Enemy vanquished

 I have been hunted --- in my own home --- for three days. By a mosquito. It buzzes my ear at night trying to fall asleep, or when I am on the toilet. I have resorted to wearing socks and a hoodie (long sleeves and pants are assumed) so that my only exposed surfaces are my face and hands, where I am most likely to detect a blood-thieving incursion.

At last, after several hunts where my enemy escaped into a busy visual background, this evening I successfully slapped it out of the air and squashed it. Sweet relief! The security of protecting my own hard-earned blood in my own home.

Vampires ask for permission to enter your home and add a sexy cultural vibe to their blood-sucking. Mosquitos are much less polite. 0 stars, future mosquitos are equally uninvited chez moi.

This post's theme word is sanguinolency (n), "addiction to bloodshed." The torment of endless itches and swollen skin bumps has driven me to sanguinolency for hematophages.

Wolfwalkers

 Wolfwalkers is an animated film from the same director as The Secret of Kells. It has a similar sort of art and line style, with movements easily flowing across the screen in a way I found very aesthetically pleasing. You can read the plot summary on Wikipedia, so I'll just give some viewing notes:

If possible, you should view this on a bedsheet in a neighbor's backyard.

Cover your delicious blood with skin, and cover that with clothing, then bugspray. (You will still be bitten on the face, and hands, and through your socks. This is the destiny of the delicious. Your itchy discomfort will be offset by the bug-free experience of neighbor kids.)

At the appropriate time --- and trust me, you will know the appropriate time --- you should absolutely howl along with the onscreen wolves. Everyone else, on their lawn chairs and picnic blankets, will absolutely do this, especially if < 7 years old.

Five stars, highly recommended. Not entirely historically-accurate.

This post's theme word is eidolon (n), "an idealized form" or "a phantom". The animation smoothly showed transition between physical humans, eidolon scents and spirits, and wolves.

Fluffy puppy on a textured lawn

 Every part of this photo seems to invite fingers to run across it.

Ika on Parrish Beach.

This post's theme word is talpa (n), either "a mole (the animal)" or "a cyst". The dog is sniffing for talpa in the lawn.

Phallacy

Emily Willingham's Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis is not what I expected. Based on the cover art and the subtitle, it seemed packaged as a popular science book, so I thought it would be a little biology, some interesting research anecdotes maybe, and (of course) the mandatory discussion of bedbugs and slugs ("traumatic insemination" is an extremely clickbait-y phrase).

The book did include those things, but they were side notes --- its true focus was humans, and particularly the way that we (esp. in the west) have structured society in general and scientific research in particular to ignore things that are female-affiliated, even when that is an obvious detriment to scientific knowledge and research advancement. Plus there was an always-uncomfortable, but straightforward and unforgiving, broad consideration of toxic masculinity.

I think in retrospect that it's mostly "life lessons" and only sort of tangentially about "the animal penis", especially since the book itself contains so many descriptions of ways that various animals transfer gametes that are not a penis. The tone overall was straightforward but wry and unquestionably a woman's voice: it unflinchingly and repeatedly drew parallels to the animal kingdom and pointed out how hollow and stupid and full of preconceived notions those parallels were. It was sprinkled with absolutely fantastic footnotes and asides. Willingham has a wonderful authorial tone and a gift for introducing neologisms and puns, casually adding references to popular culture and ancient history, and overall just making me wish that I was her friend so we could cackle together.

My notes overall ended up being mostly phrases or sentences that just struck me as awesome:

• simile used when discussing evolution: "You can be as fragile as a dictator's ego and still have attributes that prop you up, keep you alive in the current environment, and lead you to successful reproduction." (p 14)
• "When it comes to evolutionary studies of sex, gender, and genitalia, guess who the "winners" are?* [footnote: *Men. It's men.]" (p 15)
• "In this work, they used what they called "haptics" and every one else calls "dildos"" (p 30)
• "Lest I come across as unamused and far too earnest, I do think that genitalia and fart jokes can be hilarious." (p 46)
• "Frogs collect of an evening round the pond," (p 65)
• "Given that the human penis couldn't stab through a perfectly ripe avocado," (p 77)
• "The genre of "arthropod (and invertebrate) sex films" is small but mighty." (p 77)
• "This is a very fighty kind of bird, considering that they all apparently agree to go condo together." (p 84)
• "Who hasn't needed, at some point, to reach a neighbor with a lengthy protrusible organ, even if it was just spraying them with a water hose? If you're a barnacle, ..." (p 86)
• "[footnote: *The noise that they make is called "orgling."]" (p 106)
• p 132 she discusses her previous teaching and describes herself as showing slides and "intoning" and then says "I was obviously electric in the classroom."
• some great neologisms like "intromittens" (used frequently) and "tuatararium" (a terrarium for tuatara, p 216) which often is accompanied e.g. by "[footnote: *Yes, I made this word up.]"
• on p 288 I was caught off-guard by the phrase "squad goals" used w.r.t. mites
• "got his Twitter account... suspended for violating Twitter rules, which we all know is almost impossible to do if you're a white male." (p 243)
• "Lest I attract unnecessary derision (only necessary derision, please), no, I do not really think that..." (p 257)
• "This particular, not especially long (in words, but oh, the psychic pain lingers) paper uses the word "penis" more than a hundred times and the word "phallus" sixty times." (p 268)

