ceci n'est pas un journal

Sadly, this guy succumbed to rodenticide poisoning or his injuries, or more likely, because his blood won't clot, both.
An apt metaphor for the state of this country.
If you want to hear the Star Spangled Banner played upsidedown, here you go.

We were washing the oil out of a very vocal loon. Kydada tried to do her own impersonation of one but it came out sounding like a train.

The skunk smells like someone tried to light him on fire before he sprayed them.


I get the feeling this is head injury guy and not glue trap guy.

Michael says that What Can You Get A Wookiee For Christmas is worse than he imagined. And since I described it as "C-3PO, R2-D2, a chorus of nasally-voiced 'droids' and Bon Jovi," that means he imagined it was pretty bad. You know, the way I felt when I listened to Insane Clown Posse for the first time.

I’m sad to say that there’s not much happening in my life for the rest of 2018.
I’ve been listening to Verdi Cries by 10,000 Maniacs repeatedly. That’s not really helping my mood any.

I'm optimistic about Question 3. Even the most Anglized person I've ever met, and by that, I mean, she writes "mum" and has been to Londinium, will likely vote yes. With 2, Michael says that both sides want yes. With 1, well, of course the hospitals can't afford to hire new nurses, they spent so much on campaigning. I just hope things get better by the time I'll need it. The rest of it is a foregone conclusion.

Also, for whatever dumb reason, I have to reset the dumbass DNS every time I want to open a page on Livejournal, and it works fine for a few minutes and then goes back to loading the page eternally. And it's obviously just me, which means I'm screwed. It works fine in proxy, and I found out I can use a proxy to post if I get desperate, but not in a different browser or on a different device on the same network. Even when I use Google's DNS, it works for a minute and then goes back to what it was doing without constant prodding.
Burning Question: Has anybody in the history of the universe ever looked up a problem they were having and found a working solution for it?

Somebody spilt coffee on Ashley. On most days, this would be the high point. Oh, it was still great, I mean. But later on, on the way home, I met Lily, who is a really soft, fluffy doberman collie mix, who is mostly black with a little bit of brown on her face and brown and white on her paws, and was kind of freaked out by riding on a train and expressed it in the best way she could, by barking occasionally.

Erin works at the ICA and strongly recommends that current exhibition (I'll try to see it when I have some free time, that is to say, the end of December or the beginning of January). Her girlfriend Steph, whom I drew from a strange vantage point, is not much of an artist.

I didn't find anything I wanted at Brookline Booksmith but I did finally replace the Light Ages and also bought Ship of Fools, Green Phoenix: The Last Stand of the Prehumans, and Record of a Spaceborn Few. I'll have to pick up the second Amberlough book when I can, even though I have yet to read the first one because the publishing cycle moves a lot faster than I go through my to-read pile. Also, I saw a used copy of All Those Vanished Engines and I've been seeing it in a bunch of used bookstores. Which is weird, because the only reason I didn't buy it new is because I could never find the fucking thing.

On the church door is a poster saying Brookline welcomes, in different language, including ones I recognized, like Arabic (أهلا بك), Hungarian (Üdvözöljük), and Russian (добро пожаловать) and Thai (ยินดีต้อนรับ), and languages I didn't recognize, like Hawaiian (Welina), Polish (Witamy), or Finnish (Tervetuloa). I'd never expect Hawaiian. I'd expect languages spoken in and around Brookline. I'm still not sure what Karibu and Akeye are.

There was a centipede on the bathroom wall.
Later on, it had merely vanished and there wasn’t a smear of legs and hemocyanin and hemolymph on the wall.

Look, I've already been afflicted with some kind of dread curse for the last few months. I had to be around Ashley four times last week. Also, I'm pretty sure the curse only applies to actors. So I can say Macbeth all I want. Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth.
Macbeth receives a prophecy from the three Weird Sisters telling him he'd rule Scotland, so Lady Macbeth pushes him into murdering Duncan and his heir, and are driven mad by it. Lady Macbeth tries to wash out invisible blood stains and Macbeth is in too deep and continues to murder. After all, none of woman born can hurt him, and that only gives him a lot more confidence. Macduff, however, was ripped from his womb prematurely so that doesn't count, and so he beheads Macbeth.
Macbeth was written around the time King James I took the throne. Banquo in real life was a distant ancestor of James.
It was a modern verse translation, something the Oregon Shakespeare Company commissioned, and I’m not sure how it differs from the original play. The Artery points out one line, in the original, about a cat in an adage. In 1618, everyone knew that the adage was about a cat who wanted a fish but didn’t want to get his feet wet. In 2018, people don’t. I'm not sure if it was necessary but they did a good job with it. If you ask me, it'd have made more sense 'twere it a comedy.
Also, one of the lines that stuck out to me was one of the Sisters talking about using Macbeth’s nocturnal emissions in sorcery. I’d not be surprised if something like that was in the original.
Macbeth’s kilt was black, saffron, and scarlet, with a motif of triangles, and the weird sisters wore crowns of detritus, and Lady Macbeth.
The stage was perfect. The church was dark and shadowy.

Someone in the audience pointed out that Macbeth left his head behind.

Stacey sometimes paints.

She spells her name Kseniya. Makes sense, the Cyrillic ѯ was eliminated in 1708 and was never used for anything but Greek loanwords. I just assumed with Daria.

burning question: Male centipedes leave globs of sperm around in hopes that a female will find it. Is that why people on THE_DONALD call themselves centipedes?

Brazil is now fascist again I’m surprised fascism got a foothold in Brazil because it seems that fascism is so tied up in whiteness, and the last time Brazil was fascist, fascism was imposed on them. On the bright side, there were a bunch of Rice Krispie treats Primrose made left over and halfway across the world, a chimpanzee was taken from her parents and is being housed in a sanctuary because she can't survive in the world and she doesn't know how to interact with chimpanzees. But that's still good.

There’s no talk about the synagogue shooting on The Dan Simmons Forums and I can imagine way.
I had that thought on Sunday; there’s a thread about protestors heckling a Republican Senate candidate, the real victim of this. Meanwhile, on According To Hoyt, a lot of the Hoydens and Hoyts are saying that the pipe bombs are a false flag. It's as Leah said, they believe their own conspiracy theories. What Leah did not say is that the Republicans have decided that all crimes are equal.
I meant to post yesterday, kupo. I just forgot to hit post. Which means that the Republicans have found ways to sink even lower since I wrote this.

The barred owl is looking better but we think his feathers might still be too damaged for him to be released, which means we have to wait. The good news is that nothing else is wrong with him.
The waterfowl with lead poisoning have their lead levels at an acceptable level and now we just have to deal with the consequences.
The flying squirrel has been transferred to winter.
A bunch of people brought beardies and Jackie brought her rats Lucky and Lotus. Lucky's black and white and super-friendly, while Lotus is shy and slate-gray.

Jess was eating lo mein and Kaylee was eating some other kind of leftover Chinese.
Kaylee was listening to the radio and said they were talking about the World Series on every channel. didn’t realize that was the final game of the World Series. I just knew the Red Sox won last game, although it does explain why someone nearby was setting off fireworks at 11:45 PM or so.
Christabel says that once a cookie fortune called her fat. Well, it said something about an exercise routine but that’s pretty much the same thing.
Jess has a couple of fortunes taped to her laptop.

burning question: So they're phasing out Apu, but how much longer do you think the Simpsons will be on for?

