I need your help.
The other day, while watching one of these drama-packed, ostensible reality shows about deep-sea commercial fishing — it may have been “Real Wicked Trawler Trash Wives of the North Atlantic,” can’t exactly recall — I realized that I have not reconciled a latent issue from my childhood and early adulthood.
To put it briefly: Where, for the first 30 years of my life, was tilapia? How come I never even heard of tilapia until, roughly — or is it roughy — 30 years ago?
When I was a kid, Mom served fish for dinner once or twice a week. Salmon, tuna, cod, halibut, flounder, sole, etc.
“Hey, Mom, what’s for dinner?”
“Fish.”
“What kind?”
She never answered, “Tilapia.” If she had, I’d have remembered that. But now tilapia is all over the place. Seems there isn’t a restaurant that doesn’t serve some form of tilapia. Be it blackened, encrusted, broiled or breaded, tilapia is the fish du jour every du jour.
But still I’ve yet to encounter a fisherman — lake, stream or ocean — who heads off to fish for tilapia, or returns with a pail or parcel of nice, fresh tilapia.
I know many fishermen, but not even one who has told me that he’s “turning in early tonight. Gonna get up before dawn; going fishing with the guys. We’re going after tilapia.”
Nope, I’ve never known a man or woman who actually went tilapia fishing.
Furthermore, on these deep sea fishing TV shows, they hook or net all sorts of stuff and stuffing — crab, lobster, shark, tuna, eel, swordfish, haddock, hake, squid, sea bass, yellowtail, blue fish, red fish and rock fish.
And the catch is then identified.
But not once have I heard a crew member declare that the catch included tilapia. We don’t even get to learn if the skipper would be happy, disappointed or just okay with having caught some tilapia.
So then where does it come from, who catches it and why, given that I’d never heard of it the first 30 years of my life, is it now all over the place?
While I’m not sure just how much this issue has left me emotionally scarred, I’m sure it has, to an extent, affected me. Or I wouldn’t be asking for your help.
And when and if you get me through this tilapia hang-up, I’m going to solicit your help on kale. Where the heck was kale the first 40 years of my life?
Soon, with TV’s help, the other boot will drop on Jersey’s legalization of online casino gambling. The at-home horror stories, especially about the young and even underaged, will stack.
And where winners and losers eventually leave casinos, winners and losers never have to leave their homes — until they lose their homes. The losers will go deeper; the winners will lose their winnings, unable and/or unwilling to cash out because, after all, they’ll be back the next day, anyway, perhaps first thing in the morning.
In the meantime, a Fairbets TV ad cuts to the ugly core. It shows young men who’d been playing basketball bolting from the court and construction workers abandoning their jobs to flip open laptops from which to online Jersey gamble — craps, black jack, roulette, etc.
And to be clear, the commercial shows this as a good thing.
Don’t know how much time and money was spent on the project, but a study headed by Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham researcher Edward C. Archer recently concluded that what are commonly known as TV-afflicted “couch potatoes” run a greater risk of obesity than those who exercise daily.
Hmmm. Live and learn.