Overall the book was interesting and suggested new ways of considering and engaging with these issues, and I liked it. I probably wouldn't have read it if not for the squid on the cover, though, so I know my own vulnerabilities.

This post's theme word is lepodactylous (adj), "having slender fingers or toes." I will not be able to consider mittens for the lepodactylous without thinking of arachnids.

Mosquito resolution

 After many months of living at the end of a narrow internet pipe, my bits finally stopped flowing (the pipe was blocked? ok, metaphor) and I caved and signed up for fiber. Now I have a much bigger pipe! Bits are freely flowing as never before!

Importantly, I am now viewable as many pixels, often even in motion, for my many, many, video calls. My life (and many others) now consists mostly of taking video calls in different parts of my dwelling, and my interlocutors can now see me in smooth motion and continuous audio! What luxury and decadence, etc.

The pixels are in fact so delicate and rich that yesterday during lunch on my porch, my interlocutor was able to see the mosquito that I chased in and out of the frame, as it hovered around me and tormented me with the threat of stealing my blood. This was nice, because I got reassurances that I wasn't completely insane (another person validated the visible insect!) and that I didn't look completely insane (chasing an invisible phantom).

Today I received a belated housewarming gift: a giant citronella candle. Emphasis on the houseWARMing, and also on the acknowledged battle that owning a house is: battle against my house being washed away, battle against incursions of snow and mice, and the personal battle to keep all of my blood --- which, I want to emphasize, I am currently using to support vital life operations --- inside my body. I don't plan to burn it indoors, but hopefully this will resolve my outdoor mosquito deliciousness problem.

This post's theme word is henotheism (n), "belief in or worship of one god without denying the possibility of others." Welcome to my henotheistic house; over there is the citronella shrine.

Cobwebs

I went outside and discovered a spider had built an extensive web across the rear entrance of my house, spanning the door, deck, and stairs. This is some sort of arachnoid commentary on human self-quarantine and it struck me as both sticky and humorous. (Zeugma!)

This venture into the horrible humidity was made in order to chip away at emptying my office, which I'm not-really-using, for sabbatical so that someone else can not-really-use it. (Everything is wonderful, the world is totally fine, don't look too closely.) My two most neglected plants stubbornly hang on in what is surely the most arid, frigid, inhospitable summer that southern Pennsylvania can artificially offer to indoor plant life. An enterprising indoor spider, hoping in vain to capture prey in the abandoned, sealed, locked building, had constructed a foolishly hopeful web from the ceiling down to the desk chair, completely blocking off the shelves and the keyboard. This struck me as sticky and a silly emerging theme.

Are spiders everywhere just constantly walling in everything, and only the entropy of weather and large fauna keeps pathways clear?

Given the prevalence of webs, the visible black cloud of mosquitos that chased me from my car back into my house seemed incongruous. YES, I had to pass through a partially-reconstructed deck-spanning web to reenter the house. NO, it did not appear to dissuade the accursed vampiric horrors. Please, can we get some mosquito-eating bats to colonize my block?

This post's theme word is durance (n), "confinement or restraint by force; imprisonment." In this grimdark modern fairytale, the protagonist is self-quarantined at home and entirely encased in cobwebs and loneliness so thick that the quarantine becomes permanent; "Dream Durance" is rated NC-17 for psychic damage inflicted on readers and anyone attempting to engage in concurrent political discourse.

Not enough flamingos

There were a lot of landscapers cleaning up this yard, but I walked by too late to see what must have been an incredible Flamingo Setup Period.

an unlikelihood of flamingos

This post's theme word is homochromatic (adj), "having one color." The hovering flamingos provided an ambient homochromatic layer of unlikely pink.

