cleaning consequence #A4Re2 (a wild list)

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A scrap a paper when I was clearly keeping tabs of what animals I saw on a trip to Panama in January of 2007. Marc was the generous host for part of the stay and guide into the jungleness of it all. The mentioned anteater appeared sitting right above our heads on BCI.


bats, anoles, small frogs, termites, ibises, trapjaw ants, army ants, dead tarantula, dead toucan, anteater!, strange mantises & beetles, leeches, black scorpion, coati (poop & tracks), multicolored kingfisher, big damselfly, Atta columbicus, Cephalotes briveps, bullet ants!, capuchin monkeys, agouti, Harpy eagle, dancing cluster daddy-long-legs, Heliconius buterfly, howler monkeys, ant-mimicking spiders, jumping - hopping water bug, morpho butterflies, fishing speiders, tanagers

white, mangled things update

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After the recent Dorami incident a couple other distressed objects came into view of the various stream, experiences of the white and the somewhat broken.

After unloading the dryer two sets of headphones where found in the pocket of some jeans. After 30 minutes of findings some way to untie them, I wondered what I had done that all for. After all, they had been through the washer and the permanent press/high heat cycles of the dryer as well, so they would clearly become yet another piece of useless consumer electronics.

So imagine my pleasant surprise to find that both sets still worked *fine* - eerily perhaps even better (?) than before once plugged in... I guess washing helps everything. Either way I humbly recommend this as a novel, contemporary disetanglement puzzle, the kind that I always seemed to see in Pennsylvanian Dutch stores when I was a kid. This one will appeal to the iPodding generation (especially for any Amish during their rumspringa).

The next morning was a matter of omelettes. That was the plan. I was enthusiastic, perhaps even giddy for breakfast and I pulled the carton out of the refrigerator a little too fast perhaps --fling-- went an egg out of the package and onto the floor.


It looked so perfect there, like the yolk finally had a taste of some freedom. A pity though. A two-egg omelette lacks what a three one can (literally) bring to the table.

It recalls to me another egg posting I'd done years back on the old Paper Boat blog*. That one actually made it into the pan...


* I must be walking down memory lane these days,folks, my apologies

orange addendum

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I found another orange mention while dusting off some of the old electrons from my a previous blog. That post, titled "Orange" is from five years back exactly...good memories of those poppy-colored walls.
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orange is the new green

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In the current eco-frenzy the color of vogue is naturally Green: green, green, green, green , green. blah, blah, blah.

Don't get me wrong, I love green, but here in the temperate region of the globe we sometimes neglect a full appreciation of nature's other colors. While walking up Mount Wachusett the other day I myself was lost in the mosses, the leaves, the lichens in an overall daydream of green when suddenly orange tapped poked me in the side in the form of a milkweed beetle.


Next thing I knew orange appeared at every corner in some novel fashion seriatim: fungus, leaf, newt(!), insect gall, toad, wasp, and then a the very summit of the modest mountain, a goldfish pond could be found, flikcering bits of orange in a deep brown soup...

A quick Google search for the words "orange nature" turns up an nice Flickr site devoted to the theme.

Such sentiments make Andy Goldsworthy smile on the inside, I have no doubt.

Dorami

~ ~ If something didn't break while you were gone, you probably weren't actually away ~ ~

A brief history of the thing:
Dorami - sister to Doraemon, purchased as a cute copyright infringement at a ceramics factory in Xi'an China, spring 1996. First fractured: spring, 1999, North Carolina (knocked off bedstand while reaching for alarm clock). 2nd fracture: summer, 2009, Chicago (whole shelf knocked down by housesitter).
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go ahead, stare at it

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fantasy creatures have hearts (and livers) too

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Japanese monster artists have created a vast menagerie of crazy creatures (or Kaiju 怪獣). the beloved Godzilla being a most notable specimen.

Godzilla/Gojira has always been a bad-ass, with her ability to breath fire, or breath ice, be radioactive, shoot lasers from her eyes, and various other things besides (depending on what model year we are talking). But if she eats some bad shrimp, does she get a stomachache like I do? Does she even have a stomach?

Where fantasy meets the possibility of reality and myth finds embodiment is the place where a monster’s monsterful anatomy might also be imagined, and in detail. Every cause has an effect, as modern science has taught us, so it is only fair that some odd organs should underlie what otherwise would seem to be “super”natural abilities:

Godzilla’s purported ability to move her limbs with the complex grace beyond that of a Shaolin monk or drummer Buddy Rich, for example? Well, according the the anatomy chart here, we can leave that to the two subsidiary nerve ganglia in her that work like two “sub-brains” to process all that muscle control - one for the arms and one for the legs, respectively. What I love about this is that even in such a fiction lies the fact that many insects are built in just such a neurologically distributed way. When it comes to science, perhaps the matters of "fiction" and "non-fiction" are fuzzy at best...

A glimpse at some more Japanese monster anatomy charts can be found here.
Better still, the old-school Leuckhart charts
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ode to water quality

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I agree, on a blog called "the various stream" it seems only right to mention recent news on water quality:

Chicago's 2009 water quality report just came out and it was notably silent on the matter of the various pharmaceuticals that lace the public agua supply. This pharmacopeia in the tap would seem to be something to worry about considering drugs are designed to have effects at low doses - what is it to have anti-depressants, cholesterol reducers, sex hormones, and nicotine all mixed up at the faucet? In the mind of health officials perhaps "no news is good news" for the public...

