"My girlfriend turned into a worm."

"So every afternoon..."

Am I the only one who remembers Willie the Worm?

That is a puppet show — on WCAU Philadelphia — that got started in 1950. I myself got started in 1950, in Texas, of all places, but I emerged in January 1951, in the Philadelphia television market, so I had the great good fortune to encounter this simple worm character when I was young enough to get the sense that he was important and well-loved.

It must have been more than a half century since Willie the Worm crossed my mind, but my memory was jogged yesterday as I was walking through the neighborhood with Meade, and we stopped to look at an elaborate yard display that had a sign with the lyric "Whisper words of wisdom" from the Beatles' song "Let It Be." The painted letters were a bit blobby and misshapen, and Meade read it as "Whisper worms of wisdom." My memory whispered the name of that worm of wisdom: "Willie."

I'm so touched to find video of my long-lost childhood friend, the puppet Willie the Worm. But let me acknowledge 2 other Willies the Worm:

"And I did my little audition and they said can you do it more southern? And I'm like, are you shitting me?"

"It's like, you got to be shitting me. I said, well, what you have to understand is I actually did just get off the turnip truck from back there and this is how you talk.... And it was like, oh, I, I see what they're getting at. Yeah. So they wanted the Foghorn Leghorn — you know, now, ovah heah, what we have is — and... I grew up down there. I never heard that.... There are a lot of performances over the years where people who are not from the South played the part that actually used that accent. And they win Academy Awards and stuff. And I'm like, wow. So anyway, I didn't get this part. And the guy who got the part literally sounded like he was in the Bronx, but he was doing that thing, you know, I thought, wow, this is gonna be tough out here...."

Said Billy Bob Thornton, talking to Joe Rogan about the Southern accent.

Scroll back to 25:35 if you want to hear Joe link the Southern drawl to hookworm infection. I didn't think I'd hear Joe talking about "dewormers" again, but he does. 

"He’s saying, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me!' In this case, it’s sundering history."

"If you worked in the White House, you have a reverence for every wall of that place. Tattered as it may have been, there was a dignity to it. It was a quietly stately citadel of power in America, not a palace for a mad king. Trump has a manic desire to tear down history and write his own.... He believes that the only thing you can do wrong is that which is not in your self-interest."

Said David Axelrod, quoted by Maureen Dowd, in "Burnin’ Down the House" (NYT).

Sundered. 

Dowd's own words: "The president has the kind of blot-out-the-sun narcissism that spurs him to do whatever it takes to keep all eyes on him. He ignores the law, procedures, consequences. It’s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.... Trump’s talent is finding wormholes in the system that he can exploit for his own satisfaction or financial gain — things that are not specifically outlawed because it never occurred to the founders or anyone else that a lowlife could rise so high."

They left wormholes because they didn't think there would be any worms? Stop underestimating the founders! 

"If you can’t bear to leave them where they are, get the kids to kick them into a corner, stick them in a pile, let the hedgehogs and earthworms use them."

From "Should you sweep up leaves? Gardeners say no — here’s why/Experts say leaving fallen leaves in your garden could be the simplest act of conservation by providing food for worms and shelter for hedgehogs" (London Times).

By "sweep," I think they just mean rake. When we Americans say "sweep," we picture a broom.

Speaking of brooms.... have you ever heard of "The Broom of Destruction"? Here, it's in Isaiah 14:22-23:

‘I will rise up against them,’ declares the Lord Almighty. ‘I will wipe out Babylon’s name and survivors, her offspring and descendants,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will turn her into a place for owls and into swampland; I will sweep her with the broom of destruction,’ declares the Lord Almighty.

Small worm the size of a large worm.

RFK Jr. is my presumptive choice for President, so I'm keeping track of what the mainstream media has to say about him. They seem to be heightening the scrutiny, so let's take a look:

New York Times: "R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain/The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain."

In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor.... Several doctors noticed a dark spot on [his] brain scans.... The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in [his 2012 divorce] deposition.... In the interview with The Times, he said he had recovered from the memory loss and fogginess and had no aftereffects from the parasite, which he said had not required treatment.... Several infectious disease experts and neurosurgeons said... they believed it was likely a pork tapeworm larva.... Though it is impossible to know, [one doctor said] it is unlikely that a parasite would eat a part of the brain.... 

