Here’s an octopus carrying discarded a coconut shell and using it as shelter or armor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUN6c5yWJhQ

I’m telling ya, if we humans blow it, the octopus will be running the show in some millions of years.

If you love octopus stories, you’ve probably heard of the boy and girl octupi who got married and walked down the aisle arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm. . .

Mac: Quite right!

Later in the seventies Firesign dropped most drug humor. “The Tale of the Giant Rat Sumatra” was their Sherlock Holmes parody and remained entirely within the Holmes world, aside from stretching things with bizarre and/or bawdy humor plus sly references to Holmes’ coke habit.
________________________________________________________

“The road to opportunity is paved with Californians.” — Firesign Theater

I’ll have to dig those LPs out of the closet and give them a new listen.

Their albums were a tad uneven after the first golden four, but I can listen to “The Giant Rat of Sumatra,” “Everything You Know is Wrong,” and “Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death” pretty much anytime.

For the uninitiated, Firesign intentionally created their albums to be listened to 40 or more times. The explored the limits of the studio as thoroughly as any rock band and packed an amazing number of jokes, cross-references and cultural allusions into each album. Those who discount Firesign as drug humor have no idea what they are missing.

I doubt we’ll see Firesign’s like again. Comedy is almost entirely solo based on stand-up acts. Firesign was a group effort intended to produce audio movies. No one has attempted anything as ambitious in comedy since.

Sadly Peter Bergman and Phil Austin are no longer with us, but David Ossman and Philip Proctor are still alive and active.

Neo: I rewatched all of the original Upstairs Downstairs a decade or so ago. Not sure how much is nostalgia but I thought it held up pretty well. Did you see the attempted revival, about the time Downton started? I thought it was pretty good, better than Downton, but Downton ran away with that contest.

I have always posted under my real name and that has resulted in several nasty leftists seeking personal information to use in comments attacking me for my opinions. …
My disagreement on the role of single payer was enough to result in lots of nasty personal attacks, not attacks on policy ideas, and then deleting my comments, then by banning me. That was 2004 and deplatforming opponents was already a popular tactic of the left.”

Right. Why hand them ammunition?

In the pre-Heller decision days, when the right as a matter of “settled law” was supposedly up for grabs, there were plenty of highly emotional types who were dedicated to making you emotional as well if they could manage no better.

If they cannot beat your argument they figure they will use whatever rhetorical means – invective, provocation, childish ridicule of anything – in order to get an advantage; or at least discomfit you.

If you continue to respond in a careful logic machine-like manner, it only drives them more insane. And yes, when I was posting comments in a couple of fora under a longer version of this tag, which resembled my own name to a greater degree, I saw certain persons openly asking others to try and find out who I was and where I lived. Yeah, me, JoeNobody.

This led to some interesting exchanges, especially with one fellow who had found through a third party what my name was (it really was no task as only a couple letters were missing) and began making coy noises about this or that.

I had to set some detective relatives to getting me the information I needed, and then began addressing him by his full name. Whereupon he disappeared.

In a later situation over Obamacare, a somewhat similar situation erupted, and one member of a hostile Frick and Frack pair became insistent that he was going to look me up, and was trying to publicly rally the troops to assist him in this.

I got annoyed and offered him a meeting if that was what he wanted, and his fantasy that he was arguing with a weak old man faded, while his partner in insult began shouting warnings to him and saying that we should just all get along.

Had the little bugger shown up on my front porch, I would have broomed him off without so much as a word.

And all this was the result of nothing more than a couple of message board debates.

Imagine what a public figure puts up with: namely, crazies who are willing to provoke their own deaths in order to try and injure or wreck your reputation while doing so.

I love octopus stories.

Some years ago I read about an octopus in the Santa Monica aquarium that was fooling around with the recycling unit in its tank and inadvertently disassembled the recycler. Two hundred gallons of water spilled out onto the floor. The octopus was OK, but …

Bad octopus!

I give the octopus another 50-60 million years to evolve and learn to do differential equations.