ceci n'est pas un journal

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.

The one day I forget my pen is the one day there are actually many people I’d want to draw. Okay, like one person, who had a tattoo of a feather on her shoulder and of writing on her back and a microphone emitting music notes and birds in flight, with big eyes and dark hair. At least I was able to find a pen later because there was no way I’d buy a set of pens.
I'm reading Views from the Oldest House now and it's set in a future world wracked by climate change but it seems to be earlier in time and therefore more connected with our world than Through The Heart is.

Lily Simonson painted depictions of deep sea life that fluoresced under a black light.


This is all I can show you because Instagram is not cooperating with me.

Kate's favorite sea creatures are motile free-swimming polychaete worms that will sometimes shoot off their chætae like darts in self-defence. She had a fossil of a rather small eurypterid from the Silurian and later, because the eurypterid was getting too heavy, a trilobite and encased scorpion of a small and probably highly venomous variety and a centipede that she thinks is some kind of scolopendrid.

Éadaoin is Irish for passion and is the hero from Tochmarc Étaíne. She had a piece of baleen and asked some kids if they knew what a narwhal horn is made of. Spoiler alert: it's the tooth. Maybe calling it a tusk would help.

Juliane had with her parts of a Fiji mermaid, which is the head and torso of a monkey shaved and then grafted on to the back of a fish.
I'm surprised there wasn't a platypus nearby. When people outside of Australia saw a stuffed platypus, they thought "hoho, what a nut. This is obviously just a mole with a duck's bill and feet grafted on. And they're telling me it lays eggs." Then they saw the real thing. "Interesting," they all thought.

Lindsay has bird pins and a bejeweled elephant pendant and a bird-print dress.
A woman whose name I've forgotten, but is Persian, had a ring of peridot and gold and a ring made of jade and gold, and necklaces made from square bits.

I finally got around to visiting the Semitic museum. In the notebook, someone named Saxirha wrote "Milaef xibretten gimmut enut." I thought it was Maltese but now I think it's vaguely Maltese nonsense.
There are a lot of Egyptian artifacts, despite Egyptians not being Semitic.
There's a statue of a goddess with one fish flipper and one hoof, with a sun and moon behind her. They are convinced it's Aštarte but have no idea where it comes from or even if it's real.
I'd guess it was fake myself, or maybe Palmyrene, from the land of the derpy lion statues.

I ran into and petted Lana on my way out.

There were two copies of All Those Vanished Engines at the Harvard Bookstore along with nothing else that really interested me.

A man was wearing a shirt that was a homage to Van Gogh's Starry Night with stormtroopers.

I had Phở with shrimp, imitation crab meat, fishcake, and calamari.

Julie has a bracelet of red and blue gems arranged in circular patterns of six. A man looking for his cellphone only to find that it was buried somewhere in his bag called himself an artist of building demolition, and it's artistry because you can't just blow it to shit and if you fail to blow it to shit, you might have to go back inside. The train was exceptionally bouncy towards the end of our journey.

Burning Question: Is it really surprising that a Russian stooge would out a source that showed Russia's malfeasance?

I defaced a QAnon sticker. Someone probably left it there during last week's rally.

Someone on the train had purple and pale seafoam green hair and pale green eyes. A man had bright red hair.

Karen was manning the Boston Ballet tent until she ran off to get food.
A woman had a line from a Schumann song cycle tattooed on her arm.
James is a dancer. Saoirse, which is an Irish name meaning "freedom" is not. I was like "I know how to spell this." Important things to remember are "which vowels are broad and which are narrow" and "sometimes there are vowels that are just there to change the consonant sound" and "maybe there's some lenition in there."

Gabriella wore a purple dress, socks with pearls on them that she got from a small store in Chinatown, a bracelet of pink glass, and a necklace of pink and pale grey and violet. Her cats have been catching a lot of mice lately.

España - Emmanuel Chabrier
It imitates guitars with plucked strings.

Rites of Tamburo - Robert W. Smith
No, not that Robert Smith.
I feel like I’ve heard this one before but I don’t know where. It’s very vibraphone and chime heavy.

Anke Djé, Anke Bé - Jake Gunnar Walsh and Devin Ferreira
The name is Bamanankan, which is spoken by the Bambara, for something like "everyone gather together in peace."
In four parts, Fankani, a celebratory dance of welcoming, Kassa, a harvest dance, Djansa, a joyous social evening dance, and Ubuntu, which is a Nguni term meaning something like "the essence of humanity" and is often translated as "I am because we are", a message of hope. It features spoken words, and a drumming ensemble as well as traditional orchestra. I think there was a balafon as well.
At times, it reminded me of John Adams, as I had listened to Dharma at Big Sur, and Leonard Bernstein.

This too, alas, fades into darkness.

Leonard Bernstein - Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.
It’s a weird title because there’s nothing actually symphonic about it. West Side Story is a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, transposed to gang wars in New York. It goes prologue-somewhere-scherzo-mambo-chacha-meetign-fugue-rumble.

Bal masqué - Amy Beach

Impressions of Cheonmachong - Kyle Newmaster (orchestra) and Brooke Jee-in Newmaster (drum and dance routine), stepsiblings. Or something like that.
Concerto for Korean Three Drum Dance
Cheonmachong is a Korean Silla-era tomb with a painting of a Cheonma, a horse with eight legs and wings on its feet, along with gold rings and bracelets and a crown.
The orchestration reminded me of Tán Dùn.
There were five drums arranged in three cubicles for each drummer and it was just as much a dance as a it was drumming.

White Swan pas de deux - Tchaikovsky
In Russia, they perform Swan Lake with a happy ending. Gabriella's sister saw it once and said there was a happy ending, and that might be because they were a Russian troupe.
Going by maps, Swan Lake is filled with whoopers. Maybe mutes.

Gardens to Grow from Candide, Bernstein.
If you’re wondering, Gardens to Grow is the name of the dance, set to the instrumental music from Candide.

