Not smart enough to learn to chew their food before swallowing.
(warning: sad/gross pictures)
I loved the book Nine True Dolphin Stories as a kid and I'm pretty sure I haven't learned anything about them since, except maybe that they used to have feet and lost them. Also my kids are not intrigued by this book.
1 The most Unfogged part of that story foe those averse to clicking the link: Dolphins in other parts of the world have also had a hard time with octopus prey. For example, in 2012 a bottlenose dolphin in Greece was observed with an octopus clasped to its genitals.
Call me when a dolphin gets a handjob from the descent of a president.
Reading stories about the intelligence of dolphins, octopus, crows etc. has actually pushed me more towards a religious view of anthropocentrism. The intelligence of these other species seems sinister to me or at least to have a total lack of altruism. Even other ape societies seem like bad places to live with their rigidly enforced and universally acknowledged dominance hierarchies.
Maybe elephants are the exception to this. Anthropo-elephantocentrism. Has anyone come up with a theology where the Christian God is synthesized with Ganesh?
Why is everybody looking at me?
Has anyone come up with a theology where the Christian God is synthesized with Ganesh?
Hinduism, the Prego spaghetti sauce of religions ("It's in there!"), probably has already.
Even other ape societies seem like bad places to live with their rigidly enforced and universally acknowledged dominance hierarchies.
As opposed to human societies?
I feel like Hinduism deserves to be compared to a better type of spaghetti sauce.
or at least to have a total lack of altruism
Come on, the dolphin taught its kid who taught its friends that killing other animals is its own reward. How can you say it's not altruistic to share the thrill of murder?
3: It seems like an unwarranted assumption that the dolphin was trying to *eat* the octopus in that instance.
The better spaghetti sauces don't have slogans that go with the joke in 7.
Still, Paul Newman makes a better sauce.
or at least to have a total lack of altruism.
They've all been reading Ayn rand.
Dolphins in other parts of the world have also had a hard time with octopus prey
There is no way that that phrasing is accidental.
Maybe elephants are the exception to this.
Also whales. There have been reports of humpbacks protecting other species from sharks for no apparent reason other than altruism.
That piece about Tyler's grandsons is from 2012. But I looked and can't find an obit for either. A story from last year says they're still alive. And it looks like Irene Triplett, the last recipient of a Civil War pension, is still alive too.
And the first recipient of a Civil War II pension has just started high school.
There have been reports of humpbacks protecting other species from sharks for no apparent reason other than altruism because fuck sharks.
can't find an obit for either
How dare you think I didn't research my post? Wikipedia says they're both alive as of 1/2018.
Did you check the archives? http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_6523.html#514367
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_8581.html#816960
"I love you, you love me, we're as happy as can be."
I still remember the dickwick on Crooked Timber who all about how LeGuin was "a smaller writer with less to say" than Tolkien because she wasn't writing militaristic romance fiction. Good times.
I do love this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUQpWCZWsAARZGX.jpg
I don't know who you are, but great pseud.
I have previously been a medical professional and a member of the peerage before I came out as my true self, if that helps. Good to see you, Moby.
Oh, that does help.
I'm sad about LeGuin -- the first three Earthsea books are one of my formative fairytales.
Aw, man, I was hoping Le Guin would stay alive long enough for the Nobel committee to realize that trolling Philip Roth by giving a science fiction writer--and a woman--would be even better than giving it to Bob Dylan. (And she's a better writer than Dylan or Roth, so.)
Agree with 30: a perfect trilogy. Youth, maturity, old age. Thank God she was never tempted to write a fourth.
32: Hi Heebie! Hope you're doin' okay!
I do my part to frustrate and confuse Jeff Bezos by only using his websites to repeatedly buy identical copies of the Earthsea Quartet and to mail them to lots of different people at addresses around the world. Like LB, the books were and remain really important to me. The Archipelago is, I think, the only fantasy world that I have a powerful desire to visit, or perhaps to settle down and live in.
What shitty news. And LeGuin was the last person that we needed to lose in times like these.
33: Nor a fifth... (I enjoyed the short story collection, however.)
Damn, I really loved her books. It's been decades since I've read the Earthsea trilogy, would it stand up to a rereading now? Do I dare try?
Start by eating a peach and work your way up.
1,000 points to House Hick for Exceptional Wittiness at 38.
I probably should just try Earthsea. I read Discworld when Pratchett died and I don't want to be sexist.
Maybe I'll make my son read it instead. He only reads books where the Amazon description starts with:
Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world.
It costs 4 times as much as "To the Lighthouse," but I bet the odds that I get past page 4 are more than four times higher.
39 Good, maybe that's just what I need to get back into reading fiction again.
What a loss. Not just her writing but her commentary and very presence in our contemporary world. One of the very great ones has passed.
My DSA fiction group is starting with her book The Telling in ten days, but I swear I didn't have her killed to drum up interest. The work speaks for itself!
It costs 4 times as much as "To the Lighthouse," but I bet the odds that I get past page 4 are more than four times higher.
But if you read the first four sentences of To the Lighthouse you'll be halfway through.
[I really liked To the Lighthouse when I read it in high school but I think I'm a less sophisticated fiction reader now.]
41: Fucksakes. Minus 1,000 points for House Hick. Dafuq is wrong with you.
