ceci n'est pas un journal

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.

A man with a tattoo of Jormungandr was playing Chrono Trigger. I believe he was at the part where Frog joined the party. Across from him, there was a man with a tattoo from the Dark Tower, who said the movie was disappointing and wrong but It was excellent. A woman had a tattoo of a sun.
On the orange line was a very androgynous woman with very long fingers with a star pendant, heart pendant, black shirt, and leather pants.

I met a miniature husky named Ronan and a ball of floof named Olive. Olive is shy and Ronan is friendly.
I met a golden retriever. I can’t remember her name but her owner was Sam, who had orange hair.

It rained briefly and then the sun came out and it stayed as humid as ever.

They opened up with a children's choir accompanied by two soloists and a pianist at about 6:25 PM, when my iPod clock stopped because it hasn't been getting along with this humidity. They finished at 6:25 PM.
I don’t think most of the audience was aware this was going on and they thought they were just rehearsing or something.

Light Your Lamps, There’s Just One Place Where Beauty Grows, and Look at the Stars are from a 2003 opera based on the story The Little Prince and in that as here, performed by a children’s choir. It would appear that they took liberties with the titles, and perhaps Amazon thinks I should be grateful that the tracklist is only somewhat useless as opposed to completely useless or non-existent. It’s about a pilot who crash lands in the Sahara and meets a prince from a tiny planet who came here to cure his loneliness, and the pilot eventually comes to realize that he too is lonely.
He Will Gather Us Around is from Dead Man Walking, based on a book about Helen Prejean’s role as a spiritual advisor to two murderers and her campaigns to abolish the death penalty.
The Evening Prayer is from Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel. Hänsel and Gretel wander off into the woods and find a house made of candy where an evil witch lives.
The Victory Chorus is from Brundibár by Hans Krása, originally performed by the children imprisoned in Theresienstadt, scored for the instruments he could scrounge up: flute, guitar, clarinet, accordion, piano, percussion, violins, a cello, and a double bass. The Nazis allowed it because the Red Cross was visiting. Aninka and Pepíček have a sick mother and no money so they sing in the marketplace and the evil organ grinder Brundibár who is obviously Hitler chases them away, so they enlist the help of a sparrow, a cat, and a dog to chase away Brundibár. Krása was then killed by the Nazis. Tony Kushner, thankfully not related to the Kush, and Maurice Sendak illustrated a book and gave Brundibár the Hitler mustache.
Va pensiero was sung in Italian.

Gabriella says that meowing is an all-purpose cat sound.

The orchestra opened with the overture to Semiramide, a bubbly, effervescent piece of music for a tragic opera about Shamiram, who dressed as a man so she could rule over Babylon.

I was disappointed that Robert Honeysucker wasn’t singing but they had an excuse. Instead, we get a concert for Robert Honeysucker.
I do have some new insights.
Back in the 15th century, black became the prominent color in place of white at funerals and the dies iræ was added because hell and damnation are a great subject for funerary masses.
They had initially decided on an intermission between the Offertory and the Sanctus, not quite as Verdi would have it, but then decided they'd put a brief intermission between Rossini and the Requiem.'
The offertorium is in a fugue form, as it is in many a requiem.

Not that it mattered, because this night, there was no busing between North Quincy and Braintree. Gabriella said it was like that the night before and that they're really inconsistent about it even when they said that they'd be busing all summer late on weeknights.
Wollaston appears to be coming along nicely, and so does the new footbridge.

I wanted to look up what kind of spiders are big, glossy black and bright yellow and red but then I realized I’m actually dreaming.

burning question: do you think that Trump has ever went grocery shopping in his life? I'd imagine something akin to the Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns goes shopping.

We’re making a new home for the raven, because she can’t be released into the wild. She likes red foods, like tomatoes, strawberries, passion fire grapes, redcurrants (which I believe I had in my sorbetto), rainier cherries, watermelon.
Rhubarb reminds Amelia of celery and she doesn’t like that. It's great if you boil it and mash it up with some strawberries and sugar, or you can make rhubarb and vanilla tarts.
We're not sure if she likes bananas, so the skunks got those instead. It looked all pretty until we mixed it up with the dog food.

