Greg Laden's Blog

I'm not up on pike anatomy, but it looked to me like he was removing the epipleural ribs, I'm familar with Y-bones in suckers, minnows, characins, etc. They are in the myosepta and there are often two sets, a dorsal set and a ventral set. The boneless carp and buffalo you get have been run through a device which cuts the fillet vertically and breaks up the Y bones. Then when fried, the bones crisp up and can be eaten. I had a student do a class project clearing and staining suckers. There is a great deal of variability and compexity in sucker Y bones. I showed the results to several sucker people. They were impressed but nothing came of it.

Posted by: Jim Thomerson | May 25, 2008 10:01 AM

Finally found a diagram of the pike skeleton. Looks to me like the mentioned Y-bones are double headed epipleural ribs. I didn't know pike had those. What I was thinking of as Y bones can be found by googling Carp intermuscular bones, for example. All very interesting. Learn something new every day!

Posted by: Jim Thomerson | May 25, 2008 5:05 PM

First, that's not a northern...it's affectionally known as a hammer-handle. These minor notherns are also known as dwarfus northernus where I come from which is just south of Virginia, MN down the dirt road from Cotton.

Second, I can save everybody that final y-bone step: simply stream or poach the dwarfus for 6-10 minutes and the y-bones becomes easy to see and extricate with just a common fork (forget that electric thing, you could get hurt...that dude must be from Wisconsin.) Dip the remaining fish in a little garlic seasoned melted butter or margarine, serve with red potatoes, fresh green beans and fresh picked Minnesota wild blueberries and you'll then have a real Minnesota fish dinner.

Posted by: R. Schauer | May 26, 2008 10:13 PM

Is it my imagination, or does the Minnesotan accent sound similar to a Canadian accent?

Posted by: DingoDave | May 26, 2008 10:48 PM

Funny, DingoDave, i thought the same thing. It must be the "out"

Posted by: claschxtreme | May 27, 2008 6:16 AM

I think the reason we Minnesotans don't hear the similarities is that we've known both accents for so long that we hear the differences instead. It's like knowing that the people who live in the mostly German-settled areas of the state don't sound like those from the Norwegian-settled areas. To an outsider like Greg, they all sound very similar. I can tell you whether someone grew up around Princeton or Fairmont.

And I don't deny my French heritage. I am rather miffed at my French great-...-great grandfathers for caving to the idea that my great-...-great grandmothers' names couldn't be recorded in the family bible because they were heathens. I'd like to know who they are, since there are huge swaths of Canada they could have come from.

Posted by: Stephanie Z | May 27, 2008 8:27 AM

The dialect is called wither Upper Midwestern or North Central American. As a MN native who has also lived in both the LP and UP of MI, I can speak both my native dialect and the Inland Northern American dialect which also covers upstate NY as Greg mentions above and is defined by the northern cities vowel shift.

See http://www.pbs.org/speak/ about the PBS program "Do You Speak American?" for more info on this accent.

Sorry, I was just teaching a unit on this in my grammar class.

Posted by: Faithful Reader | May 27, 2008 9:13 AM