IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Over at Talkleft. House Passes Thought Crimes Bill and No One Notices?

Center of Excellence.

Who the hell comes up with these names?

Like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. But for your brain.

We got them Monday evening. It’s Thursday and there are still no tunnels. They stand around all day, perhaps philosophizing on the meaning of life without their queen.

You get the idea. Day four and still no tunnels.

Maybe they’re same-lineage ants who have lost the ability to work.

Or there is one amongst them preaching, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!”

I did a brief search on the internet for others having this experience, and expected to come up with a fair number of reports of striking ants. Instead I’m regaled with posts of people loving all the harvesty worker ant activity going on in their ant farms, photos displayed of the marvelous tunnel networks dutifully and industrialfully created by the ants, all for your very own personal edification, within the first 24 hours of being plunked down in their high tech NASA nutrient-rich gel environment.

Our ants continue to sit on top of the gel discussing.

I ask H.o.p., “Are you disappointed in your non-tunneling ants?”

“Yes,” he says.

Should they live their full three months and manage to never drill a single tunnel, that will be impressive in its own way, I suppose.

Man in the Meteorite, Fernbank Science Center, 2007

H.o.p. and I spent the past several days reviewing our knowledge on comets in preparation for a planned Friday night excursion to the Fernbank Science Center observatory to see Comet Holmes. As it turned out, they were having troubles with the telescope and the observatory, which normally opens at 8:00, didn’t open until 9:30. There were still problems and what we saw resembled nothing like this. Instead there was a vague haze with very little brightness and no observable nucleus. But then a member of the astronomy club here once told me that it was better to observe very distant objects on the observatory’s high powered scope, than relatively near ones, so that may have been a factor. Usually there are individuals out with at least one–often two–small telescopes, but there were none tonight.

Never-the-less, the outing was enjoyable. The science center was filled with people eager to see Holmes. The desk attendants were harried and at least once every couple of minutes were answering a newcomer’s inquiry of “Why is the observatory not open?” and repeatedly informing those already waiting that no they didn’t know yet whether it would open or not but perhaps.

I took some photos in the science center, tonight capturing the Man in the Meteorite.

The sixth day (or day five, whichever, we’re flexible). The ants are no longer congregated in the center of their aquarium. They’ve either had a disagreement or reached some kind of consensus and have split into two groups. One faction is on the left and another is on the right. No one is playing centrist at the moment.

Still no tunnels.

Dead Penguins
Fernbank Science Center
Nov 2007

We’re scarce around here, aren’t we? H.o.p. couldn’t care less that Marty and I have come down with bad colds (I went for three months without one and believe me I’m at least grateful for that) and has just popped on Mozart’s Requiem.

“Guess what I’m listening to?” he sings out.

I’ve decided the music adds a certain crushing nobility to the situation.

Mozart and Masons also reminds me that–No, Jennifer, we never did get our black and white tiled kitchen floor and please stop asking about it or the Dead Penguin will nip you. The landlord, after tearing out the kitchen wall and floor to replace the pipes that feed the radiators, instead spent weekend before last hacking the old flooring together with cut-outs from some other kind of material of another color and texture and thickness to prolong said floor’s life, and cobbled together sort-of-but-not-really baseboard replacements that look like a child’s first interaction with toy blocks, except for the fact toy blocks look FUN and none of this is happy and gay. No one will look and sigh, “Ah, there’s an architect in the making.”

I can kind of excuse the splintered and busted molding being reinstalled as it is part of the authentic (old) air of this old building. No telling how long that molding has been there. My mother, yesterday, mentioned how the windows took her back to her childhood because the glass is ripply like the windows of her childhood. They ripple likely because they are at least 60 to 70 years old. Yes, it sucks when it comes to our energy bills, but we have exceptionally old windows that ripple just like they used to because they are exactly what they used to be.