(Never tell people you never bothered to read Earthsea. That's like if your opener was "By the way, I burst into flames if I approach the sacred places of any faith. Just FYI.")
My boss and I have been talking about Le Guin a lot at work this week, as he has been reading the Dispossessed, and we've been telling one of our clients about her Antarctic expedition short story.*
* because we are building a thing for them** that includes a lot of Scott expedition material.
** the layoR yteicoS.
Theophilus ("Thè") Layor y Teicos, the well-known Spanish explorer.
50.2: a thing that might be open to the public? Polar exploration obsessive here.
re: 52
Yes. Probably launching very soon. It's a thing about the history of scientific publication, but one of the key case studies is the Discovery expedition, and photographs and archival material thereof.
re: 52
You know about:
https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/archives/
?
I still haven't read the Earthsea books, though I did see the Studio Ghibli movie. And I've read a bunch of other LeGuin. I'm just not much of a fantasy reader. Never read LOTR either. Made it about halfway through The Book of the New Sun.
53: aha. Keep me posted!
54: I've been to SPRI many times, but haven't gone into the archives...
I probably haven't read as much LeGuin as I should. Apart from the Earthsea trilogy, the other stuff I've read are short stories that she published in various magazines in the 80s. They were eventually published in a collection called Buffalo Gals, I believe.
29: I just now figured this out. Hi yourself.
50. Cool! Anything on Cherry-Garrard's penguin egg anecdote?
I consider myself reasonably literate but I had never even heard of "Earthsea" until this thread (I had heard of LeGuin and read the "Omelas" story, which I liked). I could blame myself but I choose to blame society, specifically in excluding it from some general canon sense of what it means to be reasonably literate. And I confess that picking up a tome of "fantasy" still feels like yuck, but maybe I will do so anyway.
61: I loved Earthsea, but it's fairy tales (as a description of genre rather than as a negative) so if that's not your thing, I wouldn't bother with it. It's fantastic for what it is, but if you don't read fairy tales, it's not for you.
As this is the "who's alive and who's dead" thread: NMM to Mark E Smith.
61: I think / hope it has a fair bit to recommend it even to people who wouldn't normally care about fantasy (although to be clear, it is 100% fantasy, especially the first book).
LeGuin starts out with a Bildungsroman and then gets fed up with that and does something more interesting, both in the context of the first book and in the overall series. The books are much slower and more meditative, even melancholy, than the kind of swords 'n' sorcery thrillride that I envisage when I think of "fantasy". They're well-written, and the writing is as understated as the world-building, which focuses on the responsibilities and disappointments of power, rather than anything more dramatic. The atmosphere owes more to (as LB says) traditional folk tales and epic poems than Tolkien, and LeGuin was doing interesting things with female and PoC characters long before it was fashionable - the second book particularly was a huge shock to me as a teenager but has really stayed with me.
I don't have a clear enough definition of "fairy tale' in my head to argue this systematically, but characterizing Earthsea as one feels intuitively wrong to me. Structurally and logically they feel to me novelistic. They use elements of myth and fairytale but bend them into a very consciously designed structure.
I finally looked up how to pronounce LeGuin and all the possibilities I thought of were wrong. This is a serious shortcoming of the internet as I can go for years not knowing how to pronounce something. Maybe there is an upside to all that "pivot to video", except I don't watch videos when there's an equivalent written story about something.
66: That's righter than what I said -- they are more novels than fairy tales. But the feel is fairytale enough that someone who doesn't want to read fairytales won't enjoy them, I don't think.
68: I think we'll have to agree to disagree there. I have no desire to read fairytales, except perhaps anthropologically.
64 Was just coming here to post that. I will be playing a lot of the Fall for the rest of the week.
I only liked the middle book of the first three Earthsea books.
This is a serious shortcoming of the internet as I can go for years not knowing how to pronounce something.
Wikipedia is useful in this regard if you've learned IPA. I learned Saoirse just this morning that way. (Irish spelling is, um.)
We should all learn IPA. My pet peeve is people trying to spell out how to pronounce things based on some weird rules that make sense only to them. Or saying something like "It's a hard G" or "It's a soft S". Those are utterances with no content.
I'm terrible at recommending specifics, because she was the first and longest "buy on publication sight unseen" authors for me. If you haven't read them, The Telling, The Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darkness are all good science fiction with societies and cultures at the center of the story (instead of tech).
If you're really allergic to science fiction too, you might still appreciate The Lathe of Heaven, or her recent collection Where on Earth (The Unreal and The Real Volume 1).
37: It'd absolutely stand up to a reread... particularly the Furthest Shore.
If I don't like it, it's all your fault because I just ordered it.
Which one did you order? A Wizard of Earthsea? The Furthest Shore is better as a culmination of the Earthsea trilogy, but given the shift in main character, it's not bad as a stand alone.
When in doubt, always pick the book with a wizard.
The Dispossessed is one of the greatest science fiction books, period.
If you're really allergic to science fiction too, you might still appreciate The Lathe of Heaven
Speaking as someone who never reads science fiction and has read The Lathe of Heaven, this is correct.
Earthsea is starting very solidly. "Poor boy from obscurity with unexpected power" became a cliche for a reason.
It's kind of dragging now. Too much telling and not enough showing.