We’re thinking of giving an inflatable swan to a swan outside or possibly for the raccoons.
We have a black vulture. Some of the guinea pigs in the fridge are starting to ferment and we’re giving them to him because vultures are capable of eating meat in a much more rotten state than other animals are. The vulture is vulture-sized, says Alex.
All Christina could smell was fermented guinea pig.
She got squirted with crystallized guinea pig blood and it liquefied on her.
Amelia mentioned giving the groundhog an enema because he’s not pooping very well.
We have a double-crested cormorant with a fish bone stuck in his esophagus and sticking out. It’s emaciated and has lice, which is usually a sign of immunosuppression. We’re going to take out the bone during surgery. When Abby wanted to illustrate just how messed up the cormorant is, she said that the cormorant didn’t attack it.
Primrose kept calling the cormorant “her” even though we can’t sex them easily. I’m not sure how we sexed the raven or if we even did. If we did, probably weight.
It did attack the cage when we put it in, although that was probably more "involuntary flailing when recovering from anesthesia."
We have a hummingbird. They get formula because they can’t live on sugar water alone. They're super easy to sex, assuming they're adults.

We got two overly friendly raccoons, and they’re very vocal, and they might not be releaseable. We tried banging metal objects against their cage, we tried screaming at them. We might be able to put them in with the other raccoons and see if they can learn, but if they can’t, they’re shit out of luck.
One of the raccoons was really dirty and smelly and they took him outside and sprayed him with a hose.

I've been having dreams about Ashley and dreams about replicant uprisings. Meanwhile, Spyro the Dragon had a peaceful reverie until a fire alarm woke him.

I have been out of the loop in politics for a few days and I return home to find that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is starting a religious liberty task force and wants to go after the SPLC. And, you know what, I do think that fascism is a religion of sorts. And QAnon is going after Tom Hanks for whatever reason. They did create Cloversexual, which anything smarter than a screech owl should think “4chan hoax”

burning question: Who in their right mind wants a raccoon flavored chip?
Ranch Raccoon is a chip flavor in England. Crisp. Whatever. Chip Chop Chicken Curry sounds pretty good and so does Sizzling Steak Fajita and Cajun Spice.

A fell wind would occasionally blow from the sea.
Still, Figment is a safe space in an increasingly unsafe world.

This year, their motto was is “ACTION is the antidote to despair.”

Someone wrote Monet ♡ Ashley on the train door window. I know Monet had a wife and I’m extremely doubtful that her name is Ashley, let me check, nope, her name is Camille. And Édouard Manet’s wife’s name was Suzanne. I looked it up.

On the train was a woman with tattoos of birds on her hip and of two shrunken heads with their hair braided and tied with a ribbon on her ankles.

Georgia designs jewelry. A woman with a crescent moon pendant and a triangular pendant that her friend made and some rings with enormous gemstones that she made sold glass animals. I always think of the country, and lately, I've been saying "Jesus, Mary, and Josef Stalin" when I feel incredulous.
Nicole, or Lola, has pendants of an Egyptian queen and the Eye of Horus and her name in Arabic, and a black stone, and has a tattoo of the moon with arrows and lamps hanging from it.
One of the jewelry-makers has a tattoo of a happy friendly onion creature reaching for a butterfly with his tendril and of a hexagram with stars nature motifs within on her thigh.

I met a stubby-leg dog named Nutmeg, which was the name of my first dog, and no, I’ve never used that question as my secret reset password question.
Some sparrows were taking dirt baths.
Believe was merged with the stem of a daisy flower on a woman's tattoo.

In Tiny Box Theater, you put on headphones and listen to a story about your eccentric neighbor vanishing from the world and turning her home into a curiusity shop and leaving you an inheritance.
I saw a post by Sarah about how she felt a little grossed out by the idea of digging through the bathroom, as if the original had you digging amongst dog poop, so instead, you dig through a pile of buttons.
There was a cabinet with card catalogues and you could pick one and go on an adventure.

There were two Archimedes' spirals, one with a tight coil and one less so.

The House of Patterns was a tent covered in designs.


Here is the latest mural, called Carving Out Fresh Options.

A woman has a tattoo of an art deco bird that was used in a Lincoln Limousine advertisement.
I thought it looked like some kind of Cambrian creature.

