FlatulentFish All Kinds of Junk

Several people have asked me the question: "Why Flatulent Fish?"

Simple, really. First, I've got a pretty base sense of humor, and anything scatological is sure to make me chuckle. Sad, but true.

Way back in 2000, I saw an article posted on ananova: "A full-scale nuclear alert was launched by NATO after submarine sounds were heard under the sea off the Swedish coast could have been sparked by flatulent fish."

This made me laugh.

For days.

This was during a time that I was working for a small internet start-up company and things were going horribly, horribly wrong, so anything which cheered me up was a pretty big deal.

Anyway, after moving on to a new company, I decided to nab my own domain. Anyone who has gone through this knows what an exercise in frustration this can be - there are lots of folks out there who snarfed up dozens, if not hundreds, of domain names in the interest of making a few bucks, and they often request exorbitant sums of money - quite often in the thousands of dollars. Ain't gonna do it for a business site, and I sure wasn't about to pay that kind of thing for my personal site. Flatulentfish was free, so I nabbed it.

For the sake of posterity, here's the story as I originally read it on the ananova site:

09/20/00- Gothenborg, Sweden (Reuters)- A full-scale nuclear alert was launched by NATO after submarine sounds were heard under the sea off the Swedish coast could have been sparked by flatulent fish. A fleet of ships headed for the Baltic Sea on full alert to track down "enemy submarines", but found nothing. Instead, analysis of the propeller-like noises detected underwater showed the sound could have come from a shoal of herring passing wind.

Funny stuff, non?

For more information on flatulent fish, check out the following resources:

• Night-farting fish puzzle researchers