Today's walrus.

Giant walrus having a nap on a Russian submarine. pic.twitter.com/LEWNmbRZce

— Human For Scale (@humanforscaIe) March 18, 2021

ADDED: Is this image a fake? Snopes dealt with it in 2019, and that particular image is fake, but there really was a walrus sleeping on a Russian submarine in 2006 and these pictures of it are not fake:

The walrus who fell asleep on an iceberg and floated to a place in Ireland where it was the most exciting thing that ever happened.

The guy at the top of this report about the Irish walrus 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/nYhYfGmDCt

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) March 15, 2021

"The Times is peddling ignorance here. Actually, the congregation of walruses on land is an age-old phenomenon known as 'hauling out.'"

"It has nothing to do with the volume of sea ice at any given time. In fact, the Times is not just peddling ignorance, it is recycling it."

Chunk.

"Chunk" is the word of the day here... for no other reason than that it's come up on its own twice: "invented something called the 'Cha-Chunker'" and "pegs in their hubs that can 'take chunks out of' the granite ledge." It's a funny word, isn't it? One thinks of "blowing chunks" or the "Goonies" boy Chunk or — if you're really old — "What a chunk o' chocolate":



The word "chunk" somehow devolved from "chuck" — the squarish cut of meat — and "chuck," like "cluck," is the English speaker's reproduction of the sound a chicken makes.

"Chunk" is a notably American word. Here are some of the quotes collected by the (unlinkable) OED:

1856   E. K. Kane Arctic Explor. II. i. 15   A chunk of frozen walrus-beef....
1833   J. Hall Legends of West 50   If a man got into a chunk of a fight with his neighbour, a lawyer would clear him for half a dozen muskrat skins....
a1860   New York in Slices, Theatre (Bartl.),   Now and then a small chunk of sentiment or patriotism or philanthropy is thrown in....
1894   Congress. Rec. 13 July 7445/1   Just one moment, my friend. You are a lawyer... Yes, a chunk of a lawyer.
1907   Chicago Tribune 8 May 7 (advt.)    It's really ridiculous the way we've knocked chunks off these Spring overcoat prices.
1923   P. G. Wodehouse Inimitable Jeeves xiii. 148   Eustace and I both spotted that he had dropped a chunk of at least half a dozen pages out of his sermon-case as he was walking up to the pulpit.
1957   T. S. Eliot On Poetry & Poets 49   Crabbe is a poet who has to be read in large chunks, if at all.

Oh, no! Crammed walruses!

They're hauling out onto dry land, 35,000 of them.

"It is really a reduction in the sea ice that is causing the change in behavior, and the reduction of sea ice is due to global warming...."

"When you eat a significant amount of ice, your body burns energy to melt it."

"Eating ice should, by the logic of this diet, also provide some level of satiety, if only so far as it physically fills space in the stomach and mouth."

At some point beyond [a] liter, too much ice can be a problem. In the case of one obese person who attempted to eat seven quarts of ice per day, [Dr. Brian] Weiner says, "Not surprisingly, this person suffered an uncomfortable feeling of coldness." In his professional opinion, that much ice per day would, for most people, be a "toxic dose." He recommends avoiding eating much more than the Slurpee-tested one liter of ice daily, "to avoid hypothermia or unusual cooling of the body. ... Some organs do not work optimally when the body temperature drops too much."...

Physics writer Andrew Jones offers more skeptical calculations as to the caloric benefits of the ice diet, determining that eating a kilogram of ice would burn 117 calories. "To reach the 3,500 calories required to lose a pound of weight, it would be necessary to consume about 30 kilograms [66 pounds] of ice," Jones writes. "Not exactly the most efficient diet plan." That means, if you ate a liter of ice every day, you would lose about a pound of weight every month, all other things in life being equal. That's not bad. And all other things wouldn't be equal. Everything in your life would be different because you would be eating a liter of ice every day.

That's in The Atlantic. You might remember my writing about ice and weight loss last January:

I've long thought that to burn more calories you ought to drink more ice water (which would include tap water on a day like today).... [I]sn't it obvious that your body is going to have to expend calories to warm up anything cold you put in. Now, I'm distracted by the thought of a lucrative business manufacturing smooth metal devices that fit comfortably into various bodily orifices. You chill them to some perfectly comfortably cool, safe temperature,  then insert them until they warm up. Calories burned....

I'm concerned that there's a blubber-up reaction to cold in the long term. Fat protects you from the cold.  Take a look at the walrus. Nature did not evolve us to freeze to death (or to starve from over-burning our fat reserves). Our ancestors survived cold and privation to give us bodies that make us drift toward resemblance to the walrus.

"Is the rise of central heating a contributor to the obesity epidemic?"