Anyway, the deed done, the old floor reinstalled (with embellishments) the landlord ran, because…

“As long as you’re going to be tearing out the floor, rather than having a busted floor reinstalled, I want a floor like in the upstairs apartment,” I’d told him. “I want a black and white tiled floor just like the Freemasons’…”

Because the black and white tiled flooring of a Freemasons’ lodge has…

…the merit of looking clean and of being easily kept in that condition. They contribute very much to the atmosphere of freshness and brightness in the building.

So there, if you ever wondered why Freemasons have black and white tiled pavement, you need wonder no longer, so don’t bother your little pointed head about it again.

The landlord had instead mumbled something about how much he really liked our flooring and too bad it was discontinued so he couldn’t make patches out of the same material. For which reason we have patches made out of some other material that are nailed down on the flooring and I’d make photos for the blog but it’s all too depressing.

The landlord (who I still like, by the way) never outright said, “No, I will not be replacing your torn floor with new flooring,” and when I insisted that we must have our baseboards back and that I hoped they would look like baseboards, he never did outright say, “They will.” So there. But I also suppose this is why, when he was done, he kind of fled, because he didn’t want to witness me standing there staring tearful at what had been wrought, my life now pointless because I will never get my Masonic black-and-white pavement after all. Never ever. Because I’m not spending the money to install it myself when we’ve got so much else that needs spending on and I learned a long time ago that you JUST DO NOT make improvements on a rented apartment. Except for a dash of paint. You just don’t do it because you never know when you’ll end up with a notice that the building has been sold and you need to get up the money for a deposit on a new place fast.

No, in lieu of permanent improvements you adorn your apartment with gobs of bookcases.

The landlord had said he’d be back week after last (which would have been this week) to paint our kitchen and its patched wall, but he never did appear and that turned out to be all right because my parents are visiting for the week and making their way from household to household.

But at least we finally had heat last night. Which was good because for several hours it looked as if we might not have heat as it wasn’t working. Especially as we now have colds, it was going to be nice to have heat (well, I was coming down with my cold). “We don’t have heat yet?!” I said, standing on chairs, checking the radiators, and was about to phone the landlord when my phone rang and he was on it and was asking, “Do you have heat?” No, I said. “Oooooh,” he moaned and made it sound like heat was at the other end of another week of our floor and wall being torn out yet again. But half an hour later I heard the pipes start to clatter and before long they began to warm.

I might not have even come down with the cold had I not gone on a ferocious cleaning jag (initiated by my parents visiting) but when you do have a cold it’s always nice to have your surroundings refreshingly rearranged and smelling of lavender from your relatively new aromatherapy burner, lavender supposedly helping with colds. And take-out Chinese. Lavender and take-out Chinese (with lots of garlic) mingles real well.

After my parents left yesterday, I crawled into bed and watched Truffaut’s 400 Blows. Hopefully, I’ll be up for the planned excursion to the museum on Friday with at least two batches of H.o.p.’s cousins and his granddad.

The third batch of cousins is making noises of canceling because, guess what, THEY HAVE THE COLD.

They didn’t make it to the big gathering at CRACKER BARREL that happened Tuesday night in Alpharetta, either.

One of my brothers scheduled the above and is forgiven that (he asked forgiveness) and our having to drive an hour and a half in Atlanta rush hour traffic to get there (late) as the company was good and no one batted an eye at anything the kids did (but they were good, too) and I came home with a knapsack full of those free packets of jams and honey (I’ve got this thing for little free packets of jams and free soaps and free shoe polishing cloths from hotels but never have I ever walked out with a towel or a television I swear).

“We’ll never get there in time, this is pointless,” Marty kept saying, as we sat sat sat in this carbon dinosaur of a river glistening red and white light far into the distance.

“It’s not pointless. When people fly across country to see you, you drive an hour and a half through rush hour traffic to Cracker Barrel in Alpharetta even if you might not make it in time,” I said.

As we slid into a parking space, we saw through the windows the salads being delivered to the several tables of relations, so we weren’t too late or Cracker Barrel was being really slow or people had held up ordering for forty-five minutes. I never found out which.

