"Orally urinating turtle boffin in nominative-determinism classic case/Shit Fun Chew probes mouth-excreting chelonian."

Actual headline — not a joke — about actual scientific research.

What's nominative-determinism?, you may ask. Possibly not your first question, but you may get to it. You might have asked, before that, what Google alert does Althouse maintain that gets her there? (Answer: "boffin"!) Anyway:

The theory of nominative determinism suggests that a person’s name can help form their choices in life, influencing the character they develop or profession they adopt.

Examples: "Poet William Wordsworth, caricaturist and Disney animator Mr T Hee, and sprinter Usain Bolt..."

Which reminds me, chez Meadhouse, we're supporting the Detroit Tigers in the ALCS, because of Prince Fielder, whom we like not because of nominative determinism, but because he's an ex-Brewer.

The conversation turtle says...

... okay, you talk now.

I encounter a snapping turtle...

... on the Capital City Bike Trail, outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

86-year-old man living on an island with 120 giant tortoises.

"I don't know what kind of nerve, ferocity and stubbornness got 86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw to buy an island in the Indian Ocean, replant it with 16,000 trees, grasses and then lure a bunch of giant tortoises... to live with him...."

Romney, the man who says "marvelous."

Obama mocked Romney this way: "He said that he's 'very supportive' of this new budget, and he even called it 'marvelous' — which is a word you don't often hear when it comes to describing a budget." Comic pause. "It's a word you don't often hear generally."

This Reuters article takes the position that Obama meant us to think that a man who says "marvelous" is "out of touch" because "marvelous" is "a seemingly out of date" word. Reuters also quotes a polisci prof saying, "It's a word you kind of associate with the upper class, and I think that the intention was to tweak Romney for being wealthy and, you know, sort of brought up in the kinds of circles where they would say ‘marvelous.'"

Wealthy? Old fashioned? My first association, on hearing one man mock another for saying "marvelous," was: Gay. It's an I'm-more-manly move. I heard a smidgeon of homophobia. Perhaps I heard it because, a few days ago, on winning the Wisconsin primary, Romney introduced Ryan, saying: "Congressman Ryan, he's a great leader, wonderful speaker, but he's not gonna take Ann's place." (Ann being, of course, Mitt's wife.) At the time, I quipped: "Combatting the 'bromance' rumors!"

This is just a meme watch. Note that the budget Romney was talking about was Paul Ryan's budget. The alliance of Romney and Ryan is so good that I suspect the Obama campaign will toy with mockery that has a homophobic edge. Let's make their "marriage" seem unseemly. Not so blatantly that they can't deny it. Any homophobia can be disguised within a socially acceptable distaste for the rich. The word "effete" was practically created for this purpose. Do you remember when Vice President Spiro Agnew derided antiwar protesters as "an effete corps of impudent snobs"?

The word "marvelous" — which means "Such as to excite wonder or astonishment (chiefly in a positive sense); wonderful, astonishing, surprising; worthy of admiration" (OED) — is a very old word, going back to c1330: "Þe fift ledde Andalas, A kniȝt of meruailus los he was." (Arthour & Merlin.) The first use with modern spelling — the double L remains current — is from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ii. xxvi:  "Miracles are Marvellous workes: but that which is marvellous to one, may not be so to another." And I like the  D. H. Lawrence:  "Their loving grew more mechanical, without the marvellous glamour." (Sons & Lovers xiii. 365.)

By the way, there's also an archaic and regional use of "marvelous," but that is as an adverb. You get things like:  "Nancy Clemens... quoted a farmer who had been hurt in a motor accident: ‘No bones broke,’ said he, ‘but I sure was scratched up marvellous.’" (V. Randolph & G. P. Wilson Down in Holler 161.) That seems quite the opposite of effete. It's folksy. I could imagine some politician using that, probably quoting somebody... some farmer.