It should be against FCC regulations to play Earth Angel without playing Johnny B. Goode after it. It’s more appropriate than the Monster Mash for this time at least. I’d say something about how Chapel of Love might be suitable for this time of year because my cousin had an outdoor wedding in October without sacrificing something to the rain gods. It mentions spring, though, so it only works for Argentina and Rand McNally, where people dress as Santa Claus on Thanksgiving, Cupids on Christmas, Easter Bunnies with pumpkins on Valentine’s Day, turkeys on St. Ajora’s Day, and the Pope on Passover. Wait a minute, that’s Providence.

Because of the unremitting rain and fierce winds tomorrow, we only had one night of pumpkin trails. I can live with that. Even if the rain stops by nightfall, which it probably won't, the pumpkins will be too waterlogged to light them again. The trails were packed from 6:30 to 8 or so, after which it slowly wound down because apparently people didn’t get the memo. Sapir said that everyone else abandoned her.
Parts of the trail were a morass. I'm pretty sure that parts of New England are now classified as a rain forest. Priya was around and I blame her. I like to blame Ashley but we had shit weather when she was in Europe, so I can't.
It's getting to the point at which I mistook Krissy for Ashley. She was wearing a hat.

When I arrived, Jen and … ugh, someone, possibly Lucy… was bathing the owl. Raisa, who has short abyssopelagic hair and a nose ring and spent the better part of three hours carving a raccoon on a tree branch into that giant pumpkin while listening to Mura Masa, who is a electronic musician and not a swordsmith, says they bathed him in peanut butter to dissolve the glue and were washing that out of his feathers.
Some visitors were speaking Swedish. Apparently, barred owls are called Kråsuggla there. Not often, I'd imagine, because they only live in North America.

Tyler and Amelia had with them an adorable sheep who was white with black splotches and two alpacas.
TJ strewed some bones on the vernal pool model upstairs.

There was Dr. Robotnik, whom Harry did not recognize, but maybe he just knows him as Eggman, there was a pumpkin with a big open mouth and toothpick teeth, an intricate Day of the Dead skull, and inside, there was a lion with a mane of flowers and cheeks and ears of oranges.
Raisa carved a zen pumpkin. She carved a hole and took out the guts and someone thought “oh, this IS the carving” so it just looks like a circle.

One of us was dressed as an ewok without the hood up and a jawa walrus with the hood up. Maybe next year I'll find a styrofoam ball, paint it red, and be a really half-assed moogle.

Emily, as in Jack’s sister, has new tattoos of flowers and butterflies and a black bear, a leafless tree against the full moon and a flock* of bats, the world, in blacks and grays. Later on, her face was painted with a sunflower.
*a colony? a cloud? Whatever, it’s not as cool as murder or parliament*.
*I stand by what I said about woodcocks.
Emily, as in the winter intern from a few years back, has no tattoos as far as I know, but then again, she was wearing a coat and a sweater.
Emily, last year's intern, wasn't around as far as I could tell.
Maggie showed up, now with abyssopelagic black hair but I only got to talk to her for a minute.

A kid had a laser sword that broke up into red and blue and green when he swung it.
I stood under the pumpkmojis, as someone put it, and also the alien from Toy Story.
Arinda is just a cool name. It may or may not be Albanian or Indonesian.

There was a pawprint pumpkin so someone yelled “darn furries are at it again!”

burning question: Utto nye usabia atoonyoba?

We have a flying squirrel who was attacked by some kind of animal, most likely a cat but maybe an owl tried to grab it. Walker is confident that he'll be ok and we're going to send him to winter at a rehabber somewhere else. Because of this, I carved World's Greatest Nogoodnik, Boris Badenov, into a pumpkin. I also tried to carve Bob and Linda Belcher. Someone else tried to carve Tina and then said it was just a girl with bangs.
Lucy was around too.
I said to Amelia who has orange dye in her hair and knows where camelids originated could be a sugar glider we were taking care of but I’m pretty sure we don’t use gauntlets to handle sugar gliders.
We have two barred owls now, one with head trauma and one who got caught in a glue trap.
We have a red-breasted nuthatch.
The two raccoons we have left are getting figs and beets to eat. And also dog food but they're not complaining.

Primrose has hair the color of drought-stricken wheat fields now.

Bella, a different Bella, carved a beardie and liked the way the consummate v's on its tail turned out so she used a similar motif on her tyrannosaurus pumpkin. Her friend carved an owl and the moon. The owl had horns, so it obviously isn't barred.
Someone carved a knot, an octopus, Frankenstein's monster, and there's a really impressive one of a face.
Someone was like "you'd think the turtles would be afraid of the alligator" but it wasn't actually doing anything.

Zack says that the facility on the cape is a renovated house so it’s not really better or anything but they do have a huge tank for seabirds that is a pain in the ass to maintain but is really helpful.


The radio was playing Halloween-themed music like Thriller and the Toccata and Fugue and the Funeral March and also.
burning question: The Monster Mash? But it’s not Valentine’s Day!

There was a woman noshing on something from Moe’s, which is not a tavern or even a family feedbag like it should be but a southwestern grill.
Me, I didn't have much time to eat, so I had a salad and wasn't able to finish it. And I had a bag of chips later.

Candide is an opera about the comically tragic or tragically comic misadventures of Candide; Cunegonede, the daughter of the Baron and Baroness; Maximilian, her brother who is utterly in love with himself; and Paquette, the maid, narrated by Voltaire at a lecture podium, who didn’t actually say "To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?” (not to come off as an apologist for Enlightenment Liberalism) That was in fact was Kevin Adolf Strom, a man whose predilections are so shameful they should be buried in the dreams of the people in his dreams. Occasionally, Voltaire would join in as Dr. Pangloss o the Governor. Dr. Pangloss delivers a lecture about how this is the best of all possible worlds and everything, from war to the fall of man, served its purpose in making this the best of all possible worlds, and then moves on to advanced physics with Paquette. That’s a euphemism. Candide tries this on Cunegonde but her brother Maximilian will have none of that, so he kicks them out of Westphalia, where he laments his situation and is conscripted into the Bulgarian Army, which wipes out Westphalia. You'd think the Bulgarian Army would be a joke but I guess they weren't a joke in 1944/1945 Serbia, Hungary, and Kosovo either. Candide finds Dr. Pangloss, who has lost his nose to syphilis, in Lisbon, and there, Pangloss talks about original sin and they are captured by the Lisbon Inquisition, who are just as unexpected as their Spanish counterparts and a lot better at their jobs too. In Paris, Cunegonde is ravished by Don Issachar and the Archbishop on alternating days, and Candide accidentally kills them both and they run off with The Old Lady off to Cadiz and then to the New World.
The second act has Maximilian and Paquette in Montevideo, where the women wear flower hats and where the Governor falls in love with Maximilian and gets married to him and then finds out he’s a man and then he goes off to a monastery or whatever. The Old Lady tells Candide the story about how she lost one of her butt cheeks and then pirates attack them. Maximilian still says “no, you can’t marry her” so Candide gets angry and kills him with the conductor’s baton. Candide and Paquette head to El Dorado, here a hippie commune, where they obtain gold and sheep, played by two women wearing oven mitts and fuzzy slippers and white dresses and pink leggings, but Paquette says she’ll go crazy if she lives in a place like this for the rest of her life, so they head off to Cartagena with the two sheep in tow, who gnaw their way through the dense jungle, and the Governor offers them an inflatable raft that will take them to Constantinople, which is what they called Istanbul in those days. There they run into Cunegonde and Maximilian shows up alive too but nobody cares about his story. They decide that Dr. Pangloss has no idea what he’s talking about and instead try toiling in the fields for a few years.

