Hello, i'm pretty new to jquery. I'm trying to insert an element to the DOM, and get that element back in my script.

Ex:

    var elem = $("body").append("");
    $(elem).show();

but it seems that .append returns the whole jQuery object.. am i supposed to use an ID for the inserted element and always reference it by it?? i really hope that there is a smarter move here. I'm used to do it like that from Prototype..