Roxanne has bright red and black hair and, on one arm, tattoos of a Metroid larva, the Ocarina of Time with red flowers around it, the Wind Fish which is in fact a whale, Mallow from Super Mario RPG, an impossible triangle tattoo she has because her brother and sister have that same tattoo, on the other arm, a tattoo that had fuck all to do with video games. On her shoulder was the planet from The Little Prince when it became overrun with baobabs. She had space on her arm for another tattoo and she’s thinking of Majora’s Mask and thought of Navi but thought “nah” because she already has the ocarina. She didn’t get very far in Twilight Princess because the Wii controls were awkward, and was bored in Wind Waker until she realized that the ruins were Hyrule after a great flood, and then found it too depressing to continue.
She grew up in Brazil so she got stuck on Booster’s Tower and used a Portuguese-English dictionary.
She thinks the best Batman is the one from the Lego Batman Movie, while Mark Hamill is the best Joker and I immediately thought of him reading Trump’s tweets in a Joker voice and she was about to ask me if I've heard those. Elon Musk reminds her of Lex Luthor.
She has a big orange cat named Boba Fett.

Nightside plays traditional Irish music.
The bus driver said that despite the big letters on the side of the bus, he's a Red Sox fan.

I've been seeing Ashley a lot more than I'd like. I do not know what to say anymore and I am getting nowhere. Well, I'm getting somewhere, but it's not anywhere that I want to be.

burning question: It is true, isn't it, that sheep eat little bushes? Then it follows that they also eat baobabs?

I'm firmly of the opinion that Batman and Robin is a more enjoyable movie than Batman Forever, not despite its many many flaws, but because of them.
Batman and Robin is the Turkish Star Wars of Batman movies.
However, the opening bank heist sequence in Batman Forever has "Oh no! It's boiling acid!"
I'm not a bank architect but I'm pretty sure the vault is meant to be impregnable and does not detach from the building. Also, I don't believe there are tow cables with the tensile strength required to pull up a bank vault or helicopters capable of lifting them.

Batman Forever could have been good. If they had Jim Carrey play the Riddler and not just Jim Carrey and did something with Harvey Dent knowing that Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same person and maybe having some internal conflicts about that or maybe have Batman struggling with “do not kill” and his need to protect his secret identity at all costs.

The best part of the video game, Michael says, is the versus mode, where you can have Two Face fight Anglophile or a bunch of clowns or whatever. Just make that a video game. But don’t hack Batman Forever, no, that would mean you’re still getting the terrible broken gameplay, no, make it Mega Man. And when he defeats a boss, he gets half a face and the powers of that face.
I found out there’s a band called Oh No Boiling Acid. They remind me of that song Lousy Smarch Weather, in which the band name is far far more hilarious than the band. You were expecting something wacky about mustard sandwiches and pineapples and ninjas and bad family vacations.

I'll have to tell Michael about Cool Cat and how I've seen better acting in insurance commercials.

Michael suggests showing up to a Free Speech rally, joining it, and espousing left-wing positions, ranging from the well known (Workers of the World, Unite! Smrt Faśizmu, Sloboda Narodu) to obscure ( ສັນຕິພາບ ເອກະລາດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ເອກະພາບ ວັດທະນາຖາວອນ (santiphab ekalad pasathipatai ekaphab vadthanathauaon) which is Lao for Peace, independence, democracy, unity and prosperity)
He described free speech as similar to Stalin’s USSR, that is to say, you have the freedom to say whatever you want, as long as the people in power, or in their case, the center-rightists who have declared themselves arbiters of social norms, agree with what you say.
It's funny that they're getting up in arms about how Facebook should allow them a platform but if you break from their radical constitutionalist/paleoconservative/fascist viewpoints, they won't let you post.

There’s an outbreak amongst the cormorant population and possibly amongst gulls and shearwaters that nosh on their corpses. There is no pattern to this. There are cormorants in Orleans with it, there are cormorants in Manchester By The Sea with it. We’ve had eleven cormorants starting in June and they’ve all dropped dead after a few days. Some times they don’t even come in too ragged looking and they still drop dead.
It’s mildly contagious to humans and potentially lethal for birds. A decade ago, they had to cull 3 million domestic chickens. We’re taking special precautions because we also look at domestic birds. Otherwise, our policy is “don’t take cormorants. Talk them out of bringing cormorants. This is what a cormorant looks like. If for some reason, they don’t get the memo, euthanize the cormorant. If they still bring cormorants after getting the memo, we will do something bad and we don’t know what that something is but it will be bad. It won’t be as bad as getting Tulsi Gabbard elected president but it won’t be a benevolent thing like dropping a harvestman in your hair either. Because when Gabbard is president, we all suffer. 20 million voters can’t all relocate to Mauritius.” And we’re going to have to triple-bag them and then incinerate them, until this plague blows over, which it will. This isn’t an emerald ash borer, it’s something that happens regularly, it’s just more virulent this time.
Note: I don’t actually think Gabbard would run against Trump. Maybe if Trump was removed from office somehow or somehow escapes justice but decides not to run again in 2020.

On the Aegean island of Syros, which is not to be confused with Syria, a place I wouldn’t visit if they made me Caliph, you can work in a cat colony if you’re preferably older than 45 and have cat psychology, cat wrangling, and cat whispering skills. Abby is bewildered, after all, cats are always neurotic and antisocial. Maybe we could send Ashley there.

Sam isn't sure if raccoons like tomatoes but they’re more interested in the feel of the ice melting.

Christina worked with someone who called her Chrissie and she said she went by Chrissie for a while because it wasn’t worth correcting her.

There were rats boarding named Mouse and Squirrel. I’m like “you’re not a mouse, you’re a rat,” to it. Caitlin agrees with me. Hers is one of the few names I can remember and put a face to, maybe because she didn't arrive with the rest.

