In 1970, Oregon highway crews packed half a ton of dynamite under a dead whale on a Florence beach, expecting the blast to send the pieces out to sea — falling blubber crushed a car a quarter mile away, and in 2020 the town officially named the site Explo - Space Daily

The problem, in fairness to everyone involved, was genuinely hard. In November 1970, a sperm whale 45 feet long and weighing about eight tons washed up dead on the beach near Florence, on the central…