There are multiple versions of this, 1956, 1973 (which is just the 1956 version with a few new Sondheim-written songs), and 1989. I’m pretty sure we got the 1989 version because Paquette has one line in the 1956 version and there was a character named Martin who joined them whilst in Suriname.
I posed the question “what if this is the best of all possible worlds?” a long time ago, I think in reference to the Course of the Heart. It was 2014, if you're wondering. And I know it isn't, because a rock from outer space hasn't punctured Vox Day's skull in this one. Also, Ashley hates me.

During the intermission, the woman behind me, who is a soprano vocalist, made a noise like a theremin. The woman next to me, her friend, had a dagger tattoo on her arm.

Katie reminds me of someone I know: abyssopelagic and copper hair and a pointed chin and big dark eyes, hoop earrings and a white coat.
I’m not sure if she was Arab or Hispanic or something else.

Leah is an artist, mostly in sculpture, but she lacks glasses and has hair of a rusted blonde. She tries to use water-based clays but finds them too fragile. She says it’s hard to take pictures of rainbows and the moon. I think I need steadier hands. A week ago, she dressed as a Valkyrie and wore a winged helmet and an utterly nonauthentic dress. There was a guy on another train car dressed as a pirate and another guy with a fox ear headband and a bushy tail. She went in the wrong direction at first so she didn't see them. She thinks that everything is too damned expensive, especially housing. She's not good at pumpkin carving but her mother is. She can understand how Bob Belcher might be difficult.
I said Leah. Then I said Leah as in L e a h to confirm. And then Leah again because I like the sound of the name. I showed her pictures of the barred owl we had. She told me she saw a bird that was the size of a mango and brown and it had a long beak and I recognized it as a woodcock.

She was having a relatively bad day and was out later than she usually is, but did see a movie that you’d think would be a dumb action movie but turns out to be a parody of dumb action movies.
It was late and I'm glad it wasn't Wagner.
One of her friends moved to Wollaston, expecting an easy commute, right before they announced that they were rebuilding the station. She thinks that endless construction and nothing being truly winterized is the nature of things.
She thinks that people who believe in trickle down economics who aren't rich are people who think they'll eventually be rich. I saw a few comments saying that people who don't believe in trickle-down economics are incapable of being happy for other people. A lot of them also believe that they should be allowed a platform but sites that allow left-wingers to congregate should be shut down.
She says that they believe in their own conspiracy theories.

She got off at Quincy Adams and missed a guy yelling at the bus driver because he needed to get to Ashmont, and I’m like “Jesus, Mary, and Josef Stalin. You got on a Braintree train. You got off at North Quincy. You got on a bus going to Quincy Adams. I can’t blame drugs, because the amount of any drug you’d have to be on is well above the lethal dose.”

I found some old music survey.
burning question: Tantric put out how many albums?

I think we just had our last truly nice day until June. I like autumn, but for fuck's sake, we're only a third of the way through.

We have a bat hanging around, waiting for the place on the Cape to fix their bat cage.
We have turtles the size of pennies. What happens is that groups monitor nesting sites and then we pluck out a few because mother turtles don’t give a shit about their eggs after they lay them, and raise them to the age when they’re not going to be eaten by everything else.
We have a woodcock with a ruptured eye something and he missed his window of opportunity to migrate. We’re not too sure about him.
We have a barred owl! He just came in yesterday. I think he has eye problems too. That sounds like a barred owl to me.
We have a rodo with crop stasis.
We have a goose with some sort of puncture wound.

Three people, Lauren, Anna, and something else, had baby beardies with them, one person had a hedgehog, one person had two rats, one person had a baby hamster and a black and white hamster whom I mistook for a rat. Sapir showed up to help out with that.

A while ago, I found some translations of design documents for Final Fantasy IV and they have no sense of measurements. Kain weighs 135 pounds, there are 6550 people in six countries that take up 55,000 square miles of land, and using Earth ratios of land to water and not Ahch-To or Scarif ratios, on a planet 1/5 the size of Ceres.
Michael can buy the World of Ruin having a population of 6550 or if they meant for everything to be multiplied by 100 or even 1000.

Avernum’s non-canon Encyclopedia Ermariana has the second largest continent with 1.1 million square miles. Better, but not quite. It’s slightly larger than Greenland.

Ashley still hates me. I don’t know; I didn’t stick around long enough to find out her emotional state.
I didn't think Robert Mugabe would live this long. I'm sorry. It's been cloudy a lot and I wouldn't be able to take decent pictures anyway.

burning question: what exactly do Asian people think is going to happen to them in a white supremacist state?
I guess they could escape when things go bad, or maybe they think they’re one of the good minorities so nothing bad will happen to them, or maybe they haven’t thought about it.
You can't build a nation based on mutual enemies. South Sudan tried that, although I'm pretty sure South Sudan only exists to fuck over Sudan, which apparently hasn't been fucked enough by their military.

Stuff is starting to happen. We have a gannet, a semipalmated plover (the name means he has partially webbed feet and they look kind of like porgs but not as much as a kestrel does), and a pine warbler. I don't know how to embed videos but apparently in my absence, we released a kingfisher.
We also cleaned the turtle pond, which I said was indicative of how quiet things are.

TJ says that they gave a bunch of kids life savers, got them familiar with all the flavors, and then gave them a bunch where the colors and flavors didn't match and they still thought the purple ones were grape.
Kaylee asked what the difference between green and black tea is and TJ said it’s all in our heads.
There’s a slight minty taste to a shamrock shake, people say.
In fact Grimace is maybe possibly supposed to represent a shake although not even Wikipedia knows what he is. I knew someone who thought he was a decaying chicken nugget and I’ve seen people, probably on theforce.net, say that he’s a crossbreed of Grover and Herry or Grover and a tomato with bad grammar or Jabba the Hutt’s cousin. Courtney thought he was a gum drop.

I'm blanking on her name. This is what happens when the place is closed to the public for two Mondays so far this autumn. It might be Sam or it might be Caitlin or it might not be either of those things. She's never seen a deer in the wild before.

Christabel doesn’t like restraining cats because you can’t suplex them like you would a raccoon because the owners won’t like that. There’s a medication for cats that involves rubbing stuff on their gumlines and she wonders just how the fuck you do that. My guess is you let the cat bite your hand.

TJ says cats are passive-aggressive when they’re not being aggressive-aggressive. He also says that cats are the opposite of mixing corn starch and water. They're solid until you try to handle them, at which point, they become liquid.

TJ saw the woman with yellow and magenta and black hair (she says she needs to redo it soon) carrying half a chocolate cake with white frosting and thought “why is Snowy wrapped in cellophane?”
Snowy was wearing a witch hat.

I think Gavin McInnes looks like a professional douchebag while Michael thinks if he dressed in 19th century formal clothing, he’d look like a villain from Django Unchained and also that Paul Joseph Watson looks like a Fallout talking head and Ann Coulter looks like Supreme Leader Snoke with a wig.
Ivana looks like Queen Brahne and Ivanka looks like Freja.

Michael says that Kavanaugh was an affirmation of rape culture. That's why Trump had to stick with his nomination, not just because he didn't know who anyone actually was and had to be spoonfed the idea by the Federalist Society.

