IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Been rethinking my involvement with the internet.

Dreamhost has been a rather dramatic company with which to host recently, and because of it this site has been unreachable about 3/4’s of the time recently. We were assured they had everything under control and then today again the website went offline.

But I’m fed up with the internet right now as it is. This perhaps hasn’t helped. Well, I’m pretty sure it hasn’t helped.

For some reason this week our fish went sceptic. I don’t know why. The water in the tank is good. PH is good. Everything is good. This happened a couple of months ago but that time the water proved to be suddenly way too acidic, the water coming from our tap the culprit. We got things under control and the fish promptly recovered. Then, bam, a few days ago they went sceptic again. We could find no cause. We began treatment with the medicine that fixed them up last time and not only have they not gotten any better but Dylan suddenly bloated up Saturday with what seemed to be a major case of dropsy.

We’ve had Dylan since shortly after we moved in here. He’s a huge goldfish. “What do you feed him, hamburger?” we’ve been asked. Because he’s gigantic.

We’re kind of attached to him. Or were. The other two goldfish are nice, but we really liked Dylan. He had personality. As much personality as a goldfish is going to have. He spent a lot of time watching us. He liked to play. He loved thwapping the top of the water with his tail. When he wanted my attention he would thwap his tail on the side of the tank to attract it.

While Saturday evening (when all this went down) we scurried around then held our heads in our hands while trying to figure out any way to save our fish, H.o.p. made up his own peculiar sort of death vigil chart. He made a graph with a line for each fish showing how close to death it might be. When one seemed to get worse he would move the line to reflect that and when one seemed to improve he would move the line to indicate its improvement. He suggested we feed them peas and then decided each one had made dramatic improvement and adjusted the lines accordingly. “I saved the fish!”

We told him it was not likely the fish would live. (I tried to use a contraction there but Wordpress suddenly will not let me use an apostrophe this morning. Crazy Wordpress.)

“I want to see where you bury Dylan,” he replied.

Anyway, the other two fish are still alive at the moment, they may indeed make it, are looking better today, but Dylan is now in a bag and they are going out to bury him. H.o.p. seems to be all right with things. He just wants Dylan buried. He does not want Dylan put in the trash out back. (Darn, why is not Wordpress letting me use the apostrophe!)

I have a rather cheerier post to make later about our new upstairs neighbor.

Our last upstairs neighbors were two women who moved in and then never paid rent. The apartment just above us has a history of people moving in who cease at some point to pay rent and then skip out. These women never paid rent again at all.

Earlier this week I heard someone upstairs at a time when the landlord would not be up there. “There is someone upstairs,” I told Marty. As it was around the first of the month, I wondered if it was a new tenant, though no one had moved in yet.

The next day I heard a lot of banging around on the stairs leading upstairs and then upstairs. What is amazing to me is how people make a lot of noise when they move in but when they are skipping out on rent they make no noise at all.

“Someone is moving in upstairs,” I told Marty.

He thought instead the landlord might be up there getting rid of any furniture left behind by the people who skipped out on their rent last month, because our landlord usually lets us know what is going on around here and he had mentioned nothing about a new tenant. I said, no, that this was definitely someone moving in and looked and outside was a U-Haul moving van.

We were returning from a trip up to New Echota on Thursday, saw G., the resident Super (he helps the landlord) and stopped to talk to him. I saw coming up the hill a pretty dark-haired young woman in a tight hot pink tank top. G. noticed as well and mumbled something about her and we made out that she is the new upstairs tenant. We progressed to the door of the building and I was thinking we would say Hello and introduce ourselves as we would reach it at the same time but she instead ignored us and walked by to talk to G. I heard her making hearty greetings as we went inside.

The first words out of my mouth when we got inside?

“She is stacked,” I said to Marty. Honestly, the bust was the second thing I noticed about her. First I had seen the pretty face but then immediately I had seen the hot pink bust leading the way of the pretty face. And when I had seen the bust in the hot pink tank top I thought well, if it was difficult getting some things fixed around here before now, it was a good chance that Pretty Young Woman With Bust would from now on be ever standing in the line ahead of us, which was why the bust merited first comment. I am a practical person that way.

“Is not she though,” Marty said. (Weird, not being able to use contractions.)

