I for one would like to be locked into the slime-mold category in perpetuity.

Actually, some mollusks do have eyes (Scallops, for example, as well as predators such as conchs and moon shells. And of course, terrestrial snails (such as one would find in a garden) have eyes.

While they don't have legs, they do have feet, with which they either slither along or dig into the sand.

Let's not be forgetting that the mollusks include the cephalopods, like squids and octopuses. They've got eyes, lots of feet, and brains. They're not lower animals.

"George Bernard Shaw famously once remarked that to say 'octopi' displayed an ignorance of three languages: Latin because 'octopus' is not Latin, Greek because the plural of 'oktopous' should be 'oktopodes', and English because the English is 'octopuses'."

Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten about the squids and octopuses. Whether a clam's "foot" really counts as the equivalent of a land animal's foot seems arguable: it could just as easily be thought of as a tongue or elbow or something.

Of course, the appendages of squids and octopuses are called 'arms' in some languages, including English, 'legs' in others, including Greek ('octopus' : 'tripod' :: 8 : 3). Some years ago, an American deodorant company did a television ad featuring an octopus spraying their product under all eight of his arms, the point being that an octopus would need to worry more about hygiene than puny two-armed creatures. (Take a whiff at the fish store: they do.) As I recall, the ad went over very badly in Japan, where octopuses have legs.

I'll volunteer for the microbe category. With no microbes in this ol' world, we wouldn't have wine or cheese. No beer or aged beef! No fluffy leavened bread! No enzymes for cleaning clothes, making paper, leather tanning.

Without microbes no nitrogen fixing in the soil! Some microbes break down oil and and some sources say that photosynthetic algae and bacteria produce half the oxygen in our atmosphere. And I won't even get into all that bacteria-fungi-protozoan action in the rumen of cattle that allow them to chew their cud (i.e.,break down cellulose and allow the stomachs to digest grass).

If you have "MD" after your name, microbes give you a reason to kick start that Jag in the morning. A life without microbes heralds not only the fall of civilization but life as we know it on this planet.

And fun! You haven't lived until you've had to room with a barrel full of drunk Porifera for a weekend. (mebbe it's the flagella)

Had enough? (Oh, yes, please. Ah'll take one of those "Microbes are yore frens" t-shirts, thank yew.)

Jeez, first Quana tells me all about flagellation, assuring me that it is the English vice, and now she's talking about flagella (Latin for 'whips'). I'm beginning to worry about her.

By the way, I ran across one more bit of evidence for the English vice, an ad for the Drew Carey Show in which veddy English Mr. Wick says "I'm here to see the disciplinarian. I've been a very naughty boy." Case closed?

I aspire to be a chewy booger myself.

Do Octopus have eyes? yes or no