When returning from holiday, one starts to think of holidays

[fivemack]

By 'south of the Rio Grande', I mean 'into Mexico' rather than 'anywhere south of 31N' - I thought this was standard usage, but various of my friends in Cambridge interpreted it the other way.

[Poll #1545665]

Comments

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

My interactions with Antactica were limited to a summer working at the British Antarctic Survey. Although the job was at a desk in Cambridge, the introductory safety talk didn't distinguish between people going South and people whose most dangerous task was to hold a pencil. So I learnt a lot about elephant seals.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I thought it was the leopard seal that you had to be particularly wary of (http://www.rosssea.info/, last paragraph), though maybe they're the ones that will sometimes decide that a diver in the water looks crunchy, whilst an elephant seal might roll four tons over onto someone who prods it with a stick [1]

[1] where they found a stick in Antarctica is a more interesting question

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

Oops, yes - I was rememberimg the wrong seal type. AFAICR one of the main issues with leopard seals was that they harbour some fairly non-standard bacteria in their mouths, which makes bites somewhat more tricky to treat.

Seals

[http://the.earth.li/~alex/halley/ (from livejournal.com)]

Leopard seals scare the divers most, as one ate someone at Rothera a few years back. Elephant seals will, I'm told and entirely believe, happily let themselves be 'gently' dragged by a Sno-Cat into a box. Fur seals, which I count amongst species best helped to be extinct, are bitey and growly and generally full of bacteria. Not that Elephant seals are also not full of bacteria, but I've had one projectile sneeze into my cup of tea before and still live.