"[B]reast reduction and implant-removal procedures have surpassed enlargements for the first time. This is amid a cultural shift away from 'exaggerated curves'..."

"... to a smaller, lighter, more 'delicate' shape, aka 'ballerina boobs,' also known as 'yoga tits.' Well, this is all great to know. I look forward to hearing this kind of talk applied to male appendages.... But may I also say that I suspect much of this might be a load of balls? Could the well-endowed women who are having reductions simply be sick of having back pain and two grooves on their shoulders like a workman’s ditch? Could the women having their implants removed simply have realised it’s hard to get clothes to fit and they don’t want to hoik two silicone jellyfish everywhere with them that may at some point leak?"

Writes Carol Midgley, in "Now is no time to have a voluminous bosom (and M&S won’t measure you)/It turns out that big ones are over and the ‘ballerina boob’ is in" (London Times).

I like that word "hoik." It has an interesting array of meanings. According to Wiktionary:

"'I felt this need to subversively convince people. I wanted to hook them more emotionally, with something they can relate to.' So she chose food. 'It is so integral to how we see ourselves and how we live every day.'"

Said the artist Allie Wist, who has created and photographed a dinner table with what you'll perhaps be eating after the global warming.

Click through to see "Flooded," a dinner spread of "burdock and dandelion root hummus with sunchoke chips; jellyfish salad; roasted hen of the woods mushroom; fried potatoes with chipotle vegan mayo; salted anchovies; and oysters with slippers."

The link goes to NPR, an American website, but I don't think Americans say "oysters with slippers." It might just be a way to say oysters on the half shell. I Googled "oysters with slippers" and got this Tori Amos song "Oysters" — which doesn't put oysters in slippers. She, the woman, has "ruby slippers," and she's "gonna turn oysters in the sand." On my own, I think of Lewis Carroll ("The Walrus and the Carpenter"):

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat —
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Leaving aside the well-shod, footless oysters, remember the Walrus and the Carpenter were — before they invited the oysters to take a walk — crying over the way the beach was covered in sand — "If this were only cleared away/They said, it would be grand!"



Stop your crying. The problem is solved, and not by the Walrus's proposed solution — "seven maids with seven mops," sweeping "for half a year." Global warming is coming to relocate the beach sand underwater, where it will be unseen seabed. And apparently you can still eat your oysters — along with your jellyfish salad and assorted horrible grungy little roots like burdock.

And here's something Leo Tolstoy wrote in his journal about a shoot of burdock he saw in a plowed field:

"Black from dust but still alive and red in the center... It makes me want to write. It asserts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other had asserted it."

That was written in 1896, when, perhaps, artists still felt some urge to uplift and encourage us. Rather than wake us up for the purpose of telling us bad news.

A man brought what he thought was a breast implant into a police station. He'd found it in the water...

... and thought it might be evidence that a woman's body was somewhere in there — maybe a murder victim.

Evidence presented at Maroochydore Station smelt fishy from the start, resulting in a unique bust #CSImarine https://t.co/5LfZsqMa2z pic.twitter.com/AbsmrMup6r

— QPS Media Unit (@QPSmedia) November 25, 2016

She's smiling because it's a jellyfish!

"I found a fish inside a jellyfish! He was trapped in there..."

"... but controlled where the jellyfish was moving."

Photo at link.

"[T]he butthole is one of the finest innovations in the past 540 million years of animal evolution."

"The first animals that arose seem to have literally had potty mouths: Their modern-day descendants, such as sea sponges, sea anemones, and jellyfish, all lack an anus and must eat and excrete through the same hole. Once an independent exit evolved, however, animals diversified into the majority of species alive today, ranging from earthworms
 to humans. One apparent advantage of a second hole is that animals can eat while digesting a meal, whereas creatures with one hole must finish and defecate before eating again. Other possible benefits, say evolutionary biologists, include not polluting an animal’s dining area and allowing an animal to evolve a longer body because it does not have to pump waste back up toward the head...."

From "Why watching comb jellies poop has stunned evolutionary biologists" (via Metafilter).