TJ told us about how two AIs were programmed to trade stocks and they did everything as they did, they just did it in some sort of code to be more efficient so we couldn’t
An AI would make a good accountant.

Michael says that if you can afford a yacht, you don't need any more money.

Kenneth Eng is back, apparently. I'd say someone read his latest novel so that I don't have to but it sounds so deranged that I can't help but want to read it, if only I could get ahold of it. It's set on a planet with an immeasurable surface dotted with locales like Forest 141, Castle 305, and Village 208, and there is a villainous Democracy of primates and a desert nation with anthropomorphic worms who sell resources to the Democracy in exchange for opals, which are used to build bombs powerful enough to level a castle.
I can't imagine an anthropomorphic worm. There's a good reason they stick to tetrapods.
The cover art's gotten a lot worse. It's a stock image of a fox superimposed on a stock image of a woman with a sword and they make no effort to make the head proportionate. It's like he's been hanging around the Mad Genius Club looking for advice.

Gamingforce is still limping on and Tritoch (aka HEY GUYS! THE PLANE! IT'S A TIGER) has resorted to interacting with the spambots.

I can't even be angry at it, even if it is one of the most toxic online communities that doesn't have "chan" in its name. It's just sad and pathetic. Although I'm sure that the fact that the toxic people like Denicalis and Encephalon and Hydelloon are long gone helps too.

burning question: Why is it that every other Simpsons episode revolves around Homer and Marge's marital strife and them still being together despite their relationship being metastable at best? You know what's sad? That I originally posed that question in 2005 and it's still relevant 13 years later. Not as relevant, at least. And, yes, I know yesterday's episode was the one where God and St. Peter watch a TV with the lives of various Springfieldians of various religions and not the one where they have marital problems, but nothing really happened for most of last week. Tensions flared up with Ashley again. It was 86°F for a day and then the rain came back. Epic45 released a new album and Here Lies Summer eludes me.

Kate just started her annual reread of The Lord of The Rings. She thinks that Two Towers is a slog, while I didn’t think it got really good until then. Yes, there are unremitting landscape descriptions but they’re not unremitting descriptions of the English countryside. She has blue and blonde hair and is a singer, folk dancer, and embroiderer. She says she first read them 20 years ago. It was 20 years ago for me too. I have the editions with the trippy covers.
Meanwhile, I just finished rereading A Secret History and will move on to Carthage Ascendant.
A woman on the train had deep purple hair and an eyeball bag with a plush skeleton hanging from it. A woman at the museum had short green hair. One woman had hair in a sunset prism orange yellow red and one woman had brunette hair fading into green.

Madison said the ticket to see the Winnie-the-Pooh exhibit counts as a member card. They had a lot of the illustrations along with some memorabilia, including a plush from the Soviet Union and some translations including Hungarian, Estonian, and even Latin. In Hungary, he’s called Micimackó. Mackó means bear. I’m not sure what Mici means. It’s some kind of grilled meat dish in Romania.


Memorabilia including Wookiee the Chew.

You could spin some words around to make up your own Hostile Animals, like the Wizzalump.

There's the only known recording of A.A. Milne reading from Winnie-The-Pooh.

Owl is drawn without horns. I think that makes Owl either a tawny owl or a short-eared owl. The Disney cartoons along with at least one drawing depicts Owl with horns. But he could be barred because I'm pretty sure bears are not native to Britain and I also know that kangaroos and tigers aren't either. Of course, Tigger, Kanga & Roo, and Winnie are toys while Owl and Rabbit are inspired by actual animals hanging around Ashdown Forest.

“But, of course, it isn't really Good-bye, because the Forest will always be there... and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it.”
Despite the name, Ashdown Forest has fuck-all to do with ashes. It’s named after some guy named Æsca.

I got a big sloppy kiss from a black and white dog. I also met a curly-haired dog and a black dog.

This isn’t what they said in the film; I used Google translate.
burning question: И почему существуют пчелы? Думаю, сделать мед. И почему существует мед? Для меня это есть.

And Jess replaced Leah.

“Mega Man X4 is a Shakespearian tragedy performed by the troupe from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Michael thinks they should get the actors from that when they remake Final Fantasy VII but I think they should just use

There is a whale shark in the Atlanta Aquarium. For those of you who are reading this in the year 3000, Atlanta is 267 miles (430 km) from the ocean. It had to be flown there in a cargo plane and the pilot had to land the plane and they have to teach them to eat horizontally because there’s no way they can eat vertically.
I'm imagining a whale shark dangling from a helicopter but there's no way that would work in real life.

Otherwise, well, there's really nothing there. A Pac-Man frog got some sort of surgery. Dova likes cheez balls. Holly has two orange tabby cats. Her friend Kelly, or whatever it was, once volunteered at the wildlife center.

Here's some stuff I forgot to mention.
There's a Sesame Street in which Trump, played by Joe Pesci with bad hair, plans to raze Sesame Street and build a tower there. There are other episodes in which Trump is a grouch with bad hair.
There's a post on According to Hoyt that says that not only should Kavanaugh be on the Supreme Court regardless of whether he's a rapist or not, but if he is a rapist, he should be supplied women to rape as long as he votes conservative.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Stalin. I'm choking on my own rage here.

By the same people who brought you that, I saw someone suggest limiting voting for senators to either elected officials or people over 40 years of age who are willing to hand over $10,000 for the privilege.

burning question: what’s your favorite Star Wars planet? Feel free to distinguish between planets you think look cool but would probably never visit (Jakku, for instance, or Hoth (pun not intended) or Felucia (any place with rancors is not a place to visit, although I guess it depends on whether or not there are doors) or Crait. Scarif and Ahch-To sound nice until you realize that the islands would probably be lashed by mega-cyclones every year around the autumnal equinox) versus places that would be nice to live on or visit, like Bespin or Coruscant or Naboo.
Also, hmm, Naboo doesn't get a red underline but Bespin does. How strange.

It was a much nicer day than last year, which meant it was a lot more crowded there.
I saw Adrienne, who remembers me from last week and thought about me on her train ride to Jazz Fest and has two tabby cats and a tattoo of a sleeping cat on her ankle and of an arrow on her arm.

Diego Joaquin Ramirez is a drummer and bandleader.
Jason Palmer is a jazz trumpeter. There’s an actor with that name too. The drummer has a yin-yang with red spokes pendant and the drummer had a hieroglyphic pendant.
One of the performances was canceled for some reason.
Gerschlauer and Fiuczynski play “mikrojazz” which is jazz on a microtonal saxophone and fretless guitar.
Gregory Lewis Organ Monk Trio plays organ jazz.
Ralph Peterson played with his new group Aggregate Prime.
Catherine Russell played with a band and before she joined them onstage, they played a New Orleans hot jazz version of Mr. Sandman.

Tea pronounces her name like “ti-ya,” not like the drink at all. It’s Serbian. I think it’s a diminutive of names like Dorotea.

I had to draw two portraits of Megan because I wasn’t satisfied with the first one. She has lotus earrings that go behind the ears, while her friend Marley has a navel piercing and a compass necklace. Megan says she tries to be an artist.

Melissa likes wearing earrings. The ones she had were prismatic elongated pyramids.

Both of Brigitte’s pendants are quartz wrapped in wire. one is the standard clear one while one is pink and yellow. The ancient Greeks thought that quartz was some kind of ice that had become so cold that it just stayed ice.
from what I can tell, bicolored quartz is typically made that way artificially.
Kayley had earrings made from discs of cork cut thin with little silver disks hanging from them, and wild hair.

