IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Young son will hopefully now think twice about leaving things scattered all about. “You need to pick all this up,” I said and said again. Then rammed my foot right into a dumbbell of mine he’d taken from next to my desk and left lying in the middle of the floor.

Ripped a toenail right off. Almost. It hung by a gelatinous gooey couple of threads and I sat and grumbled as I finished the job.

H.o.p., cowed, brought me a cheery bandaid.

To be fair, the toenail was already damaged as a while back I’d rammed the same toe into H.o.p.’s keyboard stand and bruised it black and blue. Still, it was an ugly, bloody business so it was not quite as ready as all that to be free.

I’m reminded why I always wore steel-toed boots up until a couple years ago and didn’t often walk around barefoot.

I briefly examined the toenail. Really kind of lovely in its own way. And I thought of the person I used to know who saved all their toenail clippings in a shrine.

I threw the toenail away.

In a parallel universe, I’m given to understand that an alternate me, which had observed the dumbbell, had picked it up and thus saved the toenail.

In honor of the latest mathematical discovery confirming parallel universes, H.o.p. and I are watching videos on the subject.

Perhaps there is a universe in which I enshrined the toenail.

But I’m skeptical of how we currently attempt to conceive of, reason with and put a face on these parallel universes.

Update on the notion of podcasting some readings of “Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World or In Search of the Great Penguin”.

I’ve got a nice mic here and preamp that I’m borrowing from Marty. Makes things sound so much better (though tinny was good for the animations). And I’m trying to get used to reading on mic. Though I told myself I’d do otherwise, I am stopping whenever I flub and reading over again. Which I need to put an end to. I need to just read and flail on through blunders.

Shouldn’t I?

A podium would be good. It’s difficult to do this seated at my desk. I feel cramped. I want to feel free to gesticulate, sigh, harumph, cough, sip water, swill coffee, stamp feet, and modulate.

Somewhere along the way I’ll find a happy medium?

I’ve uploaded my first reading (Chapter 1, Part 1) of Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World or In Search of The Great Penguin.

The streaming Real Audio is located here or an MP3 for download.

I pronounced “plasma” like “plot” instead of “platypus”. I’ve never pronounced plasma like that in my life but hey why not start now.

I’m aware I mispronounced Descartian. Again, why not start now.

And there’s another error that I won’t even mention because I’m far too mortified.

But by then I was pretty done with it. I’d already taken hours to do a full recording of Chapter 1, Part 1, only to have the recording sofware crash on me at the very end and scramble everything impossibly. Turned it into hash. Even though I was saving the file periodically. Chopped it up into little bits. I’d no idea it could do that to a saved file.

So I had to do the whole thing over again.

I could have rerecorded them if I’d noticed while making the recording, but these slips had gone unnoticed.

Anyway, I would appreciate any feedback.

Do you think it’s fairly evenly paced? Slow enough? Reasonably enunciated? Please remember I’m an amateur doing this at my desk, which means striving for “good” is in my means, but “great” is not.

Marty’s the one doing H.o.p.’s spelling lesson tonight.

So, I’m sitting here reading and I hear behind me:

Marty: Union. Union. He joined a labor union to try to get better pay for all workers.

H.o.p.: No, no. How about instead, “The Nature Team is a union of freedom to escape the atomic bomb”.

I was amused.

Wow. SOMEBODY (cough cough) may be using little robotic dragonflies to maybe spy on folks at political events like anti-war rallies.

Ain’t that too cool??!! Little spy dragonfiles!

Deserves a paragraph of exclamation marks!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If they’re for real.

So what was seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the D.C. march - and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, when one observant but perhaps paranoid peace-march participant described on the Web “a jet-black dragonfly hovering about 10 feet off the ground, precisely in the middle of 7th avenue … watching us”?

They probably saw dragonflies, said Jerry Louton, an entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History. Washington is home to some large, spectacularly adorned dragonflies that “can knock your socks off,” he said.

At the same time, he added, some details do not make sense. Three people at the D.C. event independently described a row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies - an accoutrement that Louton could not explain. And all reported seeing at least three maneuvering in unison.

“Dragonflies never fly in a pack,” he said.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her group is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several federal agencies. If such devices are being used to spy on political activists, she said, “it would be a significant violation of people’s civil rights.”

Wired first wrote about it on the 21st of Sept.

The Flickr dragonfly photo lords and lordesses need to work on getting some pics.

Hey, I’m convinced! I want a Goshi Goshi towel!

“…in Hoogie Boogie Land there is no war, there is no hate, can you relate? So take us Sparky. Take us where we want to be.”

And then, of course, you will want to watch the interview.

“Stop that,” the Colonel said, and rode on, exhibiting only a trace of embarrassment.

(Actually, one of the more brilliant theatrical music performances I’ve ever witnessed was a rambling Bruce Hamptonthon at the Moonshadow with the Late Bronze Age. Jerry Fields, Ricky Keller, Bill Hatcher. And Bruce pontificating. Marty remembers he was laying on the floor laughing and Jerry Fields ended up at our table, doubled over, he was laughing so hard. And I was laughing so hard that I accidentally set my shirt on fire with an unnoticed cigarette ash. I doused myself and no one was the wiser.)

Update: Ooops. It occurs to me that you may not look at the Youtube pages and see the videos are for a band called Complete. Nothing to do with Bruce. I was just free associating.

Supposed optimum living conditions. And it didn’t even drop any legs, like some hermit crabs do when they get stressed and ill. Just half crawled out of its shell today and was lethargic and limp. So we put it in an isolation tank away from the other crabs and this evening it crawled completely out of its shell and fell over dead. Laid there on its back. I tapped it to make sure. Didn’t move.

“It’s dead,” I told H.o.p.

“We should have a funeral in the morning,” he said. “With a box for a coffin so nothing will eat it.”

“You find the box.”

“No, you find the box. OK? I’ll find a flower for it,” he said. “And we’ll sing a song.”

“OK.”

“I feel bad for the hermit crab. It didn’t deserve to die,” said H.o.p.

Then I’m writing this and get up and I pass back by and lift up the towel draped over the isolation tank, and there’s the hermit crab, still alive, still out of its shell though, but it has crawled up on top of its sponge.

“So, it’s not time yet for a proper burial,” said H.o.p.