But Romney uttered "marvelous," the adjective. He was talking about Paul Ryan's budget, and Obama snickered. Am I wrong to hear a tone of homophobia? I Googled "gay men say marvelous." Sorry, to be so crude, but research can be so easy and I got the most marvelous return. It's Noël Coward's "I've Been To A Marvellous Party," in which male homosexuality and excessive wealth are merged marvelously. Listen to the whole thing, but here's the penultimate verse:

I went to a marvellous party we didn't sit down til ten
Y'know young Bobby Carr did a stunt at the bar with a lot of extraordinary men
And then Freda arrived with a turtle which shattered us all to the core
And then the Duchess passed out at a quarter to three
And suddenly Cyril cried 'fiddle-de-de'
And he ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea
I couldn't have liked it more...

I'm just waiting for young Paul Ryan to do a stunt at the bar with a lot of extraordinary men and then for Mitt Romney to suddenly cry "fiddle-de-de" and rip off his trousers and jump in the sea. And then Obama arrives with a turtle...



Who doesn't like the turtle? And the Leviathan?

Pools.

Our pool...



Their pool...



Wheee!

The favorite childhood joke of the brain scientist who focuses on the the perception of time.

A turtle enters the sheriff's office:

“I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts.

“Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies.

The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

At the Acorn Café...

... we've grown a lot over the years. We're oaks now, right?

"All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions."

"In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

The hostage-takers manifesto.

ADDED: The guy seems pretty clearly crazy, and I hope no one dies and he gets the help he needs, because this manifesto — PDF —  is hilarious, but if anyone dies, it might be wrong to laugh.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

Of course, the Squirrels. That's such a childish list of animals, and not just because of "Froggies." These are the animals in a children's picture book or Noah's Ark toy.

The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world....

I disagree. Around my city, geese are crapping everything up. I notice that no birds got on Lee's list of favored creatures.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.

How religion-y, and yet he hates religion:

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! 

He hates everything that human beings have produced. It's all filth. Even the ideas. He gets his ideas from a gorilla:

The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.

Here's the book. A gorilla tells us what to do. Example from the pages cited:

We could pension off our teachers, close schools, and open up the city to our children. Let them learn anything they want. We could take that risk....

Quinn has been hyped by Oprah Winfrey: Here's an Oprah interview with  Quinn:

WINFREY: You say that y--hundreds of years from now, children will look back on our society and call us monsters. Why?

Mr. QUINN: I think so. Yeah, because we're g--we're--we continue to take and take and take and consume and consume and consume everything in sight. And in 100 years, if--if there are still people around to think about it, we're going to look back and say, `My God, these were terribly greedy people. What kind of people were they? They were hard to understand, who had no thought for us, for the future of--of the human race.'

WINFREY: How are we monsters? In what ways are we devouring the world?...

ADDED: The man was killed. The hostages all survived.

[T]he suspect had "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back. When Lee was struck by police bullets, one of the canisters "popped." Police have not confirmed if the canisters were a bomb, but Manger said the "device may have gone off" when he was shot.

Gloria Steinem and the turtle.

#4 on Donna Brazile's rules to live by is "Ask the turtle":

I'm proud to call Gloria Steinem a friend, and this advice came from her. While on a field trip in college with her geology class, she discovered a giant snapping turtle that had climbed out of the river, up a dirt path, right to the edge of a road. Worried it would soon be run over, she wrestled the enormous reptile off the embankment and back down to the water.

At that moment, her professor walked up and asked what in the world she was doing. With some pride, she told him. He said that the turtle had probably spent a month crawling up that long dirt path to safely lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road and that she had destroyed all that effort with her "rescue."

Gloria tells this story to illustrate the most important political lesson she ever learned: Always ask the turtle.

First, the turtle's message is obviously leave me alone. How am I supposed to believe that this is a message that liberals hold dear?

Second, like Jim Lindgren reading an essay by Michael Bellesiles, I'm getting twinges of doubt about this story. The characters are just too perfectly drawn, and the events unfold in a predictably tragic yet meaningful way.

Third, just try to picture of Gloria with an enormous snapping turtle. Possibly with zombie makeup.

At the Red Bud Café...

...bloom.



Bask.

The Jonathan in that Boer War photograph is probably not the Jonathan that lives today -- fraudulently honored as the world's oldest creature.

"Since they have several giant tortoises on St Helena, they simply named the next largest one Jonathan. The date of 175 years old is being assumed because the Jonathan in the photograph of 1901 looks like the Jonathan of today. As they are very difficult to date, no one can say with any certainty that this current, reigning Jonathan is 176 or 150 or even 200."