Someone brought a rather large male sugar glider to be castrated. I can't remember which one she brought but one of them is Fury and one of them is Defender. They name their cats after gods, Sîn and Bastet and Atlas, gods that people believed in and not fictional gods, not Bhunivelze or Nyarlathotep.

Lion Man II: The Witch Queen is on Youtube. But for some reason, they call it a Telugu movie.

Delvina's zodiac sign is Exodus.

I heard Stars of the Lid in a bookstore, although I didn't find anything I wanted.

burning question: How did they get Vivica A. Fox to take a role in Cool Cat The Kids Superhero?

Elizabeth raises monarch butterflies. The fifth batch hatches in late august and in september migrates south to Mexico, where they lay their eggs in April and die, and each batch migrates northward. You can tell the females from the males because the females have thicker wing veins and lack the scent glands on their hind wings.

Snail fur is an animal, specifically a type of hydra, that grows only on hermit crabs, never on the actual snail.
Moon snail feet don’t fit inside their shell and they’re very slimy.
There are spider crabs living on the New England coast but they’re nowhere as big as their Japanese brethren.
The rocky water tub had a bat star, even though they’re denizens of the Pacific Ocean. They had a few other starfish and we're not sure what species they are.
Hermit crabs have mouthparts consisting of scoopers and grabbers that are always in motion. Meredith used very scientific terms to describe them, Olivia said.

Sūrya (do not let autocorrect near this name. It is Sanskrit for sun, not Arabic for fascist hellhole that is pretty much North Korea with better public relations) was reading a book because it came with recommendations from Emily St. John Mandel. She sang in Verdi's Requiem a few weeks ago and sings in a chorus where she said that many works were written with women in mind and aren't just tenor parts transposed to soprano.

Gabriella’s dress was white with pale flowers and a pink ribbon and contrasted against the twilight sky.

The concert was a long one.

The music from Pirates of the Caribbean was suitably adventurous and piratey, and was arranged for orchestra and a smaller string ensemble.
Maurice Ravel's Une barque sur l'océan was set to a video of North Atlantic right whales, which are critically endangered mostly because of ship strikes and entanglement, but also unreliable food supply and noise and parasitic infections and toxic algae blooms caused by rising sea temperatures. There is a species that lives in the northern Pacific. There is a southern species that is doing a lot better, mostly because there isn't as much human activity in the far south.

Bernard Herrman's wife was a writer, and when they were dating, they'd take an hour long train ride and exchanged ideas. He suggested writing about a New England composer based on Charles Ives who wrote a cantata based on Moby-Dick and then decided that was too good idea to waste on a hypothetical. Anyways, if you want to write an opera, feel free to write one based on the life of Pope Alexander VI or on the Malacia Tapestry.
There was a church scene in New Bedford with a sermon about Jonah that was cut out along with a few lines for a men’s chorus playing crewmen. A drum interrupts their hornpipe, which struck me as more demented than jaunty.

Oceana by Stella Sung is a new work, featuring the songs of humpback whales, belugas, bearded seals, and dolphins as well as the sound of seismic air guns, shipping traffic, and industry, and depicts places that I know are not here, as they include things like whale sharks.
Song is important to sea mammals, as their vision is limited by the water.

They played La mer by Debussy, which I've already talked about.

Julia says that drawing people is a better hobby than staring at your phone. There was a man covered in tattoos: a skull samurai, thunderclouds and sky serpents, jungle idols and flowers, a witch with long fingers. Otherwise, an uneventful train ride.

burning question: what do you think the Water Temple smells like?

Here are some skunks getting released.

We had some sugar gliders AKA short-headed rope dancers. They’re a kind of possum, not to be confused with opossum, and they’re called possums because they’re marsupials who superficially resemble American opossums and Australians are remarkably uncreative people, and they’re from Australia, New Guinea, and parts of Indonesia. I think that they look like baby ewoks. Females have two ovaries and two uteri. They’re popular as pets though they aren’t particularly good as pets. They have to bond with people or else they become neurotic. So they’re like the inverse of cats. Or perhaps they form hermitian bijections onto cats.
I don't know what it is Abby fed them. I think they were female, because males have a bald patch on their foreheads.

Chameleons remind me of Cookie Monster. Their eyes function in such a way that they can focus on two distinct objects at one time.

Our screech owl flies great but he’s always crashing into walls.
The groundhog, rabbit, black duck, and goose are getting released. We have a peregrine with a coracoid luxation, and we’re going to rest him becuase he’s a psycho.
We have a red-tailed hawk that does everything right but fly. He hit a window twice.
A rodo died on Saturday night and by the next day, the flesh on his face was eaten down to the bone by maggots.
The hummingbird was enraptured by a hibiscus flower.
Critical care is good, says Christina. It’s like a smoothie with hay.
Abby tossed some ice with vegetables in them to the raccoons, shouted “let it rain!” and they weren’t amused at all. She's going to take pictures and make a cookbook so everyone will know what to make for the animals.
Raccoons don't like a lot of green things.
We released one batch last Friday and we're going to release the rest of them before the week ends.
Christina made applesauce and papaya applesauce. She’s sure it tasted good but she’s not brave enough to try it.
She says that if being a vet doesn’t work out, she’s going to open up an animal cafe in some hoity-toity place like LA for all the rich people with pampered pets.
Someone thought they could feed a semi-aquatic turtle dry food.
Cutting up a guinea pig for the vulture reminds Zack of dissections in school.
In the kitchen was a leaning tower of bowls.

Trump is starting to remind me of that Simpsons episode in which Bart says "That's not enough! We demand more asbestos! More asbestos! More asbestos!"
Michael says that Bart Simpson has a conscience.

Mallory told me about the time she saw a hawk kill a duck by harassing it until it couldn’t go underwater anymore.

It’s weird because yesterday, Ashley was around, who was weathering my presence, or perhaps she was seething with rage, who can tell, and Tulsi Gabbard won a primary election in a landslide and it rained yet again, and it was a good day, and then today sucked: I cut through my fingernail. Not much, but it still hurt like fuck. I’ve never done anything like that but I have broken nails. If it's anything like that, nobody will be able to tell in a week.

burning question: what do you think the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time smells like?

