Day Five Of Nitpicking The Twelve Days Of Christmas

Fiiiiiive gooooolden riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings.

If I didn't do this one today, I think I'd be ashamed of myself.  It's pretty much obligatory.

Now, there are two thoughts that were bouncing through my mind as I tried to think of a new way of looking at gold rings:

1)  If a circle is filled in and a ring has an empty center, what do you call a square with an empty center?

2)  How could I have not done a Time Lord reference during my Lords A Leaping day?  I'm a terrible nerd.

And beyond that...

I'm tapped.

I can't think of anything clever about "golden rings."  Doughnuts?  No.  The One Ring times five?  No.  The Olympic rings dipped in gold?  No.

Nothing feels right.

So we're hitting up gold ring (disambiguation) on Wikipedia to see what we get.




Okay.  The "goldring" is another name for the White Crappie.

...I need to know more.

The white crappie is a freshwater fish in North America.  Found in rivers, lakes, and streams, it looks very similar to the black crappie (is that racist?), and another name for it used to be the silver perch.  The female lays anywhere from five to thirty thousand eggs, which the male then guards.

Interesting.

The Golden Ring is a series of eight cities all northeast of Moscow, believed to be key in the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church,  Despite being called the "golden ring" the cities are actually laid out in an upside down V-shape.  The cities are all declared to be "open air museums," and have extremely gorgeous architecture from kremlins, monasteries, churches, and cathedrals.  There's also numerous examples of the famous "onion-style" domes.

Mount Goldring is located in Antarctica.

The USS Goldring is a Bolero-class submarine named after the white crappie.  Seriously?  That fish keeps coming up in this conversation.  The construction of it was never completed, however, and what was built was dumped in 1944.

The goldring danio is a new species of fish discovered in Myannmar and why is all of this coming back around to fish?!

So, if you don't want to invest in precious metals (and trust me, early on I debated looking at the most expensive gold rings for sale, but it got really unclear after a while when the primary monetary value was more about the diamond attached to it), I guess you can just to the Mississippi river, catch a few fish, and present those to your loved one.

The Indian Hills Inn & RV Park and White Buffalo Restaurant (again, racist?) in Iowa, for example, advertises that it is a prime location with multiple lakes surrounding it, almost guaranteeing you'll catch some catfish, crappies, or other local fish.

And yet, their restaurant only has shrimp and Icelandic cod on the menu.  Curious.  I'm not sure I trust a resort that doesn't serve the food it advertises people to come and catch.