John Doe

Last night the neighborhood watch reported a raggedy, sandy-haired hobo.
His willowy silhouette passed over lawns and through front and back yards,
in and out of lamplight, under a clear half moon.

That was a Saturday in August, when I slept soundly, windows open, miles upstream from the city of sprinklers. That was when I dreamt and forgot anonymous dreams.

On Sunday morning a keeper of public works arrived with his mower and rakes to the scene: the fresh wreck of a deer, little gore and no horns, flung up on the clean grass between tennis courts and boulevard, in the sun.

proposals for meat lessons

one time I saw this movie about a guy in Italy who found a special book sitting in a dustbin. it was missing its cover and he spent the rest of the movie trying to find out what book it was.

here we have a cover but must ourselves stitch together the content; retro-engineer it if you will, like an impoverished eastern bloc regime. are you with me comrades? we need at least 10 lessons for the rising generation. I know you know about this stuff. what have experience and precept taught you about meat over the years?

Archived Americana

here’s a little more Americana from the national archives

cuckoos & roadside explosives

my friend Paul is working as a security guard in Hawaii these days. his company sends him out to protect state parks and private schools and things, and he gets to use the CB radio a lot. I could begin a completely separate blog about Paul and it would be way better than this one. we’ll see.
anyway, he’s come back again for a few weeks to sell fireworks in Roy, UT and he’s got his stand set up in a scorching parking lot between Beto’s Mexican restaurant and Dr. John’s adult novelties. for the last couple years this is where we have gone for all our firework needs. this time Kelly and Ash got to hold down the fort for a bit while Paul and I jaywalked through 4 lanes of traffic to get a Wendy’s burger. during the short while we were gone they did about $30 in business! when I was like 14 this would have been my dream job: selling fireworks from a chipboard shed up by the air force base.




















there was a time when Paul threw several routes of newspapers for NAC. and for a while we all entertained the idea of painting a flaming newspaper on the side of his golf cart. but now that he’s hustling little exploding papers, people come to him. so if you still have any fireworks you need to buy, hurry go get them from Paul. I’ve got a suspicion that he might actually be America.
“We Americans are all cuckoos. We make our homes in the nests of other birds.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
1872

a wide open invitation: Wasatch Plateau Marathon +

I’ve never done anything like this before. I want you to try it with me. and I'm letting you know now so you can save the date and begin training if you're interested. this is not a race; it is a run (or, if you prefer, a ride). here are the details.

When: Saturday, September 1, 2007, AM

Cost: free! - this is all pretty informal and out of the way.

Distance: 28 miles. come do as much or little of it as you like. you can relay with someone or bring your bike if you want, whatever. if you plan to run the distance, train as you would for a marathon.

Where: along the Skyline Drive, across the top of the Wasatch Plateau. The Skyline Drive is a mostly unimproved road that traverses the summit of the plateau for about 100 miles. We will be doing a 28 mile stretch of that between Fairview Canyon and Ephraim Canyon. the elevation of the course varies but stays around 10,000 feet.

How: the summits of both Ephraim and Fairview canyons are accessible by car. you don’t need high clearance or 4WD or anything. but you need something with high clearance to get around on the Skyline Drive and we’ll have our truck and can arrange for that and so on.


the green patch is the Wasatch Plateau and the dotted line that runs down it is the Skyline Drive. hope that helps a little.

we’ll also have the course charted, with a few water and food caches along the way. a couple days ago we went up to look around and begin surveying.

baby Ash included to show scale; she’s about 23 inches long so reckon your measurements from there. Kelly, modeling the signage below, will be there too for autographs and polaroids. afterwards let’s all have a picnic or something."bring the wife and family. bring the whole kids--yippee."here are a couple links to information about the area-
go Utah
Utah forests

this, by the way, is for anyone interested - friends, family or strangers. let me know if you’re in or have questions. and, to address any FAQ’s this is a very legal event disclaimer (a la Gil Scott-Heron) for you to sign off on.

wha’ happen?

