As well as whalers' harpoons, whales must navigate the dangers of ship strikes, entanglements in shipping nets and other ocean apparatus, disorientating man-made ocean noises, habitat destruction, resource exploitation, climate change and pollution.
As far as I could tell, on any of the main stages, not a single musician had anything to say about the cuts, banks, tuition fees, or Britain's entanglements abroad.
The suffragette and novelist Rebecca West admired the "pretty young girls" but also noted that they were contained on a site "ringed with barbed war entanglements and patrolled by sentries".
From being the "indispensable nation", Mr Obama's America seeks to be an indispensable catalyst: present, but not deeply involved.The darkest eveningThus America has sought to create the conditions for success as in hotspots like Libya while resolutely avoiding deeper entanglements.
By shunning unwise foreign entanglements, Mr Obama will be free to focus on nation-building at home.
The European project is a product of international treaties, of collective institutions and mutual entanglements.
To outsiders keen to avoid risky entanglements, insiders who prefer African solutions to Africa's problems, or anyone trying to ease the burden on the struggling UN, helping the neighbours to help the UN to restore peace in Sierra Leone makes sense.
Ron Paul, a libertarian congressman from Texas who commands a small but devoted following for his unstinting hostility to the Federal Reserve and foreign entanglements, is also likely to enter the fray.
There are political and bureaucratic entanglements here, but I don't see any overwhelming logical objection.So this is a bit of blue-skying, but why not run a national certification pilot programme with military spouses who are also teachers?
In truth, he hates to take sides, fearing that any fresh entanglements may prove as bloody and costly as George W. Bush's.
Given the intensely political nature of the debate over inequality, the research reveals just one more way in which the central bank ideal to avoid political entanglements entirely is increasingly unattainable.