Marty went back outside to get the few things we had left in our car and heard Pretty Young Woman telling G. he had great sneakers on. They are whatever sneakers that have seen better days. Pretty Young Woman also knows how to puff up egos. I now know not to believe a word she might ever say to me in a complimentary fashion, should that ever happen. And I doubt that it will.

G. was strutting and said, “Yes, everyone likes my shoes! A man in a BMW stopped his car once and got out to ask me if he could buy my shoes!”

What a story. It is one of the reasons I like G. Anyone who can whip up a story like that on the spur of the moment is OK in my book.

I told Marty I was going to tell G. he better be careful or he is going to pop a blood vessel.

Then on Friday when I was washing dishes our kitchen sink backed up with black stuff. It is not often that this happens but I have noticed that it is when we have an upstairs neighbor that we start having plumbing problems. Even though there are a number of other apartments in the building, it is when we have an upstairs neighbor that we seem to be affected. I took the dishes out of the sink and got the plunger that is reserved for the sink and stood up on a chair, stuck the plunger in the nasty water, and for about twenty minutes attempted to make an iota of difference. It seemed after about twenty minutes I saw the water level drop slightly but I decided no and called Marty and asked him to pick up some Drano on the way home. I noticed the black in the water seemed not so black, was clearing up a little, but as the water level did not appear to be dropping any further I reasoned it was sediment settling. When Marty got home he walked in and made one stab at the sink with the plunger, just one stab and whump down went the water.

So seems my working at it for twenty minutes had almost made a difference but not quite. Or so I told myself. Having managed to have almost opened the sink back up made me feel as if I had almost managed a measure of success that day.

“Remember, I have a hundred pounds on you,” Marty said.

I bleached the sink and got the dishes out of the bath tub and hauled them back in. As we had just been at New Echota the day before, I had fresh in my mind their replica of an early 19th century kitchen with the well out back of the house and did not feel very put out by all this.

Because Cul at Ratboy’s Anvil tagged me….

1) One book that changed your life?

The book that changed Cul’s life was “Quartum Organum” by Krypton. I still would like to read that.

The book that changed my life? “Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World, of The Search for the Great Penguin”.

Honestly, it changed my life.

It is changing my life somewhat because I believe in that book and no one is reading it. As I’m a writer, honestly and truly, though you can’t tell it from this blog, this is somewhat depressing. When no one reads a writer’s work they are going to bang their head against the wall and wail, “Am I not a writer!?” So it is recently changing my life as I spend a lot of time banging my head against the wall when I could be doing more useful things, though I’m damned if I know what. I had thought writing was fairly useful.

2) One book you have read more than once?

Cul says he has read Q.E.D. by Richard Feyman more than once. I have read many books more than once.

I used to read Ellison’s “The Invisible Man” once a year. I love that book.

3) One book you would want on a desert island?

Cul says a book of matches (indeed) and possibly the I Ching.

I could go with the I Ching or the book of matches. Probably the book of matches.

4) One book that made you laugh?

Cul’s vote is “Breakfast of Champions” by Vonnegut.

What’s a book that made me laugh? It’s been a long time since I read “Breakfast of Champions” and I don’t recollect if it made me laugh out loud. It might have.

“Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World” made me laugh out loud. I know how to set up a joke that will make me laugh is what that comes down to.

5) One book that made you cry?

Cul says he’s never had that experience. What’s a book that made me cry? Hmmm. I can’t think of one either. Well, except for “Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World” since no one is reading it. But I don’t think I’ve banged my head hard enough against the wall that it has literally made me break down in tears.

6) One book you wish had been written?

Cul says, “The Gospel of Jesus”. I would have to say Ellison’s “The Invisible Man”. Except I don’t wish I’d written it because then it wouldn’t read the same for me. If I had written it then I would always be a little nervous about it while reading.

7) One book you wish had never had been written?

Cul’s answer is “The Prince” by Machiavelli.

He’s probably right.

I think the majority of American history textbooks for kids should never have been written.

One book you are currently reading?

Cul is reading “MetaMagical Themas” by Doulas Hofstadter. I am working on a project and not currently reading anything.

9) One book you have been meaning to read?

Cul answers that he stumbles upon books. What’s a book I’ve been meaning to read? “Quartum Organum” by Krypton.

10) Now tag five people.

I can’t tag five people because I just am no good at tagging people.

