If you are doing the right thing these days, you are spending more time at home than usual. If you have animals, they are probably either confused by you disrupting their unsupervised kolohe time, or ecstatic that you are home all day.
Your dog may be bugging you to play while you are trying to make sense of the stock market but it may also be trying to give you a stock tip. Buy shares in the Dog Whisperer. When everyone goes back to work millions of dogs will need treatment for separation anxiety.
A tired dog is a good dog and finding positive outlets for the energy pent up in both of you is important. We are in uncharted territory here and no one knows how long this will last.
Dog hockey is likely just one of the many new quarantine sports creating color on the blank canvas that is shelter at home. All you need to play dog hockey is a bone and a broom. Dogs are optional.
You can play with one dog, but the game’s even more fun with multiple dogs. As with human hockey, fights can break out so have a penalty box.
Dogs and people alike, get bored. This has generated trouble for both, ever since the beginning of time. Dog hockey is a way for kolohe dogs and humans to burn a little steam without causing more calamity to a world currently overflowing with it.
Fishing is another positive outlet, and fishing is an exempt activity under the Governor’s shelter at home order. More people have dogs than boats, but if you are lucky enough to have both, mixing fishing and dog hockey may not be a good idea.
Someone will probably try it though, while bored and waiting for a bite. Kolohe is, as kolohe does.
There are a lot of fishermen out there who spend much of their time at home, thinking about fishing. Very few fishermen out fishing, however, think about stuff they should be doing at home. That would be pupule.
Some of the stuff that fishermen think of when they are bored at home may seem pupule to others, but if one looks closer, there may actually be something to it. For example, local skipper Bill Jardine wrote in recently with a story about catching striped marlin. Bill is one of those Big Island “classic characters” who fishes with family and friends from his “haole sampan,” a classic kupuna of a boat, endemic to Hawaii with plenty of character of its own.
Capt. Bill sent in a tale of catching striped marlin which are usually small in Hawaii waters, but can weigh up to five hundred pounds down in New Zealand. Jardine sent in a photo of a typically small striped marlin but what stood out was his atypical comment, “At the Cinder Hills koa we got attacked by at least three striped marlin, which is not a marlin at all but rather a multi-barred long-nose spearfish.”
Having never heard this postulate before, a lively discussion ensued as to the accuracy of his position. The next day, Capt. Bill provided evidence to support his claim, most of which was based upon physical attributes of the fish, and a family tree representing the taxonomy of striped marlin.
As I am a board certified nonologist, the science he displayed zoomed over my head. However, having just binge watched Pawn Stars while the dogs slept off hockey, I knew what Rick Harrison would do — call in an expert.
So I did. Two in fact. It wasn’t so much that I was looking for a “second opinion.” That would have been noble, and I am not. I was hedging my bets that with two experts, I had at least a 50/50 chance that one would side with me and say that a striped marlin was indeed, a marlin.
Bill had his evidence, while I relied entirely on the fact that it was called a striped marlin. No one had ever called it a “multi-barred long-nose spearfish” before. At least no one I had ever heard of. I didn’t say it, but in the back of my mind I wondered if maybe Capt. Bill wasn’t a bit pupule.
The first response that came back was unconvincing either way. On the one hand the renowned scientist said that the question itself was unclear. On the other hand, for clarity, he supplied a peer reviewed paper that was so full of complex scientific jargon that the question itself disappeared in the fog.
The second response came from Dr. Julian Pepperel, Ph.D., also a well known biologists. Both gents are specialists in marlin, sailfish, tuna and sharks.
Julian, however, is a you beaut, true blue dinky-di Aussie. He comes across like a down under version of a Will Rogers.
Julian, we could understand. At least I thought we could until I read the first sentence of his reply:
“In a nutshell, striped marlin used to be spearfish but now they’re not (!).”
I thought we were going to have to call Bindi Irwin to get a straight answer, but as I read further, Julian came through.
“In 2006, a paper was published on billfish taxonomy by Bruce Collette, John Graves and Jan McDowell which revised the whole group, based on genetics rather than physical features. I’m attaching it here FYI (The Abstract and Figure 3 summarize their new classification). This classification has subsequently been fully accepted in scientific circles. So, whereas previously, striped (and white) marlin were put in the same genus as the spearfishes (Tetrapturus), simply based on relative dorsal fin height, striped and whites are now placed in their own genus, Kajikia, based on DNA. The two groups are still reasonably close, but striped and whites are closer to the black marlin (now Istiompax indica) than they are to the four species of ’true’ spearfishes….”
Bill was correct based upon the science of the past, which has been replaced by the science of the present. Things change.
So the moral of the story is when kupuna say something that sounds pupule — a’ole ho’okolohe.
You never know. They might be that other kind of pupule.
Crazy like a fox.