The Lagolier

Not to be confused with a "langolier" which is a Stephen King creature that never really made any sense but likes to harass people in airports. Homeland Security should probably look into that.

I wonder why so many of us start blogs and let them slip by the wayside. I suppose it's one more thing in the day (or week) that has to get done, but I think maintaining them is almost meditative. I know for me, whether I'm creating some slapdash oddity -the only type I'm capable of- or actually talking about my latest feats of sloth, it becomes self-reflective and I often find that I feel differently about something than I had originally thought. Or at least I am often surprised at what comes out when I open the bloggity-box.

That said, meta-blogging is NOT very interesting- posts of "I should post more" or "why do we maintain these or fail to maintain them" are apologetic and unproductive. I know that in four years when I go back and read this as a bit of grinning nostalgia, there will be things that make me slap my knee and say "I remember that chapter of life; that was fun!" I also know that this will not be one of them.

In closing:

Down under the plates of the hull, the anaerobic newt looked out curiously. It had slunk its way onto the reflective plates of the shuttle to bask luxuriously on the heated surface in the sun, and then had crept under the plate for its growth phase, having absorbed all the light and heat it would need to finish the metamorphosis to adulthood. The dark, narrow crevice was perfect- millennia of evolution told it that no predators would be likely to find it here. The newt's body had begun secreting its self-cocooning sticky silk, and with bonds like titanium it had woven itself a bed, held fast to the hull and hibernating peacefully through the final checks and double checks, the blast of lift rockets and the rush of flight. Now, a million miles above the surface of its world, the newt awoke and crept out. In the joy of newly strengthened legs and cramped muscles, it did an exploratory leap.

Cake Batter Geese

Harold forked another mouthful of bean salad past his teeth, and chewed it halfheartedly. It was cold, sour, and vinegary. When he was three, he had told his mother he wanted to be a cook, but thirty-two years later he seemed cursed to permanent and extreme culinary tragedy. Even after buying several recipe books and stocking his kitchen with the best ingredients an air conditioner repairman's salary could afford, he still bungled hopelessly anything more complicated than basting a microwave hot dog with a half pint of mustard. Bean salad. How do you manage to muck up a bean salad, he asked aloud. Harold tipped the barely-touched plate into the garbage and reached for a delivery pizza coupon. He found that had used them all.


Python oil! This excellent keepsake now proven to repel ticks and vermin, draw in wild financial fortunes, and make sure no one's making a squinty face in the family portrait. Keeps change in your pockets and God in your heart, yours for the low low price of $45.79 and the last whoop of the eighth inning. Don't be caught out in the dark without it, friend. Immigrants and carnivore heliotropes may lurk these parks. At the end of days, the signs will crackle and letters fade. PER TO & S OP will spell out the nightmare name of him that comes, and all will be paper or plastic.


"Here's the deal," said the devil, "I'm gonna tear your arms off and leave you to die bleeding and vomiting, flexing bloody stumps to move limbs that are only an agonized memory. Why? Because I'm the god-damned devil, and you shoulda took off running the second you saw me." He smiled, and snarled, and reached.

you must constrict additional pythons

Ashlyn and I started playing Starcraft over the weekend. It didn't last long, though it would be fun to play some multiplayer, even though that would mean buying the game again to be able to play on Battle.net. I just looked, and it can be downloaded for $15. Right under the download button, Blizzard has posted a quote from the New York Times: "The game has become practically the national sport for South Koreans under 40". I wonder how effective that is as an advertisement for North Americans who might be considering buying it. To me, it just brings back the memories of trying to play the game online and being handily buttrumbled by Korean hordes.

It's sort of funny to me that both this drawing and the last feature very unhappy looking people. This pixel-lass is Clariet, who is a very unhappy girl. She was supposed to be the heiress to a badass magical family, but has discovered that she has no magical spark whatsoever. Though she had tutors, textbooks, and a castle full of magical apparatuses to learn from, she can't magic her way past a graham cracker. Which is fine, since should one ever be presented with a graham cracker as an obstacle, there are probably more efficient ways of getting past than magic.