And now I’ve got to get going.

Just finished eating a banana popsicle in honor of the one banana popsicle I had as a child. It wasn’t the same and I don’t think the cause is solely the intervening years and faulty memory.

When I was little and the ice cream man came around in Richland, I’d a friend who loved banana popsicles and I distinctly remember the smell of them. And I remember eating one once. A double popsicle. And it wasn’t bad. In fact, it was kind of nice.

So we have this box of Rainbox popsicles because I wanted fruit juice popsicles for H.o.p. and these were the only popsicles they turned out to have. The flavors are sour apple, strawberry that’s so sour it ceases to taste much like strawberry, banana and bubblegum. What fruit is bubblegum I don’t know but those are the only popsicles that H.o.p. will eat of this box as he says the apple and strawberry are nasty. The strawberry and the sour apple flavors are pretty unpleasant, real jazzed up; I may love tartly-flavored fruit candies but it doesn’t work so well with popsicles.

I smelled the banana popsicle and it didn’t smell, but I’ve been stopped up all day too. I remembered banana popsicles smelling of ripe bananas. I asked H.o.p. what it smelled like. He could smell something I couldn’t and said, “Yuck!” I said what did it smell like and he couldn’t identify it. H.o.p. loves bananas. Obviously, this didn’t smell like bananas to him.

It half-way tasted like bananas, mellower in spirit than the other flavors, but in some ways didn’t taste like a banana at all. It certainly didn’t taste anything like that banana popsicle I remember from my youth, nor did it have at all the same texture. Of course, some of the experience of that banana popsicle was not just the popsicle but the freezer of the ice cream man’s truck, the dry but egg-frying heat of the desert and perhaps the aroma of DDT, because seems that the ice cream man had a way of appearing in close proximity of the DDT guys fogging for mosquitos. Maybe because of the way we kids hopped on our bikes to follow the sweet DDT smoke. Which means the ice cream man didn’t always appear in the hot hot of the day as the DDT trucks went around in the early evening.

Yeah, bright, chasing after DDT. But we had no idea it could be dangerous.

These popsicles always leave me feeling thirsty, whereas the sweeter popsicles from when I was a youth appeased thirst better and were solid and cold enough one had to lick at them a little while befoore feeling the inclination to bite into them.

I followed the banana popsicle up with a strawberry and I’m full but thirsty which is kind of unpleasant. For a long while after the tastebuds feel like they’ve been scoured with a sour loofah in way that begs you wanting to relieve the sensation with something really wet but nothing is so sweet and wet to get rid of the feeling. The only thing that wet is a big glass of just plain old ice water taken in lieu of the popsicle.

It’s good to occaionally eat some of these popsicles though. It reminds me of what H.o.p. might be feeling when he has a popsicle and then begs for another, then eats another and immediately wants another. He loves the popsicles but they never quite satisfy him either. They don’t fullfill. They just make you want more popsicle because you’re now thirstier and something in the popsicle makes you feel like if you just had another then it would do the trick. But it doesn’t.

Update: H.o.p. says he always just wants more popsicles because they taste terrific.

I started out on the web doing websites before blogging, and I don’t like the way blogging tends to fritter away certain kinds of effort as if those efforts mean nothing at all. Like it just hasn’t satisfied me with the Hanford Declassified series of images and commentaries I’ve been doing. So I have recently been working on a new Remixing the Hanford Declassified Project section to my website, which will be an ongoing work as I’ve images yet to do. I’ve added more commentary and a number more images from the Hanfard Declassifed Project database and have it I think in pretty decent shape. It’s not what I want it to be but it’s not bad. I wanted it up in time for the next anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, which is August 9th, and I met that personal deadline.

The introduction reads,

That the plutonium dropped on Nagasaki was made at Hanford in southeastern Washington State, or that Hanford is said by some to be the most toxic site in the western hemisphere, and one of the most polluted sites in the world, is still, I don’t believe, known by many. One hears a lot about Los Alamos but not so much about Hanford, though leaking tanks have contaminated the groundwater and created a plume that will eventually reach the Columbia River if not contained.

I grew up in Richland, a town that was built by the Manhattan Project to house workers at Hanford and which remains so proud of its heritage that the mascot of the Richland high school is a bomb, the students are known as The Bombers and the emblem of the school is a mushroom cloud.

