Octopus and Other Aliens

By Sally Franz

It was my eleven-year-old grandson who gently pointed out to me that the plural of octopus is octopuses, not octopi. Wow, when did that change? I am guessing sometime when I was folding laundry, making stew, and paying bills. Life can get ahead of you if you do too many chores and not enough listening to Art Bell. And while I was “gone”, so much other language has changed and become acceptable. For an example, my new stove does not have buttons indicating On and Off. No, it has buttons for Bake On, Broil On and STOP. When did STOP become the opposite of On? And recently I saw a sign on the highway that read: Don’t drug and drive. Don’t drug whom…Gramma, your dog, yourself? Was the word “do” so very hard to fit in with an “s” after the word drug?

Back to the octopuses. My grandson announced over pizza while visiting that octopuses do not have a genetic make-up in common any other creature on earth. Not spiders (weren’t they related?) or squid, or slugs. We all smiled condescendingly and assumed he had heard that on a science fiction video game and ignored him. That is until my husband Googled it (“Googled” being morphed from the proper noun Google into a verb) and lo and behold it is true. Of course, the headline rang out, “Octopuses are aliens.” I bet that was on the cover of the tabloids and I missed it, too busy wondering where Elvis was.

So now what do we do with this information? What if there are a dozen or more other-worldly species down in the ocean? What if the myths of sea serpents, kraken, the Loch Ness monster and mermaids are actual creatures? Well, for one thing we have centuries of apologies to make to the people who were laughed out of existence because they swore they saw these species. To say nothing of Bigfoot, unicorns, and the Jersey Devil. My husband has seen the rumored giant squid off of San Juan Island. In fact, it chased him from underwater up a rock. Other divers in that area report being caught by a giant octopus with massive tentacles with suction cups the size of Mason jar lids.

So at last (but likely not in time to stop mass species extinction due to toxic spills) we are coming to terms that the intelligent life beyond our own might be at the edge of the water. After all, octopuses can become transparent using camouflage. They have no skeleton so they can squeeze into very narrow cracks. They can also move across dry land and they can regenerate severed limbs. Try that on, Supergirl.

Sally Franz and her third husband live on the Olympic Peninsula. She has two daughters, a stepson, and three grandchildren. Sally is the author of several humor books including Scrambled Leggs: A Snarky Tale of Hospital Hooey and The Baby Boomer’s Guide to Menopause. She hosts a local radio humor segment, “Baby Boomer Humor with Sassy Sally”.