Funky-looking and tentacular.

I'm fascinated by the mysteries of sportswriting, and these 2 sentences jumped out at me:

Even the way he plays, all funky-looking forehands and tentacular court coverage, is far from conventional, and at times polarizing. Away from forehands and backhands, he has always been a master of the dark arts, knowing how and when to work a crowd to his advantage, and being more than willing to turn a match into a circus if he thinks it will give him an edge.

That's written by Charlie Eccleshare, at the NYT, in "Daniil Medvedev, tennis’ walking Rorschach test, asks the U.S. Open what it sees."

"Tentacular" — a word I'd never noticed before. I see that H.G. Wells used it in "The War of the Worlds" (1898), to refer to the Martians with “long, tentacular appendages.” The use to describe the tennis player is close enough to the literal meaning. Apparently Medvedev was octopuslike.

But the word has appeared with a more attenuated connection to creatures with tentacles. Grok tells me that the philosopher Donna Haraway writes about "tentacular thinking" in the book "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" (2016). There's some notion of "multispecies, interconnected, and responsive" thought to be distinguished from "human-centered, linear, or hierarchical" thought. I'm told there's something called "tentacular empathy" and "tentacular relatings of kinship." Strangulating, and yet I get the sense we're supposed to love it.

Of course, the octopus is a mainstay of political cartoons. Here's one from 1877 that has some present-day resonance:

Lots more here, at "The Octopus in Political Cartoons/Russia, Germany and the United States have all been depicted as octopuses by their nemeses.

"It’s kind of hard to make a funny video about that. Like, ‘Yeah, they died. This is the end of the content.'"

"[Said the father, who] was burned out on social media and worried about disappointing people. He didn’t want to answer any more questions. Ultimately, he simply deleted TikTok from his phone and left the story unfinished. 'I mean, what do you think?' Dr. Clifford asked me. 'How would you have finished it?' He was finishing it now, I said. What did he want people to know? He paused and then said that he wanted to thank his followers for their support and tell them that he had given these octopuses his all. 'I think the obvious lesson is that they’re not good pets,' he said. 'They’re not durable pets, they’re not cheap pets, they’re not easy pets....'"

From "A Cautionary Tale of 408 Tentacles/One pet octopus suddenly became more than four dozen. They went viral. Then it all went south" (NYT).

To see the story of the little boy who loved octopuses and the dentist dad who made the boy's dream come true and displayed the the dream — while it lasted — go to the doctoktopus TikTok page: here. 

"Over the summer, everyone I know went to Greece. From Greece, everyone I know posted one picture: octopus suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea."

"The picture was a picture of an octopus (suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea), but it was also a subtle message that the person behind the camera was (1) traveling, (2) traveling to Greece, the summer-vacation spot of 2024, and not Puglia, the summer-vacation spot of 2023, and (3) not taking a selfie, but (4) you know, not just taking a picture of the Aegean Sea, which would be basic, unlike this one, which (5) managed a sort of high-low effect, given the octopus was dead and clipped to a clothesline. It would have been the perfect picture of an interesting summer, except everyone else was taking it too, stuck replicating one another in an effort to be perfectly interesting."

From "Going Dull/Being interesting is a burden. Is there relief in choosing to be bland?" (NY Magazine).

I think the problem here isn't being interesting. It's trying to be interesting, AKA trying not to be dull. Just stop trying. Ironically, that's your only real shot at interestingness. Let the chips fall where they may.

Greta Thunberg deletes a tweeted photo because "It has come to my knowledge that the stuffed animal shown in my earlier post can be interpreted as a symbol for antisemitism..."

"...  which I was completely unaware of. The toy in the picture is a tool often used by autistic people as a way to communicate feelings. We are of course against any type of discrimination, and condemn antisemitism in all forms and shapes. This is non-negotiable. That is why I deleted the last post." 

Here's the link to that quote.

Here's the original post, with the stuffed animal, an octopus, posed just over Thunberg's shoulder:

 

Here's the post that replaced it, as devoid of the octopus:

"When [Barbara] Walters asked her where she’d be had she not changed her name to Whoopi Goldberg, she replied 'I would have been a Tupperware lady.'"

