where jettisoned turkey timers go to die

it’s days like these when my thoughts are turned to eddying tides of superflux out on our periphery. today I would definitely be remiss if I just went out to make snow angels without saying a word. I might find it equally peaceful adrift in the horse latitudes, and comforting to be greeted by such familiar articles as Air Jordans and coat hangers.

the desert is probably the nearest I’ve seen to being that far out at sea. dry expanses where dragons and owls burrow, ostriches nest and jackals sleep in half-buried truck tires, winged dengue breeds in the water pooled in plastic bags. consulting the wisdom of hobos & trolls who live under the bridge in their cardboard and tar paper; these materials are temporary, transient, passing. but plastics are forever, so we say it with plastics.
word has been coming back that this is the case out there in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre; cuttlefish & prawns frolic like fawns in an enormous trash vortex, where fingerlings and phytoplankton take up residence in Tide with bleach bottles and other flotsam. these things, likewise, take up residence in them; with hungry albatrosses shuttling bottle caps, GI Joes and cigarette lighters across thousands of miles of ocean. teredo navalis shipworms can’t eat through a cathode-ray tube, but they might ride it a few knots to other waters.

surrounded as we are by incessant decay, there may be cause for moderate rejoicing in knowing that we are creating something permanent. and that with the forces of entropy working tirelessly on every molecule, still there are other forces that conspire to guide and gather all this furniture into what Captain Charles Moore has been calling a gentle maelstrom.

…into a Pirates of the Caribbean ride, an entire disneyland the size of Texas, in plastic garbage, immediately animated by tidal power. vertebrate jellyfish run discarded condoms through the filter feeders. flying fish hurtle over mile-long ghost nets drifting recklessly through a haunted forest of autotrophic algae and hockey pads. one creature’s trash is another’s casino.

there’s definitely something pathetically flattering about how they all move in to the bleach bottle bird houses that have fallen from our fingers. here at home the snow is covering everything for awhile.

where does turkey come from?

sorry, still no braille. funding constraints persist until Norbest or someone picks us up for corporate sponsorship. in the mean time you’re more than welcome to take the situation into your own hands. do I have to do everything around here? there really seems to be something about the holidays that feeds this attitude of entitlement.
I’ll tell you where they come from - here. I am surrounded by hundreds of turkey farms. the ragged white feathers of domestic turkeys blow through my yard, into my mailbox, my mouth and tomato cages. and reeking airborne molecules of turkey excrement often hang in a haze around the towns in Sanpete valley. sometimes this haze is visible. here are some turkeys in my neighborhood, in my neighborhood.

I’ve deliberately delayed posting this until after the holiday so nobody gets any ideas about political timing events or overly-punctual news releases. it’s too late and nobody wants your vote anymore. if you know anyone who ran for office, will you please tell them to come clean up their big signs now. wouldn’t it be embarrassing if Jesus came and your name was up all over the place, printed on corrugated plastic.

and this is where all the magic happens: the turkey processing plant up the road from where I live.
look around a little, it’s all here:

• the turkey/egg paradox
• tertiary sources regarding Warr with the Heathen Natives and digging a pits for neighbors
• Mexicans are to turkey processing as Koreans are to dry cleaning

this final leg of the virtual tour should raise the gooseflesh on your skin. and now is when you aught to invite any blind children forward to feel your forearm. let this tactile demonstration serve to illustrate the importance of staying in school. they’ll understand. if you and your class are not sufficiently sicked out yet, you can look into the practice of stuffing smaller birds into larger birds.

where do turkeys come from?

so your Sunday school class has been getting curious. they look to you for answers, sound direction. the following is a brief and selective report. before anyone gets their hopes up, I want you to know that due to funding constraints and virtual irrelevance, this post will not be available in braille, ever. so if there are any blind kids in your Sunday school class you’ll just have to read aloud to them and hope they trust you. but you don’t have to take my word for it. de-ne neh!

first of all, we’re talking about meleagridadae or guajolotl depending on whether you favor Latin or Latinos. but Egyptians call them Greek birds. Greeks call them French birds. both Turks and Frenchies call them birds from India. Arabs call them Roman birds. Malaysians call them Dutch chickens. Portuguese call them Peru. but let's get real, turkeys are so totally American. for more on this nonsense there’s always wikipedia.

