A big boat skims oil from the sea by collecting metaphors and mixing them, it appears from a CNN report:
New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) – A ship billed as the world’s largest skimming vessel has begun testing its effectiveness in the Gulf of Mexico, a spokesman for its owner, Taiwanese company TMT Shipping, said Saturday.The A Whale has been assigned a 5-mile-by-5-mile area to test its capability, spokesman Bob Grantham said, citing Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft…. The skimmer works by “taking in oily water through a series of vents, or jaws, on the side of the ship and then decanting the intake,” Grantham said. “In many ways, the ship collects water like an actual whale and pumps internally like a human heart.”
BONUS: TMT, the company that owns the boat, says of itself:
We believe everything, which is the reason we chose our name “Today Makes Tomorrow”.
(Thanks to investigator William J. Maloney for parsing the spokesperson’s flotsam.)