We’ve only eaten one other time in our lives (Marty, myself and H.o.p.) at a Cracker Barrel. For years we abstained because of their sex orientation discrimination policies. Though, as of 2002, this was no longer an excuse, still, we abstained. Then one night on a long drive through Texas there was no place other to eat and so last year we had our first taste of Cracker Barrel, which was a miserable experience.

No, it was an exceptional experience as they had nothing we wanted to order. Not even chocolate milk for H.o.p.

On Tuesday night, at least they weren’t out of everything (as was our previous experience) and though my meal made everyone’s eyes bug out at how uncharacteristically spartan my chicken tenders were (others had ordered meals that filled out their plates nicely), not to mention unappetizing in appearance (even my brother who loves Cracker Barrel was aghast and stuttered and called out for the waitress because he was certain this was wrong wrong wrong). There were also plenty of corn muffins left over to wrap up for my mom for late night snacking back at their hotel.

At the Cracker Barrel in Texas they had given us no biscuits or corn muffins or little packages of jams and honey.

I spent the better part of Tuesday night wondering why the decorations, which are all Americana type, included a portrait of late 18th century Lady Something English/Scottish, which looked very much like Kubrick’s Lady Bullington. As we left, I even made a point to cross the room and check the name, that’s how perplexed I was.

My family didn’t quite get my perplexity. I tried to explain. They still didn’t quite get.

“They have it because it’s old looking,” they said.

“Yes, but the Cracker Barrel look is Americana and pseudo Americana,” I said. “So, I don’t know why this…”

“But it’s old…”

“Yes, but I don’t remember Marie Antoinette being American!”

H.o.p. was attracted to the display of expensive Christmas ornaments in the shop, for which reason it’s semi-miraculous we made it out the door without purchasing a glittery bauble. How H.o.p. was convinced he didn’t need one, I don’t know. Maybe I said they were the produce of slave labor. I don’t remember.

In other news, I wrote Uncle Milton about our amazing nontunneling ants, to ask why they were amazing nontunneling ants. Uncle Milton responded,

Thank you for the email. I am sorry to hear that your ants are not
tunneling. To be honest we do not really know why the ants would not be
tunneling, that is strange. Do they still appear uninterested in working?
Which ant farm do you have? I’m just trying to see if anyone else has heard
of anything similar to this.

My response was to take the above pic and send them a link to it.

Uncle Milton wrote back,

Thank you for the response and for the picture, I love the title. It
does seem that their interest in tunneling is still mediocre. Since there
are some tunneling, I would assume that in a short period of time they will
all catch on especially if they pick up the chemical scent of a working ant.
I would give it a little time and see because the biological nature should
kick in and tell them to start working. Please keep me informed of any
progress and of anything you might need. Hopefully the slackers will get to
tunneling like the others so you will have something to look at.

We are now on the 11th day and there is no change from the picture of the 10th day.

Beyond my wildest expectations, that we should end up with highly unusual ants that don’t care about tunnels. This anomaly makes them entertaining in their own way, but tunnels would have been nice.

Of course, you’re thinking at least we have the incredible hermit crabs to cheer us up! Yes, except a month ago Sarah tunneled down, apparently to molt. And then a little over a week ago Jerry and Green Shell disappeared completely as well. So, we’re supposing they too are now molting.

How do you tell the difference between a molting crab and a dead crab when they’re buried in the sand?

As long as you’re not overwhelmed with a dead fish smell, they are supposedly molting somewhere down there, beneath all that sand and coconut fiber, still alive, not decaying, not long gone for this world. And so we daily continue to put out water and salt water and little veggie and fruit snacks (which they don’t eat as they’re underground) and food pellets.

In other words, we pretend as if we have pets because the aquarium does not smell of dead fish.

Lovely, I accidentally waxed my poor lips with Tiger Balm instead of Carmax Carmex.

Carole, I actually am sounding better now than I did on the phone early this afternoon. I know you’ll be glad of that.

But…the big lesson of this post…

Me: We have EXCEPTIONAL NONTUNNELING ANTS!

