Althouse: "It looks like axolotls are gone forever. This may not mean much to you if you aren't into amphibians..."

January 29, 2014

"It looks like axolotls are gone forever. This may not mean much to you if you aren't into amphibians..."

"... but if you read Mad Magazine back in the day the word might conjure up some memories, or even a poem."

36 comments:

Jaske said...: Time grows spine
Limbs grown to first step
Feeds on legs; 1/29/14, 7:16 PM
John henry said...: Isn't "The road out of Axolotl" the name of a short story by Terry Southern?

I was a fan in the 50's and remember those crazy words they had hidden in the margins.

Veeblefetzer, moxie are two that I thought at the time were made up but later realized they were actual words.

John Henry; 1/29/14, 7:42 PM
YoungHegelian said...: I remember a MAD magazine send-up of collegiate curriculum featured courses on some topic too obscure to be described as "Klefanaboulism 101". I use the term sometimes when I bump into some really obscure subject matter.

But it gets used nowhere near as often as when me & the Mrs are mixing something up & I'll say "Anacanapanasan!" followed by "Zendathis!"; 1/29/14, 7:44 PM
YoungHegelian said...: Some had handles, some were plain;
They came in blue, red pink, and green.
A few were orange in the main;
The damndest sight I've ever seen.
The females gave a sprightly glance;
The male ones all wore knee-length pants.

Amphibians in shorts!; 1/29/14, 7:55 PM
hoyden said...: I remember Alferd's Poor Almanac, and the entry, "July is axolotl season. Pickle them while they are at peak flavor".; 1/29/14, 7:57 PM
Paco Wové said...: Axolotls aren't "gone", though they may be extinct in the wild.

Typical of Metafilter to be both hysterical and wrong about this.; 1/29/14, 8:01 PM
Henry said...: 7 letter word.; 1/29/14, 8:12 PM
YoungHegelian said...: For all the wonder these poor creatures have given us, we can only say Thanksalotl!; 1/29/14, 8:22 PM
Grant said...: I trust it won't be inappropriate for me to post a link to the Axolotl Song here. It's packed with neotenic truth and features one of the world's very few bilingual English-Nahuatl puns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxA0QVGVEJw; 1/29/14, 8:28 PM
bwebster said...: No, not the axolotls!; 1/29/14, 8:30 PM
Grant said...: Then again, YoungHegelian just made another English-Nahuatl pun. So there are at least two.; 1/29/14, 8:30 PM
n.n said...: They'll reemerge, defiant and strong, when the last activist is extinct.; 1/29/14, 8:35 PM
Titus said...: Today at work I learned about countries that actually immigrate their citizens to other countries.

The topic was the Phillipines. Nurses, maids,emts, construction workers and waiters and "performance artists" from the Phillipines are able to immigrate to Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Qatar, UAE, and even Canada and Italy.

They may make $200.00 a month in the Phillipines but can make $800.00 a month in Saudi Arabia where they are raped and beat up and can't be catholic.

But, the good news, is they are able to send money back to the Phillipines and their children are able to get a good education.

The U.S. used to accept 76,000 of these Phillipino nurses but now we only accept 6,000.

Japan and Hong Kong now requires "performance artists" to have a bachelor's degree rather than a high school diploma. Performance Artists with Bachelors Degrees tend to be more polished. Peformance artists responsibilites are dancing in the nude, blowing guys for money which doesn't account for their entire monthly income.

Indonesia and India also allow this sort of immigration.

Western Union is a huge sponsor of this program.

immigration tits.; 1/29/14, 8:52 PM
MadisonMan said...: I still like the name Veeblefetzer.

Axolotl is not a word I remember from Mad, though.; 1/29/14, 8:53 PM
jimspice said...: Conservatives should mourn the loss of the oxolotl, as they have much in common. Oxolotls are one of the few fully neotenic amphibians, i.e. they do not undergo metamorphosis, and live their adulthood in the juvenile stage.; 1/29/14, 8:53 PM
Titus said...: The research I learned about today was resourced by the Bartik Instrument.

I am so digging economics.

Before I was publishing and than high tech and biotech.

Now I am all econ bitches.; 1/29/14, 8:56 PM
Titus said...: In the Phillipines, during the interview process, they actually check your body weight, tit size and ass and legs.

27 million Phlips want these jobs but only 1% get them.

There are over 100,000 employment agencies working on "filling" reqs.

The contract work to these countries is 2 years but some of the employees never return to the Phillipines.

Some of been in these foregin countries for over 30 years.

In order to help their families financially they stay and die in these countries where many of them have been raped and beaten.

Now that is family values.; 1/29/14, 9:04 PM
Carol said...: I grew up in Socal and didn't know about pizza except from reading Mad magazine. They always showed these eastern slobs eating big floppy slices with cheese dripping off and snails and other garbage all over it. It thought it had to be the grossest food in the world.

Very educational it was.; 1/29/14, 9:24 PM
Fritz said...: I have trouble keeping my axolatls and my aoxomoxoas straight.; 1/29/14, 9:27 PM
Unknown said...: The axolotl looks a little like the ozolotl. It'll
Drink a great deal more than what'll
Fill the fatal whiskey bottl.

The foods it eats'll be no morsl
Only meats'll drive its dorsl.

Such an awful fish to kettl!
You said a mawful, Pop'epetl!

Or something like that; 1/29/14, 9:32 PM
geokstr said...: I lived in WI for 22 years, then Southern Cal for 21, the last ten in Atlanta.