"Glow in the dark road..."

"... unveiled in the Netherlands."

"I thought that was updating an old idea, and I forced them to look at movies of jellyfish. How does a jellyfish give light? It has no solar panel, it has no energy bill. And then we went back to the drawing board and came up with these paints which charge up in the daytime and give light at night."

As if you were "dipped in hot burning oil and your body is in flames."

Diana Nyad's description of getting stung by a box jellyfish. Video at the link, which goes to The New Yorker, which doesn't warn you that the word "fuck" is yelled many times.

I'm just noticing Best of the Web's "Question and Answer" feature.

I'm noticing it because I'm noticing that I got a link, under one of BOTW's longstanding headings "Hey, Kids! What Time Is It?" (for my post, quoting Gov. Christie saying, "It Is Time to Lengthen Both the School Day and School Year in New Jersey"). I'm very pleased to get a link under such a classic BOTW heading, especially since I also recently made it to BOTW's classic "Questions Nobody Is Asking" heading. (For "Does Ezra Klein Really Have a Following, the Way Nate Silver Had a Following?")

Anyway, the new classic heading is "Question and Answer," with a headline from one place answered by some headline somewhere else. Yesterday's BOTW column had 3 examples:

Jellyfish shut down the largest boiling-water nuclear reactor in the world.

In Sweden.

You'd think jellyfish would avoid boiling water, but they went in the cooling water intake pipes, and they would probably be killed by the filtration system. The spokesman said: "There will be no dinner of boiled jellyfish."

"Nyad 1st to Swim to Florida From Cuba Without Cage."

Finally!

It was Nyad's fifth try to complete the approximately 110-mile swim. She tried three times in 2011 and 2012. Her first attempt was in 1978....

This time, she wore a full bodysuit, gloves, booties and a mask at night, when jellyfish rise to the surface.... She stopped from time to time for nourishment, but she never left the water.

The support team accompanying her had equipment that generated a faint electrical field around her, which was designed to keep sharks at bay. A boat also dragged a line in the water to help keep her on course.

"Heather Barnes, 20... was on a school trip and decided to do some early-morning coral collecting when her leg cramped..."

"... and the tide pulled her away from the reef, starting a 16-hour nightmare that would leave Barnes hallucinating from dehydration with severe sunburns, jellyfish stings and blisters."

At first Barnes thought it would be safer to try and stay in the same place, thinking that her group would soon notice her missing and send search and rescue crews after her. After two hours of idling and no sign of other life, she decided she would have to swim back herself....

'It's kind of strange because even when I didn't feel like I was strong enough, there was enough of me that still wanted to keep going. It didn't seem like a choice. I just - I had to keep going,' Barnes told....

Young women, swimming for their lives... it's a theme this week, along with the Chesapeake Bay Bridge plunger.

"They went on to endure a violent rainsquall, stinging nettles that wrapped around their legs, and an agonizing five-hour wait..."

"... while John Franklin Riggs struggled against the tides and wicked currents in Tangier Sound to swim for help. There was also the sight of blue phosphorescent jellyfish, called sea combs, clinging to their hair and skin...."

"You're either on the bus or off the bus."

It's an old hippie saying that sprang to mind when I looked at this photo (taken a week ago in Madison).



What exactly did it mean? From Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test":

[Ken] Kesey's explicit teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables, aphorisms: "You're either on the bus or off the bus." "Feed the hungry bee," "Nothing lasts," "See with your ears and hear with your eyes," "Put your good where it will do the most," "What did the mirror say? It's done with people."... The world was simply and sheerly divided into "the aware," those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of "the unaware," "the unmusical," "the unattuned." Or: you're either on the bus or off the bus. Consciously, the Aware were never snobbish toward the Unaware, but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of straight souls looked like hopeless cases...

"The movie ends with a poisonous jellyfish in an icy bathtub. Don’t ask."

Line in a Maureen Dowd column about the dangers of driving while telephoning that sent me straight to The Movie Spoiler because, in fact, I wanted to ask...

... oh... okay... wow...

Did anyone go to that movie?