"It seems that Caryn Johnson saw value in appearing to be Jewish.... So, is it racist to pretend to be Jewish if one isn’t? Is it ‘cultural appropriation’?... Perhaps Whoopi does have some distant shred of Jewish heritage buried far back in her family tree.... Minorities are often granted licence to joke about their own... If Whoopi had been better connected to her putative Judaism, she might have thought twice about her festive jumper design aimed at Jews, depicting a ‘Jewish’ octopus wearing a kippah. Most Goldbergs I’ve met know that Jewish Octopuses are usually associated with Nazi era antisemitism. Not Whoopi. When it comes to racism, it’s not only Jews Whoopi has angered. When she was dating the comedian Ted Danson in 1993, he nearly ended his career by appearing in blackface in a sketch at the Friars Club comedy event, which was reported to have included jokes about how he got her to clean his parents’ house, contained numerous full occurrences of the “N word” and ended with him eating from a tray of watermelon. The gags didn’t go down well with the 3,000 strong audience.... She’s said to have come out on stage to challenge the audience, saying: 'N*****, n*****, n*****, whitey, whitey, whitey! It takes a lot of courage to come out in blackface in front of 3000 [people]. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!'"

Writes Jonathan Sacerdoti in "Will the real Whoopi Goldberg please stand up? Is Caryn Johnson really Jewish? And would it make any difference if she was?" (The Jewish Chronicle).

***

You can see a photo of that "festive jumper" in this 2016 Haaretz article, "Will Jews Buy a Sweater Featuring an Octopus Menorah? Whoopi Goldberg Thinks So Goldberg's 'Christmas sweaters with a twist' seek to include her Jewish friends in the holidays, but use a cute version of an animal often used in anti-Semitic tropes."

Here, at the Holocaust Encyclopedia, you can see the well-known Nazi era cartoon depicting Jews as an octopus that is destroying the entire world. 

***

Goldberg said "I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!" in 1993, but in recent years she's been entrenched in a long-running group project on network daytime TV that supports and mildly challenges nice American ladies who want to think well of themselves. I'd love to see her quit the show and get back to the woman-alone-on-stage shows that first made her famous. 

Maybe she's too comfortable with "The View," but "The View" wasn't sufficiently comfortable with her. Comfort is overrated, and it deserves a particularly low rating in comedy. It's the enemy of comedy. Goldberg could build a one-woman show around this incident, and that's what I'd like to see. Take the time to look at the problem from multiple angles and bring us somewhere surprising. That's what Dave Chappelle does with his very independent shows.

Inside the creative process... God:

... a brilliant TikTok...

Kayaker gets smacked by an octopus thrown at him by a seal.

Get out of my ocean, suckers.

Caption on a GIF at the NYT: "Some seafood specialties such as sea bream are served so fresh they are still twitching."

Another caption on a GIF: "San-nakji, raw octopus, so freshly killed that the pieces squirm on your plate. It has become a dare of sorts for uninitiated visitors."

And by GIF, I mean, you see the food moving on your computer screen.

Leg parts cannot be alive and conscious. The octopus's brain is somewhere else.* But that twitching fish is still alive, is it not? The head is intact, still attached to the body which is slivered up for the diner's delectation. I've never seen — or felt that I'm seeing — so much expression on the face of a fish.

The article is "An Olympic Challenge: Eat All the Korean Food That Visitors Won’t." Like you're not sophisticated and inclusive of other human cultures if you are squeamish.

Many restaurant owners here... [say] it has felt as if the Games were not even going on. Visitors don’t seem to be venturing outside the Olympic bubble, they said.

I was determined not to be that sort of visitor. So I’ve swanned into press boxes with pork broth practically dripping off my clothes. I’ve interviewed some of the world’s top athletes with raw garlic on my breath. I am beginning to sense some of my colleagues growing alarmed with my behavior. But I can’t stop.

Elsewhere in the NYT, we are beaten over the head for our shortcomings in empathy. And, to be fair, there is a call to empathy here: empathy for the Korean restauranteur.
___________

* Suffering? To answer that question, you must consider 2 subquestions: 1. "Octopuses are super-smart … but are they conscious?" and 2. "Do you really stay conscious after being decapitated?"

"Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus - CLO for short - need not worry about being in the right ecosphere."

"Being fictional, it is not restricted to the sea. It can (and need) do only one thing: instil map-readers with fear and revulsion.... The Cartographic Land Octopus was born two-thirds into the 19th century, when the intra-European tensions were slowly gearing up towards the First World War; it flourished until the end of the Second World War. But it still maintains its grip on the cartographic imagination today, as will be shown towards the end of this concise timeline of CLO cartoons...."

From "Cartography’s Favourite Map Monster: the Land Octopus," which has lots of great illustrations. My favorite is this — "Recognize the Danger":



(I ran into that article after encountering a misplaced octopus in a Maureen Dowd column, which I wrote about here.)

"The fundamental predatory nature of Hollywood is young, attractive people — largely females — putting themselves in front of men to be judged and appraised and chosen."

