Well aren't you sweet! Thank you very much for your kind words. I'm delighted to have provided a new bit of vocab; use it with my blessings.

Octopi are indeed extremely clever, although I've always wondered on what criteria exactly you can usefully compare the smartness of a tentacled sea creature to that of a house cat.

However. If you keep an octopus in an aquarium, it is not only quite likely to die soon of resentment and ennui, but if it deigns to stay alive you have to give it toys to play with, else it gets bored. Not only that, but you have to keep changing the toys for new ones, again lest tedium ensue. A dear friend has retailed to me someone's theory, whose I now forget, that octopi interact with the world in a prehensile, grabbing manner, and that this informs their intelligence in ways that pawed animals like cats just don't get. Plus they've got chromatophores, and they know how to use them.

Upshot: octopi rock. Hard.

Thanks again for the post.

Well, crap.

This means calling Democrats spineless or invertebrate(s) is no longer the insult it used to be.

Science is so inconvenient.

It's back to morons and half-wits until someone can come up with more fitting descriptions. I'm open to alternatives, and something tells me this is just the place to get a few.

We've been getting a lot of mileage of feckless in these parts, Arvin. You can use it in all sorts of tough lovin' ways.

As much as I love "feckless," Harry, I've been ceding use of it to Tony Kushner, who's done things with it I never even dreamt possible.

Kushner, who wrote "Angels in America," spends his free time delivering panicky graduation addresses at expensive liberal-arts schools. I think this one was at Vassar:

"These are monstrous times and there's no telling. Look across the globe-- when have you ever seen such a dismaying crew in occupation of every seat of power? A certifiable nutcase here, a tinpot dictator there, a FECKLESS, blood-spattered plutocrat in this office, an unindicted war criminal in that office, miscreants, meshugenas, maniacs-- and every one of them has the means of doing the most appalling damage."

Feckless is good.

I've been stuck on craven little weasels, but - as is obvious - no good can come from maligning weasels. I think I'll be leaving the glorious animal kingdom out of it altogether.

Frankly, 'feckless' is a bit too much on the lovin' side of tough lovin' for me, vis a vis the Dems. 'Deplorable turncoats' channels my bile a bit more accurately.

An awesome octopus story I heard once:

At some aquarium (I forget which) they had a tankful of saltwater tropical fish. They were having problems with fish disappearing - and these were pricey fish, so naturally they were worried. This pattern continued for a while - every so often a fish would disappear without a trace from the tank. No remains, no nothing. They concluded that one of the aquarium staff was stealing the fish after hours and selling them to pet stores or maybe private buyers. But they had no way of figuring out who, and they didn't want to levy random accusations, so they decided to set up a hidden camera to catch the thief in the act.

A few days later the culprit was revealed. Opposite that saltwater tank was another saltwater tank, wherein lived an octopus. This fellow would wait until it was late at night, crawl up the glass and out of his tank, down across the room to the fish tank, open the top, crawl in, catch a fish, bring it back to his tank and eat it there.

"Octopi" has always bothered me. The "pus" in octopus is, I believe from the Greek for foot, which would mean that the plural should be octopoda.

Clearly I need a hobby.