Someone brought a giant spider puppet and I wanted to get some fishing wire and gradually lower it on Ashley. They had stickers. I took one that said "RADIANT!" with a happy sun on it and stuck it on my sketchbook.
Lex with blue hair and face glitter says that utility belts are better than purses because you never know when you need to repel a shark or grapple on to a building or reverse a carousel.
Someone there compared my style to Andy Warhol's before he started making prints. in which he'd draw on tracing paper and then draw over that with ink and then blot two pieces of paper together to transfer the image to a more absorbent paper.
Hope brought her partially shaved Pomeranian with her. For part of the day, she and Jess had a mermaid’s tail on and they were sunbathing. Her hair is lavender and orchid and pale blue.
I said they were going to start a new life under the sea and Jess told me that was the plot to the Little Mermaid 2.
They were listening to Mark Farina, a genre of music he called Mushroom Jazz, which is not to be confused with the Mushroom Samba, which is what happens when Yoshi touches or eats Fuzzy.

Nefertiti is Egyptian for The Beautiful One Is Here. She made an exhibit called Adhara, which is Arabic for Virgins, although it’s a star in Canis Major. The second brighest star in in the constellation despite its epsilon designation. No, I’m not sure how that works. I know in Cancer, the brightest star is in fact Altarf, the beta star. I don’t know why English couldn’t adopt the dh digraph when they got rid of ð and þ instead of adopting th for ð and þ. I think it would require making English internally consistent.
Whoever was manning it made us crackers with hummus and craisins and Spanish green olives. If I had some wine and I lost a bet, I could make a dirty Frenchman.

come write haiku news
printed on a fabric scroll
stretching through the park

The description was almost a haiku. There, I fixed it for you.
The description on the card was this:
Haikus are easy!
Just 5, then 7, then 5
syllables per line.

Here is another haiku:
Everyone standing
here counting on their fingers.
This is a haiku.


The Glitter Goddess Art Collective had a booth set up where people would either write a task for someone to perform, or pick a task out of the box, perform it, and stick it on their board.
Many of the tasks were about high fives. Mine was “pet a dog” Someone else had that idea, because they wrote “find a dog and pet it.” It's a very very incredibly easy task because not only were the pomeranian and Sirius there all day, I met a shih tzu and a husky with one pale blue eye and one amber beige eye. Somoene said “give plants a hug.” and “spin around three times” and “lay in the grass and find 5 cloud animals” and “touch three flowers” and "do a cartwheel while laughing maniacally" and "smell a flower and “happy thoughts” and “imaginary hopscotch” and “be happy and never give up” and “kick someone in the nuts.” I hope that was a force kick they did. Actually, a kid held up a drawn peanut and a guy kicked it. Taylor got "draw a flower," and her flower was purple and eight-petaled.

Aurora Flora is a tree made from copper wire, and when you block the infrared beams, the fiberoptic flora hanging above it and the lamps illuminate in reds and blues.
Kell wears pendants with a clock around a magnifying lens and a pendant with scissors. They’re very useful, she says. A tattoo on her wrist says “articulate” which is appropriate and she says it’s there as a reminder to be more like her wrist. On her back is something about being brave. She said she was probably wearing that same dress, blue and black and white stripes and streaks, last year.

In Exit Through The Gift Shop, you could take a gift or you could leave a gift. Kell was wearing a tiny hat she got from the gift shop. One of the hats had a wind-up key atop. She said "we're distracted by hats."

The Metapiano was there and at night, would illuminate in pinks when it played. It was over near the DJ booth at night, so Sam and Alex could barely hear it. Alex has a tattoo of a peacock on one arm and the moon going from new to new on her other.
Someone, whose name might be Alex, jokingly said it was a bad name.
I said that
In the Sorry Project, you could sit in a chair and show how sorry you are for the last two years in politics.

There was a setup wit 9 different kaleidoscopes, one with a rotatable light arrangement, one with tubes of colored liquid and glitter which was a better concept than an execution, and a few with nothing inside, just a lens.
and a collection of objects, glowing boca balls and beads and a crown and rubber duckies, you could look at them or spin them around, or you could just look at your hands or at the buildings.

The wall that feels is a wall of blue fuzz you can run your hands over and it would illuminate in rainbows and play violin music.
Liz says that occasionally the buttons would get stuck on on and they didn’t want to dismantle the thing to fix it.
A woman asked if it could be her new home.

There were bubbles. You can't not have bubbles. Taylor was talking about a somewhat different arrangement of the plastic bubbles.

