Furry Old Lobster

The song at the end of "The Future Soon" is "Furry Old Lobster", another great song by Jonathan Coulton. In the video's description on YouTube, I said:

The song at the end is "Furry Old Lobster", another great song by Jonathan Coulton about the tragic disappearance of the nation's first true lobster (it's kind of hard to explain).

Here's the explanation...

The song is about a completely made-up "fact" in John Hodgman's book "Areas of My Expertise". John Hodgman is the PC guy in the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" commercials, and Jonathan Coulton and Hodgman have been friends since college. This "fact" is that the original lobster was actually a kind of sea otter. But at some point, someone brought actual hard-shelled lobsters to New York and let them roam in Central Park, which freaked out the residents. So they rounded them all up and sent them to Maine, where they killed off all the original furry lobsters, so now the only lobster we see there is the hard-shelled variety.

Since the publication of Hodgman's book, actual furry lobsters have been found, but don't worry. That doesn't make any of it true.

Hodgman's book is full of great "facts" like this one (it's a very entertaining book), but somehow this one got a Jonathan Coulton song while the others didn't.

So now you know.