shucks, lolookes illiken I'm Finnished

Blog Archive

▼ 2007 (30)
▼ kesäkuu (5)
an æsthesia
this summer: blue planet run!
high school reunion
Rat Fink Reunion
cocoa krispies with eyes, potatoes without
► toukokuu (5)
► huhtikuu (3)
► maaliskuu (5)
► helmikuu (4)
► tammikuu (8)
► 2006 (89)

this summer: blue planet run!

last week these guys began a 15,000 mile relay across the northern hemisphere through 16 countries. it’s all about helping a billion people get access to clean drinking water. 20 runners are going around the clock in 10-15 mile increments to cover 150 miles a day through early September. and they’ll be coming through southern Utah in August.

(August 9-11, Boulder, Lake Powell, Blanding, Moab)

check out their website

high school reunion

all this talk about reunions got me thinking about how I graduated from high school 10 years ago and that there was probably some kind of reunion coming up. so I looked into it a little and sure enough, this weekend.

June 9, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Little America Hotel
500 S Main St
Salt Lake City, UT

whether through improved self confidence or just an eroding memory I’ve mostly shed the humbug attitude I once held about my high school. so I’d actually been kinda planning on going to the 10 year reunion. I even got a new haircut. :)

I mean 5 years? -whatever. but after 10 years, people’s courses have really had time to careen off in interesting directions; rhinoplasties, alcoholics, petty millionaires and local celebrities. a brother-in-law even tells the story of the high school reunion where Super Dell rolled up in leather on a motorcycle with a couple of escorts and started throwing around $100 bills, like Jack Nicholson in the parade scene on Batman!

here’s the thing though: it’s $50/person and no kids! so yeah, screw it. I don’t know, I guess I’d just assumed it would be a different, less formal kind of occasion. and I thought that half the fun would be in meeting everyone’s offspring.

to me this seems to send two tacit messages to alumni. the first regards the presumed economic demographic of those who are actually invited. and the second has more to do with the eminent role ones former high school “should” still play in ones life. actually, the whole thing has helped bring back a lot of things I’d forgotten about high school.

but maybe I’m just being cheap, or sentimental. your thoughts?

Rat Fink Reunion

I’m not a car* guy. but I have always been pretty intrigued by the Rat Fink scene. so imagine my excitement when I learned that the Rat Fink Reunion was an annual event in Manti. in years past we’ve always been out of town or something, but this time we got to go so I have a little report.
















first of all, you can learn more about Ed “Big Daddy” Roth at one of these places. how he scavenged junkyards to make building hot rods an aesthetic art, was the first to start using fiberglass to mold auto-bodies, and went on to create a bunch of monsters to ride around in the things – including the anti-mickey mouse Rat Fink that’s become such an icon. eventually Big Daddy Roth settled down in Manti, married a local girl and died in 2001. now his widow, Ilene Roth, has been putting this on for the last 5 years. she’s also the county auditor or something.












the Roth home is on the east end of town, last house on the street, and they open it up for you to look over the collection. then in the garage/hangar out back they’ve got a big carpeted shrine of a museum, with the best stuff even glassed off. dozens of vehicles, t-shirts and even pinstripers. whatever you want to bring, they’ll pinstripe it for you: cameras, wedding rings, strollers, palm pilot (you square!). I bet they’ll even pinstripe your ipod.

but I think this is the crown jewel of the collection: some fan mail to which Ed responds, talking about his boss old lady, being sidetracked by the devil, and how kids should NEVER COPY!

people come out to Sanpete for all kinds of stuff: weddings, snowmobile rallies, the Mormon Miracle Pageant, and to look at old pioneer homes. but if you get the chance, you really should come out to this sometime - I’m giving it a bunch of stars and thumbs. it’s a 3 day affair and there’s also tons of souvies, pompadours, tattoos, a car show, awards, parade, music, and bbq.