It makes me think of Osamu Tezuka's masterpiece Ode to Kirihito that I am now reading on an excellent recommendation from Xa. As of page 234 (granted it is over 800 pages so things may change) the diligent doctor Kirihito believes that an odd disease in remote villages turning people into dog-like forms is caused by water contamination - in that case from prehistoric mineral deposits with some strange substance in them. hmm....

Of course, just today a paper was published on the clever use of analytical chemistry to track patterns of illicit drug use among neighborhoods and towns in Oregon via testing the public water supply. Ironic but maybe unsurprising to think that the technology would be used to surveil the public's behavior in one instance and yet ignore its implication in another; alas the "war on drugs" doesn't include Glaxo Smith-Kline in our ice cubes...

If you start feeling like a golden retriever, perhaps you have a jump on where to start looking for answers.

p.s. (7/18) It *was* the water after all (some rare earth mineral). Poor Kirihito got used being doggish in the end though...

@spirographic@

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I noticed today that baby dinosaur eyes has done its page up in nice circular curl-E-Qing.

This is great just because, but also for the fact I just happen to have bought misself a spiral generating device in a 100 yen shop in Japan the other day, (w/ both pen and paper included in the kit).

The results in the very first attempt were quite satisfying; it has been over 20 years since I've used one of these things, but it is like riding a bicycle (actually not at all like riding a bicycle)


as for spinning , b.d.e. offers more still - I just can't get enough!
(make sure you click through options, post-bananas)

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tokyo to narita

passengering in a country obsessed with trains, it is hard to not oneself become obsessed

>>>

at Kurodani temple waterlilies let things go.

wiretheskiessowirey

a circled K - a woman talking wirelessly with only wires above - eyewitnessing of a sunny Kyoto in June




















click here for the haps

darwinia: file entry #452

Yes, it is his the sesqui.150.centennial of DJ Darwin, my favorite DJ of them all.

Beautiful images with problematic narration. At minute 1:46 the unfortunate and seemingly unquestioned employment of the concept "weaker human beings" by the curators in conflation this with "the tensions class conflict." The same sort of unqualified voicing that was as biologically misguided then as it is now. Yeah, nobody means anything by it, as sure as it's always said, but if you Get It, then why not Get It Right (right?) Perhaps it's my Americano ears with their own pretensions egalitarian that the British accent can't help but add some unwanted rub...

the box game

a friend of mine T.R. recently told me about a project by friends of his called The Box Game, which in turn I share with friends-you-all.

I like it very much and perhaps for the obvious reasons of: public solicitation + mystery + graphing all put together. As a dish, it is my fantasy casserole combination.

In this photo (purloined from their blog) I only can assume and hope it is Devil's Rock looming in the background. It not only triggers a deep childhood memory of synthesizer music, it is also a nice allusion to mashed potatoes and the idea of this casserole I now want to cook (kind of like shepard's pie, but not. with pine nuts)

> yay the box game <

space is the place

Space: the final frontier. Or just the stuff that is - between here and there, what people take up too much of, what every dubious lover wants.

Cloud Gate (aka. the Bean) warps it for you, providing empirical evidence for Einstein's contention that space is indeed bendable. Holla out to Anish Kapoor.


And here is a new photo of a room you'll never get to go into. Unless you are tiny (maybe you are)














You see, when you cross the new Nichols Bridge, spanning the there & here on opposite sides of Monroe Avenue you can walk into the Art Institute, wander around for miles, and finally get to the Thorne miniature rooms: 1 inch to one foot. I took this photo and fooled myself into thinking small was big and tall was short. Even still, I remain 5'6".

See the nicer images of the fuller collection here.

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nature pages

This last week at the MBL I came across Louis Agassiz's credo, all big and in its original form, hanging in the library.

We studied all-too-plenty books during the visit, but nature is also and always there to let you know what is what. Even the smallest fishes in Eel Pond were an infinity to consider.


ps. visit the Leuckhart chart exhibit


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slips of stuff

a stencil from summer 2006 (?) found in the stationary drawer today among some yellowing envelopes. Love the Lampyridae.

sun spotz

Thierry Legault photographs the space shuttle Atlantis tranversing the girth of a star we call the Sun. Yes, it is a photo from land of the shuttle floating through outer space, in orbit. Yes, the sun does in fact seem to be the very yellow object of a child's crayon.

Outer space is completely black, tracing the seemingly perfect sphericality of a thermonuclear reaction that is older than ancient. The shuttle is in silhoutte because the sun is the biggest light bulb for millions of billions of miles, and I suppose Legault ended up foregoing flash when the camera clicked. Of course, that light is 8 minutes old since the sun is far far away; 93 million miles off the object-actual sun looks different than the background provided for Atlantis.

They say and you know that Atlantis was a giant island kingdom that sank to the bottom of somewhere in watery oblivion, having almost been found more times than not. Now something by the same name with wings quenches the large yellow blanket of light. Or maybe it is a giant pollen grain. or a tiny pollen grain, because it is spring and maybe Theirry was photographing through a microscope not a telescope. it's all really it is hard to know, especially if you care to know.

a raccoon walks in front of you on the sidewalk, so it's spring

"Badgers can be choosers."

(E. Izzard)

It's always there regardless

the omnipresence in collage of an emperor who was thought of as god.

I love the collages of Nobuyuki Oura, but in some particular places they seem to make too much meaning. Ironically but not unexpectedly - where most meaning might be made of them.

The newspaper article mentions how the images ran counter tothe educational goals of the museum and its commitment to neutrality and fairness. What fairness has to do with neutrality I'm not sure; it'dseem the latter must often be given up to allow for the former. Either way, it is one thing to be neutral, and another to be neutered.