I realize how tangled this all seems right now; good luck. fortunately you don’t have to get into birds and bees, because turkeys can reproduce asexually. yes, that’s correct. so I guess that means there are some turkey clones out there. of course you can present this positively so as to not frighten them; these are benevolent clones that are more scared of you than you are of them.

Cyrillic email

awesome! I just got my first spam email in Cyrillic.
anyone know what BЛAДA or РАссылка means?
refinance? viagra? work from home? mailorder bride?

reviewing footage

today talk of the nation threw sasquatch a bone.

30 heads

sunflower seeds, curried & roasted

Cavity-Nesting Birds of North American Forests

Lord God Bird

monogamous whistling ducks

"Spirits are also attracted to their graves and to the crematorium by the love of the body which they had thought was their only self, but which in fact was merely the instrument of experience. In fact there is not one inch of space, whether on land or on the water, free from the influence of spirits."
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

"No, dear believer, there is not one inch of God's kingdom over which Satan exercises dominion, not one circumstance in your life over which he reigns."
-John David Clark, Sr.

"There is no square mile of the surface of our planet, wet or dry, that has not been crossd by the shadow of a bird - except, perhaps, parts of the Antarctic continent"

-James Fisher

10 foot terror bird

so you thought this was going to be more baloney about migratory birds as terrorist bioweapons. calm down, this is just in case you need ideas for a halloween costume, or have run out of material for nightmares.
we'll see how the liberal media spins that one.

3 autumn landscapes

taxidermy (fish)

endless pools

begin by banging your head on the diving board

free agency highway (yeah!)

oh boy, a convertible! only in America could this unique model of the highway as an allegory for salvation come about. the freedom of the open road, destination-driven, parking lots without number. and for all of us who have often found ourselves at the arcade, wondering about the infinite concentric circles of being and whether there is ski-ball in heaven. well, now we know. but if you want to make it to the Glory, the Rand McNally roadmap is indispensable. that’s the trouble with interstate freeways anymore: you miss one exit and you’re kinda screwed, at least for a while. “DETOUR, 1,000 years in Hell” etc. this sorta happened to me last year. when hell turned out to be a day in Rock Springs, Wyoming between the taco time parking lot and a haliburton compound; a real bummer.
anyway, you’re welcome to print this out and make whatever you can of it with dice and game-pawns.

it’s from 1950 (c) Leonidas DeVon Mecham, whose address in Salt Lake City actually appears off-screen along with the following disclaimer:
The bibliography to this chart is listed on the reverse side. The basis for the illustration was inspired from a flannel board lecture developed by Elder John A. Freestone of Queen Creek, Arizona entitled “Unto The House of The Lord.”

what are we waiting for? let’s turn the page . . . (beep)

looks like a couple prototypes with some text* to back them up; some of which is canonical and some anecdotal. from that real skin-and-bones chart of chutes and ladders we move on to REALMS OF DIETY/REALMS OF SATAN. you can see why they scrapped that rickety old model for this one in 1927. it’s got meticulously shaded dark matter and an earnestly laid out network of subterranean chambers, canals, locks and dams for the processing of our mortal and spiritual humors. either you rise to the top of the aquifer, or sink deeper into Parisian sewers. like Mario Brothers when he goes from bouncing along the surface and into the underworld warp zone.

as our life on this earth is spent in the open air until we’re dead in the ground, so the diagram inverts mortality. now we’re making progress.


