Squid? Or Octopus?

It's not all that long ago (a few days? weeks?) that Pharyngula came to my attention, but I've become what I guess you could call an admirer of PZ Myers.  And since it's his birthday, and he likes cephalopods, I thought I'd post this story about a squid.  Well, it's not a squid, actually, but the squid plays a very important role.  Plus it does take place in Minnesota.  Well, my dad lives very close to Minnesota, anyway. Just across the river in Wisconsin.

Here's the story:

My dad called me one Saturday morning, quite a few years ago now, and said he wanted my opinion about something Very Serious.  I said OK, go ahead, and he said he was going to tell me about something that had happened at his house that morning, and I was not to interrupt, but at the end he was going to ask me a couple of questions. He said he would, if necessary, put his wife on the phone to confirm that he was not making anything up, just in case I thought he was.

Now, a bit of background about my dad: he's a big practical joker. And having grown up with a big practical joker, I am inclined to fact-check pretty much everything anyone tells me. I will never again, for example, go into a hardware store and ask for a left-handed tool of any kind. And I knew he was lying when he told me that the stop signs with white borders were optional.

But his story, roughly, was this: he was outside that morning after a heavy snow, using his spiffy new snowplow to carve an opening in the enormous plow mound that the snowplow had left across his driveway. His, um, high-spirited pale blonde cocker spaniel puppy was nearby. The snow was deep and there were lots of big chunks of ice in the plow mound. It was kind of rough going for the old guy, but he soldiered on until an odd frozen chunk of something shot out of the snowblower-chute. He leaned over to look at it and as he was thinking, "my god, that looks like half an octopus," the barely-visible-in-the-snow puppy ran off with it.  Into the street.  Directly into the path of an oncoming snowplow, which had returned to pile snow in the driveways across the street.  Dad took off after the dog and twisted his knee, but caught the dog before the snowplow did.

At this point I couldn't help it, I said, "Dad, are you sure it wasn't a squid?" He said to shut up until he was done telling the story, and that his knee was badly sprained in case I cared.

So he got the frozen sea-creature away from the dog and took it in the house to show his wife. "Hey look honey, I found half an octopus in the driveway!"  She looked at it and said (and I'm not making this up), "Are you sure it isn't a squid?" Some discussion followed about the difference between a squid and an octopus, and they ended up looking it up to confirm that it was indeed, as far as they could tell from the parts they had, an octopus.  I'm not sure why they bagged it up and put it in the freezer, but they did, and my dad and his badly sprained knee went out to finish clearing the driveway. [This is a man who a) lives for bad weather, and b) once finished a 26.2-mile in-line skating event with a fractured coccyx sustained in a fall just a few yards from the starting line. Operating a snowblower in adverse weather conditions with a sprained knee is very likely his idea of a great time.]

The dog, however, stayed in the house. Which was good, because it wasn't very long before most of the rest of the octopus appeared, and she had been pretty excited about the first part, and pretty mad when it got taken from her. The remaining octopus remains were taken inside and frozen along with the rest of it.  Why?  Again, I don't know.  Evidence?

Some neighbors came by, and dad told them the story.  First question: "Are you sure it wasn't a squid?"  They were shown the evidence, and the pictures in the "How to Tell the Difference Between an Octopus and a Squid" book and admitted that it was in fact an octopus.  And then dad's father-in-law called.  He got the story, and wanted to know just exactly how they knew it was an octopus and not a squid.

"So that's the story," my dad said. "Could I have possibly made that up?"

"Well, yeah," I said, "but what are your questions?"

His first question was what's with the squid? Would it somehow be less bizarre to find a frozen squid in the snow in your upper-midwestern driveway than to find a frozen octopus? If so, why?

His second question was what in the hell was an octopus doing in his driveway?

I couldn't answer either question, but I thought it was a pretty good story, and we laughed pretty hard. The only plausible thing we could come up with to explain the presence of the beast was that my dad coaches hockey, or used to from time to time, and there is apparently some kind of tradition among fans of I forget which hockey team that involves hurling an octopus onto the ice if you don't approve of something that happens.  But he didn't have a team that season.  And the only thing we came up with to explain why so many people asked was it a squid was that sometimes someone's trash gets too close to the curb and the snowplows knock it over and spread it around. I mean, you could sort of imagine that maybe someone had purchased a squid at the fancy grocery store and never got around to cooking it & finally just threw it out.  But not an octopus.

Anyway, later that day, I called up some friends -- a couple who love a good story and also happen to both be pretty intrepid reporters -- and told them the whole story.  Bizarrely, they both asked the Squid Question, interrupting at more or less the same point I had. They didn't have any useful ideas about how it had got there. But just the other day, my dad was here visiting and we told the story to some friends. Well after the story was over and we had moved on to other topics, my friend's brother, whom I don't know all that well and who hadn't appeared to be paying attention, said, "Atmospheric convection. That's what it was. Like when it rains frogs or something." He said it as though raining frogs or something was a pretty routine happening where he lived.

I suppose it's as good a theory as any.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Professor.