* by the way, I realize there are few things less pedestrian than a car show. but as far as cars and paintings go, hot rods and Rat Fink are about as pedestrian as it gets.

cocoa krispies with eyes, potatoes without

wtf?

all your fishbase are belong to EOL

E.O. Wilson has been trying to get this kind of deal going for a while. now that it's coming together I have to admit I'm sort of ambivalent about the whole thing. but at the same time I’m surprised something like this doesn't already exist. when I was six or seven I started making something similar with national geographic photos and notecards. but then I gave up when my system quickly outgrew the confines of its recipe box.

I’m talking about a species of wiki, er, um I mean a species wiki: a wiki for species. The Encyclopedia of Life is what they’re calling it. presumptuous title maybe, but it goes along well with the whole ethos of the project; the introductory page and filmstrip have a nice Age of Aquarius optimism about them. it’s not really going yet, they just have some sample pages and stuff but it should be pretty rockin’ by the middle of next year.

the idea is to get a wiki going for the 1.8 million species we know of. lots of reasons for this, which you can surely imagine, so overall I think it's pretty exciting. and it looks like you’ll be able to search data at different levels of expertise too. from say 4th grade desert biome diorama assignment to Rachel Carson thrice decorated.

this way, to put it in Tyndale’s terms; ere too many years, the lowly talking head on the local news will be able to scrape together his human interest story about walking sticks, killer Africanized bees or the chipmunks at Yellowstone with the same wealth of data as the high priests of biology.

there are other precedents for this besides Brittanica and recipe boxes. for example there’s the complicated fishbase, where a guy can get lost pretty easily. before long you’re backstroking the green arrow just to keep your head above water.

then there’s the White House subcommittee-commissioned ITIS (integrated taxonomic information system) who sullenly explain basically, “look, we’re only doing this because we have to.” and his new, more global sister is the catalogue of life, where I even found they keep viruses! actually, both sites are pretty neat, but duh! no pictures.

wikispecies is pretty good taxonavigation in its 3rd year, but still lots of gaps. no English vernacular name (American Goldfinch) for Carduelis tristis, for example, which is kind of a big deal to me.

here, why don’t you compare the yeti crab pages from each site and see what you think.
wiki yeti crab

EOL yeti crab (still just a demonstration page)

ITIS/catalogue yeti crab

say, you know what would really be nice? a mashup of all of these and other databases with color images, smells, howling, chirps, and things you can chase through the woods with your own feet. actually I think I heard about something like that the other day. I’m going outside now.

Radio West in Sanpete

for the next few days radio west is in town (Spring City to be precise) doing some shows about local stuff: history, housing, the art scene, economics, dialects, authenticity, heritage (or heriteeege, as they say it around here) and so on. yes, it's on the air right now.

you can get it at 90.1fm along the Wasatch Front, 88.3 in Sanpete or from their webcast. they're having some fun minor technical difficulties but fortunately the power hasn't gone out on them yet. this happens sorta routinely around here-blackouts I mean, not radio shows.

Brad Wheeler's harmonica army

yesterday I drove 4 hours for a 2 hour meeting. now I’m all driven out, sheesh. but if it were at all possible I would make the trip up to Ogden to be a part of this thing here.

Brad Wheeler has a dream, a calling. his centenarian grandmother told him so and he’s doing it for her too. basically it’s this: round up 2,000+ people with their harmonicas (key of A) to play When the Saints Go Marching In and sustain it for 5 minutes.
it’s this Saturday and, like I said, I would totally go if I could. but you need to be a part of this. no, leave me, it’s ok, I’ll be fine. call me when you get there, let me know how it goes. you can even keep me on the line and I’ll phone in my harmonica song too. oh how I’d love to be in that number…

somebody should get Satan some tinfoil

a few years ago my friend Oliver threw one of the best Halloween parties I’ve ever been to. good food, some friends I hadn’t seen in a long time and some great costumes. as I remember, I came in a lucha mask and the hosts were Julius Caesar and the conspirators. another friend was a terrific Mr. T, with “gold” chains he’d bought by the foot at a hardware store. there was even a cowardly lion and some other people who I think dressed up as drunk revelers. and, for any humbugs who came in just their street clothes, there was a giant roll of aluminum foil on hand for them to fashion their own costumes at the door. you have to at least make an effort, right?