Summer has remembered that it's supposed to be hot. I wish it hadn't.

Break out the combover and black spidey suit

because it's EMO TIME. It's actually not emo time, but it IS stream of consciousness time, and this stream has a current like a hot cross bun. Which evokes an image of trying to swim through a river of piping hot currants, which I imagine would be agonizing. And sticky, and dark. You would emerge on the opposite bank discolored from sticky fruity napalm juice and your own burned flesh.

And with that, we take a cliche metaphor and an antiquated pastry, and turn it into an image suitable for nightmare. Somehow whenever I start typing into the blogobox this is the result.

I don't imagine many people still check our tiny cross-linked blogosphere of Vassar expatriates and Boston folks, especially now that we've all more or less stopped updating, but I'd love to know who is out there. Aside from the tigers. Tigers... I know you're out there, and I'm watching you.

So life update, because that's what blogs are for. I'm adjusting to cohabitation, living with Ashlyn living in the same room. It's a very different existence. Anyone who knows me at all probably suspects -correctly- that I do some fairly strange things when I'm alone. Now, "strange" does not mean "twisted and obscene," just odd little irrational nonsense. The state of "being alone" is something that is gone now, and that fact has changed my existence profoundly. One of the side effects has been that this blog has fallen by the wayside. It's not a bad thing, and I can certainly still find ways to be alone, but it is a big change for me.

I've got ten million (actually around eight) projects that I'm working on, everything from a young adult fantasy romp in the style of the Lioness Quartet, to a wordless solo street performance routine that would ideally, theoretically, allow me to travel to foreign countries where my vocabulary consists of "thank you" "bathroom?"and "please remove the handcuffs, I did not kill those people" ("Kérjük, vegye ki a bilincs, nem én öltem meg azokat az embereket" in Hungarian, according to Google). I will try to use this blog to post progress on these projects, as a way of forcing myself to work on them. Comments, encouragement, and harassment are all highly encouraged.

The lad on the right is named Oswald. He is a doctor's assistant who had the grave (har har) misfortune of digging up an infamous thief while on a routine search for cadavers in the name of medical science. He tried on one of the thief's perfectly preserved gloves out of curiosity, and has discovered that it has a mind of its own, often leading him to pilfer things when he's not looking, and filling his mind with all sorts of burglarly knowledge. What's more, no matter how he tries, he has found that the thing is utterly impossible to take off. Oswald was originally one of the illegitimate children hatched by myself and Sally Slade, but he's had a major overhaul since then. Next up you will meet Clariet.

llamaFace

When they were building the tree house, Tyler's dad always told him he used too many nails to hold each piece of wood in place, and that wood was a lot stronger than he gave it credit for. As the monsters outside his house howled in rage and slammed their bodies against his boarded-up windows, Tyler prayed that his dad had been right.

"Here's the deal" said the devil, "I'm going to give you this knife and this spear. Then I'm going to put you into a one room studio apartment plus kitchenette with a ravenous bear. For every ten seconds you stay alive, I'll give you 100 grams of gold (about $4000). Once the bear kills you, I'll bring you back to life and give you the money, but you and I will both treasure forever the memory of a bear mauling you to death. Of course, if you somehow manage to kill the bear instead, the gold keeps on coming, and you are set for life."

Don't fuck with me now man, I am Ahab!

