Editorial: A great big blob from the briny blue

Beachcombing, as many a resident of the top of the south can attest, is a great way to spend time.

The ebb and flow of the tides guarantees that there is always something new to see, poke a stick at, pick up or possibly even take home. For those that way inclined, it adds an undercurrent of excitement to every seaside stroll.

Shells are the obvious prize, part of the treasure of holidays at the beach. Seaweed gets gathered up for gardens. Interesting bits of driftwood are souvenired, along with weathered pieces of timber and odds and ends that have come from ships and boats. There's always plastic rubbish of various shapes and sizes and often dead birds and fish – or parts of them. And then there's the blob Rose Fraser found this week on Brown's Beach, near Temuka.

No ordinary gift of the sea, Miss Fraser's find, pictured in Thursday's Nelson Mail, was a giant blob of white tissue and, given the horror movie history of the past 75 years or so, it's no wonder that's where the beachcomber's thoughts took her. "I must admit, I thought `Heck, this is an alien'," she told The Timaru Herald. "It looks like it's got big ribs coming out of it, but it looks like they could be tentacles, so I don't know."

It would not come as a surprise if Miss Fraser was thinking of the 1958 horror/science fiction film The Blob, featuring an amoeba-like alien that terrorised a small Pennsylvania town before eventually being frozen solid and dropped by a military plane somewhere in the Arctic – allowing scope for a sequel, which duly turned up 14 years later. Steve McQueen starred in The Blob, but it was made so early in his career that he was billed as the not nearly so macho "Steven". It never achieved the Hollywood heights that the actor did, but has become a "cult classic", not least because of the opening song, composed by Burt Bacharach, also near the beginning of his career. It is bound to be showing in various locations tonight as a Halloween special.

Miss Fraser's blob, on the other hand, was not destined for longevity. It certainly looked suitable for an appearance in a horror movie – big, amorphous, ugly and vaguely threatening in a catatonic sort of way. (She lobbed a rock at it before going near, just to make sure it was dead.) But there are experts in everything and those who specialise in blobs swiftly decided that this one was the stuffing from a sperm whale's enormous head – an organ called a spermaceti, filled with oily wax and used as part of the whale's in-built sonar system.

Nothing to be scared of, then, and perhaps even a reason for some sadness that one of nature's more majestic creatures came to such an end. Even so, it would be a brave beachcomber who didn't feel a tiny shiver of fear when coming across such a strange object cast up by the ocean. It's about as far from an intricately patterned shell or a message in a bottle as you can get. But it also highlights why a walk on the beach has a special mystery, and helps to explain why this form of recreation is so popular. You never know what you might come across and if nothing interesting turns up, you can always take a break and blob out for a while.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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