* yes, the print is small but I’ll offer some highlights-
2-TEMPORAL LAWS– Men spend a life searching out NEW laws to obey. Industries and Governments spend untold billions for same purpose.
a-EXAMPLE–through learning laws of electricity and obeying them man has made it a servant…

EXAMPLE: if we were given only one bright new car for life, it is certain we would give it the best of care. The finest oil, the highest grade gasoline, keep it waxed and polished, give it shelter and care, take it over the best highways and the shortest routes possible that it might last us our entire life.
LIKEWISE: With our body (Temple) –It should receive the same care.
1-THE FREEWAY: Entrance through baptism…the filling stations are FREE. Priesthood-Sacrament Meetings, Stake Quarterly and General Conferences, the great Auxiliaries of the Church all feeding us…
3-THE LOW WAY: This is the filthy (cess -pool) way of life and drink is always associated with this way-Sins of scarlet. While many fine and honorable people may drink a little, smoke and have tea and coffee, etc., these indulgences are all tools that help turn their lives over to Satan…

FREEWAY–Show a beautiful young woman, neatly dressed (long sleeves, high neck line, etc.) radiant in health.
BROADWAY – A lady in modern attire (way of the world) low neck line etc., inviting disaster.
LOW WAY–Clothed in suggestive and lewd dress, highly painted (make up) to hide a life of dissipation…

BTW, here are some more recent models.

cosmic, like photos taken from the hubble telescope before they fixed the lens.
complicated
Albanian!
most recent, from “Preach My Gospel” A Guide to Missionary Service, p.54

further epic from the improvement era

Harris Weberg

murals from the LA creation room and so on. pretty blakean, these two. with clouds of projected dawn being spooled up into Kant’s spinning orb. counter-clockwise.

you won’t see any ichthyosaurus, pterodactyls or proboscideans here. you may have to go elsewhere and self-consciously crane your neck a bit. look back through the rows of sleepy witnesses. I didn’t post any of Minerva Tiechert’s murals either, though they’re my favorites.

over here is the garden room.
a riparian area where terraculture and aquaculture converge and a small swan paddles around the water feature. as she approaches the light-switch, does she sense its presence occupying a more robust and material plane of existence? intersections of various dimensions, the electric current running through? or just the dangling willow playing tricks on her?
mammals nostalgically fulfill prophecy in the foreground.
a fawn looking back under low hanging fruit in the sappy light. here is innocence preserved and fermenting, with no opposable thumbs for fruit-picking.
into the world-room
a flaming sword brandished from just off-screen evicts first actors into the thorny, phallic landscape of monument valley. this first frontier stretches out eastward over the alkali badlands of the west.
watch out for dirt bikers.
Edward Grigware

500 mile pedestrian

this month Sergeant Marshall Thompson is walking across the state of Utah, the long way. I just returned from going several rainy miles with him. check him out here, and go walk a while with him if you can. he's headed south.

stanley meltzoff

I was first drawn to this guy by his monstrous and goyaesque depictions of primitive subhumans butchering large game. people with heads like burnt matches and smeared faces. but I had no idea he was the fishpainter!unfortunate initials, yes. but he makes quite a cool signature of it.

Zdenek Burian, “paleoartist”

yeah, I got your vistas right here. straight society, heading cross country into the Americas. the fellas here are also movin’ on up the east side. here they come, with even more purpose than Columbus.

this and the rest are by Z. Burian (1905-1981) who people have called “the best paleo-painter” around. I don’t know if that includes all the unnamed cave painters but I do know that he’s Czech. people also say he’s the best at proboscideans so I’ve included an example.

some of my favorites are the ones he does of wooly rhinos and ibexes jumping wide chasms. from what I can tell, he got his start illustrating an encyclopedia of prehistoric life during World War II; when the nazis shut down all the universities and so a lot of people went off to write and illustrate books. aside from his paleo-stuff, Z also illustrated the Tarzan books for Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as books for Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling. he illustrated over 500 books.

it seems a lot of fantasy artists are really into him too. he’s got a real handle on the epic. and I think he’s got this great kind of Arnold Friberg touch for romanticizing all these creatures and guys. for example, this gentleman-hunter down here conveys a kind of tousled but self-assured, Tom Selleck-esque dignity.

