Turtle butts

[watchwolf49]

Is it true turtles breathe through their butts?

Yuck …

Just … Yuck …

[Senegoid]

One of the questions Cecil prints at the beginning of the column isn’t so original:

*Dear Cecil:

When turtles put their heads in their shells, what happens to their spines? Do they buckle or contract?

— Daniel Calarese*

The question comes straight out of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. In one chapter, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, nuclear scientist extraordinaire, suddenly asks this question apropos of nothing, and then completely loses interest in his important nuclear research and instead gets completely obsessed with studying turtles.

@Cat's Cradle

 "Angela was twenty-two then. She had been the real head of

the family since she was sixteen, since Mother died, since I was
born. She used to talk about how she had three children–me,
Frank, and Father. She wasn’t exaggerating, either. I can remember
cold mornings when Frank, Father, and I would be all in a line in
the front hall, and Angela would be bundling us up, treating us
exactly the same. Only I was going to kindergarten; Frank was
going to junior high; and Father.was going to work on the atom
bomb. I remember one morning like that when the oil burner had
quit, the pipes were frozen, and the car wouldn’t start. We all
sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until
the battery was dead. And then Father spoke up. You know what he
said? He said, ‘I wonder about turtles.’ 'What do you wonder about
turtles? Angela asked him. ‘When they pull in their heads,’ he
said, ‘do their spines buckle or contract?’
"Angela was one of the unsung heroines of the atom bomb,
incidentally, and I don’t think the story has ever been told.
Maybe you can use it. After the turtle incident, Father got so
interested in turtles that he stopped working on the atom bomb.
Some people from the Manhattan Project finally came out to the
house to ask Angela what to do. She told them to take away
Father’s turtles. So one night they went into his laboratory and
stole the turtles and the aquarium. Father never said a word about
the disappearance of the turtles. He just came to work the next
day and looked for things to play with and think about, and
everything there was to play with and think about had something to
do with the bomb.

[watchwolf49]

Plagiarism saves time …