Asks Instapundit, linking to Stephan Guyenet, a neurobiologist, who describes some biological processes related to brown fat (fat with lots of mitochondria) and thermogenesis (activated by the brain). Maybe the lack of exposure to cold air is keeping the brain from activating the brown fat? Guyenet describes a study:

The protocol involved exposing people to 60 F (15-16 C) air for two hours on day 1, four hours on day 2, and six hours on days 3-10. Although I assume they were lightly clothed, this is a pretty mild cold exposure.

Here in Wisconsin, where I'm only hoping for temperatures above zero and wind chills above the negative single digits, we set the thermostat at 60° so it's interesting to hear this called "pretty mild cold exposure."

"I don’t think we should talk about Lincoln’s underwear..."

"It’s not appropriate for someone so iconic. Even in the bedroom, Lincoln is never shown in his pajamas. He’s in his shirt and pants."

Joanna Johnston, movie costume designer.

***

"But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked."

Bob Dylan.

***

"How many Bob Dylan songs have the word 'naked' and how many of them can you name?" I challenge Meade with a Bob Dylan test, as I tend to do when I've done a search at bobdylan.com (as I did for the "It's Alright Ma" quote, above).

Meade immediately says "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," then none of the others — not even "You see somebody naked and you say who is that man?" — and makes 2 wrong guesses:

MEADE: "'Mr. Tambourine Man'... just to dance beneath the naked sky..."

ME: "That's 'diamond sky.'"

MEADE: "The one where the farmer is chasing him out of his house."

ME: "'Motorpsycho Nightmare?' No."

In "Motorpsycho Nightmare," Bob Dylan is just trying to get some sleep — no sign that he's sleeping naked — when Rita — "Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins" (i.e., the murderer in "Psycho") importunes him to take a shower. He's freaked out: "Oh, no! no! I’ve been through this [movie] before." Afraid of getting knifed to death, but unwilling to run off unless her father (the farmer) throws him out (because he promised the farmer he'd milk the cows in the morning), his sees his only option as saying "something to strike him very weird." What he says is: "I like Fidel Castro and his beard."



Beards. Fidel Castro made a beard as off limits to an American president — in spite of Lincoln — as Hitler made the mustache. And here I want to go back to that "Becoming Adolf" article by Rich Cohen that were were talking about a couple days ago:

[Y]ou could not wear any kind of mustache after [WWII], because, running from Hitler, you might run into Stalin. Hitler plus Stalin ended the career of the mustache in Western political life. Before the war, all kinds of American presidents wore a mustache and/or beard. You had John Quincy Adams, with his muttonchops...



You had Abe Lincoln, whose facial hair...



... like his politics, was the opposite of Hitler's: beard full, lip bare. You had James Garfield, who had the sort of vast rabbinical beard into which whole pages of legislation could vanish.



You had Rutherford B. Hayes...



Grover Cleveland...



... and Teddy Roosevelt, whose asthma and elephant gun were just a frame for his mustache.



You had William Howard Taft — the man wore a Walrus!



After the war, the few American politicians who still wore a mustache were those who had made their name before Hitler and so had been grandfathered in. Like Thomas Dewey.



Dewey was Eliot Spitzer. He was a prosecutor in New York in the 1930s (and later governor), the only guy with the guts to take on the Mob. For Dewey, the rise of Hitler was a fashion disaster. Because Dewey wore a neat little mustache. Dewey ran for president twice — losing to F.D.R., losing to Truman. In my opinion, without the mustache, the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune (Dewey Defeats Truman) turns true. One of the few prominent American politicians to wear facial hair in recent memory is Al Gore, who grew a Grizzly Adams beard after he lost to George Bush, in 2000. The appearance of this beard was taken to mean either (1) Gore would never again run for office, or (2) Gore had gone completely mental.



The decision to grow a mustache or a beard is all by itself reason to keep a man away from the nuclear trigger.

Are we going to decide who deserves out trust based on they look? Come on, Abe. Lose the beard. Okay.

Pick one:

"The toothbrush moustache (also called Hitler moustache, Charlie Chaplin moustache, 1/3 moustache, philtrum moustache, the postage stamp, or soul (mou)stache)..."

"... is a moustache, shaved at the edges, except for three to five centimeters above the centre of the lip. The sides of the moustache are vertical rather than tapered."

I found this Wikipedia article — "Toothbrush moustache" — last night after asserting that Hitler adopted the Hilter mustache to emulate Charlie Chaplin. The topic came up in connection with the array of photographs — Obama/Hitler/Stalin — that we're talking about in the previous post. Meade didn't believe me, and my belief — even if it's wrong — is at least common enough that I could easily do the research. (A couple weeks ago, the roles were reversed: Meade asserted a misconception common enough to have a Snopes article declaring it false.)

"My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava."

Via Andrew Sullivan, the ultimate in misheard lyrics:



Amusingly misheard lyrics can be called mondegreens, as explained here by Gavin Edwards:

Misheard lyrics come with many alternate names, only some of which form compound nouns when joined with the word "boneheaded." Some of the names that have been used: Music Ear Disturbance, disclexia, chronic lyricosis, and Litellas (after Gilda Radner's befuddled Saturday Night Live character). The technical term prized by aficionados is mondegreen. If your dictionary doesn't include "mondegreen," throw it out and buy a better one.