Philadelphia Zoo

The Philadelphia Zoo is a delightful hotel for assorted animal creatures. It has a lot of humane features, too, like sky-highways of netting that allow the various animals to wander outside their enclosures, wander the zoo, look at other animals and humans, and nap in the sky above the ice-cream stand.

The greenest animals I saw were these green anacondas, shockingly muscular and large and right there, waiting for the Potter-esque disappearing glass to give them an opportunity to frighten humans.

Green anacondas (2) lounging at the Philadelphia Zoo.

This post's theme word is obdormition (n), "numbness in a limb, usually caused by pressure on a nerve. also known as falling asleep." Seek immediate medical assistance if you feel the sudden or gradual onset of serpent-related obdormition.

Loose chickens

 These chickens were just out on the sidewalk.

Chicken run? More like chicken, lightly wander around.

This post's theme word is rutilant (adj), "glowing, shining, or glittering with a red or golden light." The chickens were drawn to the sidewalk's rutilant appeal in the late afternoon.

National Moth Week

It's National Moth Week, as you surely already know. I observed the ... week... by going to a moth-viewing event. We heard a little lecture about moths and then a brief lecture about ticks (summary: "It's Pennsylvania. There are going to be ticks.") and then we were lead out into the woods to view some moth-baited sites.

I learned that there are moth fanatics, a conference called Mothapalooza!, and that moth enthusiasts are called "moth-ers" and are, generally, into very fancy camera equipment that can take high-resolution digital photos for instant viewing in low-light conditions.

Here's the best my equipment could do: 

A white-with-black-spots moth and a cricket of some sort.

The Audubon Society --- which hosted this event --- is generally pro-nature (moths included), not just pro-birds (though now that I think about it, their interests might be limited to "flight-capable animals").

No moths were harmed in the making of this blog post, though ticks were strongly discouraged, sprayed against, and then minutely searched-for in the aftermath.


This post's theme word is acarophobia (n), "an extreme fear of small insects", "the delusion that one's skin is infected with bugs," or "a fear of itching." Watching a swarm of nighttime insects creep across a high-contrast white sheet ticked both the formication and acarophobic boxes of my brain.

Statuary at the Victoria & Albert

The Victoria and Albert Museum is a beautiful, well-lit, thoughtfully arranged collection of art and art-like objects. It breaks with the stereotypical joke about British museums: most pieces are accompanied by a title plaque which indicates their provenance. (British Museum, I'm looking at you: "basically an active crime scene." - John Oliver) The day was too beautiful to spend much of it indoors, but I did sneak in and poke around the astonishing collection of statuary and... statue-like things:

The scrolling scenes on the pillars tell a story.

The rooms containing these items were themselves pretty, although a bit toned-down and plain, I think to divert visual focus onto the art. Solid-colored walls, understated balcony railings, beautiful square skylight grid.

Door decorations, things to hang on the wall, and freestanding... art? of religious significance?

The pulpits, excised from the cathedrals and collected like medical specimens.

The museum entrance is luminously bright, with a giant open space. In the center of this space was hanging a special... piece. Not quite a chandelier, since it served no lighting function, but in the place a chandelier would go and of similar size, vertical style, and eye-catching details.

The view from below as our tentacly overlords dangle the bait.

I don't remember finding a title placard for this piece of magnificence, but I think of it simply as "default hair behavior without intervention". Yes, in blues and greens.

Level side view of the glassy fuzz of curls.

Across the street from the V&A sits the Natural History Museum, which sprawls over a much larger footprint and is completely and totally delightful. Again, since I was in London for The Single Sunny Day of 2015, I did not spend much time inside. But still... I spent several hours. It was very, very cool. I went on a quest for the whale skeletons --- large, but surprisingly difficult to locate in the museum's people-flow maze. Their full majesty was impeded by the extensive scaffolding supporting the scientists employed to clean and stabilize the whale skeletons, in what must be the coolest boring job title in the city: Blue Whale Rib Duster.

This open space filled with a fine lace of metal and wood.

This post's theme word is crepitate, "to make a crackling or popping sound." The suspended cetacean skeleton's crepitating boded ill for the giraffes and hippopotamuses below.

Maine art

Gotta be lobster, I guess. If the lobster were riding a moose, it would be even more Mainish (Mainerly? Mained?).

I like this painting style --- it reminds me visually of smudged fingerprints, and my associations make these buttery smudged fingerprints.

Mmmm, food is delicious.


This post's theme word is kickshaw, "delicacy, fancy dish, trinket." Vacation indulgences include many kickshaws.

Wolf on a wharf

Well, not really --- but wolf [statue] on an abandoned piling. Very realistic, lifelike, surprising to notice from the corner of one's eye.