"It is a dark equation. From the moment the proverbial girl gets off the bus, the odds are stacked against her. In Hollywood, unlike at other Fortune 500 companies, the one-on-one meetings take place in hotel suites and bars. It’s an exploitative and oddly personal process."

Said Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter (who also describes a media event that took place last April at which Barack Obama gives a speech and, immediately afterwards, "amid rapturous applause," walks "right over to Harvey Weinstein and gives Harvey a hug").

Quoted in "Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s Oldest Horror Story," by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

5 more things about this Dowd column:

1. She follows the now-standard script of dragging Trump into the story, but she keeps that scene short. She merely sticks a "Like Trump" onto the front end of one sentence about Weinstein:

Like Trump, that other self-professed predator, there were complaints that in business deals he stiffed people on bills (advertising and public relations payments), and he had a reputation for lying, cheating, taking advantage, acting like a thug.

2. She doesn't otherwise talk about the political world, except to pass along Min's idea that Weinstein was "a master at protecting himself... by the veneer of power he cultivated, by giving to liberal causes and cultivating friends in the media and politics." Here, another name is stuck in: "just as Hugh Hefner was."

3. There's something a little sleazy about slipping in other names — Trump and Hefner — without specifying the points of comparison. The charges against Weinstein are so awful, that this "like X" style of writing flaunts unfairness.

4. And note the unopened door: Calling Weinstein "a master at protecting himself... by giving to liberal causes and cultivating friends in the media and politics" makes it sound as though he was a genius and ignores the lameness of the journalists in allowing this obvious and simple ruse to give him cover. Shine some light on the weakness of your own profession, Ms. Dowd. You've been writing very extensively about the movie business for years. Why didn't you go after Weinstein? Were you and your colleagues bought off by his generosity to causes that you like?

5. Dowd often does clever things with language, but some of her efforts are strained, and sometimes an idea just does not work and should be abandoned:

He relished the nickname “Harvey Scissorhands,” given to him by filmmakers who did not like his domination in the editing room. But the nickname could work just as well for his octopus ways with women, which resulted in lots of hush money being paid out.

You just can't merge "octopus ways" with Scissorhands when you're talking about a man approaching a woman's body. Scissorhands cut and even if the cut is skillful, the presence of blades near vulnerable flesh is dangerous (erotically so, in the movie):



The octopus has soft suctioning parts, nothing like scissors, as most memorably depicted in the 1814 Hokusai woodcut print "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife":



These Scissorhands and octopus images are presented (by male artists) as powerfully erotic from the woman's point of view, but the eroticism is distinctly different and it doesn't helpfully connect up film editing with paying hush money. It's funny that Dowd was writing about editing when she let a stray octopus into that paragraph.

I advise Neil Gorsuch to bring a sandwich to oral arguments and eat in front of everyone.

Let's see how that happened.

1. I wrote a post called "We sent you Unclubbable Neil!" in which I tweak Jeffrey Toobin for writing "Perhaps Gorsuch will, as the years pass, prove to be a more clubbable colleague...." and consult the OED for the definition of "clubbable" and the older word "unclubbable."

2. The commenter Henry remembers that the word "unclubbable" appears in the description of the The Diogenes Club, in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter":

There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.

3. I do a little reading on Diogenes:

Diogenes... became notorious for his philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He criticized and embarrassed Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaged his lectures, sometimes distracting attendees by bringing food and eating during the discussions. Diogenes was also noted for having publicly mocked Alexander the Great.

4.  Distracting attendees by bringing food and eating during the discussions? I say:

Note to Neil Gorsuch: Emulate Diogenes by bringing a sandwich to oral arguments and eating.

5. Why a sandwich though? Where did that come from? It's the most food food to me. Warren Zevon said: "Enjoy every sandwich." And I don't know what Diogenes ate, except that it is sometimes said that he died from eating raw octopus.

Now, leave Neil Gorsuch alone while he prepares for the next oral argument:

Inky's escape.

Inky, an octopus "about the size of a soccer ball" at the National Aquarium of New Zealand "slipped through a small gap at the top of his tank" and "scampered eight feet across the floor and slid down a 164-foot-long drainpipe that dropped him into Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of North Island" — and that's the last the humans saw of him.

Alix Harvey, an aquarist at the Marine Biological Association in England [said]... “Octopuses are fantastic escape artists... They are programmed to hunt prey at night and have a natural inclination to move around at night.... They have a complex brain, have excellent eyesight, and research suggests they have an ability to learn and form mental maps.”

Inky's fellow octopus Blotchy stayed behind in the tank... at least for now.

