While southwards he roams to the home of the whale

Hey there, blog reader.
(he said to nobody in particular - for nobody was reading his blog, and they certainly hadn't been very particular about it, either.)

It's been a long summer, what with all the blog posts I've been writing, and the jealous attention I've been paying to these here internets. Er, I mean, screwing around and not even bothering to dust off the cobwebs once in a while.
Yeah, that's more accurate.

So anyway, thanks to a rather long layover in the Memphis airport (a lovely facility, by the way) I'm pleased to announce that I restarted my annual attempt to maintain enough focus to read Moby Dick. Thus far, I've set a new lifetime record for attention span, and made it through Chapter Thirteen!
I'm more than a bit concerned, however, as there are little to no actual nautical activities. I mean, if i told you this great American classic consisted of page after page of the philosophical wonders of sleeping with strange men, being frightened of church, and lots of talk about whales - yet nobody bothers to get on a damn boat... well I can't imagine how hard a sell this was to get published. Miracles abound, I suppose. It's like being told how amazing Star Wars is, but when you see the movie, instead of awesome spacey-ness, you get a college professor sitting in the desert, lecturing you for an hour about "automatons," and then he rides off on a motorcycle. Granted, that would make a much better start to the Star Wars films than the steaming pile that was Phantom Menace.

Still, Chapter Thirteen, eh! I'll make one last sally into the book, as my patience wears thin. If I don't see some frickin' boats then I'm done with Melville for another year at least.

Um, there is a whale in this book, right? I mean, it's not like a colossal joke that everyone knows except me, right? Honestly, I wouldn't know if I should be impressed or pathetic for not knowing about a twist ending that's been around for 150 years. So level with me, intertrons, is there a fricking whale in this book or what? Sure, with movies you just have to wait 5 or 10 minutes to figure out if you bought the porn version by accident (and it doesn't take much imagination to think of a porn title for Moby Dick, knowwhutimsayin?) but with books, the only remedy is to keep reading. Of course, the lack of any glossy pictures of the beast with two backs is a good clue that I've got the real deal, but with this much effort already invested, I'm admittedly gunshy.