Megan has no left brain, she says. She says that when she studied political science, it was a mixture of the abstract stuff and goings-on in the world today. When i took intro to international relations, it was mostly abstract stuff (realpolitik vs enlightened self-interest, Westphalia and the modern nation-state, which, as far as I’m concerned, has been rendered obsolete by the first world war).
Later on, I had a thought of Robert Lindsay’s “alt-left” being third-worldism from the point of view of places like Kenya, India, and Iran, or, in other words, rabid racism and misogyny and also support for the Axis of Resistance.
Had I not had this thought at 1 AM the night after, I’d have asked Megan what she thought of third worldism.

Stella’s like “it’s like having your photo taken in the 1920s.” Stella and Stephanie are both singers. Stella plays the bass as well. She's from Indonesia.
Tomás is impressed that I spelled his name correctly. I think in ancient Greek, θ was an aspirated t before it became a voiceless dental fricative, but I’m not sure when the change happened. Tomás has mirrorshades. Dylan was pretty impressed too, but not as impressed, because Dylan spells his name in the standard Welsh way.

I think she said her name was Noor. I also don’t think it matters how I spell it, because her necklace was in Arabic and there’s no standard Latinization of Arabic.

Elly and Sarah are not sisters, although they do look similar.

A woman had a pendant of a horned owl. A man has a tattoo of an astronaut floating in space and giving a hand signal of some sorts. In the background is the blackness of space, stars and planets, and the moon with maria like a skull picked clean. A woman had a t-shirt with various kinds of birds and flowers and safety pin earrings. A woman had thick curly hair and pins of things like cats in embrace and the question block from the original Super Mario Bros and a tattoo of some kind of four-legged forest spirit but not the one from Princess Mononoke as this one had stripes and of a wolf.

This was ganked from a thread on Metafilter about people from 4chan and 8chan going after ASMR to the point where Paypal shut then down.
burning question: In what bizarro world did we end up in where 4chan, 8chan and related - the same sites that brought us stuff like shitting dick nipples, lolicon, futa and dragons fucking cars - became the morality police of the internet? And what insane morons are listening to them?

Gabi, who spells her name many different ways, has a ring depicting a stag’s head and a necklace with three pearls.
Isabella has never been to the Gardner museum. Her bracelet has a cube with the sigil of Belias, which I always mix up with Chaos, because, hey, rams have horns and so do bulls, and her pendant is a chunk of abalone shell wrapped in copper wire. And I'm like “Oh, I know what those are.” And I don’t actually know what an abalone is because I thought it was some kind of bivalve mollusk and not a gastropod.
Mathilde is a performance photographer. I think she has a French accent.
Adrienne’s father is a painter but she says she did not inherit his talent. Because there was a guy on a train wearing a Deadpool Taco Surprise t-shirt, I thought that her tennis rackets were katanas.
A woman was reading the same exact edition of A Wrinkle In Time that I have. The kids are riding a centaur with a rainbow projected between his head and tail. The sky is clear and blue and there are flowers and leaves and an insect in the foreground. Most of the images I found are either too small or are attached to another image.
She says she hasn’t read it in a long time.
A woman had pale teal hair. A man had green hair.



There's an exhibition of Adam and Eve prints and of drinking vessels in the shape of animals and of the art of Théodore Géricault.


Teresita Fernández - Small American Fires
There are twelve of these drawings, all very similar.


Rachel Harrison - I'm With Stupid


(It's a new acquisition and I guess they haven't gotten around to photographing it yet. It's a bathtub. But here's a picture I found on Twitter. The work in the background is 50 U Heinrich-Heine Straße by Wasmuht)
Rachel Whitehead - Untitled Grey
She's famous for making a cast of a decrepit Victorian terrace house which was the last on its row to be torn down, which stayed up for 11 weeks and all that's left of it is a shitty photograph on Wikipedia. She knew it would be ephemeral so there's no point in dwelling on it.


Alma-Tadema - Women of Amphissa
This was on loan from the Clark Institute, where I went on a field trip in high school (and also to the MassMOCA, which I’m pretty sure I told you about), and at first, it looks like a blurry colorized photograph.


If for whatever reason, you haven’t seen this painting, here it is.
Someone told me that Europeans are very adamant about trains being on time, as we all know (I didn’t, although I did know that Japanese are also very adamant about their trains being on time) and Monet dressed in a tuxedo and told the stationmaster that it will be well worth it if he just let them delay the trains by half an hour and even stoke their engines to produce smoke.

My PS3 controller died, and, by died, I mean that 1) the controller doesn’t function at all when unplugged 2) when plugged in, the battery level is – and the buttons take a few seconds of holding before they register and I’m not sure what the control stick is doing but Tidus runs towards the camera and 3) won’t connect to my computer at all but on the other hand, I can use the keyboard to access the menus, which leads me to believe that it is the controller or maybe possibly the cord or maybe both and 4) will sometimes rumble when connected to the PS3 which leads me to believe that humidity is to blame, and I’m going to take a gamble and hope I don’t buy a cheap knockoff where they spend so much effort on the outside that they forget there’s stuff on the inside.
Ashley’s presence didn’t do much to improve my mood. It’s funny because this is the first time since she got back from Europe I actually wanted to talk to her, even if my reasons aren’t entirely selfless. And every time I think that maybe this time will be different and she’ll say hi to me or whatever and every time, it’s the same thing.
Overcast skies and rain don’t help either.

While I was writing this, my internet connection shit itself. Thankfully, it was merely annoying and not expensive and the autosave was nice enough to preserve most of the post.

burning question: would anyone bother to sell a cheapass knockoff controller as used? It seems to me that they’d sell it as new.

Leah (not that Leah, kupo) has sort of replaced Natalie but I have no idea for how long. She’s perfectly ok with snakes but not with spiders and lived in California for six months before she found out they have tarantulas and noped on out of there. She was curious about where hedgehogs lived in the wild and they live in western Europe and into Scandinavia, Finland, and Russia (and Estonia and Latvia) but not in Ukraine. (There are hedgehogs that live in Romania, as their binomial name indicates, as well as Ukraine and Greece and Turkey. Like that Leah, she wears glasses, so she wouldn't have to travel to Equatorial Guinea if her bucket list included things like "travel to every country with hedgehogs." She would have to travel to Belarus, where everyone is each other's cousin and a strong case against ethnic homogenity, as it is probably the most dysfunctional country in Europe despite Hungary's best efforts)
She was surprised to learn that they are found on Corsica. Probably because Sonic the Hedgehog LIED to her. What an absurd idea, ha ha ha, they’d drown on their way there.

We released the great horned owl. He stood there and stared at them until everyone said “fuck it” and Jen went to pick him up, and then he flew off into the woods. I wasn't there when this happened.

They’re trying to eradicate rabies on the Cape and soon the entire east coast, hopefully by 2050.


Neither Michael nor I have any idea who's going to be a presidential candidate in 2020.
The Republicans’ biggest advantage is that they have a bunch of middle aged people, while the Democrats are mostly old or young and those two groups are oftentimes at odds. There's a group called Hands Across The Aisle, a coalition of terfs, lesbians, religious rightists and miscellaneous conservatives.
I think what burns my ass about TERFs is that they have a lot of really good beliefs where gender isn't involved and a lot of really terrible ones where it is. It's like Occupy in that regard.
Demographics aren’t on their side and it won’t be misguided Democratic Undergrounders who move to the south for low taxes or weather who make Texas and North Carolina democratic.

