This tosses some fiction onto the news that the US Navy is using trained dolphins for minesweeping in the Gulf War II. I posted it on a humor mail list at work.
From: [a pseudonym commonly used by people on the humor alias at work] Subject: dolphin accident To: humor@[work] Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 15:02:58 -0800 (PST) US Navy Dolphin Killed in Minesweeping Accident March 25, 2003 Umm Qasr, Iraq (AP) -- A US Navy dolphin was killed Tuesday morning when an Iraqi mine exploded while he was deactivating it near the port of Umm Qasr. The Navy released the name of the sea mammal after notifying next of kin. US Navy Reserve Captain James "Flipper" Glac'dect Jr was recognized as having served with distinction on many previous missions. The Navy declined to provide details on those missions, saying they're still classified. This was the first time the media was made aware of the Navy dolphin program. "Captain Flipper", as he was known by friends, was a founding member of the Navy's dolphin minesweeping team. "He was one of the best," according to a Navy spokesman. "It was a very unfortunate accident, a great loss." His regular occupation was as a dolphin show performer at Paramount's Great America theme park in Santa Clara, California, part of Silicon Valley. During the off-season, he would often telecommute as a software engineering consultant. The Silicon Valley companies whom he worked for never knew they had hired a dolphin. "He was a pioneer. And a real geek. But I mean that in a good way," said his wife Liz in an e-mail interview, who is also a dolphin show performer at the park. "He had just been accepted to the Navy Seal program. There's so much more he had left to accomplish." The couple have seven children, all of whom are now grown up and working as performers at theme parks around the country. The family and the Navy both declined to answer AP's question whether any of the Glac'dect kids were also moonlighting for the Navy.
So how did I come up with the name for the dolphin? For the first name, I just picked a common name that a trained dolphin could probably pronounce. For the last name, I ran a random word generator program (and munged the results a bit) until it came up with something that could be pronounced only by a dolphin. :-)
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