I’d been there an hour or so when a 7 foot smoldering figure darkened the door. he came alone, had blood red skin and some pretty big horns. even more impressive were his incredibly credible goat legs; hairy, with hooves and the bandy hocks of the ungulate superorder. I heard a few conversations trail off and heads turned toward the doorway.
clip clop clip clop clip clop clip...
as the new arrival ducked through the entry and began making his way to the kitchen my friend Oliver leaned over to me and said, “somebody should get Satan some tinfoil.” in the end it turned out that everyone was pretty OK with this. some settings are more appropriate places for Satan than others. and if he’s not welcome to have a couple drinks at a Halloween party then, well, he’s just going to wander off and cause trouble somewhere else.

today Dick Cheney is flying in to talk to a stadium full of graduating college students about, oh I don’t know, probably making a difference in the world: something nobody could deny that he has done, and continues to do. not only did BYU invite him out but they’re giving him an honorary degree of public service or something.

here are some details from democracy now and npr.

it’s one thing to give an international war criminal such a platform and still another to go on to kiss his butt, piling on honor, laud and glory. we don’t seem to know where to quit. I say we although I’m not an alumnus. but my wife, sister and other family and friends have gone there so I feel like part of the community.

since security’s supposed to be pretty tight and nobody will be able to get Mr. Cheney’s tinfoil through all the metal detectors, there’s an alternative commencement that some of us are planning to attend. should be really good.

Frank Chapman's 1886 feathered hat census

Easter

!

A.K.B.

3/22/2007
7:39 am

6lb 14oz

21"

I feel like I aught to get a tattoo or something.

pictures

the machine in the garden

fill in the blanks. then let's see what it means.

fast sunday

historia animalium

Of the parts of animals some are simple: to wit, all such divide into parts uniform with themselves, as flesh into flesh; others are composite, such as divide into parts not uniform with themselves, as, for instance, the hand does not divide into hands nor the face into faces.
And of such as these some are called not parts merely, but limbs or members. Such are those parts that, while entire in themselves, have within themselves other diverse parts: as for instance, the head, foot, hand, the arm as a whole, the chest; for these are all in themselves entire parts, and there are other diverse parts belonging to them.
…Once again, we may have to do with animals whose parts are neither identical in form nor yet identical save for differences in the way of excess or defect: but they are the same only in the way of analogy, as, for instance, bone is only analogous to fish-bone, nail to hoof, hand to claw, and scale to feather; for what the feather is in a bird, the scale is in a fish.
…The active faculties, on the contrary, are seated in the parts that are heterogeneous: as, for instance, the business of preparing the food is seated in the mouth, and the office of locomotion in the feet, the wings, or in organs to correspond.
…Of viviparous animals, some hatch eggs in their own interior, as creatures of the shark kind; others engender in their interior a live fetus, as man and the horse. When the result of conception is perfected, with some animals a living creature is brought forth, with others an egg is brought to light, with others a grub. Of the eggs, some have egg-shells and are of two different colours within, such as birds’ eggs; others are soft-skinned and of uniform colour, as the eggs of animals of the shark kind.
…Furthermore, some animals have feet and some are destitute thereof. Of such as have feet, some animals have two, as is the case with men and birds, and with men and birds only; some have four, as the lizard and the dog; some have more, as the centipede and the bee; but allsoever that have feet have an even number of them.

