If you are just joining us, I wish to take you back to a weeklong trip I took to St. Johns, Newfoundland, to visit my dear friend Dawn while she was a graduate student there. After nearly dying in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic in an attempt to ride a dead whale I wound up going to a supermarket with Dawn to buy something for dinner. It was something of an anticlimax to that little adventure, but after all, one must eat.

In the U.S., supermarkets have entire aisles that are filled with nothing but tuna cans. In Newfoundland and Labrador, those aisles look exactly the same, filled with the very same cans, but one cannot buy tuna there. The cans are all filled with seal meat. Dawn had never tried it, and decided -- I will never understand why -- that this visit from her gentleman friend would be a capital opportunity to do so. We wandered the aisle for a bit until we settled on a promising-looking can that said, "Prime Seal Meat with Onions."

"They always package it with these little onions in it," Dawn explained. "I don't know why."

We took it home and opened it at dinnertime. Inside was something that physically resembled tuna, except for the color, which was a deep chocolate brown. The consistency was that of cooked beef. Three sorry little onions wallowed on top of the mess. The sight alone was enough to turn the stomach...

...and then there was the smell. We both knew it so well. It was more subtle, not as overpowering as one finds it when floating cheek-to-cheek with a decomposing Megaptera, but it was unmistakably the same: the unforgettable combination of dead mammal and dead fish. The only difference was that this time it was a little more oniony.

We both went rather pale. Bravely we each took a tiny, tiny portion of the meat on the tip of a fork, and as the aroma wafted up into our nostrils, we each took our first ever taste of dead sea mammal.

And our last, it turned out. With shaking hands we offered the remainder to the cat, who took one sniff and promptly ran and hid.