A while ago in one of those "lets talk about game development and virtual worlds" conversations I have with other people and myself every now and then, I proposed that if someone ever succeeded in making an MMO game that managed to draw in the facebook and bejewelled casual webophile crowd, that person would rule the world. Apparently Sony Online Entertainment is trying to do it. They've just come out with a game, creatively entitled "Free Realms" where you can make a character straight out of a Lisa Frank sticker sheet and run around playing mini-games, beating monsters, and questioning your personal life decisions. I've only played it for about 20 minutes, but so far I've trained as a Brawler, doing standard MMO button mashing to beat up hobgoblins, and trained as a cook, playing a hybrid Bejewelled/Cooking Mama set of silliness to create stews and porridges. It apparently has video integration with youtube, and has a real-life trading card game that has in-game benefits and vice versa on top of all the pet-training and go-kart racing and ninja roleplaying you could ever imagine, so all the little boys and girls can get all their favorite hobbies amalgamated into one game. Basically I think it's interesting that someone is making a super-casual MMO game, and blurring even further the line between "gamer" and "kid who spends all his time online looking at facebook". Technology is weird, and it's doing strange things to the chilluns.

The attached image is the character I made to explore this online debacle- there is absolutely no way to make a dignified avatar in this universe, so I opted to shoot the moon. I'm trying to pretend I'm just dabbling in the game as an observer watching an interesting development in the sociological phenomenon of Online Worlds... but it's entirely possible that I just want pixie wings.

hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiey hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiry hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiety hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosirey hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery hosiery

gentlemens

Holy wow, what the damn. Cheese and crackers.


This is probably one of those videos that everyone but me saw two years ago. I found it linked as a "similar video" when I clicked the A Different Spin youtube account. I WISH we were similar to these madmen. If you like, check out the user's other videos, he has a lot more of the same.

Throw down, Moses. Way down in Egypt land.

Photoshop photoshop ooh laaa la photoshop, photoshop!

Ba doom doom doom doooooom. The computer and I continue to improve our relationship, though I think professional counseling could speed the process along. We've worked out the "pressure-sensitive tablet pen" issue and are now working on "starting up when I goddamn tell you to."

Last night as we were driving back from Spin Jam we observed a license plate, "637 EGO." Someone suggested that perhaps this gentleman (or lady) had intended to spell Eggo™(see that alt-key combination there? Windows and I are high-fiving.) to brag about how many instant waffles (s)he has consumed over the course of a lifespan. But thinking about it further, we realized that 637 is actually not that impressive a waffle body count, as far as lifetime achievements go. I've only been around 24 years and I think for most of my K-12 years I ate Eggo™ waffles at least once a week, and at least two at a time. All those waffles add up. We do a lot of insignificant things, and we build up some pretty impressive numbers in our lives, if anyone bothered to take note. As Ricky pointed out, I wish the user interface of life had a statistics-tracking feature that let us see exactly how many pine cones we've kicked, dandelions we've blown, and foreign objects we've accidentally hit ourselves in the eye with. Oh no here comes the dangling preposition wagon to take me away to grammar jail get in the grammar foxholes and fetch me a grammar bazooka colonel. Grammar thank you.

a speedboat peels away

Just underfoot, there were dozens and dozens of pancakes. As field day continued, the children gleefully romped through relays and races and water breaks and orange slices. The subterranean pancakes had minimal effect on the proceedings; maybe the displacement of dirt caused by one particular flapjack made Tommy Chumbles lose the three-legged race, or maybe it didn't. It was irrelevant. To Principal Hob, who had spent four dark and silent hours the night before digging up the field, sowing the unassuming breakfast cakes under the topsoil, and replanting the entire field of grass in time for the 7 am bus arrivals, it was the most life-affirming sight imaginable. Because Principal Hob was absolutely, terrifyingly insane.

Horris stands on the roof, looks down, and gives the hushed crowds below a smile. Across the street, a dozen unique and deadly vipers are loaded into the cannon and fired. Horris straps nine pounds of bleeding raw ham onto his bandolier and leaps roaring into the twelve-story high emptiness. Horris and the reptiles clash high above the city streets and begin their deadly dance. The ham, the snakes, and Horris's mismatched limbs and tube socks intertwine and begin choking one another. Blood is drawn and bodies are broken. They plummet through space, none of them able to breathe, and slam into the pavement. The ball of man and meat and serpent explodes, and Horris's gore-drenched cravat lands squarely at the stockbroker's feet.

