The product of an odd night, in which I slept from 7:30 pm to 4:56 am, with a waking period between 2 and 3, when I worked through ideas swirling in my head, demanding to be explored, plus sexual arousal that needed satisfying before I could drop back to sleep, slipping into wonderful dreams, about movies (who knows why; I was aiming for a fresh edition of one of my favorite affectionate sex stories, but that’s not what I got), until I woke feeling happy and refreshed — but had to assemble notes on the movie stuff, so it’s 6:30 and I just got to my morning vitals (which are dramatically good) and now really really need breakfast, before I can tell you about the movies.
Archive for the ‘Sleep’ Category
Movies
May 25, 2025Wrong window, said the sea lion, absurdly
July 27, 2024This Charlie Hankin cartoon in the July 29, 2024 New Yorker:
(#1) Hankin is an old acquaintance on this blog; see the Page on my postings about his cartoons
The cartoon shows people queuing up at multiple windows in a bureaucratic office, each line for one type of applicant (as, in the US, at the (state) department of motor vehicles, the (federal) unemployment benefits office, or the municipal permits bureau), with one clerk for each line; in the cartoon, each queued applicant comes with some kind of ticket in hand. So far, that’s a familiar situation.
But then it’s made absurd when the clerks are aquatic mammals; a sea lion appears in the cartoon, which also refers to otters, but who knows what the other clerks are like: a manatee, a dolphin, a seal, a whale (or perhaps a polar bear, a beaver, a muskrat, a mink, a water shrew, a capybara or a hippopotamus) — given a choice, I would go to the otter or the capybara, but that’s my personal taste.
Snail, asleep
June 7, 2024An Amy Hwang cartoon in the latest — 10/23 — issue of the New Yorker that I found hugely funny, for reasons I couldn’t at first explain:
(#1)
Well, there are people who can fall asleep (pretty much) anywhere, as they say — I’ve been such a person for about 70 years now — but I have never just lain down for an impromptu nap on the ground out in the world, as the snail in #1 seems to have done, preposterously.
Actually, the cartoon snail is lying flat as a flounder, in such a way that it’s hard to be sure that it’s only somnolent and not in fact deceased. It could well be not merely sleeping, but dead — reversing the customary formula, of many applicabilities, that someone or something isn’t dead, but only sleeping. Snail3 in the cartoon looks a lot like the Monty Python pet-shop parrot: this is an ex-snail, gone to meet its maker, and its snail buddies are just slip-sliding along in denial.
So #1 is wonderfully absurd. It’s also an excellent example of a cartoon existing equally in two worlds: visually, the world of snails (lacking males, since snails are generally hermaphroditic; bereft of speech; and also exhibiting dormancy but not, apparently, actual sleep); behaviorally, the world of human beings (where Snail1 can remark that he — Snail3 — can fall asleep anywhere).
But then I was carried away into the complexities of sleep in human beings and in other creatures (where it contrasts with rest and dormancy, not to mention death) and into the behavior of snails, where I will report — surprise! — on a 2011 study from the Journal of Experimental Biology about a common pond snail:
Behavioural evidence for a sleep-like quiescent state in a pulmonate mollusc, Lymnaea stagnalis (Linnaeus)