"I've been rethinking my spirit animal. I'm not sure how souls are transpositioned when we pass over to the great beyond."

"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."

Wrote William in last night's café. What I said about squirrels — in the first post of the day yesterday — was:

Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.

The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:

The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.

Respect the squirrel....

For the squirrel survival is enough.

The kindness of a banana is magic.

Appreciate magic; don't expect it.

Don't become addicted to it.

Failed junkie.

"I promised him a squirrel sandwich, and he's going to get one."

Who wants to try one?

(My favorite part of the video is when The Huntress is slipping the skinned carcass into the boiling water, and she says he looks kinda cute.)

ADDED: Let me embed the video. Not for animal-lovers or the queasy, but really funny, especially after the shooting part.



UPDATE: I'm creating a "squirrel" label, in case you want to read all 34 Althouse blog posts.

We tried to figure out what that hawk was eating.

There are close-up frames in the video in the previous post. Commenters had ideas:

Rick Lee said...
Mmmmm... bunny.

Bruce said...
The kids are gonna be pissed off when they don't get any candy or Easter eggs this year.

galdosiana said...
It's hard to tell, but it looks kind of like a weasel. Were you guys able to figure it out?

Jason (the commenter) said...
"Why can't I just eat my otter?"

Irene said...
Squirrel is a nice, sweet meat.

Big Mike said...
If neighborhood kids come around putting up posters about a missing kitty, I maybe know what happened to it.

No, it wasn't a kitty or a bunny. It wasn't a squirrel either. Weasel and otter were our 2 best guesses. I was leaning toward otter because of the black-tipped tail. Quaestor — another commenter — said groundhog, but it's just not the right shape.

So we gave up and went out to bike the Capitol City Trail. Oddly enough, we spotted the same animal by the side of the bike path. Like the creature in the video, it's dead, but its fur and skin were intact. Help us identify it. Photos after the jump:

"Hello, I’m Tom Hanks. The US government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine."

 Said Tom Hanks in "The Simpsons Movie" (in 2007), quoted in "‘The Simpsons did it first’: Tom Hanks’s video for Biden likened to cameo" (London Times).

From the London Times article:

In a two-minute video released by the Biden Inaugural Committee yesterday, the Oscar-winning actor narrates the accomplishments of the Biden administration in its inaugural year — pointing to the distribution of vaccines and that “shops and businesses are buzzing again all over the country.” 

Here's the new video, which I clicked off — muttering "Oh, jeez" — at the 3-second mark: 

 

I'm going to try again to watch it, for the sake of this post, but I'm going to publish first, because I don't know how many on-and-off clickings it will take for me to reach the end. 

ADDED: Okay. I've finished. It was long, but it mainly said we're dealing with Covid and the economy is coming back. It would have worked just as well as a Trump ad. Maybe the Democrats realize they need to squirrel away the divisive issues.

"Increasingly, when diving solo in their free time, the two wore wingsuits, sometimes called squirrel suits, to extend their flights before pulling the parachute."

"The suits are webbed under the arms and between the legs to slow the fall to earth and give experienced users some ability to maneuver through the air before pulling the parachute."

It works, but not all the time. BASE jumper Mario Richard hits a cliff on the way down and dies. He was 47.

ADDED: Here's video of the kind of human behavior we're talking about:



There's the age-old dream of flying like a bird, but I don't think birds do that, deliberately flying against a cliff, touching it, feeling the thrill of the dare. Watching that video, I thought: These people are consenting to death, if death should reach out and grab them. Thrilling. That's the video they generate, for us... to live vicariously. We're not the ones who die.

Outside the Capitol today — a march, snow, and Peter Yarrow.

Meade wielded the Flip camera and I edited this. I also appear now and then as the blonde-haired photographer in the black coat, walking against the direction of the marchers. We begin with some women dressed as vegetables:



Other highlights:

1:01 — a man yawns.
1:10 — the WTF sign.
1:28 — doggie.
1:38 — "HITLER STALIN WALKER."
3:22 — "In the old days, we knew how to deal with peasants!... Burn you like marshmallows!"
4:18 — squirrel costume.
4:32 — "Is Cat Stevens here?"
5:05 — "That's Peter Yarrow."
5:32 — Toilet paper on the "Forward!" statue.
5:52 — The "Yin/Yang" sign.
6:27 — I get in the way of 2 ladies who are trying to take a picture of 3 guys in "Star Wars" costumes. Since they don't have a wide-angle lens, they need to stand way back, and feel entitled to a big stretch of empty sidewalk.
7:10 — "I've been fingered as a Walker supporter because I walked in front of her picture of the 'Star Wars' characters!"
7:41 — A woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty has duct tape on her mouth. Not on the video: I say to Meade, "I'd ask her why she has tape on her mouth, but she has tape on her mouth," and Meade says, "And if she didn't have tape on her mouth, and you asked her why don't you have tape on your mouth, she would remain silent."
8:00 — big Teamsters truck.
8:33 — Meade talks to the women with the "Obama, Where R U?" sign (which was the only reference to Obama we noticed today).
9:00 — Finally, a giant puppet!
9:12 — Meade gets a look into the soul of the puppet.

"Little Chrissy, say sugar."

Here's a clip from one of my favorite movies, "Pecker"...



... which I was watching this morning, because I saw that I'd been mentioned on Facebook. It was Annie Gottlieb saying "Ann Althouse, do not watch" about a pre-production trailer to a movie called "Squirrels."



I said, " So... that did make me click, but I stopped at 0:43. I don't want to see the squirrel bite off the girl's finger. And isn't that the girl who played Little Chrissy in 'Pecker'?"

I looked it up and saw that "Pecker" was made a long time ago, in 1998. I am getting old! So is the actress that played Little Chrissy, whose name, I see, is Lauren Hulsey. She looks like this now and seems to work not so much as an actress, but in visual effects. Perhaps she got into that through her experience making "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," where they made her look like this.

I guess there's a creepy kid category within child acting. Back when I was a kid, the #1 creepy kid was Billy Mumy. And I mean pre-"Lost in Space," particularly the "Twilight Zone" episode "It's a Good Life."

Recommended Amazon Instant Video: "It's a Good Life" and "Pecker."

"We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music [with] displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites."

"We are alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country. It one of the rivers we have to dam."

Said NY Mayor Eric Adams, quoted in "Eric Adams urges social media to ban ‘drill’ rap videos for promoting violence" (NY Post).

There are so many songs about violence, often sung from the point of view of a murderer. Indeed, the second one that sprang to my mind was from the sanctimonious promoter of censorship, Neil Young:

 

I don't know rap. Never heard of "drill rap" before just now. So I have no rap-focused opinion. But I oppose censorship, and I understand art well enough to make the distinction between the writer and the story told.

Down by the river I shot my baby/Down by the river/Dead, ooh/Shot her dead, ooh....

And what was the first song Althouse thought of? 

All those tags.

The other day, I was blogging about tags, and somebody asked what are all the tags. I considered adding a sidebar gadget that would show all the tags, but I saw that there were over 3,000 of them. For what its worth, I've copied and pasted the list of tags, which you can see after the jump.

The number in parens is the number of times I've used the tag. The list is in alphabetical order, with the top of the list being tags that were originally written with quotation marks. This is something the software no longer lets me do, so some of those tags reappear without quotation marks, and thus the numbers in parens for the tags with quotation marks are not accurate.

If you want to find the posts that have a particular tag, copy and paste the word(s) into the search box at the top left of this page, and when you find a post that has that tag, click on that tag. In other words, forgive me for not taking the time to make this list all hot links.