"Here's the deal:" said the devil, "you tell me how many people you're going to kill. I'll give you two hours to do it, and at the end I'll give you ten thousand dollars for each person. Plus if you manage to kill as many as you said you would, I'll rewind time, set the whole thing to rights. Nobody's dead, nobody remembers you did anything wrong, and you keep the cash. But if you DON'T reach your quota, you don't get the money and you don't get the reset. Sound fair?"

deserting

I got a new computer. It is a Windows machine. I'm still getting used to it, and I suspect I'll keep getting used to it for a good long while. It feels rather completely different from the old laptop, and I keep making typing mistakes, but I'm sure it will come to feel like home. As soon as I can wrangle something with which to make graphics, I will do so.

I killed the first zombie.

I might have saved the world. Or I might have just killed a man. Either way I want to write this fast because something may be coming. I was driving to go pick up an air mattress for the trip this weekend and I swear I saw the first zombie. A man shambling toward the gas station with his neck at a broken angle, dragging one leg and foaming at the mouth. He was headed for the minivan parked at the far pump. I slowed the car down to see what was wrong with the guy, and he turned his head around and sniffed for a second. His eyes were black, with some kind of red skin irritation all around them. He was moving toward the van, and the van had kids in it.

I know zombies aren't real. But I know that if they were real, they'd look like this guy, and if he bit even one person it would be over. It would spread like it does in all the movies, and we would just have to find out whether this one has a happy ending where only 99% of the population dies, or if this is it. I can't say whether what I did was sane. I just know that I would rather risk my own insanity and incarceration than risk the lives of every person in the western hemisphere.

I killed him. I stopped my car in the middle of the lane and I grabbed a golf club from my bag in the trunk. I ran into the gas station lot and while the two other people standing by the pumps started to scream, I bashed the zombie's head in. I caved in his skull, and I scattered bits of zombie brain all over the club, the pavement, my face. I didn't get any in my eyes. I was careful.

The people were screaming, and I could see the guy in the gas station looking out at me and dialing something on his phone. I ran back to the car, covered the license plate with my shirt, closed the trunk on it, and drove home. I checked the news for any stories that sounded like a zombie infection, but nothing has come up. Whether it was a virus or black magic that made the first zombie, I think I stopped it.

I don't know what to do, and I don't know how long I have until the police find me and put me away for murder. Maybe they won't. I don't know how it works, or how many cameras or how many witnesses there were. Obviously putting this online might not be the best idea, but I want you all to know what happened if I disappear, and I want you all to be on the lookout in case the one I got wasn't the first, or wasn't the last.

I killed the first zombie. I might have saved us all. I might never sleep well again.

hamfists. Fists of ham. Pheasantfists. Fists of absolute nonsense.

Good morning fiends and bestiaries. I am once again in Atlanta, this time to receive money instead of spending it. We did a flawless show at Georgia Perimeter College, and are getting fully paid not only for the show, but also for the transportation costs there and back again, the rental car, all the fuel, the hotel, and all our other expenses. Our clients are flying us across the country. We're making it.

I also got to catch up and hang out with most of my old Atlanta friendfolks in the wee hours of this morning, roving from a four-tiered Irish pub to the basement apartment of Admiral Nicholas Turbo Benson and Victor B. Bicycle. Bless their hearts, one and all. There's a part of me that is uniquely Atlantan. And it's been a while.

I still don't have a real computer. This is being written in the glamorous environs of the Sheraton Atlanta hotel lounge, and up in Boston, 1300 miles away, I still have the darling little piece of shit that Wildfire Chad is lending me. I ran a time test for it- I measured the time it takes the laptop to open Firefox against the time than it takes our toaster oven to toast a bagel. The laptop won this contest by exactly twelve seconds. Truly technology is amazing. Truly I miss having Photoshop to draw some poorly-conceived ostrich-hammock to accompany this post.

How the words Ostrich and Hammock might possibly interact is something I'll leave up to your sultry little wonderminds. Release ballast, Mr. Hannibal! We float easterly!

