That sounds like a challenge. Hmmm...

Think they're any better in the original German?

MKK

A turtle? Look, a cat I could understand.

Lydia mentions a terrapin. My word. That certainly calls to mind plenty of other variations. You could go through the whole animal kingdom, couldn't you...not to mention vegetables and baked goods, or even frozen foods.

All would be mindnumbingly tedious, of course. But then I'd find the very first story about Roy Orbison wrapped in clingfilm pretty tedious - mod, as I said, a certain squick to the whole thing.

Anyway, I got to poking around looking for the current locations of all the old standard articles on the subject. And once I was in that neighborhood, it didn't take more than a couple of clicks' worth of distraction for me to stumble across the Waxman/Portillo piece.

I posted about it. And Andrew Brown said "Fnurgle! Now why don't people write stuff like that about American politicians?" So I obligingly went looking for some; and while I didn't find much, I did find the Roy Orbison in Clingfilm site.

See? It all makes perfect sense.

Speaking of making sense, Lydy, thank you for pointing out the terrapin. That prompted me to a realization I've just appended to the main post.

Re your own question, I think Jetta is just his pet terrapin, and that the odd weightiness you sense is there because Jetta is real.

Have you ever seen an illustration in which there are a bunch of passable-looking human faces, plus one face that somehow pops out at you? You look at it for a moment, trying to figure out why, and then say, "Oh, he used a real person for that one."

Also, animals in fiction have greater density than human characters, which can generate odd inertial effects ... but that's a different subject.

There's always that moment that you look at someone, and say "We really did grow up on different planets, didn't we?"

I could go on about Roy, Pretty Woman, icon of rock, Travelling Willbury's, untimley death, classic voice, etc. etc. -- but I'd think you'd have a better chance of describing the difference betwen red and green to me.

So, suffice to say, he's a froopy hood who completely doesn't deserve shrink-wrapping, even if that would preserve him for weeks.

He seems to have that deadly combination of talent and too much time on his hands.

Also, animals in fiction have greater density than human characters, which can generate odd inertial effects ... but that's a different subject.

Between that and the Mary Sue explanation, I think I want more digressions from Theresa. I knew about the Mary Sues because I happen to know a bunch of Harry Potter fan-fic writers and several of them have submission procedure policies and whatnot which expressly forbid the Dread Mary Sue. (Almost as bad as a Dread Gazebo, wot?) But I think I'd still get a kick hearing (or reading rather) Theresa's explanations on Mary Sues. Plus, I want to find out about animals and inertia. This grasshopper has much to learn.