Uncle Milton: You have MEDIOCRE ants.

No, Uncle Milton, we have EXCEPTIONAL, NONTUNNELING ANTS! This is how I’ve survived, by not accepting mediocrity into my life. Instead of suffering the mediocre, we marvel at the exceptional. OK?

A cousin H.o.p.’s age is now, after being a reluctant reader, making his way through the encyclopedia.

If H.o.p. was making his way through the encyclopedia, I’d be proud of him too. He’s not.

H.o.p. has instead discovered the joys of the comics and graphic novels alley of the second hand bookstore.

I mentioned comics to my sister. She showed me a comic she says her son enjoys, that teaches new words. I glanced at a couple of pages. Not really a comic. On each page is an after thought illustration introducing a new word and lots of text following on ways to use the new word.

H.o.p. would howl if I tried to introduce this to him as a comic. Even I recoiled and I didn’t want to recoil. I wanted to like it. A vocabulary builder!

People love Singapore Math and Singapore Science but H.o.p., from the age of five, refused to look at either. Why? Because he couldn’t stand the illustrations. Nearly every learning program to which we’ve introduced him has either failed or succeeded on the strength of its graphics, despite the fact he’s been sucked into crap like Neopets.

Marty took H.o.p. to Book Nook on Wednesday after his piano lesson (while I was waiting here for my parents) and introduced him to David Lindsay who was there. For years Marty enjoyed more being trashed by David Lindsay’s music reviews (when he was trashed) than the good reviews written by lesser talents. Lindsay knew what he was talking about, knew history, and was amusing.

We used to religiously visit Book Nook. The late night, winter stops were the best. Cold outside. Warm in. I’d sit on the floor, a tablet in hand with the numbers of comics I was missing from certain series, and start searching through everything used that had recently come in. This was before the internet and I even planned some trips to include stops at stores that were known for their comics inventories, determined to complete certain collections of mine.

Our interest in comics flagged to nothing eventually, for which reason we haven’t been frequenting Book Nook since before H.o.p. was born. But this looks like it’s about to change. H.o.p. came away from that Wednesday Book Nook excursion insisting on regular visits so he can sift for new issues. We let him in on the fact that we used to collect comics and have years of Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer and others packed away in boxes elsewhere. We promised we’d dig them up.

We’ve a lot of old alternative comics boxed away as well, but they’re too mature for him.

We located several of our old Silver Surfer graphic novels. They’re now on the table and H.o.p. is dancing happily around. “Yea! Yea!”

One reason I stopped reading comics was because of the explosion of steroidtastical physiques, the huge mammaries and the violence. We’d never been much interested in D.C. Comics, but then Marvel was changing how it was doing things. The X-Men had splintered into numerous series, too much to keep up with or spend money on. The Silver Surfer kept disappearing or dying, whatever. Artists we’d enjoyed such as John Buscema and Moebius were moved off series we appreciated also for the characters and story lines and into things in which we didn’t have much interest. Metropol, which we’d liked, was finished. Some of the alternative comic books we’d followed for quite some time had dried up (Mr. X was overrated but better than a lot of what was following and had some really fun art). First Comics had ceased publishing, and we’d read a good bit of their stuff. As far as I was concerned, Love and Rockets, which had been awesome, was pretty wrung out. Starting off with Mai, the Psychic Girl, after a couple years we had pretty well exhausted the manga that wasn’t rip-your-eyes-out gack gross and a huge turn off with the proclivity for sadistic sex involving females with underage faces. Confronting the outrageous muscles and glands on prominent Western commercial display and the gross out manga when I sat down to search through the stacks had gotten to be too much for me.

Marty reminds me that Pynchon seemed to have completely ripped off the story line from First Comic’s Whisper for his Vineland novel. I’d forgotten about that. When I was going through our books day before yesterday, rearranging some of the cases, I pulled out Vineland to look at again.

H.o.p. came home with a Silver Surfer issue and The Mice Templar. Marty had only glanced through them and missed all the violence in The Mice Templar, and I suppose he didn’t expect there to be much blood and gore in a mouse comic. But there it is.