A Tale of Two God Dammits

The Best of Times:
*We now have an agent for A Different Spin, who is jovial, friendly, and thinks he can make us a lot of money.
*We have military and college gigs for all sorts of exciting locations, which can also make us a lot of money.

The Worst of Times:
*My computer was stolen out of the exhibit hall at the APCA conference in Atlanta. There seems to be some kind of investigation happening, and I may get some money for it, but I still lost a lot of writings, art, and personal documents. I also -obviously- don't have a computer, so updates will be even rarer than usual until that gets fixed.
*Tim hurt his neck at practice this morning while doing the Atlas balance, and got Emergency Roomed. He is now in the warm embrace of prescription drugs and Soul Calibur, and nothing serious is wrong, but nobody knows how long it'll be before he can flip and juggle again. This takes down our financial outlook significantly. But he should be fine in the long run, thank Flying Spaghetti Monster.

who radishes the radishmen?

I had a thought today as I was putting on my shoes in the living room. The thought was: "If a doberman jumped at me out of that doorway right now, I would now be prepared to kick it in the mouth." This thought immediately went to a man reviewing security footage of my living room in this scenario and wondering "man, I wonder how that kid was prepared to kick that doberman in the teeth. That's some reflexes, that is."

I am always prepared. Unfortunately, the things I'm prepared for (fuck you grammar) never happen.

life is full of unhappy men in dapper suits

Tonight at 3:15 am we will be having our second annual vacuum sale blowout right here at Marvin’s Vacuum Emporium. Whether you don’t own a vacuum or you’ve been waiting for just the right time to buy that new vacuum for the family, tonight is the night! Drop by our lot for huge savings and unbeatable deals on name brand models, and don’t forget to enter your business card in the drawing at the door for a chance to win a horse!

pissing all over the floor

This is what we're doing tomorrow for the audition. We're also giving them a DVD of all our fire stuff, and telling them to imagine that the clubs are on fire (that's what they told us to do, rather than do fire acts for the preliminary screening) Yes, it has the same music as the last juggling video. But this one's set in the Teen Center of the local YMCA. ...awesome.

I am adorable.

I decided it was blog post time, because there are a few things that have come up that I want to yell about from my tiny soap box. First and foremost, I bought Ashlyn a tarot deck so she can start playing with all fun hobbies a tarot set allows: spiritual reassurance that it's okay to have another cupcake, and turning over the Death card at small children while saying "booga booga" are the big ones. To commemorate the event I also drew an aww-thats-precious picture in Vaguely Amazing style. You can see it off to your left. Yes, it's precious. I also think it's Neat, which is why it is here instead of back in my private life where it belongs.

(I realized after posting this that "Vaguely Amazing style" might be meaningless to some of you -how many of you are there?- who only met me recently. Vaguely Amazing was a factually-impeccable autobiographical account of Ricky and my Vassar years in web comic form. That adventure can be begun here if you're curious.)

Secondly, on the A Different Spin front, we have decided that our America's Got Talent audition will consist of the four of us going on a diet of nothing but food coloring (one color for each of us) for the 24 hours preceding the audition, and then urinating a full-color map of the United States of America all over the floor of the studio. We'll show them variety talent. Even if this act doesn't get us a spot on America's Got Talent, I'm pretty sure Stephen Colbert would give us a luxurious all-American yacht fleet in appreciation of our art.

Along the same vein of humor... an earlier discussion among the house regarding highways and sexual deviancy led to one of my patented Bad Idea google searches, and this gem came out in the wash.

There. Pissing all over public television and adolescent sex jokes about highway numbers. Is all the Adorable gone now? No? Alright, well then here's an alternate picture. You can just imagine I put it up instead of the tarot card.




My google ads are all about odor removal. The things that show up on that little side bar never cease to amaze. I really hope someone stumbles on this blog by accident while looking for "Septic Smells" or "Soup Recipes" or "Children's Sleep." A little befuddlement is good for the brain.