Washington Post: "RFK Jr’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test/A line-by-line dissection shows he’s often echoing Russian talking points" (by Glenn Kessler, the "fact checker")(free access link). Excerpt from a long piece:

A reader asked us to fact-check a four-minute “history lesson” posted by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on YouTube. International events — and the causes of war — are often open to interpretation. But Kennedy’s lecture, about how the United States allegedly provoked the Ukraine war, was filled with so much misinformation and Russian talking points that it seems worthy of a detailed look....

“When the wall came down in the Soviet Union and Europe, [Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev destroyed himself politically by doing something that was very, very courageous. He went to [President George H.W.] Bush. He said, ‘I’m going to allow you to reunify Germany under a NATO army. I’m going to remove 450,000 Soviet troops. But I want your commitment. After that, you will not move NATO one inch to the east.’ And we solemnly swore that we wouldn’t do it.”

Heridescence.

I'm trying to read "Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art/The artist and musician uses machine learning to make strange, playful work. She also advocates for artists’ autonomy in a world shaped by A.I." (The New Yorker):

While Herndon applied lipstick and Dryhurst packed a diaper bag, I sat alone with Link in the living room, administering a bottle of milk. As he turned his head, he looked first like one parent, then like the other—a quality Dryhurst called “heridescence.” I thought about the ways that parenthood forced and foreclosed on multiplicity. What was more of a fork than a baby?... [Later, at the gallery, s]trobe lights periodically illuminated three large heaps of compost, flecked with humus; a machine puffed artificial fog. Speakers played recordings of a compost pile.... The sounds of worms and microorganisms at work emerged as the honking peals of a saxophone.... In a side room, a sheaf of poems, printed on edible paper, sat on a spotlighted pedestal. Visitors were invited to eat them. It was hard to know how to be. “Let’s go somewhere else,” a small child said to her father.

What was more of a fork than a baby?

"The major take-home message or summary of this discovery is that it is, in principle, possible to stop life for more or less an indefinite time and then restart it."

Said Professor Teymuras Kurzchalia, "Worms Revived After 46,000 Years Frozen in Siberian Permafrost/Scientists want to understand how the worms survived in extreme conditions for extraordinarily long periods of time" (NYT).

The worms, which were buried approximately 130 feet in the permafrost, were revived simply by putting them in water, according to a news release from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany....

The creatures, which have a life span measured in days, died after reproducing several generations in the lab, researchers said.... The roughly millimeter-long worms were able to resist extreme low temperatures by entering a dormant state called cryptobiosis.... Researchers identified key genes in the nematode that allow it to achieve the cryptobiotic state....

If only they could engineer those key genes for us, the humans, then perhaps one day we could moisten our dead and bring them back to life for a little while. 

"The hammerhead worm... slithers like a snake and resembles a piece of whole-wheat spaghetti, led by its mushroom-shaped head."

"And it also secretes tetrodotoxin, the same debilitating neurotoxin found in puffer fish...."

 

From "Toxin-secreting hammerhead worms are invading the D.C. area. How to stop them. The snake-like worms contain a potent neurotoxin and can grow more than 22 inches long" (WaPo).

"Plans are afoot to turn Notre Dame cathedral, once it’s restored, into what some have called a 'politically correct Disneyland'...."

"The plans, yet to be rubber-stamped, will turn the cathedral into an ‘experimental showroom,' with confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures replaced with modern art murals. New sound and light effects will be introduced to create ‘emotional spaces.' Themed chapels on a ‘discovery trail’, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia, will pop up. And Bible quotations will be projected onto chapel walls in various languages, including Mandarin. The last chapel on the new trail will have an environmental emphasis. Defenders of the new plan are bound to say that Notre Dame, before the heart-breaking fire of 2019, was already an artifice. The sublime cathedral, begun in 1163, was heavily adapted in a Gothic Revival style in the late nineteenth century.... With exceptional buildings, close to the public’s heart, like Notre Dame... architects can’t get away with doing the hideous things that go down well at the club. Well, they can’t on the outside of buildings, anyway.... And so radical changes for the exterior were vetoed.... Because people aren’t quite so familiar with the inside of Notre Dame, there is greater wriggle room for the anti-history brigade to prevail...."

From "Don’t turn Notre Dame into a 'politically correct Disneyland'" by Harry Mount (The Spectator).

I agree with Mount, but I just want to descend into the mundane language issue: Is "wriggle room" the British version of "wiggle room," and, if so, are there subtle, interesting difference between wriggling and wiggling that we ought to take into account? 