here’s a gallery

and if you go to Stramberk, he’s got a museum

petro-tarsi and clay footings

Vernal is out in northeastern Utah by the border of Colorado. that’s where 3 generations back the Remingtons fled a burning house and mortgage. and that was when my grandma’s family moved out to Salt Lake City. Vernal, Utah is also where they dig up dinosaur bones. in the 50s the National Park Service built a visitor center with this big housing over the bone quarry.
here’s a photo of my brother and I visiting the bones like 20 years ago. one year my wife and I went out there for our anniversary. it was mid-March so we stayed off-season at this frozen hunting lodge/honeymoon cabin with a large heart shaped jacuzzi. there was a rusted flintlock rifle hung over the bedroom door and a big chiffon bow hung over the bed. in the corner, a TV/VCR with 30+ VHS tapes. that was the last time I went out to visit the dinosaur bones. the day was overcast and we were the only ones there. a couple months ago they closed the place down, probably for good.

no fire, no arson and I’m pretty sure that they’d had the place all paid off. the swamp clay that has sheltered the bones for 150 million years has been slowly tearing down the structure from the ground up. it looks as if bentonite, which likes to maintain a certain medium of entropy, is a handier base for holding your bones than for your building. so the floor had become all uneven and caused the rest of the structure to splinter and crack apart, pulling away from the hillside, yanking free a ceiling beam here, buckling a doorframe there, and so on. there’s a disquieting fable in this. but what is conspicuously absent is the place being haunted; lonely dinosaur spirits or the ghosts of individual bones wandering around when the visitors have gone home. I’m sure I did read something about how most of the fossils are sorta radioactive.

Sinclair's petro-animism

Sincair oil is a Salt Lake City-based corporation; they’re siamese twins with Little America. fueling your journey by day and putting you up for the night. in my county there are 7 Sinclair filling stations, which is like 3,500 people to every green apatosaurus. of course there are other filling stations too but this is where I buy my gas and where my car passed safety inspection yesterday. it’s on the corner of what was, until earlier this year, the only stoplight in the whole county, one block from where I live.

photo taken today actually; several hundred sheep ran the red light a few times. with 3 or 4 Peruvian guys riding herd.

of all the oil company mascots around, Sinclair’s dinosaur is by far the boldest illustration of our utilitarian relationship with the primal world. not Chevron, with his gendered cars, alert with eyes. not Exxon’s tiger, grarrr! Shell Oil’s stylized scallop does approach the audacity of Sinclair’s animism.*

But I gotta say that Sinclair is probably my favorite place to get screwed at the pump. I mean, if only the butcher were so candid about “who killed the pork chops?” and about what it’s all about. I mean what this wild mystifying world of stratified wonders means to us: about $60/barrel. when we start scratching around for the stuff in tar sands and shale, that’s when we know it’s time to begin cloning more apatosaurus and bulldozing them deep into mass graves.

*for more on whether oil really comes from dinosaurs, plankton, shells or what, check out Cecil Adams’ the Straight Dope.

readasaurus & mathadon

harnessing elementary kids’ fleeting zeal for paleontology and channeling it into more marketable and sensible pursuits. like math & even reading.
it’s paper-mâché but the kids I asked said they doubted that there was any candy inside.

so… is print really dead?

mammoths in moth balls

today was Kelly’s birthday and you know what she asked for? season 3 of Northern Exposure on DVD. at first I couldn’t believe it; I thought she meant my birthday. I am very lucky.

did you ever see the episode where they find the wooly mammoth frozen in a glacier and then that one guy cuts it up into steaks? that was more than 10 years ago. (if you’re looking for quality, nuanced and up-to-date commentary on television then this might not be the blog for you. my apologies.) about 20 years ago a bulldozer was working on the Huntington reservoir dam on the mountain above my house and dug up a 10,000 year old mammoth skeleton. they cast a replica and assembled it in the Fairview Museum up the road. you can go stand or read a book in its big shadow; museum donations are voluntary.
x-mas with Kent & the Huntington Mammoth

apparently they’ve found specimens of very well-preserved mammoths out there in the ice. even baby ones. and some with leaves and grass still in their mouths; mammoths that died with their boots on. there is speculation about how thawing due to climate change is beginning to expose a lot of old mammoths. this has got some people thinking about how it might be prudent to clone some long extinct megafauna back into existence to try and make up for all the minutiae we’re presently wiping out.