Hi-Ho Cherry-O was a great game.

It taught counting, and colors, and introduced the idea that birds and dogs can take away everything you've worked so hard to build, instantly. I've never trusted them since.

Last night at Spin Jam we had a serendipitous and surreal experience: some of the other performers there had responded to a Craigslist ad for America's Got Talent, and are going to audition this weekend. This prompted a conversation in which we wondered whether we might also Got Talent, and whether we should go in to audition too. Opinions were mixed. We probably would have decided not to, except that Mooch immediately got a phone call from America's Got Talent, asking us to come in and try out. Apparently Johnny Blazes had recommended us, and (s)he has some connection that makes hir opinion count over there. Neat. Maybe if all goes well, you can make fun of us on national television. You can even put on a Simon Cowell hat. And if you do, I can beat you to death with a golf cart.

And then I'd probably get arrested.

Anyway, we're apparently going to try to merge our literal circus of juggling and fire calamity with the metaphorical circus of the national media. This union, like that of Pasiphaë and the Cretan Bull, will probably spawn a monster that will consume entire generations of young Greeks. I'll make sure to bring a ball of yarn to the audition to make sure we can find our way back out again.

flippin out with the pancake squad

So. When I graduated from the Vassar machine I was pretty confident that that was it. There would be no more extravagant evenings of liquoring up, bizarre forms of Twister, smooching on strangers, and wantonly flinging balls of flame around one's body. Fortunately, it turns out that in the city of Boston there are wonderful creatures that are more than happy to continue these traditions.

We have friends! We go out to see people, and people come to see us! I love when things work the way they should!

[The picture accompanying was drawn by me as an entertainment during a neverending game of Risk: Godstorm™ and colored by Katie. It is a loverly birdimal.]

Overcast Orange with a whiff of sewage

Orson speared the last of the fish creatures. It gurgled a fluidy protest as it clutched the weapon sticking out of its gut, as if to argue that Orson's move had not been entirely fair, and if it had just been ready, the fight might have turned out more in the fish's favor. Orson emphatically kicked the shaft of the spear, sending it and the attached monster splashing unhappily into the slime of the bay. He swung his leg back over the seat of the bike and wiped a smear of fish blood off his leather sleeve- hopefully the smell wasn't permanent. Shaia gunned the engine and in the usual choking cloud of foul, particle-filled smoke, the two sped off down the dock in the fading, dusty light.

When they’d finished telling Dodd about the ordeal, back at the lounge, two hours and twelve beers had passed. Dodd gave a heavy sigh, leaning back on the cracking green fabric of the booth and peering across the bottle-strewn table. “Sixteen fish-men, and all of them carrying weapons. Spectacular. At this rate, next time they’ll probably have semi-automatics.”

Orson leaned forward. “Making gunpowder under water…” he began. Shaia sighed loudly to cut him off.

“We stopped them before they made it into the city at all,” she said, “they still don’t know anything about us except that we kick their asses every time they decide to come up to the surface. What I don't get is, why do they keep coming back?"

“I don’t know,” said Dodd, “but they’ve attacked the docks five times so far, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. We just need to be prepared, and make sure they don’t steal any more supplies. They may not have our resources, but they’re inventive with what they get their hands on.”

“You sent out submarines last week after the first attack though.” Orson said, “did you see how many of them there are, or where they live?”

“The water’s still too polluted,” Shaia sighed, “I took a sub down there myself, and it’s nothing but sludge and radiation. I can’t see anything, and the sensors just get scrambled. I say the fishes don’t understand us, but we don’t understand them any better. I can’t imagine how they can even survive down there, let alone communicate and hunt. I don’t like how little we know about them.”

Dodd stood up. “Neither do I,” he said, “but our hands are tied. They can come into our world more easily than we go into theirs. We just have to wait for them to make their next move. I’m putting three volunteers on watch tonight, and installing a heavy gun down there first thing in the morning. You two should get some sleep. Make sure to get a patch for that cut, Shaia. Rations are tight, but we don’t want you getting infected with whatever bacteria the fishes might have to offer.”

