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"It’s just so shocking... It’s an animal that has another animal stuck up its nose" (WaPo).

“They’re really quite long eels, and their diameter is probably close to what it would be for a nasal passage.... I struggle to think of an eel really wanting to force its way into a nose... It almost does feel like one of those teenage trends that happen... One juvenile seal did this very stupid thing and now the others are trying to mimic it.... We’re hoping it’s just one of these flukes that will disappear and never be seen again”...

I like the use of the word "fluke" — another fish.

That was the first time I ever wrote the word "genteel."

In the post about the NYT explaining Trump and wrestling: "[Trump's] tweeting of the wrestling-with-CNN video has caused the NYT to explain the context, which may be alien to its genteel readers."

I had to look up the spelling. You have to be careful not to write "gentile." "Genteel" actually looks wrong, like crudely phonetic spelling. Meade says it looks wrong "because it has an eel in it."

Ah, yes. "The Genteel Eel," that's the title of a children's book I want to write.

Here's the etymology of "genteel" from the (unlinkable) OED:

A re-adoption, at the end of the 16th cent., of French gentil , which had been previously adopted in the 13th cent., and had assumed the form gentle adj. and n. The re-adoption first appears in the form gentile, distinguished < gentile adj. and n. (= non-Jewish) by retaining the French pronunciation of the i and the stress on the last syllable. It is probable that it was originally fashionable to retain the French nasal sound in the first syllable; hence the vulgar pronunciation represented by the spelling ‘jonteel’, which occurs in comic literature of the early 19th cent. The fully anglicized spelling genteel came in at the end of the 17th cent.... Another attempt to render the French sound is jaunty n.

A few years before the middle of the 19th cent. the word was much ridiculed as being characteristic of those who are possessed with a dread of being taken for ‘common people’, or who attach exaggerated importance to supposed marks of social superiority. In seriously laudatory use it may now be said to be a vulgarism; in educated language it has always a sarcastic or at least playful colouring.

Wow. Did you know that gentle, gentile, genteel, and jaunty were all basically the same, all based on the French word gentil?

ADDED: How does the idea of not being Jewish get connected to those other words? The French word "gentil" comes from the Latin noun "gens," meaning nation. In Latin, the adjective, gentīlis, meant belonging to the same people or race. In French, the adjective, gentil, took on the meaning of belonging to a good family. The oldest meaning of the English word "gentle" was "Well-born, belonging to a family of position; originally used synonymously with noble." The word "gentile," meaning not Jewish, seems (as I read the OED) to be more directly connected to the Latin meaning, though I find that confusing, since many different peoples are not Jewish. I guess it makes sense if the word caught on in the plural form.

ALSO: I felt as though it was the first time I'd written the word "genteel," but a search of this blog's archive shows I'd written it twice before. (Not counting the times it appeared within quotes.)

The first time was in an October 2008 post in which I paraphrase what Dana Milbank is really saying about Sarah Palin: "Yes, dammit, why can't Palin simply resign herself to the fate of the campaign?... ... Palin responds with 'rage.' Anger is stage 1. Get with it, lady. You belong at stage 5, resignation, where the nice, genteel Mr. McCain is."

The second time was in November 2013, when Alec Baldwin got suspended from his MSNBC show after he got caught on camera calling a paparazzo a "cocksucking faggot." That presented a problem not because it's sexual, but because it's anti-gay. I said: "[S]hould he have a political talk show on MSNBC? That's for MSNBC to decide, and obviously they have. MSNBC has chosen to be more genteel and respectful toward the cultural elite. It doesn't seem to know how to foster vibrant discourse about politics, and the gambit of putting on the over-passionate Baldwin was always lame, even before he embarrassed them."

These days Baldwin is know for his impression of Donald Trump. We don't have any old video of Trump uttering anti-gay slurs, but, interestingly enough, we do have photographs of Alec Baldwin using wrestling moves on a media opponent.

"An X-ray image shows how far inside the man's body the eel was able to get."

A gruesome image, but it's not like it was the eel's decision to enter the man's body:

A man in China's southeastern Guangdong province admitted himself to a local hospital after he reportedly got a live eel stuck inside him. According to British tabloid The Sun, the man inserted the 20-inch-long Asian swamp eel into his anus after seeing it done in a porn movie, and he had to endure all-night surgery to have it extracted.

So it was a Lemmiwinks situation!  

Hurry onward Eeliwinks, or you will soon be dead.

Mud.

"Life is made up of marble and mud." — Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud... And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. " — Shakespeare

"I made all my generals out of mud." — Napoleon Bonaparte

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." — Orson Welles

"POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." — Ambrose Bierce (from "The Devil's Dictionary")

"'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.' Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing." — John 9:5-7

"The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud..." — T.S. Eliot

Information at your fingertips: It's the Internet!

This cracked me up — not as much as something else that I just read (which made me laugh so hard I had to wipe off the screen) — but really hard:



(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

ADDED: That was in olden times. Today: Eel slap.

"You see, their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex."

"This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion. Later, as they grow, follows madness and death. These are pets, of course. Not quite domesticated."

These pets were the Ceti eels, and I am tormented with regret that I came so close but missed a beautiful chime yesterday. I love when a theme, character, or image that appears in one post recurs in another post on the same day. Yesterday — a day when I should have been highly attuned to the distinctive pleasures of blogging, because it was the 5th anniversary of the blog — a notable animal appeared: the eel. I made an "eels" tag to honor it, and saw that there were only 3 other posts that had been visited by the elusive eel — in all these 5 years.

