I grew up in NYC in the 1970s, and any whale in the Hudson back then would have surely developed evil superpowers from the toxic sludge and have mutated into an enigmatic quasi-villain character from the animated The Tick series (deep cut!).
But it appears activism and good government policy can in fact achieve good things.
For two years in a row, Dr. Dubroff said on Tuesday, she has spotted a whale swimming outside her living room window. Last year, she didn’t quite believe the sighting was real. But she saw a whale again on Saturday — and in the same spot again on Sunday — and news reports confirmed her hunch: The Hudson River has a resident humpback.
“It was general excitement and shock,” Dr. Dubroff, 39, said, “and how thrilling that a whale can be in the Hudson, based on what we see float by sometimes.”
Indeed, the Hudson, as scenic as it is, does not scream “whale habitat.” But experts say cleanup and conservation efforts have led to cleaner waters and an abundance of fish, amenities that have attracted at least one humpback whale to the river waters off Manhattan this month.
So that's nice.
Speaking of sewage, my return to the long, hard blog would not have been complete without the reminder that there exist on the Internet horrible psychotic assholes, and sometimes they link to you. I've always despised this idiot, who back in the day would regularly link approvingly, until one day I said that in Putin's Russia, gays get beat up. Then I was no longer fuckface's idea of a Good Leftist. Oh well!