In Milwaukee, this might have meant a 20 minute delay, but in Atlanta, they have no idea what that white stuff is, let alone how to drive in it. On top of that, the idiots let out all the schools at the same time all the businesses told their employees to go home - instant gridlock. They finally got to people here today that had been in their cars for 24 hours going nowhere - it was like deja vu with the 405 in LA.

In SoCal, the same kind of breakdown of civilized society occurs when the weatherman predicts a 5% chance of drizzle, whether it happens or not. This is is why they have made weather totally illegal there. Generally, each TV station records one forecast a year (sunny, clear, temp just right, 2% chance of precip, to be safe) and runs it for the next 365 days.; 1/29/14, 9:33 PM
geokstr said...: Oops. Somehow this got posted to the wrong thread. Sorry about that.; 1/29/14, 9:34 PM
Dr Weevil said...: At 60, I have still never read one of the most famous poems in the English language, Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud".

But after roughly 50 years, I still recall the Mad Magazine parody - I'm a bit uncertain on line 3, but I think I'm letter-perfect on lines 1, 2, and 4. Here it is:

"I wandered lonely as a clod,
just picking up old rags and bottles,
when onward as my way I trod,
I spied a host of axolotls."

There's not much else I remember so well from so long ago.; 1/29/14, 10:05 PM
SteveR said...: I didn't like that David Axolotls prick who worked for Obama, I'm glad they are going extinct.; 1/29/14, 10:20 PM
madAsHell said...: I have several Mad Magazines from the late 60's, early 70's. The right price takes them from my son!!; 1/29/14, 11:07 PM
Jay Vogt said...: From the World Wildlife Fund (to whom, by default, I am sympathetic) . . .

How many species are we losing?
Well... this is the million dollar question. And one that’s very hard to answer. Firstly, we don’t know exactly what’s out there. It’s a big complex world and we discover new species to science all the time.

"Scientists were startled in 1980 by the discovery of a tremendous diversity of insects in tropical forests. In one study of just 19 trees in Panama, 80% of the 1,200 beetle species discovered were previously unknown to science... Surprisingly, scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than how many species there are on Earth."

So, if we don’t know how much there is to begin with, we don’t know exactly how much we’re losing.

But we do have lots of facts and figures that seem to indicate that the news isn’t good.
Just to illustrate the degree of biodiversity loss we're facing, let’s take you through one scientific analysis...
•The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.*
•These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species will become extinct each year.
•If the low estimate of the number of species out there is true - i.e. that there are around 2 million different species on our planet** - then that means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year.
•But if the upper estimate of species numbers is true - that there are 100 million different species co-existing with us on our planet - then between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year.
Unlike the mass extinction events of geological history, the current extinction challenge is one for which a single species - ours - appears to be almost wholly responsible.
This is often referred to as the 6th extinction crisis, after the 5 known extinction waves in geological history.
So without arguing about who’s right or wrong. Or what the exact numbers are.
There can be little debate that there is, in fact, a very serious biodiversity crisis.

So let me get this straight. We don’t know really how many species there are in the first place (although 10 million has rough consensus); we don’t know the background (normalized pre-human) extinction rate; we don’t know to an order of magnitude the elevation of the extinction rate that is correlated to(not caused by) the dynamic presence of humans on the planet; the earth has suffered and survived quite well five prior “mass extinctions”; even though we don’t know for sure what caused these other “mass extinctions” , we can be certain that we’re causing this one; we can’t argue about the numbers; we can’t assess responsibility (other than the certainty that it’s humans) and we can't question it’s characterization as a crisis.

Typical baby boomer hubris. It has to be because of us, because we’re really just that important.

But, hey, I guess if the science is settled, it’s settled.; 1/29/14, 11:34 PM
Jay Vogt said...: Oh, and because were so certain that it's all about us, lets refuse to send water to the farmers of the San Joaquin valley so they can't put some of the most productive agriculture resources on the planet to good use to feed us fresh produce thereby allowing that we can import more of it from the environmental Shangri La that is Mexico.

Got it.; 1/29/14, 11:50 PM
Gahrie said...: Anyone else wondering if this was one of those species that is supposed to go extinct?; 1/30/14, 12:36 AM
Kirk Parker said...: The Aztecan tl is my second-favorite phonetic sound Not Used In English. (Favorite, by far, is the Central Sudanic br.); 1/30/14, 3:07 AM
Anonymous said...: I’m proud to be Black; said a Black man.
I’m proud to be Asian; said an Asian man
I’m proud to be White; said a racist??; 1/30/14, 3:34 AM
rastajenk said...: First they came for the axolotls, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not an axolotl....; 1/30/14, 5:41 AM
commoncents said...: Video: "Noah" Super Bowl Spot (2014)

http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2014/01/video-noah-super-bowl-spot-2014.html; 1/30/14, 5:46 AM
Rusty said...: Gahrie said...
Anyone else wondering if this was one of those species that is supposed to go extinct?

Nope,
Don't really give a shit.; 1/30/14, 5:50 AM
Johanna Lapp said...: Will the word axolotls remain valid in Words With Friends?

Take advantage of a triple-letter x or triple-word (or both!) plus the bonus points for playing your entire rack -- wow!; 1/30/14, 7:09 AM
JoyD said...: "Now I am an axolotl"... Julio Cortazar, the Argentinian writer, writing metaphorically about political repression. You may know him better for Blow-up or Hopscotch, a masterpiece of nonlinear writing.; 1/30/14, 7:28 AM
ken in tx said...: Titus, immigrate means to go in—think inter. Emigrate means to go out—think exit.
The Philippines emigrate (export) their nurses, not immigrate them.

When I saw axolotl, I read atlatl—Aztec spear chunker; 1/30/14, 5:57 PM