ADDED: Inky and Blotchy — it's like Itchy and Scratchy.

A poor rural province in China spent $465,000 erecting a 120-foot golden statue of Mao, but when the internet saw the photographs and made fun of it...

... a demolition team came and demolished the whole thing in one day.

A person answering the telephone at the Tongxu County government offices said he did not know anything about the demolition. He referred a caller to the county propaganda department, where the telephone went unanswered. Another person answering the telephone at the local Sunying township also said he had not heard of the demolition.

According to villagers and reports on online chat sites, the statue was the idea of a local businessman, Sun Qingxin, the head of Lixing Group, a conglomerate that owns food-processing facilities, hospitals and schools, as well as makes machinery. Mr. Sun paid for it, they said...

“He is crazy about Mao,” said a villager who identified himself as Mr. Wang, a potato farmer. “His factory is full of Maos.”...

[A] woman named Ms. Yang, 75, said several villagers cried when it was knocked down. “Mao was our leader and ate bitterness for us,” she said.

ADDED: Perhaps the idea was to have one of these very large roadside attractions that bring visitors to various out-of-the-way places. Me, I'm pretty averse to traveling and am not easily suckered into going a long distance to see some big damned thing you're supposed to feel you ought to see, but I could spend years doing day trips in Wisconsin to all the places listed as "Wisconsin Attractions and Oddities."

One of them is the recently removed Ozzy the Octopus that was a few blocks from our house. Ozzy killed no one, ate bitterness for no one, but he did preside over a car wash.

But if you're more of a bucket-list-y world traveler, here are some colossi you could feel you need to visit, such as the "Statue of Unity," honoring India’s first deputy prime minister, which will be somewhere you probably wouldn't even have considered going. It will be 597 feet tall, out-talling the Spring Temple Buddha, heretofore the tallest statue in the world, which gets a good lot of people to go to Zhaocun township, which is somewhere in China. Also at that last link is the Peter the Great Statue at the confluence of the Moskva River and the Vodootvodny Canal in Moscow. I recognize it only because I recently flipped through a slideshow of the ugliest statues in the world.

The end of the Octopus.

The end of a Madison era.

Here's a picture I took of the great pop-culture character back in 2006:

At the Underwater Egyptian Café...

Sister, lemme tell you about a vision I saw/You were drawing water for your husband, you were suffering under the law...

(Thanks to Chip Ahoy for rearranging me in that photograph by Meade.)

"A rising tide of outrage is forming after pictures emerged of a 20-year-old diver who dragged a giant Pacific octopus from its watery home..."

"... and then killed and ate it for his friends art project."

[Dylan Mayer] now is in the position of having to justify to the diving community why he hunted the gentle and intelligent animal....

'I eat it for meat. It's no different than fishing. It's just a different animal,' said Mayer...

So what is it — meat or art? Let's not overdo the denunciations. Portraying him as an artist....

ADDED: Octopus art should relate to "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife."

At the Long Legs/Long Arms Octopus Café...

... don't worry about overreaching.

(The item pictured, from the Chazen Museum is an ivory object from 19th century Japan.)

Putting the last 2 posts together makes me think about a Beatles song.

It's one of my least favorite Beatles songs, but Ringo's a good guy, and it's one that he managed to write. He says:

I wrote Octopus's Garden in Sardinia.

(And he wrote "Sardine's Garden" in Octopussia.)

Peter Sellers had lent us his yacht and we went out for the day... I stayed out on deck with [the captain] and we talked about octopuses. He told me that they hang out in their caves and they go around the seabed finding shiny stones and tin cans and bottles to put in front of their cave like a garden. I thought this was fabulous, because at the time I just wanted to be under the sea too. A couple of tokes later with the guitar - and we had Octopus's Garden!

Ah! Peter Sellers. I was just watching a Peter Seller's movie last night: "The World of Henry Orient." Recommended. Do a triple feature of movies in which 2 girls get together and things get crazy and show it along with "Ghost World" and "Heavenly Creatures." Or make a double feature with another Peter Seller's movie from the same era, "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" (especially if you disapprove of Ringo's toking):

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right about this.

On the one hand, it is absurd for a world leader to be attacking an octopus, but superstition is a sign of a deficient culture:

"Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values."

I agree. Let us aspire to perfection, love sacred values, and turn away from superstition.

(Via First Things.)

Paul was right!

"If Paul gets it wrong tomorrow, nothing is going to happen to him, to Paul. Paul has proven his mettle so far and there is nothing bad waiting for him round the corner if he gets it wrong. It could happen to anyone. Even an octopus can get it wrong."