Word: whaled
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...extraordinary effort, but then again, this was no ordinary cetacean. The 22-ft.-long, 10,000-lb. orca with the droopy dorsal fin was none other than Keiko, the star of the 1993 hit movie Free Willy. In the film, Keiko plays a killer whale condemned to a life in cruel captivity until released to ocean freedom through the efforts of a small boy. The part came easily to Keiko, whose real life story paralleled Willy's, and the movie inadvertently made his plight known worldwide. Now, in an ambitious experiment, a dedicated team of scientists, animal behaviorists, trainers, divers...
...spot. For the uninitiated, it was hard to make out what was going on. A drug-smuggling bust? A search-and-rescue operation? The filming of the next James Bond movie? The reality was odder still: all these humans were scurrying around in an effort to take a killer whale for an ocean walk and find him some of his own kind to talk...
...least, says Vinick in tones of relief, "Keiko speaks killer whale." Long years alone in a concrete-sided pool--which, unlike the open seas, quickly bounced back any of the sounds Keiko made--did little to hone his conversational skills. Keiko was only a juvenile of two in 1979 when he was captured in Icelandic waters by the Gudrun, a ship that, ironically, is based in Heimaey's harbor, next to the bay that is Keiko's present home. Shipped to a marine park in Canada, Keiko did not respond well to captivity, and lesions started appearing on his skin...
Producer Richard Donner's Free Willy saved him. The 1993 Warner Bros. movie was a hit and was followed by an international public outcry, led chiefly by children, when it turned out that Willy in real life was Keiko, a sick and far from free whale. In January 1996, UPS helped pick up the tab for flying him in an ice-water-filled crate to a new home in Newport, Ore.--a $7.3 million pool, four times the size of the Mexican tank, with pumped-in, 37[degrees]F seawater deep enough to dive in. The pool was built with...
...Sound Vol. 5: Rare Masters." To an obsessive, of course, the words "rare master" are Pavlovian triggers like "never released", "obscure B-side" and "the Beatles butcher-cover." That it turned out to be a great record was irrelevant - I had no choice. I was Ahab, the white whale was off the starboard. Somehow I got the money (probably around six or seven dollars) and "Rare Masters" was in my hands...