"I am the walrus"

Mink with crayfish, Saskatchewan. (Wikipedia via Matt P.)

Badger kin + bad jerkin

Julian Barnes writes about Jules Renard in the LRB:

he sits at a cluttered desk; behind him is a scruffy bookcase and a calendar showing the first of some month; on the floral wallpaper hangs a looped speaking tube, perhaps for ordering his mid-morning coffee. He looks wary and fierce, badger-like, as if he has just been dragged from his sett, stuffed into a suit that scarcely fits and ordered to face the camera: the result is one of the most ill-at-ease author photos I have ever seen.

Romps and rafts of otters

Wikipedia:

The word otter derives from the Old English word otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from the PIE root *wódr̥ which also gave rise to the English word water.^[1][2]
An otter's den is called a holt or couch. A male otter is a dog, a female a bitch, and a baby a whelp, kit, or pup.^{[citation needed]} The collective nouns for otters are bevy, family, lodge or romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature, or when in water raft.

OED agrees and notes that otter was metanalyzed in the Middle Ages as "a notyr." (I seem to remember having blogged this fact but can't find the post.) A meaning of note:

c1700    Street-robberies Consider'd 33   Otter, a sailor.

Another:

A fishing device, typically used by poachers or other unlicensed anglers, consisting of a wooden float with baited hooks attached that is paid out on a long line; (also) a similar device used by anglers to retrieve fishing gear that has become snagged.

Mormon replacement therapy

(Posted here because of the riffs on "the Mormon Church’s Head of Public Affairs, Michael Otterson, a master craftsman of the Utahan bland style")

Snippets from James Fenton's review (NYRBlog) of the South-Park-inspired musical "Book of Mormon":

To the perhaps prosaic mind of Michael Otterson, a satire that turns on the supposed irrelevance and ineffectiveness of the Mormon mission to Africa is very much wide of the mark. After all, as he pointed out to the Post’s readers, in the seven years that it had taken the creative team to put together and mount The Book of Mormon, the Mormon Church in Africa had been responsible for bringing clean water to more than four million Africans, getting wheelchairs to 34,000 legless children, and so on. Why should Otterson pay $200 for a ticket to be “sold the idea that religion moves along oblivious to real-world problems in a kind of blissful naiveté”?

He has a point. The comic situation of The Book of Mormon is perfectly serviceable as comedy, but it has no interest at all as satire on the Mormons’ African mission. We are in Uganda, but we might as well be in Kazakhstan, or any kind of nightmare Abroad. From the point of view of the Mormon missionaries, the attitude of the natives toward Almighty God is crudely dismissive, and expressed in language which causes gasps of tickled outrage from the audience. But it is impossible to reconcile this happy-go-lucky indifference to the Supreme Being with what we have encountered in recent history when the African churches have had their say on the future of, for instance, the Anglican church. What often comes back at us out of Africa, by way of Christian culture, is a sharp Victorian rebuke for our back-sliding. It has nothing happy-go-lucky about it. 

And about the Mormon church's willingness to make adjustments (cf. Russell, "The Mormons had a divine revelation in favour of polygamy, but under pressure from the United States Government they discovered that the revelation was not binding.")

This willingness, admirable in its modest way, to jettison or modify revelation in order to conform to public opinion, has been characteristic of Mormonism since the long dispute over polygamy: in the end, it would seem, they get the point. They listen to criticism over the decades. They make some furtive adjustments. They clean up their act. [...] In the context of the musical, the openness to ragging, the patience under blasphemous attack, become less mysterious. It is as if they understand the ridicule that they are currently undergoing at the Eugene O’Neill Theater to constitute a sort of hazing. To get through the ordeal they must keep their good humor, and it is worth doing so because, at the end of the hazing, their reward will be a greater acceptance in society.

"It's not a weasel, it's a marten"

NYT via Jenny Davidson:

Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into an apartment and assaulted a man in Washington state.

The victim asked, "Why are you carrying a weasel?" Police said the attacker answered, "It's not a weasel, it's a marten," then punched him in the nose and fled.

The attacker was apparently looking for his girlfriend and had gone to her former boyfriend's apartment Monday where the victim was a guest.

KXRO reports he left the carcass behind.

Police later found the 33-year-old Hoquiam man arguing with his girlfriend at another location and arrested him after a fight.

He said he had found the marten dead near Hoquiam, but police don't know why he carried it with him.

A marten is a member of the weasel family.

It would be misleading to describe this story as raising more questions than it answers: it doesn't answer any.

Migratory patterns of books

The Grob sends this along from Vietnam, where he's holidaying:

I love the luxuriant bright red hair, which enhances the usual association of mustelids with lechery; however, the book on the whole sounds more Fay Weldon than SEAL club. I'm always surprised by which English-lang. books make it to faraway parts of the world; I suppose they just indiscriminately acquire remaindered books: e.g., when Calista was exploring the remoter parts of India (I think) last year, she found

a bookstore here with a sizable volume of lowell (and aside from _the audacity of hope_, _mein kampf_, various things by paulo coelho, very little else).