On Pangaea, people wrote
“the two most important days of your life as the day you are born and the day you find out why”
Selamün Aleyküm, which is the Turkish spelling of the Arabic greeting “A salaam alaykum” and means “peace be with you.”
Alexa and Auriane 4ever
“Make a contract with me and become a magical girl.”
“there’s a deeper wave than this rising in the world, it’s called love.”
“it’s free real estate.”
“will climate disruption divide us.”
“i will never stop thinking of you”
“we are many, they are few.”
“what if your nipples had eyebrows?”
“who on Earth cares about a sick pigeon?” with a beautiful drawing of a rodo in flight.
“black lives matter.”
“if I’m to run the future, you’ve got to give up the past” or something like that.
“justin loves everyone”
“grab her by the heart”
“girls are the future”

Back in the 60s, white feminists had their own problems with class or biases, while the mainstream black men saw feminism as divisive.
Some things change, some things stay the same.

[Click for art]


For The Women’s House, made for the women inmates in Riker’s Island prison and then deemed inappropriate when the whole place became a men’s prison and whitewashed over, and then salvaged and put on display elsewhere. It depicts women who were rejected by society as they reintegrate themselves.


To be an artist is a political act.
The Spiral Art Collective felt uncomfortable with a woman in it and only allowed Emma Amos.


Sandy And Her Husband
Emma Amos found herself closed off from the art world, as a black woman.
The observant will notice her self portrait hanging on the wall.


Dingda McCannon created her own woman warrior from recycled mini flag poles and a belt of bullets and hardware store junk, and were painted in black, for black people, red, for the blood shed, and green, for the fertile homelands.

Women of color found themselves working with and sometimes against white feminists.


Catlett: Target. Represents the killing of black activists.


Faith Ringgold, a self portrait inspired by Picasso.


Pushkin, by Chase Riboud.


The Liberation of Aunt Jemima
A video depicted racist stereotypes


Juju Bag For a White Protestant Male
In this, the artist imagines a white protestant male using a pair of rowing oars, a sweater, a silver double decker bus from Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee, a Republican party elephant key ring, even though the frog has replaced their mascot to the delight of pretty much everyone who wears elephant-themed clothing and to the consternation of Matt Furie, stock certificates, a Mary Ellen doll with a shopping art as the perfect woman.


Dingda McCannon - Empress Akweke


Maren Hassinger, Learning


A dress made from white gloves.


Allison Saar, Sapphire.
With very little blue.
Reagan brought about a more conservative 80s.
In 2018, GBLT people, women, marginalized ethnic and racial groups, the eco-left, dreamers, eccentrics, and revolutionaries all make their voices heard, even if their voices go ignored.




Caitlin Keogh - Blank Melody, based on a poem by Charity Coleman.


Kevin Beasley uses old fabrics and clothing, clumps them together like an abstract Yoshitaka Amano painting, and preserves them in resin. A woman was talking about an assigment she had in high school, to bring in objects they were collecting, and then she wandered off.

There is a shag rug covered in castoffs of other projects, with five balls of underwear and socks dangling from shoelaces.


He draped fabric to look like hoods and cowls and scarves worn by invisible people. This one reminds me of Blade Runner. I have no idea why. Maybe because of the saffron-colored hoods those people wear in one scene. Or perhaps The Ghost of Christmas Future. I know I shouldn't bring that up in August, although once I've seen Christmas decorations on Saint Ajora's Day, which is still summer, and that's just cruel. In another gallery, the sound is recorded, where it is distorted and played through this, a conversation of phantoms.


Livejournal even reminds me that instagram links are ephemeral.


This thing is the height of a child, the head is proportioned like an adult and the shoulders and body fall away.


A lot of this stuff is from a specific store in Harlem.



This sculpture transformed your voices into white noise, so yo could talk or sing or make loon noises. It's called Strange Fruit, named for the poem and Billie Holliday song about lynching.


Faith Wildling grew up in a Christian commune in South America, where women were always always covered and there was strict gender separation, and she embraced feminism in her 20s because she never got satisfactory answers from religious conservatism.


Chantal Joffe, self-portrait with Esme.


Kantarovsky, Violet


Lucy McKenzie, untitled.
Two shadows contemplating a textured Mondrian.


Vik Muniz, mounds, depicting incongrous elements in heaps. Glass eyes, fish, dried seahorses, rotting raspberries, rose thorns.


Tara Donovan, nebulous. Made from thousands of strips of scotch tape. The description likens it to fog rising out of the floor but I see it as a mat of fungus.


Zoe Paul, a weaving on a discarded fridge grill found on one of the Greek islands.


Deconstructed camera.



i met a woman with constellations tattooed on her arm: Cancer, Scorpius, Aquarius, and Gemini. I’d recognize Cancer, Scorpius, and Gemini, but not Aquarius. And you’re probably thinking “wait a minute, Cancer and Gemini are nowhere near Aquarius and Scorpius,” and you’d be right but they represent the zodiac signs of her family members, not the night sky.

One of the docents had polka-dot socks and a spiral tattoo.

In the mid-room, they asked about revolutions.
People wrote “humans are innate revolutionaries.”
“Say no to jokes and humilation about your gender and culture and sexual orientation from anyone who doesn’t understand.”
“yes I can vote”
“expressing myself through speech, through music, through hair, through style”
“change what is oppresive.”
“young adults today are being treated with respect. when our parents and grandparents were young, they were silenced.”
And stuff in Spanish, some about Venezuela probably encouraging an uprising against populism and Bolivarism. Lift up your hearts, as Ecuador rejected populism and is giving Assange the boot.

The cultural wars are over and we’ve won.

I met another shih tzu, who was mostly white with brown spots.

The band Tupahn, led by Ronaldo Tupahn Carniero da Silva, was playing Afro-Brazilian electric guitar music near Harbor Towers, and there was another klezmer ensemble with clarinet, accordion, and acoustic guitar.