"Another beer first," Orson suggested, "I'm not quite ready for the night to be over."

Dodd grudgingly agreed, and the conversation changed to lighter matters from there: the pulley rigging in ship house D and the mongrel dog that Haskell found hiding in his mail bag. By the time they each had drunk another two rounds, the worries of the skirmish on the docks was far from their minds.

horrible adventures in the snake world

I've started a new part-time job at an after-school program for troubled yoofs. Helping kids with homework at the 2nd grade level sounds incredibly easy and as intellectually stimulating as stapling one's own finger to a turkey sandwich (challenging) but I'm actually having a lot of fun. Watching the concepts develop in their mind, and seeing the difference in rational thought and reasoning between an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old is something that my other work with kids has never shown me. Plus I get to spend 2 hours a day doing whatever I want, so naturally next week I'm running circus workshops, and after that we'll be populating islands with fantastical hodgepodge creatures. I'm sure it ultimately will get boring, as all "jobs" do, but for now it's a solid source of income, and something I'm happy to do every day.

For my next trick, I will mix slapdash art with meaningless photoshop layering, and excrete it into the public eye, off to the left. I will then ponder the fact that you already looked at it two minutes ago as soon as the page loaded, and I will point out that this "next trick" therefore must have involved time travel. Ta-DAaaaaa.

The image is explained in the last paragraph, I swear.

I'm sure everyone knows about this, but firefox's Google search bar offers some really profound, troubling, head-scratching revelations about web-based humanity. Put in the first few letters of something, and "suggestions" will pop up, based on popular searches. Every so often I like to type in a few words and see what America is up to. Some (abridged) examples:
root: "I am"
suggestions: I am bored; I am legend; I am sasha fierce; I am the walrus lyrics; I am pregnant; I am sam; I am green today
---------------------
root: "where is"
suggestions: where is the love; where is chuck norris; where is my mind; where is my g-spot; where is waldo; where is dubai
---------------------
Oddly, the top search suggestion for "help me" is "help me howard." Either there's a movie out there called Help me Howard, or somewhere a superhero has been born, and the only way to invoke him is by searching for his help on Google.

There is also the fantastic feature that lets us see what we ourselves searched for in the past, before the suggestions even start. So, if I put in "potato" for example, I see not only the suggestions (potato soup, potato salad, potato recipes, potato pancakes) but also what I have searched for within the past year involving potatos (potato famine, potato farm, potato gun furry porn). I truly don't know where that last one came from and I swear I didn't make it up for this post. I think I must lay traps for myself across the internet, and then forget about them later. I can't imagine what potato gun furry porn would look like, much less why I would want to find it.

On the topic of strange things my internet habits lead me to find, and which you probably didn't need to know about... the Japanese will make porn out of anything. Despite the movie coming from their culture, somehow someone Grossly Misunderstood and decided that The Ring would make good hentai material, and that girls coming out of your television screen would actually be pretty neat. The picture above is one very tame sample of a much larger and more graphic body of work. Anyway... The Ring scared the crap out of me personally. I guess making porn of it is somebody's coping mechanism.

Another nail in Walt Whitman's coffin.

I've noticed that the great majority of my literative spew has moved toward the dreamy and hallucinogenic, and usually ends with, or involves, someone's death. There will be no more of that. With that in mind, here is a poem about a jackhammer:

O jackhammer, my jackhammer! our fearful task is done.
here stands a mighty mega-mall, complete with Cinnabon.
the I-beams came to make a frame, the plexi-glass surrounded.
built on the very concrete that we pulverized and pounded.
But heart! heart! heart!
Though the digging has been dug
My jackhammer has died this day
For someone pulled the plug.

Dammit, still got the death in there. I suppose it can't be helped.

