I want to add a comment something along the lines of "We've lured them into the open. Now, let's pick them off one by one, starting at the left of the herd. You have to aim low, because most of them are lemmings."
POLITICO: Source: 'False' report led to Capitol lockdown - Glenn Thrush - Source: 'False' report led to Capitol lockdown
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ReplyDeleteMisconceptions about lemmings go back many centuries. In the 1530s, the geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg proposed the theory that the creatures fell out of the sky during stormy weather (also featured in the folklore of the Inupiat/Yupik at Norton Sound), and then died suddenly when the grass grew in spring.[4] This myth was refuted by the natural historian Ole Worm, who accepted that the lemmings could fall out of the sky but that they had been brought over by the wind rather than created by spontaneous generation. It was Worm who first published dissections of a lemming, which showed that they are anatomically similar to most other rodents, and the work of Carl Linnaeus proved that the animals had a natural origin.[5][6]
Driven by strong biological urges, some species of lemmings may migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can and do swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat.[7] This fact and the extremely strong unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings may have contributed to the development of the myth.
The myth of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 National Geographic Society article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.[8] Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into sure death after faked scenes of mass migration. [9] A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but in fact were launched off the cliff using a turntable.[10]
In more recent times, the myth is well-known as the basis for the failed Apple Computer 1985 Super Bowl commercial Lemmings and the popular 1991 video game Lemmings, in which the player must stop the lemmings from mindlessly marching over cliffs or into traps.
Because of their association with this odd behavior, lemming suicide is a frequently-used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences. This metaphor is seen many times in popular culture, such as in the video game Lemmings, and in episodes of Red Dwarf and Adult Swim's show Robot Chicken. In Urban Terror, falling to one's death is called doing the lemming thing.