The ceramic octopus was a gift from my friend Mur, and as soon as I know who made it (or where she got it) I will post an update here.
Lastly, we have one of this year’s Hallmark Keepsake ornaments. “Learning with Mr. Ray” depicts one of my favorite scenes from Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo. One of Nemo’s classmates is a young Flapjack Octopus (Opisthoteuthis californiana) named Pearl. Flapjacks, like all Cirrate octopuses, are deep-sea cephalopods, so, if she could have even survived living in a coral reef at all, Pearl must have been a transfer student or something. All the same, it’s nice to see obscure cephalopod species depicted in popular culture!
We had a marvelous Christmas here at ISK headquarters, and if you celebrate I hope you did too! This year was Kid Indie Squid Kid’s first Christmas, and even though he is a little too young to know what was going on, it was still very exciting. Family came to us, so we didn’t have to worry about traveling with the baby, and that turned out to be ideal, because I seem to have the virus and/or secondary bacterial infection that WILL NOT DIE.
It will come as little surprise that there were a number of cephalopods underneath our Christmas tree. Here’s a rundown of all the loot…
My plans for a week of short Christmas ornament posts got waylaid by a time destroying combination of illness, work, weather, and social commitments. So here are the two that were intended for Thursday and Friday…
This Santopus (or should that be Cephaloclaus?) ornament sports a biologically inaccurate toothy grin (and eye brows), but I’m willing to go easy on it because its arms all twist and curl in different directions. And I think that’s neat.
This one is probably my favorite of the bunch—a Sperm Whale and and a Giant Squid (and some echinoderms) on a wreath of seaweed. The ornament came from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. It is particularly appropriate because the museum’s logo was inspired by one of the oldest specimens in their collection: a complete skeleton of Physeter macrocephalus.
The classic image of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy draped in giant tentacles, that we first saw in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #2 (1994), was finally rendered in Christmas ornament form in 2002. The ornament was sculpted by the now apparently defunct Big Chief Studios and released by Dark Horse Comics.
Elves make the toys, reindeer pull the sleigh, but cephalopods are perfect for the oft-overlooked but highly important task of keeping the Christmas lights untangled!
My sister got this festive octopus ornament for me a couple of years ago in the U.S. Virgin Islands—St. Thomas, to be exact.
While this shirt isn’t Christmas-themed per se, to many people the impending holidays instills a feeling not unlike the sensation of being charged by a Giant Squid and a Grizzly Bear on a bicycle.
Cephalopodmas (aka Squidmas, aka Solstice) is next Tuesday, so every day this week I will post a bonus photo of a different cepahlopod holiday ornament.
I don’t think this rubber octopus was intended to be a Christmas decoration, but it has a string on it so…POW! ORNAMENT!
National Geographic has posted this cool new video of an Amphioctopus marginatus, aka the Coconut or Veined Octopus, using a coconut shell as protective camouflage. I’m not exactly sure why it’s news, since I’m pretty sure this behavior has been well-documented for a while now, but this video is all kinds of awesome! (See my previous posts about the Coconut Octopus, here and here.)