The term "mondegreen" was coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Atlantic article. As a child, young Sylvia had listened to a folk song that included the lines "They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen." As is customary with misheard lyrics, she didn't realize her mistake for years. The song was not about the tragic fate of Lady Mondegreen, but rather, the continuing plight of the good earl: "They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green."...

Any misheard lyric is an impromptu audio Rorshach test. It can be alarming to discover that significant parts of our brains want pop songs to cover the lyrical topics of cheese, walruses, and clowns....

Some people never learn the words to a favorite song--or transmute them into something more to their own taste. My friend Alma liked Billy Idol's "Eyes Without a Face" because she thought the title was "I supply the fish."

We hear what we love to hear.

ADD: I gotta get my Fred and Wilma. (These song translations are a whole genre on YouTube. Click around.)

Pointless/Walrus/Bad Mood Leads to Lethal Rage.

(Photos from DUMBO.)

"I wrote Lennon's obituary for this newspaper the day after he was shot, Dec. 8, 1980."

Paul McGrath writes a memorial to John Lennon, which he publishes 5 days before the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death:

By and large, he had found his peace. He had survived his vices, his politics, his rages and his therapies, avoided the junkie's death unlike so many, only to meet a cheap little handgun in the hands of a sad case like so many others he had met, kids who believed in some desperate part of them that this man could actually pull them out of the pit. And he couldn't. All he could do was write and sing, and in those songs tens of millions did in fact find a real solace, a pushing back of the fog and the dark.

I'm going to pick out a set of John Lennon songs to play it as I drive my car -- baby, you can drive my car -- in the next week. I'll reveal the song list later. If you care about John Lennon, tell me, what is your song list?

UPDATE: After collecting 35 songs from my various CDs, I selected these 17:

Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Come Together
Tomorrow Never Knows
Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!
Instant Karma!
Strawberry Fields Forever
Rain
Across the Universe
She Said She Said
Don´t Let Me Down
You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
Girl
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
In My Life
I'm So Tired
Revolution
A Day In The Life

I'm going to put the second group of 18 in my car too:

A Hard Day's Night
Please Please Me
Not A Second Time
You Can't Do That
All I've Got To Do
I Call Your Name
Sexy Sadie
Julia
If I Fell
I'm A Loser
Ticket to Ride
I'm Only Sleeping
I Feel Fine
Help!
Mind Games
I Am The Walrus
All You Need Is Love
You Know My Name (Look up the Number)

Some things about the sequencing I did on purpose. Others I find amusing now that I notice, like that I put the two songs with exclamation points together. These are all songs that appeal to me for one reason or another, and I didn't put them in the order that I favor them, though I did put my favorite one first.

UPDATE: Al Hurd remembers John and lines up 3 discs worth of songs.

Cabbage-blogging.

An emailer, having read my last post, declares: Forget tire-blogging! The new thing is cabbage-blogging! I look into it the new trend. Hey! Just yesterday a head of cabbage was revealed as Fafblog's Man of the Year!

Well, maybe you are in the midst of making your Red Cabbage Christmas Salad. Maybe you are Croatian, celebrating a traditional Croatian Christmas, with some fine stuffed cabbage. Here's some Spanish Christmas cabbage. How many nationalities have a Christmas cabbage dish? Feel free to cabbage-blog!

Or maybe you have a Christmasy cabbage miracle to tell about.

Did you know broccoli is a type of cabbage?

Did you know "cole slaw" is just Dutch for sliced cabbage: koolsla?

Did you know Cabbage Patch Dolls are back this year? Maybe you've got one wrapped under the tree right now. Did you know there was an urban legend that the CIA or President Reagan had Cabbage Patch Dolls designed to get people used to loving ugly babies so humanity could carry on after a nuclear war?

Speaking of ugly, did you know you can get a Donald Trump Cabbage Patch Doll?

And then there is the cabbage of fable:

It is said that no sort of food causes so much thirst as cabbage, especially that called colewort. Pausanias tells us it first sprang from the sweat of Jupiter, some drops of which fell on the earth. Cœlius, Rhodiginus, Ovid, Suidas, and others repeat the same fable.

Rabelais: Pantagruel, book iv. (Prologue). “Some drops of sweat happening to light on the earth produced what mortals call cabbage.”—

The poets have lavished their attention on the lowly cabbage. Yeats:

All his happier dreams came true
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
“What then?”sang Plato’s ghost, “what then?”

Lewis Carrol:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

There is also the cabbage of politics. H.L. Mencken has good political wisdom framed in cabbage terms: "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

And George Orwell begins his "1984" with the reek of cabbage:

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.

Well, that reminds me what I don't like about cabbage. So maybe I won't get too carried away with the new cabbage-blogging craze. So don't hesitate to pick up the slack and cabbage-blog yourself.