"And the Xhosa for 'tort' is ulwaphulomthetho (oo lwa poo loom twe to)."

Questions, asked at Althouse, get answers.

Police beg for help catching 10,000 escaped crocodiles.

In South Africa, where a flood enabled the animals' escape from a farm (where they are raised for their meat and their glamorous skins).

"I managed to get my head up and scream 'croc' and then this giant dragged me under again."

"I got my head above water again and this time I was swearing and saying get this thing off me. I was just screaming for help. I couldn't feel any pain but I could see his teeth sinking into my leg. I thought I was going to die. I could only see about four centimetres of the top of my leg and the rest was in the croc's gob."

Well, clearly she survived, since we have that quote, but how did she survive? (The saltwater crocodile was 3 meters long.) Her friend on the shore — Al Sartori — went in:

"I jumped into the water and on to its back and stuck my thumbs into its eyes until I felt it start to slacken off.... I picked up the croc and chucked it back into the water and it came back at me. It was pretty heavy."

Great heroism by Satori! A euonym? "Satori is considered a 'first step' or embarkation toward nirvana."

The student's mind must be prepared by rigorous study, with the use of koans, and the practice of meditation to concentrate the mind, under the guidance of a teacher.... Chinese Zen master Wumen Hui-k'ai (無門慧開)... struggled for six years with koan "Zhaozhou’s dog"...

The koan is: "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" Does a crocodile?

Wumen, having understood the koan wrote this poem:

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes;
Everything under heaven bows together;
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

I know a poem about a crocodile:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

"Bungee cord snaps above crocodile-infested waters..."

Video.

Erin Langworthy... had to swim with her feet tied together to the Zimbabwe side of the water, and had to free the cord when it got caught on rocks.

Pop-up...

... crocodile.

35 years of "Blood on the Tracks."

Do you remember waking up in that tenement apartment that morning in 1975 and listening to the new Dylan album on the FM radio? "'Twas in another lifetime... one of toil and blood..."

Shelter from the Storm begins with four seconds of unaccompanied acoustic guitar strumming, lively, purposeful, and then it is joined by the voice. “’Twas in another lifetime,” Dylan begins, “one of toil and blood,” immediately establishing this song as one cut from the same musical cloth as the traditional folk tales, gospel songs, and murder ballads Robert Zimmerman was learning before he “came in from the wilderness,” only not as “a creature void of form” but as “Bob Dylan”. It is a song that, thirty-five years after its original release, remains both contemporary and as timeless as one of the most basic archetypes of human experience: the hunter.

History and myth reveal three basic types of hunter: first, the hunter/gatherer who operates strictly to sustain life on either a personal or group level; second, a warrior whose primary motivation is destruction; third, a seeker whose interest lies in finding Holy Grails or a heart of gold.

The hunter in Shelter is ... a seeker with no interest in destruction but reconnection.  Despite being “burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes an’ blown out on the trail, hunted like a crocodile (the hunter becomes the hunted), ravaged in the corn”, this quest will continue until she is found or the hunter is dead.  “Nothing really matters much,” the narrator in Shelter states, “it’s doom (destiny, fate) alone that counts.”

I made fun of the mixed metaphor — I had the ridiculous image of somebody raping a crocodile in a cornfield — and you defended Bob. That was in another lifetime, it seems.