The Turtle House.

That's The Turtle house by Kurt Völtzke at El Gouna (Red Sea, Egypt), which I'm seeing this morning at the Wikipedia article "Cultural depictions of turtles." I got there because, after blogging about the Green Reaper, I went looking for other government-designed mascots. I'd thought of Smokey the Bear on my own, but that's the one that seems to make us think that the government should be in the mascot-designing business. I found a WaPo article from 2014, "It’s (almost) Smokey Bear’s birthday. Here are some other decidedly less iconic government mascots." There I discovered a Federal Trade Commission atrocity called Dewie the E-Turtle, which was supposed to teach us about protecting our privacy on the internet. That got my attention because I believed the green thing in this photograph was Dewey:



I was wrong about that. The green thing is actually BAC, a creation of the Department of Agriculture. He's a bacterium, which explains the other mascot, which is Thermy, who's there to bully you into overcooking your meat. But I'm only figuring that out now, after I've become entranced by "The Cultural Depiction of Turtles." I love Wikipedia.

That article goes on and on with many stories from many different times and places.... including, of course, The "World Turtle," which gets its own Wikipedia article:

The World Turtle (also referred to as the Cosmic Turtle or the World-bearing Turtle) is a mytheme of a giant turtle (or tortoise) supporting or containing the world. The mytheme, which is similar to that of the World Elephant and World Serpent, occurs in Hindu mythology, Chinese mythology, Scientology and the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.....

And if that makes you want to say "turtles all the way down," I 'm here to tell you that "Turtles All the Way Down" has its own Wikipedia article, and you know what that means? It's Wikipedia articles all the way down.

Stephen Hawking incorporates the saying into the beginning of his 1988 book A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court discussed his "favored version" of the saying in a footnote to his plurality opinion in Rapanos v. United States:

In our favored version, an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies "Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Now, you may be saying, what is this post about? What is Althouse trying to get us to discuss? Is it the architecture in Egypt? Is it mascots again, with even more weirdness and government stupidity? Is it Wikipedia? Is it turtle mythology through the ages? The amusing prose style of the dear departed Supreme Court Justice? Are we supposed to expand galactically into deep discussion of the shallowness of human understanding? Yes!