I wonder what the world would be like if the Central Powers won the war, or at least, something like the Turkish War of Independence happened and they were able to move on relatively unscathed. After all, who was hurt the most by the Treaty of Lausanne? The answer is the Arabs.
That’s not a burning question.
I'm sure that's why Turkey didn't join the Axis.
I'd imagine Austria-Hungary wouldn't last. Ash has Austria-Hungary, but then again, all sorts of things are different in Ash. It's like A Princess of Roumania, where Romania, Germany, and Turkey are the premier European powers, Ethiopia is a scientific powerhouse, Christianity is a minor religion mostly practiced by the Romany and a source of their legends and the old Roman gods are worshipped instead, Britain and France were destroyed by some cataclysm, and the Americas remain uninhabited aside for a few English outposts that reverted to primitivism.
I could imagine a French Hitler but I can't imagine the French Army successfully invading Germany.

And my keyboard died. It only lasted one year. Actually, the one I had before that only lasted two years.
And it happens the same way every time. A random, arbitrary key, this time i and k, stop working.

burning question: How do you think Quina would react to Jordan Peterson? Probably try to eat him. Assuming if s/he did eat Jordan Peterson, what power would s/he get out of it? Bad Breath? Would it just contribute to Frog Drop?

Hurricane Florence was a nailbiter. It's still a nailbiter despite being three days away from impact with the Carolina coast.

Carina is heading back to Romania. We had a cake with a road and four rubber animals none of which are indigenous to Romania or Massachusetts.
Natalie’s leaving. To replace the summer people, we have Kydada, Gianna, Galya, and Celestia.

The guinea pigs we were feeding to all of our raptors plus the raven and opossum all had a sickly-sweet smell to them. I have no idea why. It’s better left a mystery. There were a few guinea pigs which were unsuitable for any creature we had but the dermestid beetles.

The freezer temperature was -34 which means it was working remarkably well even if it’s set to C and not F.

We have 10 rabbits and 17 squirrels and a big brown bat. Bats like the taste of mealworms but don't recognize them as food so we have to train them. Typically, autumn babies are in worse shape than spring and summer babies and these guys are in really poor condition. In med ward and in the outdoor cages, we have have, in order of how appetizing their meals sound, a canada goose, a few rodos and modos one of which got loose, a toad, a squirrel, a brown-headed cowbird, an opossum, a peregrine falcon, a red-tailed hawk, a great horned owl, and a herring gull.
The website tells me that waterfowl starter is a combination of grain meal and some fish meal and rosemary extract, citric acid, marigold, and some supplements. The rodent blocks are more or less the same thing, just add some oats and peanuts. And now you know.

I was searching for Punctuation Pizza and I swear that Google knows what you’re looking for but decides to remove it from the search results just to fuck with you.
burning question: why are there flights for Punctuation Pizza? Midgard isn’t even a real place.

There have been two kinds of summer days this year. Most were very hot and humid and occasionally rainy, mid 80s at minimum. At least 21 of them were 90 or above. Some days are unseasonably cool and overcast. It was the second kind of day, so of course, the air conditioning was on in the bus, and the bathroom door wasn’t opening, and I'd probably take a scythe to the Burmese poppy fields if the bathroom at Assembly was locked up. After peeing on the poppies, of course.

There was a peculiar smell at one side of the amphitheater. Sickly sweet, like someone tossed an especially potent permanent marker in the brush.

A woman on the train had blue hair.

Katie has green in her hair and makes her own jewelry.

I met a woman with a blue-ringed octopus tattoo, a woman with monarch butterfly and roses tattoos on one arm and a ragdoll on the other, a man with a braided beard, a woman with hair of a fiery autumnal orange yellow red. A woman with a dog had a tattoo of a skull and flowers and of the cave from Aladdin.

I met a few papillons, a few corgis, a bunch of pomeranians, a husky, a few golden retrievers, a few black dogs, a shih tzu with a tan body, gray head, and black snout and tail.

Ash has never seen Evil Dead nor has she read Ash: A Secret History. I’m rereading the first book because I picked up the other three at a library sale. It pulls no punches as to how nasty and brutish life in the 15th century was.
Of course, Ash, being short for Ashley and all, is named for the tree, not for the powdery remnant of things burnt, neither of which translate to Satoshi in Japanese.

Pineapple Jam is jazz fusion ish. They covered Uptown Funk, Scarlet Begonias by Grateful Dead, Stayin’ Alive combined with Another Brick in the Wall.

Watts aren’t in mourning, this is rock and/or roll.

Arms and Ears has the violinist from As The Sparrow.
One time the lead vocalist was just rocking out with the sound off.
One of their songs reminded me of Bends-era Radiohead, except with violin, of course, and he said "we're gonna up the ante because that one was fuckin... uhh, sorry" and played some fast surf music with a violin, of course.
They said when they were done, they were going to paint their faces like power rangers. At the end, he was like "this one is called Petty... it's a song."

I finally met the members of As The Sparrow properly. Crystal and Mark remember me from Greenfest, surprisingly.

As The Sparrow has a new album out and they've been promoting that heavily, so they've been playing a lot of songs from that. Dark Moon, Forest Beast. Maybe Redline or Boys. They also played Emily, Creeper, Moneylender from In A Box, and Lie To Me Dear from The Otherside.
High School Girlfriend reminds me of Arc Iris. Okay, it reminds me of a sixties pop song but modern takes on sixties pop remind me of Arc Iris. Speaking of which, Arc Iris has a new album coming out in October and also Noble Dust released something earlier this year.

Mark gave a shoutout to these two guys at the top of the steps dancing and to all the dogs in the audience and to the guy who booked them because they could just as easily book a Creed cover band.
There are eight members of the band. I figured there’d be six because, hey, there are six characters in Clue. Crystal said that maybe when they started out, they had six members.
Since they had eight members, they were surprisingly loud, considering they're swing-folk and not rock and/or roll.

There were two guys dancing at the top of the stairs and two women salsa-dancing in the lawn below.

Kelsey has a star earring and a crescent moon earring. Ellie (?) has a pendant of a horn she got in Portugal. They're friends with As The Sparrow.

I went to get a shrimp burrito and there was a guy playing a Tonic song on acoustic guitar.

They were selling laser pixel swords and lightsabers and rainbow lightsabers and fairy wands and spinny things.

Some people on the orange line were alternating between French and English in their conversation and toying with a balloon.

Grace is from Alabama, where there are many ospreys but no dovekies or snowy owls, but in college here. She wanted to be a doctor and then she took organic chemistry and decided she didn’t want to be a doctor anymore. She has a tattoo of a sun and moon in embrace each with feminine faces surrounded by flowers and her friend Abby has the same tattoo so I’ll know her if I see her. Unless she’s in Alabama, anyway. One of her tattoos she did herself with a tattoo gun and she said it hurt. She has a paper crane on her other arm and quotes on her feet. She’s been playing Destiny 2 and the new Doom. Her dad is obsessed with Ratchet and Clank. She says that Final Fantasy sounds complicated. She never takes the red line, mostly green and orange so she had no idea where she was going.
Things are changing. Trump is the last gasp of a dying movement.
That day, I heard people speaking in some lovely west African language, Amharic, Somali, Arabic, something Indian that was probably Hindi, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Cantonese.
Maybe because she's in a cosmopolitan place and not reading 4chan, where members are right now propagating fake coupons in which the barcode displays "this is a robbery, put all large bills in the shoebox" when scanned.

burning question: Can we deport 4chan members to the sun?