“Yeah, it’s not Beatrix Potter,” H.o.p. had to say of it.

I looked around online and found however Mouse Guard, a comic which gets a good review and is described as not having the limb separations, and will order that…

Because H.o.p. is hooked, of course. Hooked on comics. For years he’s had an ancient Fantastic Four in his room that I’d not boxed up, that I left out for him, expecting that he’d one day be interested and wanting him to see one of the old greats first before diving into the new. I had intentionally boxed the rest, not just the mature comics, but all of them, because I had this feeling he’d fall into them wholly and didn’t want that happening when he was three, four, five, six, seven, eight years of age. I knew they’d be IT for him, but because of their themes, even the less intense ones, I didn’t want him stepping into that world until he was at least nine years of age. Which may sound odd, considering he’s been deep into animation for years.

Over the years, he returned to that Fantastic Four comic repeatedly, pulling it down from off his shelf like it’s a rare treasure, examining it like there’s something mysterious to be unraveled and brought to light. And I kept putting it on a higher shelf, staving off the inevitable.

Haven’t uploaded anything for H.o.p. in a long while. Stacks of drawings pile up several feet high all over the apartment. I need to start getting some of them scanned in. Was just doing this one tonight because I find it heartwarming that his conviction that Martians exist is unflagging.

This is a little sketch he did in one second then finished in Photoshop, quickly illustrating for me how he wanted to design a Land Rover that would seek out those Martians. These days he spends a good bit of time working on producing finessed figures, like he sees in comic art, but I like his little flash sketches for their energy.

The rumors have started.

Unidentified acquaintance of acquaintance: “FEMA has a plan for mandatory evacuation of Atlanta when the water runs out in February.”

Where? To New Orleans?

Susan of French Road Connections was inquiring how our ants were doing so I thought I’d update.

There they are. Day 20. There’s a wee bit of tunneling down the side of the habitat, just a little more than evidenced on day 10.

The three perforations towards the center of the gel are the ones we made before we put the ants in their new home, as per instructions. The ants have pointedly ignored those.

For comparison, this link shows what ordinary ants achieve by day three in Allen Hong’s NASA gel ant habitat.

But Allen Hong has ordinary Harvester ants. We have exceptional non-tunneling Harvester ants…who like making sculpture of the few granules they’ve mined.

Susan inquired,

If they were honeybees acting like that, it would be symptomatic of queenlessness. Are they touching mandibles or grooming each other? That’s how they would be sharing pheromones and promoting “hive mind”, if they were functioning as a colony. Do you actually have two camps, or is there some contact between the two groups? Is there a source of electromagnetic radiation ( motor or flourescent light?) near enough to disturb them?

Susan, they’re supposed to tunnel despite the lack of a queen (it’s illegal to sell the queens). From what Uncle Milton wrote, the scent of even one worker ant is supposed to inflame the others into joyous paroxysms of tunneling behavior.

They do appear to groom each other, but what do I know, they may instead be pretending to groom each other. There are not literally two camps of ants. Mostly what they do is all sit on top of the gel in a little bundle, consulting on what not to do next, while one lone ant struggles at tunneling behavior off to the side.

I moved their habitat in order to take this picture, which is why they’re all running around, upset by the earthquake. But we keep it, as advised, on a shelf where they’re not disturbed, away from direct sunlight. There are no motors or florescent lights nearby. Just books. As instructed, we don’t disturb the habitat, but I’ve read of children veritably playing soccer with ant habitats and the ants blithely continuing to tunnel away.

Uncle Milton said I should keep them updated on the progress of our ants. I suppose I’ll send them this pic. I may also send it along to Dezeen.

P.S. Melisaur’s Flickr photoset shows what our ant habitat could have looked like by now if our ants gave half a damn. But our ants appear to be cousins to Wes Barnes’ ants who also were philosopher ants done in by the futility of endeavor in the face of the yawning void.

Melisaur’s ants actually have a queen as they were farmed off a tree.