I was planning to eat at Siam Bistro but then I saw that a new place, Kala Thai, is open, and their prices are good, and I saw that it had mango salad, which is quite delicious, and was made with mango, red onion, cilantro, scallion, chili flakes, carrots, Chinese celery, and cashews. With some kind of vinegary dressing. They don’t have as much selection as other places I've been but what they do have looks good. Also, I’m not sure if the eggplant in their green curry is the Thai eggplant or the standard aubergine. The only place I’ve ever seen Thai eggplants are in Trader Joe’s green shrimp curry, which was discontinued long long ago.

There is also a halal market and shawarma/pizza place nearby.

A woman waiting for the silver line had a tattoo of a serotonin molecule, an ankh necklace and a spiked choker.

I spent a few seconds staring at one of the doors before realizing “oh, I came FROM Haymarket,” which I don’t usually do, “there’s naught but a wall there.”
The train was there but I ran in.
Jill was like “made it” to me and was listening to Lady Gaga when her phone died. The other guy I drew got off the train at Broadway. She says that I’ll have to find him again, and I said it’s happened before.

I had to draw Brianna because her t-shirt said "It's Friday!" and depicted Jason triumphantly wielding a bloody axe and machete. She had a necklace that depicted a hormone responsible for dreaming.
There’s at least one Friday the 13th every year and I can prove it mathematically.
So, let’s say January 13th is zeroday. What’s Zeroday, you ask? Who cares? It doesn’t matter. February 13 is Threeday, March 13 is also Threeday, April 13 is Sixday, May 13 is Oneday, June 13 is Fourday, July 13 is Sixday, August 13 is Twoday, September 13 is Fiveday, October 13 is Zeroday, November 13 is Threeday, and December 13 is Fiveday.
It’s slightly different for leap years.
Kym knows someone who can tell you what day of the week a specific date was.
I’ve heard that it only works between 1901 and 2099 because of the fact that years that are divisible by 100 but not by 400 aren’t leap years and that screws up everything but I might be wrong, or maybe you could do some more math and extrapolate further.
She says you can go back to whenever the Gregorian calendar began.
Brianna has a bag with video game stuff on it. I thought it was Zelda because of pixillated swords and magic books and hearts, but it also had robots and I don’t remember any Zelda games having robots in them. There was a high-tech dieselpunk dungeon in Majora’s Mask which I got through without the help of a guide and I always like to point that out along with the fact that it took me weeks to get through the Spirit Temple and weeks to get to the Fire Temple.
Casssidy has rainbow pants. They had intricate patterns on them.
They have a yellow lab named Splash who loves water but is afraid of everything else, including terriers. Kym told me about a great dane mastiff mix they had who was also super skittish, even though he was 190 pounds and came up to Cassidy’s navel. She told me about the time Boston had a bunch of painted cows throughout the city and how the dog was afraid of them. That was in 2005 and they have an official site still.

They just got back from a trip to New York City and recently visited South Africa, where, after decades of people feeding baboons, baboons associate humans with food and break into their houses.

Meanwhile, in "you can't make this shit up" news, the man who started a wildfire had posted QAnon ravings and meanwhile, every other idiot believer in QAnon like Shadowdancer Duskstar is saying it's part of a conspiracy to discredit them. I was more surprised to find that Ashley still wants nothing to do with me than I was to find that Shadowdancer Duskstar believes in QAnon.
Kurt Vonnegut would throw down his pen and say that he couldn't write anything as absurd as real life.

burning question: what if your nipples had eyebrows?

The Gardner Museum had their last community night of the summer. Josh Knowles played alone. The spin-the-wheel game was completely overhauled. Instead of scouring the entire museum, you’d go to a specific room and, for example, find an object that you’d like to touch, but you mustn’t touch, or think about where in the museum you’d place a portrait of yourself, or find an object that makes you think of yourself or about the past and the present, or a place to meditate. You could draw a constellation of your life and the people in it done in black and white and silver colored pencils or make a print by putting paint on a squooshy rectangle, putting flowers or other things between it, and transferring it to paper, and leave a print for someone to take.

There was a procession of people in glimmering sea-blue and luminous green and autumnal orange coral outfits holding parasols in the form of jellyfish, of stiltwalkers.
There was a fencing group. One of the guys said “hey, what’s that?” The suits had wires attached to them so they could keep score. The guy said “it blasts you with electricity. 54% of them die from it. The others, we kill.”
A woman has a tattoo of a quote from Holes. A group is putting on a performance of Measure for Measure in Russian although we both think Putin is more Richard III.

Devin has a pendant that is sea glass wrapped in wire and a tattoo of roses on her legs, while Hannah has a choker of blue gems.

There was a woman with a green ponytail and black and golden stripes for the rest, wearing red-colored sunglasses. A woman's pin said "feminist by day, cat-lover by night."

A woman on the train studying Mandarin Chinese. I didn’t get to say anything to her because, speaking of China, I met Bella, who was a shih-tzu who looked exactly like what I’d imagine a shih-tzu named Bandit looks like. Black ears, black raccoon mask around her eyes, and very adorable.

Kelsey has tattoos of flowers on her wrists and has dabbled in art.

I had a steak fajita from Amelia's Taqueria and it is quite good.

I don't think things have improved between me and Ashley. Obviously, the status quo is getting me nowhere. I had Bells For Her stuck in my head throughout the day.

burning question: I find that Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro. Don't you?

I don’t want to think of Ashley's presence as “yeah, this is going to be a bad day.” If I have to interact with Ashley for a few hours to appease the rain gods, so be it. A little hardship is a small price to pay.

A woman had lavender hair, a woman had green and black hair, a man had tattoos of plant fronds and ornate writing with floral details and flames, a woman had a tattoo of a cat face and a heart with writing and a raised fist and a harp.

