“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it an explosion, but it can be like an enormous fart. It would be quite unpleasant if the stomach blows up. It’s not very nice to have rotten whale parts showering over you.” These comments were made by Tore Haug of the  Norwegian Marine Research Institute  in Bergen as he described a very foul-smelling whale carcass that has found its way into a Norwegian fjord.  Mr. Haug certainly sounds as though he’s rather well-schooled in our favorite topic. Unfortunately, much of Norway is “familiar” with whales in a way that defies the international community. Perhaps this is how the whales strike back against Norway’s ongoing  commercial whaling  industry. As for the photo, I’m honestly not even sure what it’s showing. Apparently, the entire exterior of the whale carcass has turned completely white. And it really stinks. Crews were trying to prevent it from making landfall by towing it our of the fjord. Meanwhile, several jurisdictions and researchers were trying

In this AP photo, the giant, swollen tongue of a dead humpback whale appears close to exploding. Alas, it did not. The ballooning organ did, however, contribute to the whale’s death. While some officials initially said the swollen tongue indicated an infection, experts now believe that a large volume of air may have been forced into the 40-foot leviathan’s tongue after it was struck by a ship. The whale apparently survived the supposed impact, though, as it was seen by a tour boat and two ferries struggling to swim. Forced onto its side at the surface by its own tongue-pontoon, the whale was observed having difficulty getting its blow hole above water in order to breathe. The humpback carcass washed up on the west side of Admiralty Island in Southeast Alaska, officials said. Links to the original article and a larger photo follow: Death of Swollen-Tongued Whale Probed   – washingtonpost.com (Larger photo)   – washingtonpost.com

Way up in the northwestern corner of Oregon is the small town of  Clatskanie . Despite being over 200 miles away from where Oregon’s infamous whale made its debut, it lays claim to its own unique connections to the Exploding Whale.  In an editorial in  The Clatskanie Chief , publisher and editor Deborah Steele Hazen writes, “There are many far-flung paths that begin, end or cross in Clatskanie.” One of those paths involves Jack Sweeney, who, in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon kind of way, is intrinsically linked to the exploding whale through his relationships with two key players in that drama. It turns out that Sweeney was classmates with George Thornton — the highway engineer in charge of the detonation — in Clatskanie High School’s class of 1947. And then at some point, Sweeney relocated to Eugene and became neighbors with none other than Walter Umenhofer, the poor guy whose 1969 Oldsmobile was crushed by a large piece of flying whale blubber following the explosion. Recently, Sweeney

Register-Guard  columnist and perennial exploding whale enthusiast  Bob Welch  has once again referenced Oregon’s exploding whale in one of his columns.  In  “Dozer, not dynamite, eases whale’s final passage”  — part of his “Where are they now?” series — Welch discusses the fate of the  40-foot gray whale that recently washed up on Oregon’s coast  just a few miles north of where  Oregon’s original exploding whale  met its infamous end. He says: First, rest easy: The whale was not blown up with dynamite, one of those seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time methods used in 1970 in Florence — that wound up busting car windshields and triggering lawsuits. He goes on to explain how the recent whale was pushed 100 yards to a sandy location, buried, exposed by the next high tide, and then finally reburied above the high-tide line. The column has been added to our newspaper article section here: “Dozer, not dynamite…” (7/2/07)   – TheExplodingWhale.com