"I got my one foot stuck because I was trying to get my electronics out of my pocket. I knew not to panic."

"I have to be a macho man. You can’t ask for help when you’re trying to impress the girl you’re with."

Said Mitchell O’Brien, quoted in "Man Sinks in Quicksand and Emerges With a Girlfriend/A Michigan man who ended up waist-deep on an unstable beach was rescued, and found himself in a relationship" (NYT).

A comforting thought: "As it happens, drowning in quicksand in real life is nearly impossible, scientists say. Sand is denser than the human body, so even if one’s legs sink, the air in the lungs keeps the body too buoyant to go all the way under."

And here's that John Mulaney bit about quicksand: "I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life — behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky. I used to sit around and think about what to do about quicksand. I never thought about how to handle real problems in adult life, I was never like 'Oh, what's it gonna be like when relatives ask to borrow money?' Now that I've gotten older, not only have I never stepped in quicksand—I've never even heard about it! No one's ever been like, 'Hey if you're coming to visit, take I-90 'cause I-95 has a little quicksand in the middle. Looks like regular sand, but then you're gonna start to sink into it.'"

"Thank you all for coming, and shame on you for being here."

Said Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, quoted in "'Twain hated bullies.' Conan O'Brien receives Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center" (NPR).

I'd love to hear a lecture demonstrating — with lots of quotes — Mark Twain's hatred of bullies. I have a Kindle copy of "The Complete Works of Mark Twain" (only 99¢ at Amazon!), so I can easily do my own search, though it's hard to do a search for the word "bully," since many of the occurrences are in things like "Bully for the lion!" — shouted by "young ruffians" during a tour of the Coliseum in "Innocents Abroad" — an archaic usage.

But how can you delve into Twain and his times when you've got Trump... and your "shame" for showing up in what was once an arts paradise and is now the humbled plaything of that garish clod who is remaking everything in his own horribly orange image?

"As the water level drops, formerly sunken boats are emerging in the mud, and other vehicles are getting newly stuck...."

"And on Monday the National Park Service shared several photos on Twitter that showed trucks stuck in the mud around the lake – a shoreline that looks deceivingly stable, but acts more like quicksand."

CNN reports — with photos showing the kind of truck that makes you think you can go where those other vehicles can't.

Interesting to see the old quicksand! threat making a comeback. From a 2010 Slate article:

For now, quicksand has all but evaporated from American entertainment—rejected even by the genre directors who once found it indispensable.... Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement: A pool of water, thickened with oatmeal, sprinkled over the top with wine corks. It was, in its purest form, a plot device unburdened by character, motivation, or story: My god, we're sinking! Will we escape this life-threatening situation before time runs out?... Time was, a director could sink a man in the desert and still win the Oscar for best picture. Today, that gimmick has been scorned in third-rate schlock.

Here's the comedian John Mulaney joking about his childhood concept that quicksand was going to be a big threat.

"y’all ever hear ~12,000 people laugh at a transphobic joke, while you’re a trans person in the audience who didn’t know..."

"... the transphobic comedian would make a surprise appearance at the John Mulaney show? yeah. wasn’t fun. fuck you D.C."

Tweeted someone named "rae (spookiest version)," quoted in "John Mulaney Draws Criticism for Having Dave Chappelle Open, Tell ‘Transphobic Jokes’ at Ohio Show." 

That's in Variety, and I appreciate its putting "transphobic jokes" in quotation marks, but I think we need to see the actual jokes. I'm just going to assume that this was more material like what we saw in "The Closer," which some people characterized as transphobic and others did not. 

And there is something odd about going to see one comedian and getting surprised by the appearance of somebody you would actively boycott because you see him as picking on people like you. You're sitting there in a big group of people with whom you were expecting to feel camaraderie, and there they are, all around you, laughing, and you're thrown into a horrible feeling of alienation, which isn't what you paid your money for and what you anticipated as you went out for a good time that night.

Should comedians make people uncomfortable? That's asking the question at a high level of generality. Maybe comedians should make people uncomfortable but only the people who are too comfortable and never at the expense of the people who are already uncomfortable. 

And maybe audiences who pay to see a comedian who doesn't deal in discomfort should be spared being subjected to a comedian who does. Variety says John Mulaney "tends to stay away from political or social issues" — whatever that means. So maybe this is a case of that. People who expected not to get challenged got challenged. 

Mulaney obviously chose to do that to his crowd, so readjust what you think of his tendencies. Why did he inflict Dave Chappelle on his audience? He had to want to do that. 

ADDED: TMZ gives some idea of one of the jokes. You know how Chappelle was attacked on stage by a man who was carrying a knife that folded up into a fake gun: 

 

Chappelle seems to have called that "a gun that identifies as a knife" (or was it "a knife that identifies as a gun"?)