Mud.

"Life is made up of marble and mud." — Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud... And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. " — Shakespeare

"I made all my generals out of mud." — Napoleon Bonaparte

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." — Orson Welles

"POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." — Ambrose Bierce (from "The Devil's Dictionary")

"'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.' Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing." — John 9:5-7

"The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud..." — T.S. Eliot

Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Information at your fingertips: It's the Internet!

This cracked me up — not as much as something else that I just read (which made me laugh so hard I had to wipe off the screen) — but really hard:



(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

ADDED: That was in olden times. Today: Eel slap.

"You see, their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex."

"This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion. Later, as they grow, follows madness and death. These are pets, of course. Not quite domesticated."

These pets were the Ceti eels, and I am tormented with regret that I came so close but missed a beautiful chime yesterday. I love when a theme, character, or image that appears in one post recurs in another post on the same day. Yesterday — a day when I should have been highly attuned to the distinctive pleasures of blogging, because it was the 5th anniversary of the blog — a notable animal appeared: the eel. I made an "eels" tag to honor it, and saw that there were only 3 other posts that had been visited by the elusive eel — in all these 5 years.

As the blogging day drew to a close, I memorialized 2 actors — I called them "iconic TV actors" — who had died. One of them was Ricardo Montalban. When I think of Ricardo Montalban, I think of "Fantasy Island".... I mean right after I think of rich Corinthian leather....



But, in the comments, it became clear that my readers thought of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." Cedarford said: "They gave Ricardo some great villain lines. All time classic villain lines." He listed some quotes, and one was what I used to begin this post.

In the comments, I express my delight at the reappearance of the eel: "Wait! There are eels?!! I started today with eels. This blogging thing is so spooky." I heard the chime, but I didn't sound it on the front page. The chime must be noted on the front page or else.

Not Althouse asks: Or else what?

Are you kidding? Didn't you notice? Else is an anagram for eels. Or else: eels!

Eels! Eels! Eels! Eeeeeeeeeeeels!



Did I choose the German version because I loved the German title "Der Zorn des Khan," reminiscent of the title of my second favorite movie of all time? No, I'm sorry I couldn't find the scene in English, and it's pretty cool in German, and in any case, the eels have only body language.

"Screw Civility: Why Bush-Bashing Should Be Obama's Eeelection Strategy."

That's heading used by The New Republic in email that got me to click over to this article by Michael Schaffer.

Naturally, I was interested. Interested in eeelection, which I took to be a way of e-voting for electric eels. Also screwing civility sounded hot, though I deplore the close proximity of screwing and electric eels. And then, of course, it's provocative to advise Obama to Bush-bash — or to screw him with an e-eel.

Clicking over, I see the sober headline is "Exit, Pursued By History: How Bush treated Clinton and how Obama should handle Bush."

Obama should save the civility shtick for Republicans he'll have to work with. As for the guy retiring to Texas, the new administration should ensure he remains the useful foil he was during the 2008 campaign. That starts with letting nothing--not public amnesia, not nostalgia, and certainly not a statesmanlike gesture from the White House--lift him from the PR cellar. When the new crew opens up the books on Bush's government, they ought to let every embarrassing detail out....

There's no guarantee Bush will remain this loathed forever. After next week, bad employment figures and reports about failed initiatives land on Obama.

There was Clinton-hating before there was Bush-hating, and there will be Obama-hating too. Can we break the chain of hate? Shaffer thinks that's for losers. Keep hate alive.

Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for decades; Republicans kicked around Jimmy Carter for a dozen years. If Bush's successors play their cards right, Democrats could use his legacy as a thumb on their side of the scale for a generation....

Because hope and change... that would be such a stupid path to take.

Meanwhile, in a more civilized location, Barack Obama is dining with the conservative opinion leaders.

“Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives."

I'm just watching this video after watching "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" on "Nova":



As one of the commenters over at YouTube says "Can we all agree that that is the BEST performance ever from a carrot in a music video?"

Here's a review of the documentary:

MARK OLIVER EVERETT does not deal in reassuring platitudes, whether writing bruised and barbed confessionals as the frontman for his cult rock band, Eels, or discussing the suburban Virginia upbringing that sometimes informs them. “My father was always there,” Mr. Everett said, “in the way that the furniture was always there.”

His father, Hugh Everett III, was a quantum physicist who, as a graduate student at Princeton in the ’50s, pioneered the many-worlds theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that proposed the existence of parallel universes. But to the younger Mr. Everett, the rock singer known to fans and friends simply as E, his father was a shirt-and-tie-clad fixture at the dining room table, an inscrutable figure who preferred chain-smoking Kents to conversation, and scrawling calculations on yellow legal pads to parenting.

“I didn’t really know he was a famous quantum physicist,” Mr. Everett, 45, said.... “It wasn’t something anyone talked about around the house. He barely spoke at all.”

I guess it's not so cool to have a genius dad. The younger Everett, we learn, couldn't understand math at all and flunked basic algebra.

IN THE COMMENTS: ElcubanitoKC said...

I really wanted to kill this whiney idiot. He can't speak in plain English ("behold my metaphor!" again), and he obviously didn't care about his father. He has no idea about science, in fact he very obviously rejected it all "because daddy didn't hug me!"...ugh. I wanted to refresh my quantum mechanics and the history of it, but this bearded fool was in the middle of it, and irritated me to no end. I had to turn the TV off.

Yes, I started watching thinking I could gain some appreciation for a theory that has always only seemed perfectly insane to me, but it turned out to be much more of a personal interest story about a mopey alternative rocker. The science part of it was therefore slow-moving. At one point, I thought the story was aimed at children. Then, I adapted and started thinking of it as a more creative documentary along the lines of "Crumb" and "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" -- two of my favorite movies -- and I thought it was kind of cool. Are you supposed to like Mark Oliver Everett -- was his father a secret 3 Stooges fan? -- or was he more of a Charles Crumb sort of character who inspires pity, mild loathing, and fearsome recognition?

"I'm not sure what possessed the eel to beach itself like that, but maybe it's a member of the 'Fans' tribe on Eelvivor..."

"... and is therefore prone to such stupid and ultimately self-defeating moves." Hahaha. Sara M — who actually worked on "Survivor" — is guest-recapping the show this week at Television Without Pity. She's got a great recapping style and inside info on the show. (Jeff Probst is not "a smarmy talking airhead.... He, like, runs that show." The show is "surprisingly un-manufactured" and "What you see is pretty much what happened," so that eel was not thrown on the beach by the producers.)

"It's not good to accessorize an eel."

And therefore "Mosaic" lost, and poor Rob ("you didn't give me a specific task!") got fired. Yeah, yeah, I was sucked into the cultural vortex that is "The Apprentice."