-Aristotle

Historia AnimaliumBook 1

mark your calendar, count some birds

the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is doing their annual bird count this weekend, February 16-19. go outside and look around, then go to their website and tell them what you saw. they'll take your word for it.

last year’s count brought in like 60,000 checklists and reported 7.5 million birds overall, 623 different species. one of the things revealed was the ongoing range expansion of introduced Eurasian Collared-Doves which are now living in my neighborhood too. entries are accepted until the end of the month and there are some prizes you can win like binoculars and, um, “cherry cobbler bird food.”

fishers of sharks

Reverend Kevin Thompson just got busted. he’d been recruiting fishermen from among his disciples instead of the other way around and now he’s going to jail for a year and a day. here’s the USDoJ release. when the faithful would ask if things were legit, he told them it was the will of God.

if you want to hear him talk about the operation and "some discovery channel stuff,” all in a light brogue, then you can easily download a terrific little 7 minute mp3 here. it’s an excerpt from a longer sermon where he gets into, as he puts it, a deep spiritual lesson he learned from sharks and the unique business of catching little baby sharks. he leaves out the part about baby leopard sharks growing to about 7 feet.

happy birthday Galway Kinnell

Daybreak
On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still: and by the time
pink sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.


The Gray Heron
It held its head still
while its body and green
legs wobbled in wide arcs
from side to side. When
it stalked out of sight,
I went after it, but all
I could find where I was
expecting to see the bird
was a three-foot-long lizard
in ill-fitting skin
and with linear mouth
expressive of the even temper
of the mineral kingdom.
It stopped and tilted its head,
which was much like
a fieldstone with an eye
in it, which was watching me
to see if I would go
or change into something else.

-Galway Kinnell
from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words
1980

happy birthday Daniel Tammet

in junior high they would call assemblies over all kinds of stuff. if a PG cover band was in town and friendly with the school board, they could find a captive audience of those students with good attendance or citizenship indices. student elections, drill team, talent shows and Jostens also got stage time.

once Kim Peek came to our school with his dad, and did some amazing parlor tricks for us all. after an introduction of his accomplishments, qualities, parts and passions, he told some of us what day of the week we were born on. then he performed some other pretty tangled calculus which was lost on most of us. that was a good assembly. since then I’ve run into him several times around town, mostly downtown at the main library.

then I hear about this guy, Daniel Tammet. he was in junior high about the same time I was, but was getting bullied slightly more. when this would happen he would sit down, put his fingers in his ears, and count in powers of 2. 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096 8192 16384 32768 65538 131072 262144 524288 … retreating back into his mind for miles.

numbers have become his personal friends. friends with textures, colors, sounds and movement. 11 is especially friendly. 11 and 1 are both brilliant white, like light pouring in, he says. 4 is shy and 5 is a loud thunderclap. 37 is lumpy like oatmeal and 89 is falling snow. Dave Letterman is 117.

9’s are especially exciting; they are immense like skyscrapers, elastic bands stretched way out. the 9’s are also blue and, when multiplied with other nines, grow more deeply blue. for Daniel, prime numbers are the lonely ones. they are smooth pebbles that stand out from the others like signposts. also, somewhere here I aught to mention that Daniel is an autistic savant. he’s drawn some pictures of how he sees numbers. as you can see, he doesn’t carry any ones.
I can sort of imagine this method. at St. Timothy’s elementary I would count in terms of dots in simple formation, like dominoes, and then fit them together like legos. but nothing like this.

about 3 years ago Daniel spent 5 hours reciting pie at Oxford. he made it down to the 22,514th decimal place and had the public onlookers in tears. he speaks English, Spanish, Icelandic, Welsh, Esperanto and a bunch of other Indo-European languages. these days he’s working on his own language called Mänti.

3 winter haiku

I mistook a cold
fanbelt, chirping down main street
for a canyon wren

hoarfrost, each morning
twenty-four below zero
encrusts my doorknob

this is when they crack
last year's water balloon lips
and fall off the tap

Tiktaalik

last year they found Tiktaalik up in Nunavut, Canada and since then it’s made its way into museums, Nature, PBS and the Colbert Report. so I’ve really been scooped here. but as the bones have been sleeping in late Devonian sandstone for about 375 million years, 10 months hardly seems an issue anymore. the name was suggested by the locals (Inuit elders) and it means “large shallow-water fish.”

