Waterworld

The obscure local daily that I read has a story today about aquariums, pegged to the death of the whale shark (Ralph) at Atlanta's Georgia Aquarium. It mentions Ginger Strand's Believer piece. Here's a taste:

In an essay published in The Believer in 2005 before the Georgia Aquarium opened, Ginger Strand catalogs the relationship between aquariums and ruined ecosystems: the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California is on the old Cannery Row, made obsolete by the depletion of sardine stocks; the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward was paid for largely by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Settlement Fund; in the Ocean Voyager exhibit in Atlanta, there are scant and inconsistent facts about whale sharks — they reach 45, 60 or 65 feet depending on which sign is consulted — but copious details on how they were airlifted from Taiwan (“via UPS!”).

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Here's an illustration from dreams of yore.

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Also in the Times—Dizzyhead Dennis on Twin Peaks. How about this lede, eh? The kid can write!

LIKE the homecoming queen who was its resident ghost, “Twin Peaks” died young and left a ravaged but still beautiful corpse. Both demises are now inextricably linked: When David Lynch’s hit series revealed who killed Laura Palmer in the fall of 1990, it also committed a kind of symbolic suicide.