The OED does not have anything about "wriggle room," but it does have a definition for "wiggle room," though it's a "draft addition": 

Another U.S. expression the OED notes is "get a wiggle on" (which means to hurry). English has so many words. Do we need both "wriggle" and "wiggle"? And we also have "squirm" and "writhe," to name 2 more. "Squirm" has the advantage of rhyming with "worm," but worms really seem more to wriggle... or is it wiggle? "Wiggle" is the official Bob Dylan choice.

I'm not that worked up about the Disneyfication of the interior of Notre Dame. The contents of those alcoves along the perimeter are transitory — they'll live out their little lives and pass away.

UPDATE: This post made me remember a song that I don't think I have thought of in over half a century:

  

 

This song, from 1959, is by the stunningly unattractive men who called themselves The Playmates. Their hit that you're more likely to remember is "Beep Beep."

"When a 38-year-old man fell from his bed during a violent seizure, his wife found him shaking and 'speaking gibberish' on their bedroom floor at 4 a.m."

"After he arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the man, who was reported to be in good health and had no history of related symptoms, suffered another seizure. Doctors were stumped... until a CT scan of his head... finding three brain lesions, doctors diagnosed the man with neurocysticercosis after they concluded that larval cysts from a tapeworm had migrated to his head 20 years ago and embedded into parts of his brain.... 'This gentleman was a little atypical, but not amazingly rare, in that his parasites were dead and calcified and there was no living parasite in his brain for one or two decades... The infection was long gone, but part of his brain was scarred — and that scarred area was leading to the seizures.'"

From "His sudden seizures were a mystery. Then doctors saw a tapeworm in his brain from 20 years ago" (WaPo).

I was relieved to understand that the worm wasn't alive for 20 years. But then I start thinking about this: "Did you know that only one in ten of the cells in your body is actually human? That's right. A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature" (Huffpo).

Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?! 

ADDED: I say "I was relieved to understand that the worm wasn't alive for 20 years," but why would I have thought that? Because the caption under the photograph at the top of the page says, "Doctors found that a tapeworm had been living in a 38-year-old man's brain for 20 years"!

"The moment I got my first vaccine shot, I started thinking of the coronavirus the way I think of scurvy—something from a long-ago time that can no longer hurt me, something that mainly pirates get."

"'Yes,' the papers would say. 'But what if there’s a powerful surge this summer? This Christmas? A year from now? What if our next pandemic is worse than this one? What if it kills all the fish and cattle and poultry and affects our skin’s reaction to sunlight? What if it forces everyone to live underground and subsist on earthworms?'"

That's David Sedaris, in "Happy-Go-Lucky/'Who are you?' I want to ask the gentle gnome in front of me. 'And what have you done with Lou Sedaris?'”

That's in The New Yorker, so it's some kind of read on the location of the liberal American mind in this stage of the disease. I'm sure the story was written and nailed down before the most recent summer spike and new CDC words of guidance, but I'm going to take Sedaris's ridicule as a statement of where we — we, the New Yorker readers — are now.

There's much more to the story, and I won't spoil it, but it's an important update in the longstanding comedy that is the Sedaris family. I was delighted to see at the bottom of the last page: "His new book, 'A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020),' will be published in October, 2021." That is the second volume of his diaries, and I am — I believe — the world's biggest fan of the first volume. I have listened to the audiobook over 1,000 times.

"Tiny worms often breed in the mish, but are not dangerous. The saying 'the worms of the mish arise from it' means it is a problem that cannot be solved..."

"... but is not worth worrying about. The maggots comes from flies laying eggs on the cottage cheese that is left to drain on a straw mat, by the farmer in the open air. Sometimes they add Borax to kill the maggots, but you cannot use again as fermenting agent. If Mish is prepared in a factory, it does not contain any maggots."

I looked up "Mish" in Wikipedia. I love the simplicity of the image of this stuff...



And I love the metaphorical potential of the worms that arise from the food itself and that are not worth worrying about... though I am always going to object to maggots in any food you might want me to eat and the worms actually don't arise from the food, they are introduced by the flies, and it underscores that you don't want flies landing on your food.

