It’s not so much “rotting” as it is using low-tech, few-ingredient methods to remove or neutralize the ammonia in the things as much as possible. It’s not that old-time Icelanders wanted to eat rotten shark – they wanted to eat shark without huge amounts of ammonia (which this species routed through its system, for a variety of reasons), and didn’t have a lot on their rocky island to work with.

How would it get from the Dead Sea to Indonesia?

Drive or take bus, like everybody else. Everyone knows the trains don’t run on time there.

<taking off sunglasses>
It’s not dead!
</taking off sunglasses>
dum-dum-duuuuum.

This. I heard on NPR that she hasn’t been seen in a while.

Yeah, best bet is to blow it up, I reckon.

That thing isn’t even close to not being identifiable as a whale.

Perhaps it’s not unidentifiable, but I don’t agree that it’s not even close. I have no doubt that a non-expert like you would be unable to deem it either identifiable or unidentifiable if it were slightly less identifiable.

Why would it have to be unidentifiable by a non-expert in order to qualify as unidentifiable in general?

Surely, if it is at all identifiable to a non-expert, then it is likely very identifiable to an expert.

I’ve had hakarl, and to be honest, the taste makes you kinda wish it was very, very poisonous. It’s one of those things I reckon started out as a drunken bet between a couple of vikings, with everybody just one-upping each other with claims of how tasty it is, and now everybody kinda has to go along with it in order to save face.

As for the creature in the link, no idea what it is, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out it’s the result of a drunken bet between a couple of vikings.

One scientist has stuck out his (undecayed) neck and declared it a dead whale, possibly suffering from a bacterial infection that made it float instead of sink

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/scientists-have-identified-the-50-foot-creature-that-washed-up-on-an-indonesian-beach/ar-BBB7Vbh?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=DELLDHP17

Bonus – click on the link and scroll down to see a similarly inflated whale off the coast of Australia that looks like (as the article puts it) the vanguard of an alien invasion.

It’s a question of whether a non-expert can deem it not close to being able to be deemed “not unidentifiable”. I argued (albeit as a non-expert myself) that a non-expert could not conclusively determine whether, if it were hypothetically slightly less identifiable, if it would still not be unidentifiable (whether by an expert or not).