Natalie is an artist. On her arm are tattooed roses and the words “nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished” which is a rather loose translation of the quote 繟然而善謀 by 老子.

Turned out I was right: Gabriella was not willing to brave the heat and humidity. Since it was in the low 70s but fiercely bright in the courtyard, she showed up to that, with necklaces of pearl.


Most of the arias were from The Barber of Seville, one was from L’incoronazione di Poppea, in which Nero (yes, that Nero) was portrayed by a castrato in Monteverdi’s time but ever since Mozart came along, was portrayed by a woman or a countertenor, and a trio from Orlando that I'm pretty sure I heard.
Haydn is not remembered for his operas. The one they performed was a trio from L'Incontro Improvviso, in which three women recall an inspirational movement.
She pantomimed marching during Figaro’s aria from The Marriage of Figaro.
Rain Quartet is from Regina, which is an anti-capitalist opera by Marc Blitzstein written in the 1940s set in the turn of the century deep south and utilizes spirituals, parlour music, and ragtime, and depicts a game of cards in the rain.
The encore was from Hamilton, and the singer playing George III wore a paper crown with star stickers.
At some times, it's hard to hear.

On display at the MFA are a scroll depicting a 4000 mile journey, which would be about 12,000 lǐ (里), starting at the coast, and several propaganda postcards, including one depicting a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden.
There’s one about the free city of Gdańsk and Germany asking us how we’d like to have our country split in two.
Spoiler alert: Alaska is a state, so obviously, we’re okay with it.
Germany asks if the United States would agree to such frontiers.
It depicts New England split in two with a chunk of Vermont and New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts part of Canada and I don't think anyone told Hitler that Maine exists to give the abolitionists a few votes. Also, Germany was split in two to give Poland a way to the sea and it’s really obvious in that map that Canada had sea access.

Amanda has tattoos of flowers and a skull on one arm and of a turntable on the other arm. She plays guitar and she’s trying to find a band to play in back home in Chicago.
Jorge has an abstract tattoo on his arm.
Marie has tattoos of comets with five-pointed stars and flowers.

burning question: How is it that someone as uncharismatic as Trump has a cult of personality?

Pick up the book closest to you. Turn to page 206. The first sentence explains your love life.
“just now nothing seemed particularly urgent”
from Views From The Oldest House.
I wouldn't have even bothered if it weren't so true.

Despite her Andy Warhol t-shirt, she's not an artist.
Since I forgot my sketchbook, I used the CharlieCard receipt.
She just took a picture, probably out of a not-so-paranoid thought that it would just get seized by the gods of airtravel and sent off to Frashër or Francistown, Botswana or something. Frankfurt is part of the good Germany, not the shitty part of Germany, that is to say, Saxony, where highs for the next few days are in the low 70s to the low 80s. There were plans to make it the capital of West Germany but some idiot decided that if they did that, it would be harder to reunify with East Germany.
We picked the one train where the air conditioning didn't work but it did rain on someone across from us, and they told us to get off at Andrew and get in a different car.
Views From The Oldest House mentions satellites, like Through the Heart, and mentions Shaker Loops, a John Adams composition, and something called Through The Heart.
It mentions a composition called Views From The Oldest House and Google tells me it's a real thing by Ned Rorem, from a suite in six movements.

It didn't rain on the third day where no rain location or rain date was planned. Instead, it was a steamy 98° F, exceptionally hot for late August and I don't think Gabriella was willing to brave the heat. Someone at Brattle Books said that back home in Hawaii, it never gets that hot.
I saw a brilliant gold-colored dragonfly.
A man in the Common played African drum to the music on his speakers.

Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture to commemorate the anniversary of the October Revolution and to celebrate the death of Josef Stalin.

Borodin's Polovitsian Dances was performed with chorus, hurrah, and the theme is used in some movie and in an episode of Itchy and Scratchy in which Itchy, lacking a valentine for Scratchy, pulls out his heart and eventually, he reads a newspaper that says that you need a heart to live, while another part was used in something but I can not think of where.
It gets more and more chaotic and frantic.
In the opera, the dances are performed to entertain the captive Prince Igor.

Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony is the one with the waltz in lieu of a scherzo and a recurrent fate theme and, why, yes, I do still mix it up with the 4th in my head. It doesn't help that they both have recurrent fate themes. They're the only ones I've heard live in their entirety. I'm not sure why I haven't heard the Pathetique yet.

There was a woman with blue hair and tattoos of monarch butterflies and a Hello Kitty with butterfly wings and five-petaled orange flowers. A woman had half of her spine and ribcage and a scapula tattooed on her back, and a sigil that looked like a 5 with a taloned end. A woman had peacock feathers on her back and an ouroboros on her arm.

I met a chocolate shitzu. Speaking of which, I was finally able to get a gauge of Ashley's emotional state and it's not good.
I also met a doge and a golden retriever puppy and a dog who is 14½ years old.

burning question: You dunkin' your sausages in that syrup, homeboy?

It was hot. So hot that even the air conditioning didn’t keep the place cool. I think something died in the dumpster but it was removed and now only the smell of something dying and starting to ferment in the late summer heat remained.

When I got in the kitchen, I was like “I know that voice.” Bella's voice is distinctive. All the winter people were back. Okay, it was just Zack, Bella, and Christine, as Emily wasn’t feeling good but Bella said she’d relay a message to her and then relay it to Michael or Erica, and Eliza was in the Philippines, probably not watching Batman Fights Dracula (it’s weird that I can find a plot summary and a review of it but then again, there are people who have seen it), and Taylor is in Massachusetts again but playing volleyball or something. I have no idea where Caroline is. Julia was around but on a different spacetime wavelength. So, really, it’s half the winter people plus Caitlin plus a new arrival whose name is Galia, which is Hebrew and means ocean wave. Bella’s dog broke her laptop and she feels that Christine did not express nearly enough sadness it. Bella is rather demure and sweet and yet when she feeds raptors, she pulls the skin off of the rats and dumps the organs. This is the one thing that she didn't miss. She's going to intern at a horse place in Maryland. I don't know much about horses but I'm pretty sure they're not carnivores.
The freezer is fixed and Caitlin said it’s been broken ever since she started.
A man with blue hair brought his beardies Sam, short for Samhain, and I’m one of the few people who caught the mispronunciation, and Spyro’s progeny Puff Jr and Pax, who, ironically, is the largest one and therefore he bullies the others. He was wearing a shirt with the TARDIS.
Ellie didn't know if I was talking about her or the goat.

I had to pull a smaller lid out of the sink disposal. I would not have done that if Ashley was around.

Prince Toadian has a spinal injury but his back legs work.
We have a water snake. We have a couple of baby squirrels and a baby mouse.

Bella was as surprised as I was to learn that Alyas Batman En Robin came out in 1991. I can believe it, though. There’s a Filipino compilation SEAIndie put out and I’m pretty sure it was recorded with a Talkboy.

She had a plain bagel with some avocado on it.

Meanwhile, in Chemnitz, a few thousand Nazis are rallying and going after anyone who's a migrant or looks insufficiently German.

In my dreams I have the recurring power to reverse spacetime by a few minutes. In one part, I was outside the Forest Temple which was on an oceanside wooded cliff and someone else was inside and when they completed whatever task they were meant to do, a stream of green light came out of the top.

