Where did the lamprey come from? This animal happens to be central in my PhD thesis, which I hope to defend in June ...

Remember that my childhood was full of woe and strife;

'Cos I was squeezed out of my Mum by an ultravigorous Dad

And dumped right on the gravel - it's all so very sad.

And if that wasn't bad enough my parents went and died

And left me orphaned in this stream, an insult to my pride;

But, when I'm a little older - some say four or five - I'm going to change my colours and really come alive.

You may think I'm kidding but inside my notochord

I feel these changes coming and teeth growing like a horde;

I'll live on social welfare and I'll suck you good and dry

A daily blood transfusion should keep me feeling spry.

Never mind your blood group - just let me hitch a ride

Roll over if you wish to - I'll latch on to either side

I'm not worried by your morals or your very numerous scales

Board and lodging's quite enough - I've no interest in your tails!

Your pelagic upper class has had it god too long

Don't forget we're not just suckers for you to string alone

And now I've made my mark and it looks as if you're dying

I'm off to spawn upriver, to keep the red flag flying"

... and of course the thread in Gravity's Rainbow, where the sinister Dr Ned Pointsman and his cohort of Pavlovians, such as Jeremiah 'Merciful' Evans, share a copy of a manuscript by the Master, trying to 'prove the stone determinism of every soul' ... up against them is one Roger Mexico, the 'antipointsman', the heroic representative of both mathematical chaos and messy human randomness... and his friend, who's named Jessica...

Argh, it's those synchronicities again.

I had a theory that in Gravity's Rainbow 'escape' from paranoid pattern-making is essentially impossible. That is antiparanoia, where nothing connects to anything else, a state few can survive for very long.

But we can choose our patterns, our forms of paranoia ('even Goya couldn't draw ya'), our ruling structures - we have a degree of control over what looms out of the flux.

One such dichotomy is the choice between the moiré and the chessboard -- the former standing for degrees of freedom, of higher-order structure emerging from the interplay of periodic patterns, while the chessboard represents sinister paranoia, fear, Kafkaesque control nightmares, the concept of determinism and a game run by somebody else, aka 'Them'.

Which is why the proverb for paranoids tells us: <You hide, They seek>.

Paranoids, in the Pynchon universe, are also linked to schlemiels, or goofily chaotic but human(e) persons, and to the Preterite, the passed-over souls in Calvinist theology who are neither Damned nor Saved, but left to muddle through on their own, or together, as the case may be.

Good question. Somebody very famous -- rather embarrassingly, I've forgotten who -- was reputed to have died from eating 'a surfeit of lampreys'. So now I can't use the word 'surfeit' without thinking of lampreys.

And there's also a convoluted poem by Ogden Nash, where the god Jupiter (or Jove?) decides to dress up as a lamprey fisherman to seduce a Greek nymph (his other costumes, like bulls and swans, were being cleaned) ... but he couldn't find his lamprey-fisherman costume either, so turned up naked with a lamprey bucket/net/spear.

And she turned him down. According to Nash (and it helps to think of Roosevelt and 1930s USA here) ...

"He offered her his chariot, a dandy four-wheeler/
But she was a Southern Nymph, a Hellenic Dixiecrat, and she had been taught never to trust a Nude Eeler."

Lamprey: A pseudo-fish of the genus Petromyzon, resmbling an eel in shape and in having no scales. It has a sucker-mouth, pouch-like gills, seven spiracles on each side of the head, and a fistula or opening on the top of the head.

< A more positive approach might be to harvest and market the lampreys. For centuries, river lampreys have been considered a delicacy in Europe -- King Henry I of England, in a fit of royal gluttony, is said to have died from a "surfeit of lamprey." But the unappetizing appearance of the eel-like fish and their unpalatable state when caught on their spawning runs has so far undermined their popularity as a food fish in this country.>

The mind boggles on all available cylinders. You looking at eel neurons, doc? Ganglia with ancient jaws? Computers powered by proto-fish? Or that old philosophical poser, <What is it like to be a Lamprey?>

Those things have a nervous system? Maybe they write poems and poison princes too...

This fish angle could explain what John Cale meant:

"Like that ancient teenage dream/
Of sole to poison sole to poison sole..."

Both the <Lamprey> and <Remora> have virtually identical physical structures, including shspe and fin arrangement.

Both follow other fish-hosts like shadows.

What is the difference between them?

(there are two)

As you'll have noticed, I know very, very little about actual lampreys. Just that they're vaguely eel-like, don't belong to the regular pelagic fishy families, and have some kinda jaw problem...

And are presumably edible in small doses.

Amazing, isn't it, that you can be a professional *anything* when your professional results are no better than chance ... hi, I'm a professional lawyer, this here bell curve shows the distribution of my clients on death row ... why that's astonishing, I'm a professional dentist, and if you examine my patients you'll find their rotten teeth match the dentistry-free pattern *exactly* ... but all a dentist needs is a strong right arm and an indifference to human suffering...

I'd better not mention clerics. If they ever got near a bell curve it'd be a miracle in itself...

*reverts to science mode after earlier delusional passage*

Well, it just wouldn't be the same in Canada, would it?

There was a young girl in Quebec
Who was buried in snow to her neck
When they asked "Are you friz?"
She said "Yeah, I is,
but we don't call this cold in Quebec".

We can work out who won the Ashes on wicket countback tomorrow.

G'night, all.

Beware the <mighty Limerick!>

Remember what happened last time....

Just saying.

Absolutely! The lamprey is the most primitive vertebrate that still exists - it hasn't evolved much in the last 400 million years - and so it is a good model system for understanding how locomotion [swimming] is generated in neurons in the spinal cord. This is a link to the group I work with:

Up at this Ungawdly hour to finish my <Canadian Pubic Policy> paper, due at the <Witching Hour>. Luckily, this will keep me in front of the Computer all day so I'll be checking in regularly for <spamming breaks>...

Aint you outta bed yet <Dominate>? This is no way to run an Empire!!

<Ziggurat> I enjoy your fine stepped Pyramids, sir. I notice no one has answered my <Lamprey/Remora> trivia question yet? Don't you guys watch the <Discovery Channel>?

Ad Astra!!!
Vita Brevis, Ars Longa!!
Ergo Jump in the Lake!!