You take a cup of applesauce. You add a pinch of straw. You drop in fourteen oysters (seven cooked and seven raw).
Doing research entertains me, and I’d like to think I have some skill at creatively synthesizing disparate sources into something coherent and accurate. Here I’ll be writing up some of my thoughts, findings, and theories on a range of topics, none of which I will have any “qualifications” to discuss. I was planning to start off with some essays on neuroscience and consciousness, but I went on a long detour into the world of marine invertebrates, and then another long detour into human population history, so I’ll start there instead. According to my notes, I’ll eventually have things to say about mucus, sunscreen, metformin, why people have dreams about their teeth falling out, how cheap Chinese take-out is like ketamine, why yawning is contagious, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, the nature of suffering, rat erections, the jhanas, and aesthetic experience as viewed through the very cringe-y lens of different Hogwarts houses.
What’s with the name “Glunker Stew”?
In a little remembered 1969 Dr. Seuss book, there is a story called “The Glunk that Got Thunk.” The narrator — apparently the original endpapers make explicit that he’s the Cat in the Hat’s young son, though the story itself only implies this — says that his sister likes to “use her Thinker-Upper” to “think[] up friendly little things / With smiles and fuzzy fur.” But she gets bored with the friendly little things and decides instead to push her Thinker-Upper to its limit. This is a mistake:
Then, BLUNK! Her Thinker-Upper thunked A double klunker-klunk. My sister's eyes flew open And she saw she'd thunked a Glunk! He was greenish. Not too cleanish. And he sort of had bad breath. "Good gracious!" gasped my sister. "I have thunked up quite a meth!"
At first, the Glunk doesn’t seem dangerous, but he is rude and condescending, and he jeopardizes the Cat-in-the-Hat family’s financial security by recklessly making an expensive long-distance phone call to his beloved mother, to whom he painstakingly explains the complicated recipe for Glunker Stew, which includes a “hunk of chuck-a-luck” and “[t]hree dozen kinds of berries.”
The summoner of the Glunk tries to “Un-thunk” him, but, on her own, she fails. Finally, though, her brother shows up.
Could she Un-thunk the Glunk alone?... It's very doubtful whether. So I turned on MY Un-thinker. We Un-thunk the Glunk together. Then I gave her Quite a talking to About her Thinker-Upper. NOW... She only Thinks up fuzzy things In the evening, after supper.
There are lots of things I like about this silly little story — the sense of both the power and danger of reification, the unexpected role of telecom-related practicalities, the way that it pits sibling collaboration against ostentatious filial piety — but I’ll leave a full explication as an exercise for the reader. At any rate, that’s the agenda here: thinking up fuzzy things in the evening, after supper. And oh yeah, there won’t be a paywall. This is a hobby, not a business:
"Money?...Pooh!" The Glunk just laughed. "Don't think of things like that." Then he said, "Now, darling mother, Let me see. Where was I at?"