There was a klezmer band playing outside State station, with tuba, clarinet, banjo, and a trumpet. I forgot the last one and had to look it up on Instagram and I’m surprised I saw it.

So what we got were:
Title Theme from Star Wars. Everyone knows this so here are some thoughts on Star Wars. 1. I’m not sure if the Jar Jar As Sith Lord crackpot theory is from a Robot Chicken sketch or if Robot Chicken is just referencing the crackpot theory. 2. A long long time ago, Katherine held a Star Wars marathon and I said that because I bear no rancor for her, pun intended, and I said that it should just be the six movies and maybe Turkish Star Wars, not the Ewok movies or the Holiday Special. Here’s what I think should happen to people I do bear rancor towards, like Ashley or really anyone involved with causing climate change. Watch the Holiday Special one time for each movie I through IX, the spin-offs, the Ewok movies, and Turkish Star Wars.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which was picked to contrast with the theme from Star Wars.
Excerpts from the Mother Goose Suite: Pavane de la belle au bois dormant; Laidoneronnete, impératrice des pagodes; and Le jardin féerique,
Which translates to “pavane of the sleeping beauty,” I think when people call French elegant, they found the wrong word. Or perhaps the wrong language. Hungarian is elegant. Inuktitut and Massachusett are especially elegant. Often, books that are translated into French double in length.
Look up a post I made in 2015 called Fantasies, Fables, and Faraway Places
While this was happening, a few girls did an improvised dance and a flock of geese took this as an omen and seized half of the lawn.
Carmen-fantasie for Flute and Orchestra, which is an arrangement of a few themes from Carmen, including the two iconic ones.

What we were supposed to get was:
The first movement from Symphonie fantastique: Rêveries-Passions, which depicts a lovesick young musician seeing a woman he finds irresistibly attractive.
In the later movements, he finds himself at a festive party, has a picnic in the countryside, thinks his love is spurned, takes opium and dreams of his execution and a witches’ sabbath.
Throne Room and End Titles from Star Wars.
The Imperial March
Unfortunately, it was canceled due to nasty thunderstorms. Maybe Gabriella knew and didn't bother showing up, or maybe she just didn't want to deal with the humidity.
The people behind me said that if one of them gets struck by lightning, they'll both be messed up, and that it's the best way to go.
I disagree. Getting struck by lightning, or really, anything you hate, would be humiliating. It would like getting hit by the car Ashley is driving. Or dying by a rabid squirrel. I don't mind squirrels, actually.

burning question: what are the odds that it rains on the two days they don’t have a rain date or rain location planned?
Actually, probably not much worse than the odds that it rains on one day.
At least when it rains next week, they can move it to the next day and if it rains the next day, they have an indoors location.

Michael told me about a Turkish movie in which Captain America and the luchador El Santo team up to fight Spider-Man, who is the leader of a criminal gang.
Apparently, there's a petition in Turkey to change the borders of Batman Province to the Batsignal.

We can’t sex the raven. Well, we could do a blood test but that’s not worth it. We’ve still decided on “her” although we don’t know if she even has a y chromosome.

Michaela has a tattoo of a spirograph-y design on the back of her neck. She got a pet duck, it escaped, and we ended up with it and gave it back to her. She doesn't know what breed of duck it is. She also has ferrets and dogs.

We received two crows, a sanderling with missing primaries, a cormorant first thing Monday morning and we think there’s an outbreak of Newcastle disease, a viral disease, because all the cormorants we’ve received died, an ultra-dehydrated squirrel, his littermate came too and died within 20 minutes, some birds covered in bright pink do-it-yourself slime made from Elmer’s glue, shaving cream, contact solution, and food coloring. It's not toxic but it does keep them grounded, so we're going to clean it off of them. If you do make your own slime, make sure to clean up after yourself. We have a great horned owl.

11 (can’t remember his/her name. There was a list somewhere. All I know is there’s a Scallawag, a Pocahontas (although the Pocahontas towel was with Puff), a Thutmose, and maybe a Djehuty or Ramses and a few others named after relatively obscure pharaohs or officials) ended up in the lower portion of the turtle enclosure with Valley, Tortimer, and Truffles. Jacob said he took the elevator. Christina said he either climbed his buddies or the other box turtles were like “get out of our house” and pushed him off. What actually happened is one of the railing posts was broken and he pushed his way out. No, I don’t know how to say “horrible, horrible freedom” in Egyptian.
Primrose was out in Myles Standish State Park and it was so foggy and she thought an axe murderer would get her. There are summer camps there and those are Jason’s hunting grounds.
Jacob said the blue jay and robin release was like something right out of a picture book.

She (I've forgotten her name. She's not Carly, Amelia, Grace, Caitlin, Abby, Christina, or Alex) hollowed out a zucchini and filled it with squash, melon balls, limes, berries frozen in ice, and grapefruit.
She doesn’t know if they eat limes but there’s only one way to find out.
Natalie says that the animals eat better rthan she does. They also got papaya, peaches, mangoes, and celery.
We had French beans, which are called that because they sound fancy, and they’re not even from France, they’re from Guatemala.
There was a recipe on the back of the bag with something about crushed peanuts and cumin powder and sautéed onions.

Raccoon Roundup begins this week, yet another thing making it feel later in the year than it actually is. It normally wouldn't be this week but we have so many of them. Natalie says we're thinking of overwintering the friendly raccoons so they have more time to learn how to be raccoons. Natalie is dreading autumn and its second wave of squirrels.
On the other hand, it was 98 F at 4:30 PM and we had set up a sprinkler in the raccoon enclosure.

Jen asks
burning question: what kind of crime spree does one go on at a national park?

It feels later than it should be because Greenfest was earlier than usual. Nay, we're only halfway through summer, and I have light years to go before I sleep.