Discovery Channel thought this over some and they have reduced it to eight steps.

suggested method is as follows:
1. remove soft tissue from one frozen mammoth
2. attempt to identify a complete strand of DNA
3. extract an egg from a female of the mammoth's closest living relative, the Asian elephant
4. irradiate that egg to destroy its existing DNA
5. take the mammoth DNA and insert it into the elephant egg
6. using in-vitro fertilisation, insert the egg into the female elephant
7. wait 22 months (the gestation period of an elephant)
8. raise and care for the baby mammoth

this is a little complicated, especially for the layperson. I think we could save ourselves and taxpayers a lot of trouble by skipping steps 2-7. we just get some of that mammoth hair (yeah, extract it, whatever, do whatever you have to do) and fasten it all over the baby Asian elephant. surely this will take practice and tenderness but not 22 months' worth. look, I know I’m no scientist; this should be no secret by now. but I am a human being and my ideas count too. anyway, I don’t think the scientists understand baby mammoths like hair replacement techs do.

humanity in getting there, humanity in going

Dennis Bramble at the University of Utah & Daniel Lieberman at Harvard have a different angle.

this is basically what they found.

and the Nature abstract

as a runner, I feel a little better about this one. I think we've always been trying to beat the vultures. but give lawn dart enthusiasts the opportunity and I’m sure they’ll come up with something fairly plausible too. same for bow-hunters, badminton players, whatever: the morphology of the human hand bears a remarkable functional and visual similarity to the badminton racquet. . .

(26.2 / 3:27:27)

aquatic apes & ultrasound

the motel in Logan had a TV. and around 9pm there was a cable show with a man named Jones who has spent a lot of time with dolphins. some of the show he spent talking about dolphin sonar and trying out these custom-made dolphin speak-and-spell devices. but he was quick to confess that we don’t really know what the whistles and chirps mean, so it was kind of like releasing a big praying mantis on the typewriter keys. that is, Jones was the mantis. and however nimble, the mantis doesn’t know QWERTY. fortunately dolphins are non-judgmental and they seemed to appreciate his effort and that he wasn’t blasting them with naval sonar. they even chased a hammerhead shark away from him.

you know, there’s a hypothesis, a Rodney Dangerfield among theories, about people coming from a race of swamp apes. this aquatic ape hypothesis is based on a lot of pretty disparate observations about how people nowadays have a “diving reflex,” enjoy beachcombing, and sometimes turn out to have webbed toes. we can’t twitch our skin very well, we’re not scared of the water and it’s even been pointed out that we do it like dolphins. yeah, I guess that’s right. Anaximander was the first to propose something like this, around 500 BC. and though we don’t credit him for the term “swamp ape,” it seems he may have been onto something. the trouble is that macaques and other primates can also hold their breath. and they say our ears are too big and our underwater vision too poor for the theory to really go anywhere.

that is, unless we’re talking about the Moken Sea Gypsies; who totally rock!

it’s been about 9 months since I’ve been to the ocean myself. but over the last couple months I’ve become more interested in doppler and ultrasound. and I can’t help wondering how it must sound from the inside, through all the membranes and amniotic fluid. it’s probably not exactly a sound so much as a vibe and if they could recreate it, they’d sell all kinds of ultrasound ringtone cards to pregnant women. something between vibrate and an orchestra of crickets or a pod of dolphins, available over the counter at a pregnant woman mall kiosk. the pregnant woman/fetal foto. like the recent marriage of KFC & A&W.

huuuuuuuum…
jeez, I’m sorry for that. I’m not sure what happened.

anyway, it’s all really exciting and I think it’s time to start experimenting with some of these sounds, at least at home I mean. a week or so ago we tried looped choruses of strings and percussion amplified to around 100 dB.

