Puck

Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.

“I saw Tim’s work well before I met him,” Nisi told me later. “I moved to this neighborhood the same year I moved to Seattle, 1996 or so. The Central District is one of the city’s ‘historically black’ areas. People had warned me against moving here, and yes there were crack hovels and mattresses on the lawn but also BBQ restaurants and beauty parlors and other signs–for me–of home.”

Tim was home, we saw, and Nisi called out, “Hi, Tim! Is it all right if my friend takes some pictures?” Continue Reading »

Share This

Large carnivore’s have been on my mind lately, as my Web development team (the amazing Phil and Rose) just finished a refresh of WSU’s Large Carnivore Conservation Lab’s Web site. I’m pretty sure the Large Carnivore Lab is going to offer you better advice than this, but it probably won’t be as funny:

I found this sign on a section of Flickzzz called Very Weird Signs. Probably not entirely work safe. More advice for dealing with animals:

The comments on the source post raise doubts as to the legitimacy of some of the signs portrayed there (i.e., they’re a bunch of damn fakes; who was it that said there are lies, damn lies, and Photoshop?), but that doesn’t detract from the irrepressible creativity of the collection.

Share This

Jayme Jacobson keeps finding these… things in her home. Here’s one now:

Eclectons, they’re called:

Eclectons spontaneously assemble out of everyday household products. If you pay close attention, you can catch them at the instance of assemblage (IA). After that, they fade from view, moving beyond the perceptual capacities of human beings.

But where, we wonder, do they do when they fade from view? We do, after all, live in a universe where energy is conserved. Jayme has some insight for us:

“Where do eclectons go?’ asked one of my young friends. It’s a good question because, as we know, they disappear from view shortly after IA (instance of assemblage). Evidence is a bit sketchy but one theory is that they are trying to get back to Eclectonia, a poorly understood galaxy about 450,000 light-years away that was recently picked up by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Check out more electons here.

Share This

Me luv LOLcats.

see more crazy cat pics

Share This

Sometime in the mid-90s, I received a manuscript from Sarah Hafner. The result was a chapbook of stories called Some Girls. Sarah’s writing was hilarious and cutting at the same time, so when she asked me to consider her novel, The Elements of Style, I said, Sure, send it on over. I loved it and tired for a long time to raise the capital to publish this fine novel. It never came to be, and eventually I sold Permeable Press. Thankfully, Vivisphere bought The Elements of Style and brought it out as a handsome paperback. As one reviewer put it:

A mature Salinger arrives on the scene and it’s a woman! Continue Reading »

Share This

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

As Robert Anton Wilson (the man, the modality, the moonmeld) indicated in undisclosed locations known only to a select few, and the Dogon of West Africa have known for thousands of years, cheese is of alien origin. The phrase “the moon is made of green cheese” is not just smoke blowing from the door of an opium den. Rather, it is a literal truth, one a world-wide conspiracy has sought to suppress for many moons. Cows are robots from space, implanted with soulful stares that have but one purpose: to disarm and befuddle the planet Earth’s population into thinking that they, and other udder-bearing beasts, are the sole source of milk and milk by-products. Which, in fact, they are. Continue Reading »

Share This

Here’s something that supports my long-held thesis that scientists make the best science fiction writers not because they know so much about science but because they’re so damn weird:

“…if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”
From Nematodes and Their Relationships, 1915 by Nathan Augustus Cobb, the “father of nematology in the U.S.“

Share This

essay by Brian Charles Clark

My interest in permeability formed a clot in my imagination the day I first flew solo. I was thirteen, and I was alone. I was sitting on top of the Knoll, for the first time surveying what would be my stomping grounds for the next fifteen years. My fear of moving away from Chula Vista, tucked away in the southwestern-most corner of California, fear of leaving friends behind, all sour was distilled by the calm sage and stoic Joshua trees. The dark chemistry of depression sank deep away into the vats of boulders beneath my feet.

I was leg dangling on an outcropping of rock about nine feet wide. The rock face dropped some ten feet beneath my seat, and then buried itself in the reddish desert dirt. The realtor who sold my parents the acreage, on which they had a house built, had dragged a magnet through the soil and pulled it up coated with iron filings. The eastern face of the Knoll sloped steeply away beneath me for several hundred feet. A cool breeze pushed with mild insistence at my back, and the future was luring me into the arms of the air. In a moment that is indelibly tattooed on my physiological memory—this is a moment that I can ever re-member—I lurched and then I flew. Out, over, in–now I can offer an explanation, but what was really happening, what did flying really feel like? Continue Reading »

Share This