Caitlin was playing the Legend of Zelda game for the Switch, whatever that one is called.
Caitlin says that faces are abstract and like circles but not like circles, so they’re hard to draw, while hands are easy because they’re just a bunch of rectangles stuck together and there are fingernails.
I’m not sure if I spelt her name right, because as another Caitlin, who once took art classes and wears a sun pendant, says, there are a million ways to spell Caitlín. Not CVIIIlín, that’s C-a hocht-leen. In Indo-European languages, the words for one, two, and three mostly look very similar. Mostly. Armenian, I am looking at you.

Someone told me something. I don’t speak French but I can guess that it’s roughly “awesome drawings.”

I met multiple men with octopus tattoos, one who used to make art all the time. I met a woman with venetian masks tattooed on her back. Morgan has tattoos of a lantern overgrown with flowers, I think lavender, of a parasol, of a rose, of a flower. She has a glass pendant. She wore a floral dress and a lace vest.

I thought at first Evolution Dance were associated with Luminarium because of one of them having a flashlight and because of the ambient Merzbow music, and one walked across a bridge of the other dancers to a recorded monologue about the childhood fears of the dark and of the things that lurk in the dark.
For the rest of their dances, they used various pop songs. One of the dancers had intricate tattoos, one of the dancers had a circular design tattooed on her arm.
Pumawary Tusuy are dancers from Peru, who wielded feathered staves. A few of the dancers had hadeopelagically black hair.

I think Arvisa is a Latvian name.
Jim Cruise, the Spoon Man, did his impression of a heavy metal spoon player, in which he put on a wig and had a fake tongue hidden inside his mouth that lolled out and he played it with heavy metal spoons. I was expecting him to take the spoons but struggle to hold them. And it wasn’t just spoons. Butter knives. Carving forks. Pie servers.
It’s better to be spooned than to be forked, he says.

Ed Koban played a song, Mni Wičoni, which means “water is life” in Lakota and a song called Ahééh, which means “gratitude” in Diné Bizaad.
Evens Gregoire plays acoustic guitar.

The park service had a booth. Originally, you could touch a coyote pelt but people thought that morbid and the stamp ink that was the color of dried blood that got on it didn’t help, so they brought out a coyote plush and a barn owl puppet. You could also spin a wheel and if you answer their trivia questions right, you can be a jr. park ranger. Horray for Zoidberg!
Caitlin was at a nearby booth later. She gave me some stuff on drains.

There was a woman with butterflies on her shirt and roses on her shorts, with hair the color of tropical lagoons in twin knobs.

They moved the fashion show to Sunday. I tried to draw Josh but wasn't able to draw him in a black dress and eco-friendly jewelry because he was only on stage for less than a minute.
Alicia went off to do other things after she was on stage for the fashion show. Alicia has a pendant with the constellation Capricornus and Adrammelech’s sigil, just in case you thought she really really liked that constellation, even if it isn’t the best Zodiac constellation. That would be Taurus, arguably, or you could make a case for Sagittarius, Virgo, Gemini, Cancer, and Leo. Or Scorpius. Or Aquarius. Or anything that isn’t Pisces or Libra. Capricornus does have a rogue planet floating about. And I’m pretty sure her surname isn’t Harkonnen.

Taylor, dressed in mostly whites and pale colors and golden jewelry, was passing through and I’m like “am I mixing you up with someone else who is also named Taylor?” and asked about the tattoos and, yes, they’re on her foot, Hashmal’s sigil was just obscured by the strap of her sandal.
When I wrote this, it was her birthday, but by the time I get the post up, it will be August 6, so wish her a very merry unbirthday for the next 364 days. Also, it’s my unbirthday too. Also, I have a quasi-birthday on August 17.

3nity is pronounced three-nity, which means it would be appropriate if they played on July 16 instead, or, at least, while Andrea was there. Or maybe she was. They played a blend of American, Latin, and African styles, except I'm pretty sure Latin styles are already a blend of African and American styles.

Shindaiko is a Japanese drumming ensemble, and, for those of you who don’t know about Japanese drumming, they have these giganterous drums called ō-daiko. This ensemble also had shamisen and electric guitar. Typically, it’s a male-dominated performance but Shindaiko says “fuck that.”

Tem Blessed rapped about the environment and bees. He's from Cape Verde.

I tried to draw Stephanie really quickly and decided I didn’t like it and started over. Just pretend it isn’t Stephanie. I also tried to draw someone who probably didn't speak much English and who had to get off the train at South Station anyway.
Near us, three guys had a dance-off on the train, Dance Dance Revolution style.

Burning Question: what kind of conspiracy will they cook up once QAnon dies out?

I can only consider it appropriate that a concert meant to bring awareness to climate change was canceled due to the effects of climate change. Laini and the Wildfire sounds good and not getting to hear them was probably the biggest disappointment of the rain. Grupo Fantasia, Mamadou, and Tiz Compa have played previous Greenfests and will probably play yet another one in the future. Kalifa and Koliba is Afro-pop.
And I still haven't figured out what Piperi's hours are, nor am I entirely sure they know what their own hours are.
On the bright side, I did buy Evolution's Shore.

The guy who ran Surfing Goat Soaps, where no goats were harmed, said that the rain would get worse than it was and I didn’t believe him. I believed him later, when it did get worse. And didn't get better.
Josh, who has a tattoo of a forest on his leg, said that there were tornado warnings to the west. And there actually was a tornado in Webster. Remember, there's nothing wrong with the climate at all.
A woman was saying that Uber is an exceptionally big problem because they tend to stop or circle around waiting for their pickups and mess with Boston’s already snarled traffic.

It just occurred to me yesterday that the glass headhouse above the escalators in Government Center alternates between blue-lit and green-lit, like the colors of the trains.

The ride in was mostly uneventful, aside from a man dressed in 18th century clothing.

burning question: what would happen if you gave a yoyo to a flock of flamingoes? Flamboyance of flamingoes. Whatever collective noun for flamingoes, Lana, shut up.

