Alex has informed me that, in Bradenton, FL, there is a street called Manatee Ave. Of course, this goes without saying — the manatees deserve no less! Little does she know, there is in fact a whole county in Florida named for the venerable manatee.

In fourth grade, we had to do a report on an endangered species. Ever on the look out for opportunities to be different, I chose the Florida Manatee (not to be confused with the Dugong, which is also endangered). Especially back then, most people wouldn’t have heard of the manatee, and it looked cute and odd — just the sort of thing I liked. I did my report, and probably did pretty well on it (why not?), and then sort of forgot about manatees.

They’ve always been in the back of my mind, though. When I joined the internet in the mid 1990s, and learned to create web pages, I made my own little website, complete sub-sections including a fledgling web directory (think: amateur Yahoo run by a high-schooler with a little time on his hands) which I called “Inert Manatee, Inc.” As you can see, there are still people out there with old, broken bookmarks to it. It was really crappy, but the point is the cool name, and that I had a picture of a manatee.

In writing this entry, I came across the Save the Manatee Club, which is pretty cool and has great pictures of manatees. You can adopt a manatee for $25, and for $35 you even get a neat 2005 manatee wall calendar! Note, however, that you won’t find any comparative organization working to save the dugong. The cynical side of me observes that, aside from well-known animals like tigers or eagles, cute, funny-looking animals, especially ones that live close to home, receive the most attention and help when it comes to trying to save them from harm by humans. It’s lucky for manatees that they’re cute and that some of them live in Florida. Still, my optimistic side is bigger than my cynical side; just because manatees are lucky and get lots of attention doesn’t make efforts to save them from going extinct at the hands of humans any less good.

[EDIT: Just after writing this I found that the WWF Philippines has (had?) an adopt-a-dugong program, though I couldn't find out how to adopt one. At the very least, if you want to help the dugongs, you'd probably do well to give to WWF Philippines. Still, I think my point about cuteness & local stands. After all, where are the opportunites to adopt a Sonoran tiger salamander? Huh? Huh?!]

Incidentally, one of the results of that Google search for “inert manatee” is some old newsgroup post I made in 1996. Most people don’t use newsgroups anymore, or aren’t even aware of them, but in any case, this post is a good example of multiple breaches of newsgroup etiquette. First, I was probably just participating in one newsgroup, but I cross-posted my message to multiple newsgroups. Next, the message is merely a reply to somebody else’s message telling yet a third person how pointless their post was. I got to sound all high-and-mighty, but I was really no better than the other two. Note the classic “if you step in crap, it gets on your shoe” analogy. Sigh… I was so awesome then. Finally, note the high-tech mid-90s sig, which is not only larger than the actual content of my post, it also includes a neato border and giant ASCII letters spelling the first part of my cool “JaCK NiCHoLSoN” nickname. And of course, it says I’m affiliated with Inert Manatee, Inc.

Also incidentally, yet another result of that Google search for “inert manatee” is a page that mentions my 1995 X-Files theme for Windows 95. Just in case anyone is out of the loop on this, that version of Windows introduced the concept of “themes” consisting of a background image, a collection of system sounds, system cursors, and a few icons for “My Computer,” “Recycle Bin,” etc. I made one for The X-Files because I was in high school and I liked The X-Files. Apparently it wasn’t too bad, because you can still find it for download in various places on the net. I was even contacted a year or so after I made it by a company that was producing a CD-ROM collection of Windows themes. They wanted permission to include my theme, which I provided. So not only is my theme still around on the ‘net ten years later, I’m pretty sure somewhere it’s burned into some CD-ROMs for posterity.

(For fun, here’s the theme, rescued from the ‘net and repackaged, without any edits, for your enjoyment. The README file has some text added at the top written by someone else; I’m keeping it because it identifies the creator of one of the included screensavers, and it’s interesting. As the README says, I made the minimize/maximize sounds myself (because I couldn’t find any suitable X-Files show audio to use). Therefore, the minimize/maximize sounds in my X-Files theme are recordings of me breathing into my computer microphone. Somewhat amusingly, I’ve noticed that some other X-Files themes from around then re-use my cursors and minimize/maximize sounds. Fine by me, I’m all for sharing, and I did specify in the README that I was putting it in the public domain — I just find it amusing that my breathing noises are floating around on the internet in multiple places. By the way, things like this are things you should never tell your significant other, because they’ll never let you forget it. At this point, however, it’s too late, I may as well just share it with everyone.)