archeo-archery

I first saw one of these dinosaur targets last summer in the county Pioneer Day parade. it went by on a haywain float with camouflaged guys.
this is where you can also find targets shaped like wild boars, lynx, fat turkeys(easy), sleek turkeys(harder), and deer with their organs painted on the outside. there are less conventional ones too like baboons, pink panthers, carp, cobras and giant poison frogs!*
not like shooting a trachodon or a baby brontosaurus, these are the badass kind of dinosaurs. the sort of dinosaurs that hate freedom and want to destroy your way of life and your babies. this time it’s either him or you.
that’s right, you’re extinct and if you ever so much as think of coming back into this world as our contemporaries, this is what you would have coming to you. right in the rib panel!

there’s something awfully redundant about shooting a dead lizard. but we’re using the appropriate modified Clovis technology and not like howtzers & stuff so the anachronism’s not too glaring.

*the manufacturers support our troops in Iraq, whose target of choice in the 2004 expo was a stegosaurus.

*the roadkill torture test - no woodpeckers, no problem

*4,000 arrows in a skunk- shot from a shoot

***** !

present values

a curiosity of neighborhood kids

when ninety or so bats are squeaking under my eaves, that’s a colony. and when they fly out they are called a cloud.

and when I was taking these pictures the neighborhood kids began to gather too.

ok, some faces after all

sphinx moth hornworm caterpillar discovered hiding under the green beans. I don't know anything about bugs, worms but I think this one will turn into one of those moths that look like hummingbirds. if a cat doesn't eat it first.spadefoot toad. I accidently dug her up when I was planting some dogwoods by our neighbors' chainlink. a lucky miss of the shovelblade. she must have also survived applications of roundup to weeds and an earlier going over w/ a tractor tiller. sometimes being able to dig a hole is the perfect thing. she's pretty dazed here, before the reburial.
once, when I was like 9 I caught and kept a frog, which died. so I buried it in the ground in my neighborhood. I also buried in the back of my mind a scheme to later exhume the body when it would be just bones. then I'd have a frog skeleton which would be fantastic! when what seemd the appropriate span of time had passed (probably less than a month) I went to dig up my frog skeleton. I was having a hard time finding it down there where I remembered leaving it. then, off in the periphery I saw something kicking around in the dirt I'd been spading out. yeah, he had totally faked me out but he must not have counted on being dug up again. I only remember vaguely what happened then. amnesty, I think it was. I went home without a frog skeleton.

this nighthawk had broken its wing somehow, probably hit by a car. also called nightjars or goatsuckers, though they’re not related to chupacabras. they seem to be more closely related to boomerangs. that’s what they look like hurtling though the air at dusk, catching bugs in that big maw.
a couple more nighthawks
our newlywed friends in the house next door are in their 60’s. they like to spend some of their evenings eating late dinners or playing board games in their camper trailer parked outside.
on the other side of town I’ve noticed a place in the road where his first name is written very clearly in tar. knowing he worked for the city, I asked him about it one day. he kind of blushed and sheepishly confessed that it was him. she has an electric guitar she sometimes plays and sings with.
in their home, they have a room where their cat lives. this room has pictures of other cats, as well as a telephone. when they moved in they gave us a tour of the place and how they’d been fixing it up. “we’re just tickled, I’ll tell ya,” he kept saying.
the other night we went to sleep to the sound of crickets and their rolling dice on the kitchen table out in the trailer.

stringbeans to Utah

we’re currently being overrun with squash and tomatoes. you can split hairs about whether it’s an invasion or an occupation if you like but the rest of us don’t have time for that. I turn my back for a few moments and there they are, growing, always growing. how is it that I’ve allowed this to happen again?

earlier in the year. no shortage of high tension wires and twine for different uses. mostly to keep the huffys out until the sprouts can fend for themselves.

calabaza jungle

crooknecks and zucchini, a procession

radicis

chiles

and last season’s green beans stay perfectly fresh online.