Today in Weird-Ass Headlines: Skating Rink Closes Amid Outrage After Freezing 5,000 Fish in the Ice

This is just your normal skating-rink-freezes-thousands-of-fish story so if you’re already read a bunch of this today then you’re good to click away.

A skating rink in Japan faced swift public outcry after an exciting new art installation called “Freezing Port” that featured quite literally featured thousands of dead fish frozen right into the skating rink surface.

Fun for the whole family! Just leave Bubbles the Goldfish at home.

The facility — Japan’s Space World — was forced to temporarily close after the public outrage that mounted in response to the how-did-they-think-this-was-a-good-idea installation. Lest you think that Space World discriminates against which marine life gets frozen and featured, crabs and shellfish were also included in the fun!

The park remarkably reportedly posted advertisements for the “Freezing Port” display on its Facebook page with the caption, “I am d… d… drowning, s … s… suffocating.” The manager Toshimi Takeda told CNN Money that he was surprised at the public’s reaction once it got picked up by media outlets.

“We were shocked to hear the reaction as the ice skate rink was very popular since it opened two weeks ago, we had an unprecedented number of visitors,” Takeda told CNN, noting that the sea critters were allegedly already dead from a fish market before, you know, being frozen for people to skate on top of. He continued, “[W]e had endless opinions about the project, we were shocked… We are sorry for the project and decided to close the rink on that night.”

And here unedited is the greatest single sentence from the original CNN Money report by Yoko Wakatsuki and Ben Westcott: “Takeda told CNN the park would unfreeze the skate rink to remove the fish, hold an ‘appropriate religious service’ and then reuse them as fertilizer.”

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J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) is an editorial producer and columnist at Mediaite.

[h/t Fark]
[image via Space World Facebook]