Story Notes: Salmon Rose · 3:38am Mar 16th, 2019

Story Notes: Salmon Rose

A huge thanks to SirNotAppearingInThisFic for pre-reading, Out Of Work Derpy for editing the cover art (putting on the cutie mark), and my vet consultant for giving me the lowdown on what happens at this type of conference.

Source (YouTube)

Warning--spoilers below the break; y’all might want to read the story before the blog post. Or else not; I dunno.

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*He did not actually demand this. In fact, he’ll likely be quite surprised by it.

Faithful readers won’t be surprised to know that the 2018 annual ichthyologist conference was held in Rochester, NY. They also invite the herpetologists along, but those weren’t mentioned in the story.

Linda Dugnė, our protagonist, was named after the Lithuanian river goddess . . . however, further research suggests that the author who mentioned her was known for making up facts. I don’t recall noticing that when I first was doing research, but then that was nearly a year ago.

Dr. Cope is based on a real historical figure: Edward Drinker Cope. Sometimes the jokes just write themselves. I have no idea if he actually drank like a fish. Since he was Quaker, I’d assume probably not.

Ant-sized Wikipedia link

Dr. Ghoti is named after a variation of the spelling of fish; the word was likely coined by William Ollier Jr. For those who haven’t seen it before, you pronounce the gh as in enough, the o as in women, and the ti as in nation.

Since then, it’s been used as an example of why English phonetics are dumb; to any of my readers who learned English as a second language--and many of mine who learned it as a first language--more proof that English is dumb.

Dr. Salmon Rose is named after a series of stories I’ve written, collectively called the Sam and Rose stories. For people who were expecting this to be one of them, you can put down your torches and pitchforks--the real deal is coming this weekend.

I got the idea of the punny name quite some time ago, when discussing the series with friends. The ichthyologist pun took a bit longer to come up with, but when I had it, I just had to run with it.

Other little tidbits . . . shark-shaped USB drives are a thing. I’ve got one, which interestingly had nothing to do with anything aquatic. At a tool show I was at, there was a supplier with “Shark” in their name handing them out with the catalog on them. I expect that the idea was that mechanics would want them (I know I did, and the bowl was empty when I came back around a second time), and hopefully they’d at least load the catalog onto their PC before using the shark-drive for personal use.

I didn’t do that second part. Nor can I remember the company name. But by golly, I’ve still got that shark-drive.

Amazon Link!

They also give out lots of imprinted pens, and at least at vet conferences, pens are made to look like syringes. Also notepads, tote bags, and so forth. Again, I haven’t been to a conference of this type, but my vet friend has, and I’ve seen some of the swag she’s brought back from conferences.

(At mechanic tool shows, we get Loctite anti-seize sticks, and long red straws and stickers and other exciting products like that.)

Most of y’all probably have guessed what comes after “One Fish”; if not:

Warning--link is kind of spoopy

Thinking on it, I have been remiss. While I assume that all my readers know what a salmon is, that could be a faulty assumption. So if you don’t--it’s a species of fish.

There are two things I think of when I think of salmon. One of them is a legendary bit of marketing. Salmon flesh basically comes in two colors--pink, and whitish. Back in Ye Olde Times, people were used to canned salmon being pink, and a certain entrepreneur found himself with a large quantity of not-pink salmon. Guessing that people might be alarmed if their canned salmon was a different color than they were used to, he advertised it as “The salmon that doesn’t turn pink in the can.”

The other thing about salmon is that they live mostly in the ocean, but go to their home river to spawn. Since we’ve put up dams and other fish obstacles on rivers where salmon might want to spawn, we have also come up with ways for fish to get by them. Fish ladders are fairly common, but of course as proper ‘Muricans, we had to come up with a more . . . ballistic solution.

I’ll let John Oliver explain it as only he can.