Burgers, Beaches and Blue-Bloods

I love weekends. Especially weekends when I don't have to work, or check in with my parole officer. Weekends when I can focus on good, clean, all-American leisure activities, like grilling out, goading bad golfers, and time travel.

Last weekend, at the beach, I got to enjoy an all-American cookout, featuring all the all-American dishes, side dishes and desserts. And then I had to apologize to a 400-million-year-old snob.

Not my fault, but I felt I should apologize anyway. You be the judge.

I was innocently walking along the beach, making little all-American post-gluttony gastric noises, and there it was! A perfect Limulus polyphemus, washed up by the tide. I ran up and gingerly lifted its shell, hoping to see some signs of li...

Hold on. You DO know Limulus polyphemus, right? Oh, c'mon.

Okay. For those of you who slid through our fine American public education system without the extras, like an education, or a treatable social disease, I'll back up a bit. We're talking, of course, about our friend, the horseshoe crab.

Limulus polyphemus (literal translation: "Polly want a phemus?") is a fascinating sea creature that settled on a nice, distinctive look over 400 million years ago and hasn't changed since, like Twinkies, and Dick Clark.

According to my intensive 45 seconds of research, "Limmy" has a shell made of three parts: the Carapace, the Middle Ages, and the Santa Maria. This amazing creature can be found in "near-shore areas" (literal translation: "Polly want a condo?") along the East Coast, as well as in other potentially toxic scenarios, such as a political endorsement from Dick Cheney.

During the complex mating ritual of Limulus polyphemus, the male shows up first (no great surprise, that) and then grasps the female, using a special claw known to mating specialists as the "bald-faced lie." According to lab assistants who obviously don't get out much, the male may not let go for months, though we can't confirm this, since the lab assistants swooned, or drowned, or sold the research photos to a supermarket tabloid.

But what makes Limmy so special is his blood. It's blue, like the blood of most Americans who can afford to spend months at a time on the beach, clawing at females. (literal translation: "So has Polly got a roommate?")

Then, in the 1950s, a scientist named (ready?) Dr. Bang discovered that this blue blood had an interesting trait: it would get very ticked off if you threw impurities at it. Well, so would I, but let's move on.

Before Dr. Bang popped in, we used rabbits to test for drug impurities. Invent a drug, grab a bunny and a syringe, and see what happens. Bunnies survive, call Marketing; bunnies don't, call Housekeeping. The bunnies got ticked off, too, though it was hard to tell. But then Hugh Hefner took up their cause and a whole different mating ritual began.

Then, thankfully - unless you're a horseshoe crab - Dr. Bang figured out that the blue blood could be used to test for drug impurities, and a cottage industry was born. Right now, somewhere in America, some guy is headed for work. Clock in, grab a crab, extract some blood from the crab's "nebula" region, throw it back in the tank till next time. No apologies, no band-aids, no "I Gave Blood: How 'Bout You?" stickers, no dinner and a movie first, nothing.

So I thought it best that I apologize for America, since Obama was off somewhere being transparent.

By the way, my research unearthed some charming chatter about Limmy. Witness this guy's calm, rational prediction: "When all the horseshoe crabs are gone, humans will eat each other. I hope I'm gone by then."

I hope he is, too.