Mystery Cheese like Substance, Could be a Whale of a Tale.
This morning on various websites was the story about the strange item washed up on the shore of Wellingtons south coast. Orginally it was speculated that the rather large object was a lump of cheese, and the likely source was probably some sort of ship, as it is not too common for people to go around leaving 500kg blocks of cheese all over the place.
This was the picture of it.
ROBERT KITCHIN/Dominion POST
This in itself would be cool, as they were deciding on what to do with it, I would of loved to see someone take to it with a chainsaw to make it smaller to move.
But as with every good story, this is not the end of it, oh no.
The Wellington city council has had a deluge of calls about it, from people who are apparently smarter the marine biologists, scientists and council staff all together. They know what it is, have too much time on their hands, and a slight addiction to a certain website called Wikipedia. Acording to them it is Ambergris, which if you are like most of the population of New Zealand, your probably wondering WTF is that.
Well in basic terms, it is whale vomit (there’s two words I never thought I would be putting together in a sentence)
Apparently eating squid all day can cause an irritation and this leads to the whale throwing up. Ambergris is apprently very valuable, as it is rare, and it is uncertain of the supply of it. It is used in the process of making purfume, mmmmm goody.
The council aren’t too sure, and seem to think it might a tallow type substance or some sort of packing material used on ships.
So basically no one knows what this chunk of crap is, and it seems that it might take a while before they actually do, when they finally stop answering the phones from crazy locals and get a proper answer, I’ll let you know what the outcome was.
In the meantime, what do you think it could be? Leave a message and let SNICE know.
[UPDATE]
An update to the story, just as the council were wondering what to do with the big lump of greasy crap, they realised that locals who thought it was Ambergris went into some sort of frenzied goldrush type madness, and began hacking it up in the hopes they could sell it for the mega dollars Ambergris is worth.
Apparently no testing is to be done, unless there is problems from people trying to sell the stuff.
The general consensus is that it is a lump of cooking fat, due to the basic cylindrical shape of the object orginally, and also that it was the size of a 44 gallon drum.
So it seems that a bunch of dumb asses have a chunk of cooking fat at their house.