As the blogging day drew to a close, I memorialized 2 actors — I called them "iconic TV actors" — who had died. One of them was Ricardo Montalban. When I think of Ricardo Montalban, I think of "Fantasy Island".... I mean right after I think of rich Corinthian leather....



But, in the comments, it became clear that my readers thought of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." Cedarford said: "They gave Ricardo some great villain lines. All time classic villain lines." He listed some quotes, and one was what I used to begin this post.

In the comments, I express my delight at the reappearance of the eel: "Wait! There are eels?!! I started today with eels. This blogging thing is so spooky." I heard the chime, but I didn't sound it on the front page. The chime must be noted on the front page or else.

Not Althouse asks: Or else what?

Are you kidding? Didn't you notice? Else is an anagram for eels. Or else: eels!

Eels! Eels! Eels! Eeeeeeeeeeeels!



Did I choose the German version because I loved the German title "Der Zorn des Khan," reminiscent of the title of my second favorite movie of all time? No, I'm sorry I couldn't find the scene in English, and it's pretty cool in German, and in any case, the eels have only body language.

"Screw Civility: Why Bush-Bashing Should Be Obama's Eeelection Strategy."

That's heading used by The New Republic in email that got me to click over to this article by Michael Schaffer.

Naturally, I was interested. Interested in eeelection, which I took to be a way of e-voting for electric eels. Also screwing civility sounded hot, though I deplore the close proximity of screwing and electric eels. And then, of course, it's provocative to advise Obama to Bush-bash — or to screw him with an e-eel.

Clicking over, I see the sober headline is "Exit, Pursued By History: How Bush treated Clinton and how Obama should handle Bush."

Obama should save the civility shtick for Republicans he'll have to work with. As for the guy retiring to Texas, the new administration should ensure he remains the useful foil he was during the 2008 campaign. That starts with letting nothing--not public amnesia, not nostalgia, and certainly not a statesmanlike gesture from the White House--lift him from the PR cellar. When the new crew opens up the books on Bush's government, they ought to let every embarrassing detail out....

There's no guarantee Bush will remain this loathed forever. After next week, bad employment figures and reports about failed initiatives land on Obama.

There was Clinton-hating before there was Bush-hating, and there will be Obama-hating too. Can we break the chain of hate? Shaffer thinks that's for losers. Keep hate alive.

Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for decades; Republicans kicked around Jimmy Carter for a dozen years. If Bush's successors play their cards right, Democrats could use his legacy as a thumb on their side of the scale for a generation....

Because hope and change... that would be such a stupid path to take.

Meanwhile, in a more civilized location, Barack Obama is dining with the conservative opinion leaders.

“Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives."

I'm just watching this video after watching "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" on "Nova":



As one of the commenters over at YouTube says "Can we all agree that that is the BEST performance ever from a carrot in a music video?"

Here's a review of the documentary:

MARK OLIVER EVERETT does not deal in reassuring platitudes, whether writing bruised and barbed confessionals as the frontman for his cult rock band, Eels, or discussing the suburban Virginia upbringing that sometimes informs them. “My father was always there,” Mr. Everett said, “in the way that the furniture was always there.”

His father, Hugh Everett III, was a quantum physicist who, as a graduate student at Princeton in the ’50s, pioneered the many-worlds theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that proposed the existence of parallel universes. But to the younger Mr. Everett, the rock singer known to fans and friends simply as E, his father was a shirt-and-tie-clad fixture at the dining room table, an inscrutable figure who preferred chain-smoking Kents to conversation, and scrawling calculations on yellow legal pads to parenting.

“I didn’t really know he was a famous quantum physicist,” Mr. Everett, 45, said.... “It wasn’t something anyone talked about around the house. He barely spoke at all.”

I guess it's not so cool to have a genius dad. The younger Everett, we learn, couldn't understand math at all and flunked basic algebra.

IN THE COMMENTS: ElcubanitoKC said...

I really wanted to kill this whiney idiot. He can't speak in plain English ("behold my metaphor!" again), and he obviously didn't care about his father. He has no idea about science, in fact he very obviously rejected it all "because daddy didn't hug me!"...ugh. I wanted to refresh my quantum mechanics and the history of it, but this bearded fool was in the middle of it, and irritated me to no end. I had to turn the TV off.

Yes, I started watching thinking I could gain some appreciation for a theory that has always only seemed perfectly insane to me, but it turned out to be much more of a personal interest story about a mopey alternative rocker. The science part of it was therefore slow-moving. At one point, I thought the story was aimed at children. Then, I adapted and started thinking of it as a more creative documentary along the lines of "Crumb" and "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" -- two of my favorite movies -- and I thought it was kind of cool. Are you supposed to like Mark Oliver Everett -- was his father a secret 3 Stooges fan? -- or was he more of a Charles Crumb sort of character who inspires pity, mild loathing, and fearsome recognition?

"I'm not sure what possessed the eel to beach itself like that, but maybe it's a member of the 'Fans' tribe on Eelvivor..."

"... and is therefore prone to such stupid and ultimately self-defeating moves." Hahaha. Sara M — who actually worked on "Survivor" — is guest-recapping the show this week at Television Without Pity. She's got a great recapping style and inside info on the show. (Jeff Probst is not "a smarmy talking airhead.... He, like, runs that show." The show is "surprisingly un-manufactured" and "What you see is pretty much what happened," so that eel was not thrown on the beach by the producers.)

"It's not good to accessorize an eel."

And therefore "Mosaic" lost, and poor Rob ("you didn't give me a specific task!") got fired. Yeah, yeah, I was sucked into the cultural vortex that is "The Apprentice."