Very difficult to date....

I guess I’m just like a turtle
That’s hidin’ underneath its hardened shell.
Whoa, whoa, oh yeah, like a turtle
Hidin’ underneath its hardened shell.
But you know I’m very well protected —
I know this goddamn life too well.

Turtles!

In the Japanese Garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

Injuries of the day.

1. Following to the interests of visiting family, I took one step onto the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center and fell flat on my back. I'm used to ice skating, so I can't tell you why this happened. Was it the fresh Zamboni-izing? The weirdly leaden, horribly rigid ice skates they rent out? Or was it sheer inattention and overconfidence? I don't know, but it hurt, especially my pride. I went on to skate for an hour without further injury.

2. At the Children's Zoo at Central Park Zoo, I turned away from a turtle aquarium and, blinded by harsh late afternoon sun, cracked my head on a concrete tree branch. There are concrete trees everywhere, configured at child-friendly heights. I managed to navigate the rest of the Children's Zoo without further collision. I fed a couple alpacas, and they did not bite or spit at me.

3. In an effort to enter FAO Schwartz, we walked 2 blocks in search of the end of the line. Rounding the corner at Madison Avenue, I walked past a woman — an Upper East Side middle-aged blonde — who punched me in the back. I have no idea what punchworthy offense she believed me to have committed, but it seems to have been nothing more than occupying space on the sidewalk that she wanted a straight shot at. I was relieved that no one wanted to wait in the line, and we hailed a cab back to Brooklyn.

A man shoots a feral cat that was stalking endangered shore birds.

And he is on trial now, facing 2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

[James M.] Stevenson, 54, does not deny using a .22-caliber rifle fitted with a scope to kill the cat, which lived under the San Luis Pass toll bridge, linking Galveston to the mainland. He also admits killing many other cats on his own property, where he operates a bed and breakfast for some of the estimated 500,000 birders who come to the island every year.

In her opening statement, Paige L. Santell, a Galveston County assistant district attorney, told the jury of eight women and four men that Mr. Stevenson “shot that animal in cold blood” and that the cat died a slow and painful death “gurgling on its own blood.”

She said that the cat had a name, Mama Cat, and that though the cat lived under a toll bridge, she was fed and cared for by a toll collector, John Newland. He is expected to testify.

Whether the cat was feral is the crucial point in this case. Mr. Stevenson was indicted under a state law that prohibited killing a cat “belonging to another.”...

Ms. Santell argued that because Mr. Newland had named, fed and given the cat bedding and toys, the cat belonged to him and was not feral.

It seems to me that Newland is the greater menace, encouraging a nonnative predator in a delicate environment. The idea that this destructive behavior creates ownership is outrageous.

But Texas has moved in the other direction and has changed the law, so that in the future, it is a crime to kill any cat. What absurd sentimentalism about species! The birds are native and endangered. The cats are highly effective predators. And Stevenson has a productive business, which Newland was undermining.

This isn't about whether we love birds or cats more. The article portrays the trial as a charmingly colorful face-off between bird lovers and cat lovers and ends with the punchline "But you see, I’m a dog person... If he had shot a dog, then I’d be more upset."

This is a case about the ecological balance, and a man could be deprived of his liberty because he tried protect the environment (and his business that depended on it).

ADDED: A propos of the stalking cat, here's a stalking man coming in through the cat door. And meeting death. (Via James Taranto, who's mixing up the Turtles and the Lovin' Spoonful.)

"It looks like the Turtle!"

A scary art project.

... Duke Riley, a heavily tattooed Brooklyn artist whose waterborne performance projects around New York have frequently landed him in trouble with the authorities, spent the last five months building the vessel as a rough replica of what is believed to have been America’s first submarine, an oak sphere called the Turtle, said to have seen action in New York Harbor during the Revolutionary War.

Mr. Riley’s plan was also military, in a sense — though mostly metaphorical, given that he is an artist. He wanted to float north in the Buttermilk Channel to stage an incursion against the Queen Mary 2, which had just docked in Red Hook, the mission objective mostly just to get close enough to the ship to videotape himself against its immensity for a coming gallery show.