Ted Daeschler, Neil Shubin and Farish Jenkins were the guys who found it there. here's what Ted looks like in his natural habitat as simulated by PBS in the backdrop.

some people have trouble with the name Tiktaalik so there are other catchy things they’ve been calling it. so far, fishapod seems to be catching on the best but I guess we’ll see. there’s a spirited debate on taxonomy, semantics, etymology and the naming of things as applied to ichthyopods on crooked timber. they get into legfish, lungfish, tetrapods and the possibility of organisms with actual fish for feet or even the number 4 attached to the ends of each of thier legs; and how, cladistically speaking, we’re all a bunch of fish.

“Literary comedy and biological evolution share in common the view that all change is conservative. Organisms and comic heroes change their structure or behavior only in order to preserve an accustomed way of life which has been threatened by changes in the environment. The ancient fish that developed lungs when its home in the sea became untenable was not a radical revolutionary, but a public-spirited preserver of his genetic heritage… To evolution and to comedy, nothing is sacred but life itself.”
-Joseph W. Meeker
The Comic Mode

for some great photos and a little text, the University of Chicago has set up a virtual home for Tiktaalik. all of this has catapulted the creature up into the pantheon with archaeopteryx and hobo hamilis.

army ants

The whirligig beetles are wary and fast with an organ to detect the ripples.

The arachnid moths lay their eggs inside other insects along the borders of fields or rows in clusters of white cocoons.

The red pine borer is a longhorn beetle. Their antennas are half the length of their body and they feed on dead red pine.

Robber flies with their immobile heads inject a paralyzing fluid into their prey that they snatch from life in midair.

The snow flea’s mode of locomotion is strange and odd with a spiny tail mechanism with hooks and a protracted tube from the abdomen to enable moisture absorption.

The female praying mantis devours the male while they are mating. The male sometimes continues copulating even after the female has bitten off his head and part of his upper torso.

Every night wasps bite into the stem of a plant, lock their mandibles into position, stretch out at right angles to the stem and, with legs dangling, they fall asleep.

If one places a minute amount of liquor on a scorpion it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.

The bombardier beetle, when disturbed, defends itself by emitting a series of explosions, sometimes setting off 4 or 5 reports in succession. The noises sound like miniature popgun blasts and are accompanied by a cloud of reddish-colored vile smelling fluid.

It is commonly known that ants keep slaves. Certain species, the so called sanguinary ants in particular, will raid the ants of other ant tribes and kill the queen, then kidnap many of the workers. The workers are brought back to the captors’ hive where they are coerced into performing menial tasks.

And as we discussed last semester the army ants will leave nothing but your bones.

Perhaps you’ve encountered some of these insects in your communities displaying both their predatory and defense characteristics while imbedded within the walls of flesh and passing for what is most commonly recognized as human.

-Tom Waits
Army Ants
from Orphans, 2006

sea slugs, bombardier beetles and megapods

Lanny Johnson at the Alpha Omega Institute has prepared some information on sea slugs, bombardier beetles, and megapod thermometer birds on the kids page.

Here are some highlights
“Girls, would this sea slug look good in your hair to wear as a barrette on Sunday morning?”
“Consider, how many times did the sea slug have to die from the poison darts before he got it right?... Not only is our God a designer, He is Awesome!”
there are also coloring book pages.

back to schools

A fish, like the tuna or the sardine, which live in a school, would be less likely to vary than this lonely horned shark, for the school would impose a discipline of speed and uniformity, and those which would not or could not meet the school’s requirements would be killed or lost or left behind. The overfast would be eliminated by the school as readily as the overslow, until a standard somewhere between the fast and slow had been attained. Not intending a pun, we might note that our schools have to some extent the same tendency. A Harvard man, a Yale man, a Stanford man—that is, the idea—is as easily recognized as a tuna, and he has, by a process of elimination, survived the tests against idiocy and brilliance. Even in physical matters the standard is maintained until it is impossible, from speech, clothing, haircuts, posture, or state of mind, to tell one of these units of his school from another. In this connection it would be interesting to know whether the general collectivization of human society might not have the same effect. Factory mass production, for example, requires that every man conform to the tempo of the whole. The slow must be speeded up or eliminated, the fast slowed down. In a thoroughly collectivized state, mediocre efficiency might be very great, but only through the complete elimination of the swift, the clever, and the intelligent, as well as the incompetent. Truly collective man might in fact abandon his versatility…