Notice his buddies, who have made the leap and are now stalking ever closer to the shore, and the unsuspecting pedestrians on this unexpectedly perilous walking path.


This post's theme word is dess down, "to push with the horns, as a bull". When his verbal dressing-down was for aught, the satyr resorted to dessing down the wandering questers.

The inspirational cat?

A local artist paints many portraits of cats. The storefront window is full of these paintings, and one extremely lifelike statue that I stopped to watch for a moment. Then it moved!

Perhaps this cat provides the inspiration for the others?

Or maybe he just stopped by to spend some time with buddies.

This post's theme word is limn, "to portray in words," or "to draw or paint, especially in outline." I cannot accurately limn my surprise at the sudden motion of one cat among many.

Parasite

Horror and tension do not appeal to me as fun leisure-time sensations. I don't like to be scared, and tense cliffhangers are unpleasant.

Nevertheless, I enjoy Mira Grant's books. I don't especially seek them out, but when they stray across my path, I consume them --- usually as quickly as possible, using the Band-Aid-removal strategy --- and enjoy them. Grant's Parasite begins her latest trilogy, this time on the topic of medical-science-advancing-enough-to-implant-beneficial-tapeworms-but-something-goes-wrong. My experience with the previous one (Feed / Deadline / Blackout --- medical-science-advancing-enough-etc-flu-etc-zombies) was positive, but tense. I read Feed over a few weeks; I read Deadline and Blackout in a single weekend. Immediately. Perhaps my lack of exposure makes me susceptible to the stress of cliffhangers, or the reasonably plausible zombies and well-used varieties of format drew me in.

I liked Parasite. Perhaps I am building up a resistance to Grant's authorial magic. She is consistently good, dependable for a cliffhanger at the end of every few chapters, and enticing "excerpts" from in-universe documents at the beginning of each chapter, a trail of misleading breadcrumbs which deepens and intensifies the unfolding novel.

There were certain structural clues, though, and parallels to the previous trilogy (in an unrelated modern-day universe). So many things did not catch me by surprise. Secret medical agencies? Check. Government-organized disease researchers? Check. A confluence of events (intentional? accidental?) which results in the protagonist, a young adult woman, being chased by zombies? Check. Cell phones, secret interpersonal codes, the feeling that an all-powerful Big Brother is somewhere manipulating things and shaping destiny/leaving a trail of clues, lots of scenes with tense emotional showdowns over trust and information-disclosure? Yep. And the book-ending climax? I saw it coming in the first chapter, it's hinted at everywhere. I can only imagine that books 2 and 3 must reverse this climactic reveal, otherwise it's... too straightforward, I think.

But to be clear: I liked it. I like Mira Grant's writing; it is unlike anything else in my experience.

You should read this book if you are hard to gross out, and not prone to medical nightmares or formication.


This post's theme word is curettage, "scraping", usually in a medical sense and applied especially to the uterus. The recommended removal procedure for tapeworms does not involve curettage.

Scrap octopus Fabrice

One month of Saturdays spent, and --- lo! --- a large collection of worn and stained green shirts (plus one old spherical pillow) is transformed into one fantastic pillowcase octopus. 

Fabrice, my scrap octopus.

I quilted the "skirt" portion for fun, and also as an experiment in quilting t-shirt cotton. It was interesting. I will certainly take the lessons learned here forward in the next sewing project. One main lesson is: don't quilt t-shirt cotton, it's too stretchy. Another is: finishing touches matter. I spent a lot of time considering how to attach the tentacles and make the underskirt, and these things have much less of an impact than the shape of the head and the style of quilting.

The rest of my shabby old clothes have a reprieve now, while I focus on other projects. The other residents of the bedroom should beware, though... Fabrice's octopus head is stretchy, so he is quite capable of consuming other softies.

This post's theme word is celadon, "a pale green color," or "a type of ceramics having a pale green glaze, originally made in China." Fabrice's original habitat offers many mottled celadon backdrops against which he is camouflaged.

Chopstick technique

I am intrigued by the chopstick technique presented below.

How does a single tentacle control both chopsticks? It looks like it's a hunting tentacle, so maybe the hunting tentacles have extra abilities that the others lack. The configuration as represented looks instable. A small amount of squirming on the human's part would suffice to loosen from the ominous --- dare I say, eldrich? --- grasp of the squid's tentacles.

But a merry eldrich grasp it is!


This post's theme word is micturate, "to make or eliminate urine." The hapless human micturated in terror, but the ocean absorbed both his screams and that small embarrassment.