On this day of celebration, let us remember and honor the invaluable contributions of squid to pirate lore and culture:

- Davy Jones and the Kraken in Pirates of the Carribbean: Dead Man's Chest. As observed elsewhere, the Kraken's mouth is much more like the Sarlaac than like any cephalopod I've ever seen, which is weird--wouldn't a huge clacking squid beak be more terrifying than concentric rings of teeth?

A Maui News article about the Hawaiian language caught my attention (okay, the attention of my google squid alert) with this sentence:

Waihee is usually translated as "octopus water," but there's a story about a man being killed by a squid who covered the area with slime.

I'm so intrigued! Was the man killed directly by slime, or did a squid, who tangentially covered the area with slime, also kill a man? What is the Hawaiian word that was translated as slime, and could it also mean ink?

This guy Spillane has a quarry on his property in Illinois, and for years he's been selling limestone to landscaping companies. And for years, he's been seeing fossils in the rock--particularly, fossil cephalopods.

You may recall classical Linnean taxonomy with the mnemonic "Kings Play Chess On Funky Green Squares" (or one of the racier alternatives) or perhaps you simply committed it to memory: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. But if you hear about a group of animals--cephalopods for example--how are you to know which level it belongs in? Rules are variable, as is the case in much of biology, but the best clue is the last few letters of the word.

Unfortunately that doesn't help with Cephalopoda, so I'll just go ahead and tell you that it's a class. Squid form their own order within this class:

Animalia
    Mollusca