I came close to phoning the shenani-police over the non-existent Robert Sherwood play The Petrified Forest, but I decided not to when copies of the play were handed out in class later that week. But this news item takes the cake.

Today’s poll on TIME Magazine’s website asks, “Should the killer whale that took the life of a SeaWorld trainer be put to death?”

Let me make sure I understand this correctly: a certain marine mammal called Orcinus orca but more commonly referred to as the “killer whale” one day kills someone. And everyone is shocked for some reason. Now TIME wants to know if we should exact retribution from an animal whose very name proscribes the act it has committed.

What’s next? Calling in a noise complaint because the howler monkeys are too loud?

84% of the 6,583 respondents (since the last time I had checked) voted “No.” 16% said “Yes.”

To 1,096 of TIME readers: I call shenanigans. Not all animals automatically become cute and cuddly when they’re put into SeaWorld–particularly not those with the word “killer” in their names.

Some people tend to be shenana-haulics. They call shenanigans every time an opportunity presents itself. They call shenanigans so much that the word begins to lose its meaning and their friends start to question their ability to judge shenanigan-worthy situations.

I pride myself on not being one of those people. I reserve calling shenanigans for only the most important situations, when the circumstances are so outrageous that the only recourse is nothing less than calling shenanigans.

That was the kind of situation I ran into last week after reading Haruki Murakami’s “Ice Man” for my intermediate fiction class. The story includes the character of an ice man, a man who is not physically made out of ice but otherwise possess all the characteristics one would associate with an ice man–he enjoys cold temperatures, avoids obvious heat sources, exhales cold breaths that immediately condense when they hit the surrounding air to create puffs of wispy smoke. All of these qualities are described in exacting detail.

So why the shenanigans?

Because there already is an ice man character in existence: Victor Fries, from the Batman DC Comics universe. Murakami’s “Ice Man” was published in The New Yorker in 2003. Victor Fries goes back at least to The New Batman Superman Adventures in the late 90′s, and back to the comic book series however many decades before that.

Murakami’s ice man matches the description of Victor Fries in almost every way. The only difference is that Murakami’s ice man has an all too convenient case of amnesia that blocks out memories of his past, rendering a potentially fascinating central character flat and ambiguous. Hell, given the memory loss, Murakami’s ice man could very well be Victor Fries cast in a new setting and transferred into a new body that can survive in warmer temperatures (which happened in an episode of Batman Beyond, so it’s entirely possible).

As soon as I made the connection I made a point of calling shenanigans. I called the Shenani Police and filed an official shenani-report which formally listed the shenaninfractions that Haruki Murakami had incurred. Then, when I went to my intermediate fiction class that week and the teacher asked for our reactions to the story, I immediately volunteered to respond. I informed everyone of how I had made this startling discovery and had called shenanigans.

Everything was quiet for a few seconds. One kid sitting in front of me leaned back and said, “That’s actually a good call on that.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Everyone else was apparently so shocked by my revelation that they were effectively speechless. The teacher tacitly admitted that Murakami is familiar with American pop culture and likely worked subtle elements of pop culture into his story, but didn’t go so far as to agree with me.

It’s not like I was expecting her to agree with me outright, but there’s nothing more frustrating than pointing out something that is so blatantly obvious to you but goes right over the heads of everyone else. It only became more obvious when we began discussing the story and came across sentences like, “His words formed white clouds above him, like comic strip captions,” and, “The ice man was as lonely as an iceberg in the dark night.” For crying out loud! It has “the dark night” right in the freaking line! I know it says “night” instead of “knight” and it’s translated from Japanese, but all the same–how much more obvious can Murakami make it? It’s almost like he’s mocking us for not seeing the connection.

During a break in the middle of class the teacher asked me to explain who exactly Victor Fries is and how he resembles the ice man. I told the story of how Dr. Victor Fries became the villain Mr. Freeze and gave her directions to the cartoon episode of Batman on AOL video, which features Victor Fries as the primary villain.

So there. I have made my case. Haruki Murakami: I’ll see you in shenani-court.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, we’re starting on the final video project for my 210 production class. Our group planned on starting to shoot this weekend on the 19th and 20th because the dallies (meaning, the raw footage of we had shot so far) were due on April 22nd.

On last Tuesday, the 15th, we were dealt a special little surprise. While originally the due date for the dallies was the 22nd, a “revised” syllabus handed out a couple weeks prior shifted the due date five days earlier–to the 17th. In other words, we lost the weekend when we were going to shoot, and we had two days to come up with footage.

We had absolutely nothing at that point. I called shenanigans on the due date shift, and everyone else expressed their dismay at not having known about this abrupt change. Even if we had known it wouldn’t have done us any good because one of our group members was out of town the previous weekend and the rest of us were writing papers last minute for another Media Arts class.

Now we all had to abandon whatever we were planning on doing over the next two days in order to shoot. Each person in our group of four is doing a one minute video, and each of us needed at least some footage for our videos shot in time for Thursday. We did two back-to-back night shoots on Tuesday and Wednesday night, each of which took about five hours, and we filmed in-between classes on Wednesday. For me, this meant I had to pull an eighteen hour day with only three and a half hours of sleep on Wednesday, waking up at 8am for class and not getting to bed until 2am Thursday morning.

It was rough, but in the course of two days we went from having nothing shot to being a third of the way done with the project.

Then came Thursday. At the start of class the professor announced that since the due date for the dallies on the original syllabus was the 22nd, they would be due then instead of today.

You may be thinking, “Hey, isn’t that what you guys said in class on Tuesday?” You don’t have to scroll back to the beginning of the post to check. That’s exactly what we said.

Our entire group was shaking with frustration, and for the second time that week, I called shenanigans.