But, anyway, I was looking up "Mish" because I was trying to figure out if there was any reason why I shouldn't link to this piece — "Trump Demands CNN Apologize for a Poll Showing Biden in the Lead" — written by someone who goes by the name Mish. This is at TheStreet, a website co-founded by Jim Cramer. I haven't come up with any reason not to read this article. Don't know if there are any worms arising from within, so let's dip in:

The Trump campaign claims is the CNN poll is "designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling." "It's a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President"... Two days ago Trump says he "hired respected pollster, McLaughlin & Associates, to analyze today's CNN Poll"...

Unusual Cease and Desist Order

The demand for a retraction and a very unusual cease-and-desist order came out today....

Totally Amusing Response

“To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media,” said CNN executive vice president David Vigilante. "CNN is well aware of the reputation of McLaughlin and Associates. In 2014 his firm famously reported Eric Cantor was leading his primary challenger by 34 points only to lose by 11 - a 45 point swing. The firm has a C/D rating from FiveThirtyEight"....

"New species of bloodsucking leech with three jaws and 59 teeth found outside Washington."

A WaPo headline.

AND: In other worm news, "Ancient Britons had giant worms in their kidneys, study shows" (Fox News)("It was great to find the earliest evidence for fish tapeworm, giant kidney worm, and Echinostoma worm so far discovered in Britain"). And, "‘Like spaghetti’: Worm-slurping, hopping rats discovered in the Philippines" (Mongabay)(" Once they detect an earthworm, they quickly pounce. They then brush the dirt off and swallow the worm whole, 'like a long spaghetti,' according to the scientists").

"Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented."

"People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night — familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren’t seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.... But the crux of the windshield phenomenon, the reason that the creeping suspicion of change is so creepy, is that insects wouldn’t have to disappear altogether for us to find ourselves missing them for reasons far beyond nostalgia.... [T]he losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported 'a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.' Lister’s inbox quickly filled with messages from other scientists, especially people who study soil invertebrates, telling him they were seeing similarly frightening declines. Even after his dire findings, Lister found the losses shocking: 'I didn’t even know about the earthworm crisis!'"

From "The Insect Apocalypse Is Here/What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?" (NYT Magazine).

There's some kind of race going on here in Madison. I think that's nice, but..."

... must the people scream continually? I guess it makes sense to the people who are on the scene, somewhere a few blocks from me — maybe Camp Randall (the football stadium)— but it just sounds like chaos from my desk next to open windows. The screaming started at 8 a.m. and has been continuous for now over an hour. I got up at 5, so it didn't wake me up, or it would have been even more annoying.

Last night, there was continual noise from the cicadas, but it didn't bother me because they're insects. I remember thinking that if the same noise were coming from a machine — the noise does sound mechanical — it would be intolerably annoying. Why are machines more annoying than insects? Because of people. People make machines and choose to run them, and I don't like that impinging on my serenity. The insects, I cut them some slack. They don't know what they're doing, and they certainly don't know I exist and have feelings.

But those screaming people right now...

OH: Speaking of the animals of Wisconsin, the other day, I was walking along the sidewalk when I unwittingly stepped on a worm. It caught my attention by going into what looked to me like writhing pain, like the biggest ham actor in a dying scene. I thought, oh, no, I hope it dies quickly and doesn't suffer, but can a worm suffer? This one sure looks like it does. I told my little story to Meade and he said, "That's a jumping worm." A jumping worm! Have you heard of these things? The worm wasn't suffering. It was doing the jumping worm thing it does all the time. I probably didn't even really step on it, just jostled it a tad.

"I thought this painting was finished in 2014... It ended up as an abstract piece that took ages to complete due to the intricate, worm-like patterns that filled the canvas."

"I was not able to appreciate or bond with the piece at that time, it was a struggle to complete and I was not satisfied with the end result at all. I had no idea what compelled me to paint it, or what it was trying to say, and it was shelved in my studio, where it rested in this unsatisfactory state for many months. Little did I realise that all would be revealed soon enough, and that this painting was being influenced by other beings.... In the summer of 2013, I went to stay in a traditional Bwiti village in the jungles of Gabon, ... Despite this seemingly bad news, I now understand the blessing of being infected with Loa Loa.... Now that I look back, I realise how strange and interesting it was to have my artwork subconsciously guided by a bunch of creative worms. It has made me wonder who the artist is, really?"

Writes Ben Taylor. Images of paintings at the link.

"If I were a plumber, would they have attacked me as ‘a callous plumber?’"