My father was a scientist at Hanford through the 50s and 60s, studying the effects of low level radiation on miniature livestock and when I was nine years of age I was one of the many school children in Richland who took part in a very casually portrayed testing on the possible transmission of low level radiation through local dairy and food. So, though we moved away from Richland when I was ten years of age (to Augusta, Georgia, located next to the Savannah River Plant, which was another plutonium production facility and has its own troubled history) the area has been an abiding interest of mine, for Richland has a rather unique history and was an unusual place to live.

In many ways Richland was a great place to grow up in, for government and corporations, even while poisoning the area, attempted to make Richland as attractive as possible to families, most of which were youthful with young children.

I had approached some of the issues concerning Hanford in my book Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World or In Search of the Giant Penguin, but in the latter editiing stages I’d decided that much of the information I gave concerning Hanford was inessential to the plot and removed most of it. But I was still wanted to something concerning Hanford/Richland.

When I learned of the Hanford Declassification Project which recently made available nearly 77,000 photographs and other documents, I was greatly interested. The description of the declassification project from the Hanford Historical Declassification Project website reads:

The Department of Energy, Richland Operations Office (RL) has aggressively implemented the commitments made by the Federal Government to openness in Government which was stated as a ‘Fundamental principle that an informed citizenry is essential to the democratic process and that the more the American people know about their Government, the better they will be governed. Openness in government is essential to accountability . . .’ RL is committed to responsible openness. The Hanford Declassification Project (HDP) was initiated by RL to declassify to the maximum possible extent all previously classified Hanford operations information (documents and photographs). There are over 77,000 declassified photographs of early Hanford (1943 - 1960) available… These World War II and Cold War era photographs depict early Hanford construction and the employees/families who lived and built/operated the site.

I became even more interested in the archive when a search for the words “Nagasaki” and “Hiroshima” yielded no results. It was curious to me that Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been excised so neatly from the declassified documents for this portion of the Manhattan Project. Thus was initiated my own ongoing project of taking the photos and using them as base for digital paintings and collages, sometimes adding subcontext.

Many times I get stuck and have to ponder on a painting for a while. Sometimes the detail involved is such that I will stop working on an image for a while, do something a bit less complex, and return to it later, so a painting may take days, weeks or months to finish. Is the labor worth it? I’m not sure.

Please read the essay, “Growing Up in the Shadow of Mt. Fuji” then peruse the digital paintings, some of which are accompanied by commentary. The thumbnails will take you to smaller versions of the paintings which can be clicked to see larger views. The original photographs upon which the paintings are based are also supplied.

Drop by and take a look and let me know what you think.

Has been a queer week for me in that while I was working on getting up the “Remixing the Hanford Declassified Project” I rather felt I was in an alternate universe, there being so little on the blogosphere etc. this week about the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So little that though I knew the Nagasaki anniversary was on the 9th, I began to feel like maybe in an alternate universe it was, but not here. But had reassurance with news reports today on the anniversary that if I blogged on it being today no one would have cause to stop by the comments section and say, “Uhm, what are you talking about ’cause there is no such anniversary.”

Yeah, there’s a lot going on in the world but it still felt odd.

So H.o.p. got tonight to see a little of what it’s like when a movie is being filmed.

The movie is “One Missed Call”, directed by Eric Valette (French, don’t know anything about him). It’s a remake of a Japanese horror film where people receive voicemails from the future which include the time of their deaths. They receive these voicemails from themselves and get to listen to themselves scream as they die.

On his way home, Marty saw some filming going on down at the Abbey and took H.o.p. over. They stood around and watched them set up the shot. The scene was a car going down the street but as they filming a car came out of a parking garage and wasn’t supposed to be in the picture so they had to start again. They shot it two more times. Did some dialogue in front of the Abbey from different angles. Then the last shot was of people walking to the entrance of the Abbey and…whah..horrors…the lights go off!

There was a pick-up truck sitting in the middle of the street with a stunt driver in it but it never moved. They pulled up a big water truck that never did anything and a crane too that didn’t do anything. There was a car sitting in the yard and there was a fake fire hydrant knocked over.

When Marty was on his way home they were filming someone walking down the middle of Piedmont.

Now you know some of what to expect in “One Missed Call”.

H.o.p. thought it was cool.