But when his sub was stopped by a New York City police boat around 10 a.m., the outcome was not metaphorical at all: Mr. Riley, 35, and two friends who had helped tow him were taken into custody by a phalanx of law enforcement officials, and their excursion briefly raised fears that a terrorist attack might have been under way.

Riley got some great publicity, and people don't seem too mad at him. This shows that if you're going to do performance art that summons up fears about terrorism, it's good to have a military history theme to appease the kind of people who don't cotton to performance art.

For contrast, remember the artist -- Clinton Boisvert -- who placed boxes labeled "Fear" around the NYC subway, not too long after 9/11?

I cannot fathom the mind of the turtle.

What's with them standing so close together they're forced to bend their heads up like that? They have enough room to space out and hold their heads at a more natural angle. Yet they're all doing it, even the one in front who must be imagining the back end of a turtle. I cannot fathom the mind of the turtle. Life must be so different there on that log... which is in a little pond on the grounds of the University of Texas... near these waterlilies...

Spring!

Pix!

Lots of bare feet and mud. Plus: clean laundry, turtle, etc.

"On cultural issues, Richardson has the distinct advantage of not setting off any culture war vibes."

"He was in college in the late 1960s, but he was listening to the Beach Boys, not Janis Joplin."

David Brooks on Bill Richardson. (TimesSelect link.)

I like the idea of giving Richardson more attention, but I want to talk about this shorthand: the Beach Boys, not Janis Joplin. Is this some way to say clean-cut, straight-arrow, drug-free, "Wouldn't It Be Nice If We Were Married?"?

The Beach Boys sang:

Though it's hard I try not to look at my wind chimes
Now and then a tear rolls off my cheek
Close your eyes and lean back now listen to wind chimes
In the late afternoon you're hung up on wind chimes
Though it's hard I try not to look at my wind chimes

I tend to think there were some drugs in the picture. Meanwhile, Janis Joplin was singing:

Whoa, I need a man to love me.
Don’t you understand me, baby ?
Why, I need a man to love.
I gotta find him, I gotta have him like the air I breathe.
One lovin’ man to understand can’t be too much to need.

You tell me who had their head on straight. Nothing against Bill Richardson. I'm just monitoring memes from the 60s.

I'm gonna be round my vegetables
I'm gonna chow down my vegetables
I love you most of all
My favorite vege-table

That's the Beach Boys. And here's Janis:

I ain’t the kind of woman
Who’d make your life a bed of ease, ha ha ha ha!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I’m not the kind of woman, no,
To make your life a bed of ease.
Yeah, but if you, if you just wanna go out drinkin’, honey,
Won’t you invite me along please.
Oh, I’ll be so good to ya babe, yeah!
Whoa, go on!

Which leftever 60s heart would you prefer?

And, by the way, just as an aside, I'd like to say I ain’t the kind of woman who’d make your life a bed of ease. Ha ha ha ha!



IN THE COMMENTS: Gerry says:

This is one of the rare times where I see sexism in something you do not. Much more frequently are the cases where we both see sexism, or that you do and I don't.

Joplin is viewed as an aggressive, sultry, sexually aggressive woman, not like those guys who were only into surfing, driving, sex, and pleasure-seeking (including drugs). You know, just beach boys being boys.

Interesting. Yes, well, you can detect in my writing here that I was bonding with the Janis mindset and feeling threatened by the elevation of the Boys. And I was thinking about bringing in the subject of Hillary Clinton as I was adding those "Turtle Blues" lyrics and identifying with them.

"American Idol" -- the 24.

I'm glad Melissa Doolittle and Brendan Rogers -- the erstwhile backup singers -- made it. I'm glad Chris Sligh -- the guy who lookes like Turtle Mark Volman -- made it. Paul Kim -- the Asian guy who was irritated that when people think of an Asian guy on "American Idol," they always think of the comic contestant William Hung -- he made it. Well, 24 contestants made it. I can't tell you about all of them. My brain is numb after sitting through a pretty boring show where we watched a lot of people get into an elevator, ride in the elevator, get out of the elevator, walk a long way across the room, sit in a little chair, listen to Paula/Randy/Simon coyly dribble out the news whether they made it or not, walk back the long way across the room, get back in the elevator, ride down the elevator, get out of the elevator, etc. etc.