Said the lawyer, Jim Guinee, who made video of a worm crawling out of a half-eaten piece of cod and posted it on Facebook, with the name of the restaurant tagged, quoted in "Restaurant berates ‘irresponsible reaction’ of man who shared video of a worm in his food" (WaPo).

In a Facebook post about the incident, the restaurant said it takes “every precaution while preparing and cooking meals for the public.... With that being said, one of our seafood purveyors did send us Saturdays cod and missed the small worms that were found by two of our guests, located in the center of their piece of fish.... We immediately halted serving this dish. We also compensated the family of 8 generously and expressed our sincere concern and apologies that one our guests had anything less than an amazing experience at our restaurant.”

Then the restaurant called out Guinee, an attorney, saying it was “very surprised at the callousness and irresponsible reaction of an attorney of law to attempt to destroy our reputation & possible livelihoods due to something that could have happened to anyone, whether cooking at home or in a restaurant.”

Here's the video:

When WaPo reports on what's in The Daily Mail, it uses a stock photo of a beach in Martinique....

... and you have to click on a link to the Daily Mail to see the closeup of buttocks infested with worms.

The headline at WaPo is "Medical journal’s buttocks photos show up in tabloids. Patients not amused."

Key information: The couple consented to the use of the photographs, and they were warned that there was no way to control whether the "tabloid" press would notice the story in the medical journal and run with it. The Washington Post isn't the tabloid press, because it reported on the controversy and only used a pretty stock photo of a beach not an ugly ass photo.

The couple's name has not been used, but they're afraid there's enough identifying detail — the cruise to Martinique, the name of the hospital back home — that people who know them will figure it out. The damage in the Daily Mail was already done, though, and they created this new story that I'm reading now, about the journal withdrawing the article because they raised a stink. (That's the Streisand effect.) So they're more likely to become famous for their worm-infested ass, and they're also the people who forced the article out of the medical journal where it might help other people.

On the plus side, a lot more of us know of the potential to get worms in your ass by sitting on the beach. The beach in Martinique, you're thinking. No...

When [dogs and cats] defecate on the beach, hookworm larvae can easily migrate through the sand....  [S]ome beaches along the Gulf Coast of the U. S. and the Atlantic seaboard may also be teaming with the parasites.... [W]alking barefoot on contaminated beach may cause the infection. [Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston] said he speculates that this couple may have sat bare-bottomed on the sand, or the sand may have gotten into their bathing suits.

Hotez needs to take a closer look at women's bathing suits. Decades ago, women decided that the buttock was more or less part of the upper leg and could be completely exposed in the important pursuit of making the legs look longer. A woman sitting on the sand in the most ordinary women's bathing suit — unlike a man in just about any man's bathing suit — is going to have her buttocks in contact with the possibly worm-infested sand.

ADDED: Amazingly, there is also video of the worm coming up out of the sand:

"Let me get this straight. You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?"

From "Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?/A British broadcaster doggedly tried to put words into the academic’s mouth" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

The quote in the post headline is what Cathy Newman said after Peterson said:

There’s this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy. And that is so untrue that it’s almost unbelievable. I use the lobster as an example: We diverged from lobsters evolutionarily history about 350 million years ago. And lobsters exist in hierarchies. They have a nervous system attuned to the hierarchy. And that nervous system runs on serotonin just like ours. The nervous system of the lobster and the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters. And it’s part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn’t.

Lots more quotes from the interview and analysis of what's going on at the link. I just want to quote something from the movie "The Lobster":

HOTEL MANAGER — The fact that you'll turn into an animal if you don't manage to fall in love with another person during your stay here is not something that should upset you... Have you decided what animal you would like to be if you end up alone?

DAVID — A lobster.

HOTEL MANAGER — Why a lobster?

DAVID — Because a lobster lives to be over 100 years old, has blue blood just like an aristocrat and stays fertile all its life. And I like the sea very much. I water-ski and swim quite well, ever since I was a teenager.

HOTEL MANAGER — I must congratulate you. Usually the first thing people think of is a dog and that’s why the world is full of dogs.* Very few choose to become unusual animals, which is why they are endangered. Rarely does someone choose to be a tuna fish, due to the dangers it faces, or a polar bear, due to its adverse living conditions. A lobster is an excellent choice.

And here's the great David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster." Excerpt:

Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. The logic of this (preference p suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.

______________

* Notice that "the British broadcaster doggedly tried..."