In Culture
Eggs and ambergris was reportedly King Charles II of England's favourite dish.
In Chapter 91 of Moby Dick, Stubb, one of the mates of the Pequod (captained by Ahab), cons the captain of a French whaler (Rose-bud) into abandoning the corpse of a sperm whale found floating in the sea. His plan is to recover the corpse himself in hopes that it contains ambergris. His hope proves well-founded, and the Pequod's crew recovers a valuable quantity of the substance. Melville devotes the following chapter to a discussion of ambergris, with special attention to the irony that "fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale."
Ambergris is key to the Ian Cameron novel The Lost Ones, from which came the 1974 Disney film, The Island at the Top of the World.
In Tales from the Crypt #44 a plague-stricken man is eaten by a sperm whale, which produces ambergris that results in a cursed perfume.
In Futurama Season 4, Episode 16 "Three Hundred Big Boys", Kif gives Amy a watch that is shortly after swallowed by a whale named Mushu. They make the whale regurgitate the watch, causing Kif to be covered in ambergris in his attempt to get the watch back.
In the 2001 film Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter sends Clarice Starling a letter which he writes while intentionally wearing a hand lotion containing ambergris, correctly assuming that this would ultimately aid her in discovering his location in Florence, Italy, due to it being legal only in few parts of the world.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)