The light, piercing the surface, showed the water almost solid with fish—swarming, hungry, frantic fish, incredible in their voraciousness. The schools swam, marshaled and patrolled. They turned as a unit and dived as a unit. In their millions they followed a pattern minute as to direction depth and speed. There must be some fallacy in our thinking of these fish as individuals. Their functions in the school are in some as yet unknown way as controlled as though the school were one unit. We cannot conceive of this intricacy until we are able to think of the school as an animal itself, reacting with all its cells to stimuli which perhaps might not influence one fish at all. And this larger animal, the school, seems to have a nature and drive and ends of its own. It is more than and different from the sum of its units. If we can think in this way, it will not seem so unbelievable that every fish heads in the same direction, that the water interval between fish and fish is identical with all the units, and that it seems to be directed by a school intelligence. If it is a unit animal itself, why should it not so react? Perhaps this is the wildest of speculations, but we suspect that when the school is studied as an animal rather than as a sum of unit fish, it will be found that certain units are assigned special functions to perform; that weaker or slower units may even take their places as placating food for the predators for the sake of the security of the school as an animal.

-John Steinbeck

The Log from the Sea of Cortez
1941

God is Born

The history of the cosmos
is the history of the struggle of becoming.
When the dim flux of unformed life
struggled, convulsed back and forth upon itself,
and broke at last into light and dark
came into existence as light,
came into existence as cold shadow
then every atom of the cosmos trembled with delight.
Behold, God is born!
He is bright light!
He is pitch dark and cold!

And in the great struggle of intangible chaos
when, at a certain point, a drop of water
began to drip downwards
and a breath of vapour began to wreathe up
Lo again the shudder of bliss through all the atoms!
Oh, God is born!
Behold, He is born wet!
Look, He hath movement upward! He spirals!

And so, in the great aeons of accomplishment and debacle
from time to time the wild crying of every electron:
Lo! God is born!

When sapphires cooled out of molten chaos:
See, God is born! He is blue, he is deep blue,
he is forever blue!
When gold lay shining threading the cooled-off rock:
God is born! God is born! bright yellow and ductile
He is born.

When the little eggy amoeba emerged out of foam and nowhere
then all the electrons held their breath:
Ach! Ach! Now indeed God is born! He twinkles within.
When from a world of mosses and of ferns
at last the narcissus lifted a tuft of five-point stars
and dangled them in the atmosphere,
then every molecule of creation jumped and clapped its hands:
God is born! God is born perfumed and dangling and with a little cup!

Throughout the aeons, as the lizard swirls his tail finer than water,
as the peacock turns to the sun, and could not be more splendid,
as the leopard smites the small calf with a spangled paw, perfect.
the universe trembles: God is born! God is here!

And when at last man stood on two legs and wondered,
then there was a hush of suspense at the core of every electron:
Behold, now very God is born!
God Himself is born!

And so we see,
God is notuntil he is born.

And also we see
there is no end to the birth of God.

-D. H. Lawrence

Ernst Haeckel: a brief and selective abstract

here he is on Christmas, 1860

and why he named a jellyfish after his first wife:
"Mitrocoma Annae belong to the most charming of all the Medusae… Its tentacles hung like blonde hair ornaments of a princess…" his sea squirts &c.

other plates, including hummingbirds, bats, spiders, frogs, flatworms, reptiles, liverworts, gazelles and insectivorous plants are in his Kunstformen der Natur.

hasta nunca güey

“...Two days before Salvador Allende was gunned down, Pablo Neruda, dying of cancer, woke at Isla Negra, to find the walls of the room where he lay covered in clinging starfish.”
-Ray Gonzales
The Walls

sooner or later it all gets disappeared, even the rotary club