Burning Question: Where's Khanpasha Nuradilov when we need him?

A woman on the train had a l’Cie brand tattooed on one shoulder and Batwoman’s sigil and a quote overlaying it on the other arm, and she had a shirt with a pirate cat and hat depicting a fangly bear wearing a hat. Her girlfriend (maybe?) had lavender locks in her hair and tattoos of tiny arrows.

There’s an art gallery inside Atlantic Wharf. Until October, there is art envisioning the future. I really don’t understand why Instagram is being so uncooperative. “In April 2012, Facebook acquired the service for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock.” Okay, now I do. Thing is, I can search by location but not by tag and this has been true since at least Friday, and I’m pretty sure the only sites that should be problematic on my end are Spotify, because Spotify is designed to not function with Safari, and Facebook, because Facebook is deliberately a godawful bloated mess that puts out enough spam to kill every crocodilian that has ever or will ever live.

I don't actually know who made any of these.



















Pressing the green button causes the music boxes to activate.

One of the women at the desk was reading Catch-22 and means to read Slaughterhouse-5. She’s read a collection of his stories published posthumously but none of his famous works.

Here's a summary of As You Like It.
Oliver cheats his younger brother Orlando out of some inheritance and tricks Charles the court wrestler into snapping his neck by convincing him that Orlando wants him murdered, but Orlando wins the match anyway, Rosalind is smitten, and has to go into hiding. Meanwhile, Duke Frederick exiles his exiled brother Duke Senior's daughter Rosalind to the Forest Of Arden and his daughter Celia joins her. Rosalind disguises herself as a boy named Ganymede and Celia wears a shawl and calls herself Aliena. Touchstone, the fool, here wearing socks with golden stars and moons, joins them, carrying their things. They meet Corin, an old shepherd, and his protege Silvius, who is hopelessly enamored with Phoebe. Phoebe wants no part in it. Orlando spends his time writing love poetry and posting them on trees, and meets the Duke and threatens to kill him if he doesn't get an apple. Orlando tells Jaques "I do desire we be better strangers" (I'm going to use that line on Ashley) and Jaques tells him not to mar any more trees with his poetry and Orlando tells him not to ruin his poems with his voice. Ganymede runs into Orlando and convinces him to pretend he's really Rosalind, so she can press him about his feelings and teach him how to be a good husband to her. Phoebe falls in love with the disguised Rosalind and Rosalind tells her to sell when she can, for she is not for all markets (I'm going to use that line on Ashley). Oliver shows up, says that Orlando was injured when a snake startled a lioness and the lioness tried to eat Oliver, and then falls in love with Celia. Ganymede reveals herself as Rosalind and Phoebe is utterly bewildered and indignant. Duke Ferdinand has a change of heart and allows his brother and his entourage to come back.

The set had walls made of doors and lanterns and ladders.
It was longer than 90 minutes but I wasn’t expecting it to be that short. Still, even on a Sunday, it was probably easier (and with more pleasant weather) than going to the wildlands of Plymouth and a lot lot lot lot easier than going to fucking Delmarva in September.

I know what hěn hǎo (很好) means.

I had a dream in which I saw Nixon in China in a brick and white room filled with sand and it was set in a dystopia in which Mark Zuckerberg ran everything.
I close my eyes at 5:30 AM, have a short dream about a 90s DOS aesthetic shmup set in a ruined concrete bunker town in modern Afghanistan.

burning question: is artwork about the future inherently political in nature?

There was a cosplay event somewhere in the city, so Erin had a white sweater with heart shapes cut out and a wig with lime green braids and blue coiled hornities and holographic slightly oxidized copper green platform sneakers and a chain chomp pin on her bag, her friend wore a cowled haori and had dark orange hair, and her other friend had a black shirt and camo pants and had a green something with orange trim in his lap.

The Boston Jazz Fest has been going on for 8 years apparently. When I got there, it seemed pretty quiet but then it filled up.
It took me a long time to find the park but then again, the place didn't exist 5 years ago; it was just a bunch of parking lots and the World Trade Center. No, not that World Trade Center. I'd be able to get crab juice and khlav kalash if it was. On the other hand, there's a bathroom.

Alex, Sam, and Celine were telling people to vote yes on question 3. Hopefully it’s successful. Celine was almost named Xenia, which is weird because not only is she not of Russian descent, but her dad hates Russia with a fiery passion, but then Xena came out. Maybe it’s because of Greece, because ξενία means hospitality.

Jen has a tattoo of a male painted bunting who is at least two years of age, which is actually a cardinal, amongst pink flowers on one arm and a bunny with wings from a story on her other arm. I immediately thought of The Little Bunny Who Wanted Red Wings and its Miss Puddle Duck who was very obviously a male mallard but maybe ducks don't believe in gender essentialism. Or it may be Pookie. They're long and majestic wings, unlike Pookie or the rabbit who wanted red wings.
Jen was wearing her earrings the wrong way.
We do have “buntings” here but these ones are from Central America and the Caribbean islands.
Gili, which is not short for anything, said her drawing would probably be more boring because she didn’t have any tattoos.
I looked it up; it's Hebrew.

Lily drew the people sitting next to her on an airplane trip from the Azores. She’s part Portuguese and part Irish, which is why she’s pale and has blue eyes and light hair. She’s good with train rides but a very nervous flyer.

A woman passing by had a horned owl t-shirt and a half-mechanical horned owl tattooed on her leg.

A woman had blue-looking eyebrows but she said it was just sunscreen.

A woman had tattoos of a pocket watch and blue lotuses and a corvid with blue wings and a violet tail with the saying “Time is precious. Spend it wisely.”

I met someone named Emily.

Kristin has a necklace made from transparent crystalline white, neon pink, black, and creamsicle mixture orange gems, and she had a really adorable labrador-shepherd-hound mix with her.
A guy had a border collie Australian shepherd mix with black spots against gray and a white head with blue eyes.
There was a big white dog with black cow spots and a small white dog with black cow spots.

Richard Evans sung things like Fly Me To The Moon and There Will Never Be Another You and a few songs about time towards the end, while Jamal played bass and someone else played keyboard.

Albino Mbie has a new album out, and I got a special discount because of the portraits. Today, his bandmates were from Boston, Japan, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic, which is the Czech Republic and not Czechia. Ashley wasn't at the concert.
I'm used to getting CDs for 10 dollars but then I realize that back in the days of CD stores, CDs were 15-20 dollars.

Zeke Martin and the Oracle plays funk fusion.

Bradle Bartlet Roche played saxophone, including Fly Me To The Moon, and boogie woogie piano, including the Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu and two Billy Joel songs, the Root Beer Rag and Piano Man.

Pat Braxton did a tribute to Aretha Franklin at the end of her set, but no Nessun Dorma. Aretha stands alone.

ZYG is a funk/hip-hop drummer. Later on, he played with the GroovaLottos.
The lead of the Groovalottos is Wôpanâak.

Miranda has a pendant with an ocean wave, while Rachel has a necklace of small gold disks on a chain.
So Räven means “fox” in Sweden. Okaaaaaaay. While the word for raven is korp. That makes sense, actually.

They put candy on the papers to keep them from flying away in a strong breeze and if people take the candy, they have an entire bag of it.
I told her they need rocks.
burning question: who would eat rocks? There aren’t any Gorons around. That guy right there, Beardsley McTriforceTattoo gets it.