That's a heart you could crawl through

I almost didn’t open the email. For starters, it arrived in my inbox at 3:46 a.m. – well within the working hours of poor displaced members of the Nigerian royal family. This particular royal called herself “Fran Morales,” and the portion of her message I could read with the email app’s preview mode sounded hokey.

“Hello I am contacting you from Guinness World Records in London, a…”

I didn’t like “Fran’s” punctuation. I'm certainly not a punctuation expert, but the absence of a comma following a greeting seemed like a sure sign of duplicity perpetrated by a non-native English speaker.

I opened the message anyway.

“Hello

“I am contacting you from Guinness World Records in London, and I am currently researching images for the 2016 edition of our book.

“We are interested in possibly using your image of the whales heart on your blog http://www.compasswhistle.com/2013/02/middle-earth-or-at-least-the-middle-of-new-zealand/whale-heart_6286/

“Could you let me know if you would be happy for us to use it?

“I look forward to hearing from you.

“Kind regards

Fran

“Fran Morales
Deputy Picture Editor
Guinness World Records Ltd.
184-192 Drummond Street
London NW1 3HP”

I recognized the link “Fran” had included as one I created two years ago for my website, CompassWhistle.com, It directed to a picture of me. Climbing through a replica of a blue whale’s heart. With a dopey look of (feigned) wonderment plastered across my face. (GROAN).

My husband, Matt, snapped this embarrassing photograph during a visit to Te Papa, the Wellington-based national museum and art gallery of New Zealand. We were within the children’s section of the museum, and the exhibit invited young visitors to tunnel through blood vessels of the life-sized plastic model. So I did too. Matt and I shared a good laugh, he took the picture, we posted it on our travel blog and then promptly forgot about it.

Despite Matt and I’s best efforts, CompassWhistle.com never made it big within the blogosphere; At most, the site received 50 unique visits a day. So we were floored a few months ago when Jetpack indicated a sudden spike of several hundred unique visits a day. What was going on? The referral log indicated much of the traffic welled from a MetaFilter feed. About whale vaginas.

CompassWhistle.com traffic referral stats

The 30-comment MetaFilter feed began in August 2014 when an astute user named “viggorlijah” posted a link titled “...the big baleen whales can be over 100 feet in length, so their reproductive tracts likely wind for several feet. That’s a vagina you could walk through. (SFW),” a quote he borrowed from a June 2014 Scientific America blog post baring the auspicious headline “Getting to KnowWhale Vaginas in 7 Steps.”

Interesting, but what does any of this have to do with Matt’s whale heart picture? Well, some idiot named “maryr” joined the feed by posting a link she titled “Oh god I can’t unsee it.” It directs to Matt’s whale picture.

Props to "maryr" for all the traffic (I believe it helped make Matt’s picture the top Google Images result for the query “whale heart”) but I am gravely offended by the implication I’ve crawled through a whale’s lady parts, by being labeled as something unsightly someone would wish to “unsee” and by yet another comma infraction, this particular assault against the vocative case.

I Googled Fran Morales. She seems legit. And those goofy Brits add all kinds of unnecessary letters to words (e.g. colour, flavour, behaviour, harbour, honour, humour...). Perhaps they make up for it by ditching commas. If Guinness World Records wants to set the record straight about my whale heart encounter, I’m “happy” for it; Matt and I give the reference book our blessing. The 2016 edition hits bookstands in September. I encourage you to purchase one.