The article consists of one paragraph about baboons and one about meerkats, but the emphasis is clearly on the meerkats, which are featured both in the illustration and in the "weird but true" factoid. Meerkat is a Dutch word.
After the class, two of the children, a brother and sister, were playing a card game while they waited for their parents to pick them up. I heard them saying, "Red fish! . . . Blue fish! . . . Special fish!" Since special is the modifier they usually use if they don't know how to say something properly in English, I checked to see what they were playing so I could give them the needed vocabulary. The "special fish" turned out to be none other than the namesake of this game:
Less than an hour later, I had finished work and decided to check a few blogs. Clicking on a link to a Vox Day post with the uninformative title "You Can't Say I Didn't Warn You," and vaguely expecting something medical or political, I found this instead:
This is obviously not the sort of topic Vox usually covers. His very first sentence calls meerkats "the Piranha of the Serengheti."
Immediately after this, I checked my own blog comments. In my recent "Fever dreams" post, I recount a dream in which D∞D = D&D = "Death & Death." A new comment there by Rara Avis reads:
"Dood" literally means "death" and "dead" in Dutch; I was wondering whether to tell you this before.
Another Dutch word, like meerkat, and it's linked to the double-D. Then I realized that piranha has also been associated with double-D.
Not only is it a double-D, but the numeral 3 is very close to being a lemniscate.
Piranha 3DD was released in 2012, the same year as Life of Pi, which prominently features meerkats. It's called Life of Pi because the main character is called Pi -- short for Piscene, meaning "of or pertaining to fish." Piranha, of course, is a fish name that begins with the letters pi. One also notes in passing that Green Lantern's Eskimo sidekick is called Pie.