I ordered three umbrella hats this evening, with pointy tops to spin plates on. We shall put them on the heads of unsuspecting audience volunteers, and I think they'll have a grand time. I've always wanted one of my own. An umbrella hat, that is. I'm pretty well set when it comes to grand times.

A Different Spin has been invited to join the performer roster of Urban Circus, a Boston-based talent promotion company. We have a photo shoot with them on February 4th. The guy I talked to at the agency also said he was interested in bringing me on as a birthday entertainer and performer for their "pirate parties". Semi-regular gigs that I don't have to do any booking work for? Sounds pretty ideal to me. And of course ADS is going to the APCA conference in Atlanta in March, which is the big leagues. From what we've done so far in the show-writing and skill-development departments, we're actually ready for it. Our juggling and volunteer acts are legitimately hilarious. I'm proud of what we're doing here, and I hope it keeps going for a long time.

crossing the streams of consciousness

Down on the docks the concert was in full swing. Colors flew from the keys and into the evening air like wild confetti, streaming down onto the adoring crowd. Walder's teeth flashed under his visor, his head swooping back and forth to follow his keyboard strokes: if Ray Charles had been blue-haired, white-skinned, and possessed of Walder's transmissible synesthesic talents, they would have been indistinguishable. The touch of Walder's fingers on the keyboard sent out not only music, but also waves and flavors in every sensory channel imaginable: a symphony in dreams.

The crowd drank in the torrential harmonies, tasting the warm swirls of cinnamon chords in stereo. A fizz of sixteenth notes burst from the keyboard reef as a school of electric blue angelfish. The speakers thrummed. In seat nine of row MM, an old man peed himself. The warmth looked distinctively like a D minor.

In the chaotic frontal moshpit just under the stage, a group of the young and impetuous felt their synapses overload, sizzle, and collapse. They had disregarded the banners warning emphatically against the use of hallucinogenics at this particular concert, and as a consequence were now being psychically torn apart by the fifteen-layered tempest of overlapping and conflicting sensory inputs. The synesthetic mutant Walder left an unfortunate trail of hyperstimulated, maddened fans in the aftermath at every venue, gibbering creatures capable of nothing but humming tunelessly and chewing at themselves.

Among the victims on this night was Jacquelin Luff, a pink-haired cartoon enthusiast. As her neurons informed her that seven levels of fractal reality were simultaneously converging on the bridge of her nose, she prayed to Voltron for salvation.

the land is doomed

I may at last have joined the ranks of the motivated. This might have something to do with the fact that I have definitely joined the ranks of the poor. I am a rank-joiner. Wikipedia informs me that "a joiner differs from a carpenter in that he cuts and fits joints in wood that do not use nails."

Free health clinics are a new and interesting experience: waiting for 5 hours in the waiting room of a clinic and finally being told that you can't be seen today, despite what they told you on the phone, is pretty awesome.

I've got a 3-month gift subscription to Netflix, courtesy of my family. This means I can stream any movie they have, any time I want. Unfortunately, the movies they have available for streaming are usually ancient, technicolor beasts that lurch their way to 2 and a half stars before their budget expires and they slurk back to their fetid back lot spawning pools. Amidst this metaphorical swamp, I found a neat little anime called Paprika, whose soundtrack has been going through my head nonstop ever since. I also watched Kevin Costner's The Postman, and found it quite satisfying.

There are no more unrelated paragraphs of irrelevant autobiographics. We are both free to go.

A Different Spin Jugglestuffs

Look for do this it to be a vidjo.

a new twist on animal crackers

Yesterday in a large asian market with an overpowering fish smell, Ashlyn found a sort of do-it-yourself Pocky kit, that included little cookie sticks and a chocolate frosting dipping pit. Each stick had an animal on it, with some little characteristic written in big blocky (safe to eat?) ink. The cookie sticks had things like "ELEPHANT: JUMBO" and "TURTLE: SLOWLY" on them. But there was one that was too good not to share.



Bat: Only in the Night

Yes indeed.