I found two Indonesian coins along with a few US coins. One of them is 100 rupiah and has a picture of a kakaktua (indonesian equivalent of sic, whatever that is) raja (Probosciger aterrimus) on one side and a garuda on the other, while one of them is 100 rupia and has a picture of Prof. Dr. Ir. HERMAN JOHANNES, who worked in alternative fuels and sabotaging Dutch military.
They feel flimsy, almost unreal. Maybe Indonesia has different standards.

Erin has her hair in a bun the color of violets and a tattoo of a red flower on her wrist. Jess has multiple ear piercings and bracelets.
I saw the man with the lovecraftian cat hat and the nude woman tattoo and learned that his name is Felix. He sang the theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
A man had a tattoo of an eye, a man with a twisted wood staff, a compass rose with S, S, C, and W, which is personal to him.

Jackelyn Dacanay, which is Ilocano and of unknown origin, was selling jewelry, not stuff she made but unwanted or unsellable stuff she acquired.

Hannah of The Sunset Kings was there, not performing, and so was her friend Marina, who has abyssopelagic black hair and a necklace of interlocked chain links with a pendant at the end and some writing in French tattooed on her arm.

Ed Koban, who is Kanien’kehá:ka, played flute and told us a folk tale about a young Kiowa boy who could run faster than anyone else and jump higher and shoot crickets out the sky with his bow but couldn’t impress a girl he liked, so he went into the woods and a woodpecker was making holes in a tree branch and he heard whistling from it, so he wanted it, but the woodpecker was like “NO! YOU MUST LEARN PATIENCE” and after many days, he made a flute and got the girl.
I found something similar. It’s like Ancient Greece: every group of people is going to have their own twist on the legend of the Love Flute.
He played a double flute which is also used in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, India, and Russia.

NyaLi is Singaporean, and her band includes people from Poland and Costa Rica and Vietnam and Puerto Rico. She has a tattoo of the Very Hungry Caterpillar and of a butterfly and of the Giving Tree, and of hugging arms. Amazingly, she didn’t compare my art to Shel Silverstein. She sang a duet with a guy from Bahrain, a wistful song about going back home.
Nicole has a turtle pendant.

The Pat Braxton Band played tributes to Billie Holliday and Frank Sinatra.
Yoham Ortiz would play the guitar with a piece of paper inserted behind the strings to give it a twangy buzzy effect, and he played in a style from the northern Dominican Republic, a lament for refugees combining Brazilian fado with American blues.

Coley Virgo is a Rhythm&Pop singer of Jamaican descent who played an Adele song, Rolling in the Deep, which I’ve only ever heard played on the ukulele, and a Sia song, Chandelier.
Los Ciegos del Barrio played various forms of Latin rock hybrids.
Nicholas Emden played Chilean-style folk rock.

A woman had skeleton earrings.

I took handwritten notes and I told her that my handwriting is the equivalent of a Kerry accent.

Rachel says there probably isn’t a market for counterfeit rupiah, especially something of such a low denomination. 100 rupiah is a little over half of 1 US cent. She thought about biting into the coin to test it but I told her that it might not be a good idea because I found them on the Braintree station platform.
Andrea was born on July 16 and has tattoos of a sword and roses and a peering eye, a wolf, the words “chi pasika” (I think) which is Pali, and I couldn’t tell because it was written in Latin annd not in the Devanagari script, although if it was, I’d probably guess Hindi or Sanskrit instead, and a UFO above trees and mountains.
They were eating a Jamaican vegetable curry and seitan something.
Earlier, I had some of that rice and elbow macaroni stuff from that Egyptian food truck and later than that, I had a Red Fortress wrap, which is spicy tandoori chicken, lettuce, and spicy mint chutney.

Despite not being a visual artist, Andrea knows what I'm getting at when I say that I wish I could carry around colored pens and pencils with me.
I said I wanted to show her my colored works but my iPod wasn't cooperating. Rachel said it was probably a mixture of the fact that it's ancient and the heat and humidity, and she says her phone occasionally stops working but she's never really thought about the environmental conditions when it does happen.

Rachel, who is part-Indian, says that most Indians speak Hindi. I’ve heard Tamil but she hasn’t. I’ve also heard Sinhala but they’re not from India.

I said that from what I’ve heard about Indian cuisine, the further north you go, the hotter it gets, and I think that might be more or less true with the weather, because the Tropic of Cancer cuts through India just south of where Pakistan and Bangladesh meet the Indian Ocean.

She doesn’t find Thai spicy.
Rachel’s goal in life is to visit every continent, including Antarctica, and she says she’s visited 3 1/2: the obvious North America, the somewhat-obvious-from-conversations-about-Kerry-accents-and-cuisine Europe, and the less obvious Africa, specifically, Morocco, along with Istanbul, which is in Asia but barely. I said I’ll count it as Asia so she doesn’t have to go schlepping off to Afghanistan or Turkmenistan or whatever.
My advice to anyone contemplating visiting Yemen: Don’t visit Yemen. If you simply must visit Yemen, visit Aden, not Sana’a. You know, the place where they don’t have “kill the Jews” on their flag.
I said that with the travel ban, I doubt we’re going to see Yemeni cuisine in the future. She likes Moroccan a lot.
She says that there is a lot more Indonesian food in The Netherlands. She said the seafood wasn’t bad in Iceland.
It’s probably before they fermented it.

Rachel wanted to visit Croatia and almost went there and to Bosnia and Herzegovina, but it ended up getting canceled. She didn't know about the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb then but is very interested now. She's been to Budapest briefly. She wants to see the Mayan languages and wondered how I recognized Mayan.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t fill up the sketchbook. Part of it is because I counted the pages wrong. Part of it is because the four people I had in mind didn't get on that train possibly because it was so crowded and so I spent most of the ride home reading Primavera, which is beautifully written and reminds me of the story of Persephone and is unclear if it's set in an environmentally degraded fantasyland or in an environmentally degraded but magically realistic future Earth and sweating like Roger Ebert.

burning question: Can we exile these fuckers* in exchange for asylum seekers?
By this, I mean anyone involved with spreading Qanon and Pizzagate.