The Touchable Mind was an installation with strings that would vibrate.
It reminds me of a passage from Shriek: An Afterword.
Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening silver strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together…When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain…every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each puppet in a different way, because we are all puppets on strings and we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to other puppets…

There was a slo-mo video booth. Two people made a video in which one of them feisty slapped of pain the other and then hugged and made up.

Elsewhere on the Greenway were vintage neon road signs and a tunnel of metal arcs lit from above.
It’s timed, someone experimented with it.

A woman had a tattoo of a girl watering the flowers in her hair.
A woman had a tattoo of No-Face from Spirited Away and other things.
A woman had nice tattoos that I can’t remember and her friend was like “five hundred Cracker Jack boxes later.”

Shalhavit has rainbow sherbet colored hair and had an iridescent jacket wrapped around her waist and a bag with two butterflies made from wrought metal and colorful gems.

Sarah wore a viridian ballgown held with a clasp. It was slightly short because she had some lights underneath and it made her look like she was hovering, unless you looked at her from too far away or through the anima of a bunny or a snake or an ant, in which case, you could see her feet. In her hair were pens with a piece of circuitry and rainbow toast cat hanging from them.
We had to wai for someone to bring forks so we could have cake as well.
She says that if someone is building a time machine, it's someone here.
Kristin, who dances with Amy Kucharik, has watched Steins;Gate but Sarah has not. Kristin's birthday is July 26.

She says that if your birthday is July 28, you won’t be allowed to have any cake. Okay, you can’t have carrot cake which says Happy Unbirthday on it but you can have the raspberry cake or the poppy seed cake.. Or you can have cheese. But not cheesecake. Or you could have crackers or cucumbers or a mixture of goldfish and red Mickey mouse goldfish or pickled string beans or you can make cucumbers and cheese sandwich. Sarah peeled parts of the cucumber off, wanting to strike up a balance between “I don’t want bits of cucumber rind stuck in my teeth” and “typically, the darker parts of the vegetable or fruit is where all the nutrients are and I don't want to lose that.”
She had a cheese spread that I thought looked like rainbow sherbet and she said is a sunset in a tub. I'd expect it to be mango or tangerine flavored.
Cucumbers are round, not squared.

It’s not art, it’s tea. Although tea can be art. We had Thai ice tea, where you have to tilt the teapot at an extremely awkward angle in order to pour it, and we had hot tea but no way to heat it. Someone suggested using that hot thing in the street. We had lemonade as well. The pink lemonade was local but Natalie's yellow lemonade wasn't. We didn't want to drink insects.
They were still trying to figure out what flavor the donuts were. Coffee cake is typically round, yes, but they don’t usually have holes.

Sarah always thinks of Homestarrunner when she thinks of fire, while I always think of Beavis and Butthead, and I recently found Daft Punk vs. Strong Bad, and it’s amazing. She mentioned that song and fhqwhgads, which by the way is fhqwhgadshgnsdhjsdbkhsdabkfabkveybvf, which can only be pronounced by Strong Bad and Caucasians, to her friend and he was like “uhhhh, can you spell that?” and she’s like “NO!”

Across from our tea party was a man playing the drum.

Someone hit a juvenile seagull with their car and someone else got a bowl of water for him to drink.

Andrew’s shirt is a heart made from circles and loops and his pants are patterned with diamonds and circles. He reminded me of a more modern version of the characters from the performance of Pélleas et Mélisande I saw.

Andrew wore a blue robe with floral designs and a red shirt with circle designs, and his pendant was a blue orb held by talons.
His favorite line from the Simpsons is “There have been times when I lost patience with him even lashed out at him but this man has turned every cheek on his body.

Taylor had her arm stamped with the word CORPORATE and has a tattoo of a cat made from nebulae and the night sky and a black crescent moon outline superimposed on it, and of Venus's sigil with a raised fist inside. On her dress was a sticker that said "not your target demographic."

I went on a quest to find an Office Max or Staples that was closer than the one in City Hall Plaza. I found an answer, though it's not to my satisfaction. On the bright side, I found a (closed on weekends) Falafel King and an (open daily) Noon's Mediterranean.
I think I lost the pen while going through Red Tape, a maze where you jump through the hoops and try to navigate all the red tape. I did this by crawling along the ground. I’m not sure how you were intended to go through.


Guzzalina reminds me of Luscious Jackson.
It's too bad Circumference Circus was doing their routine at the same time.

Norma has a pendant of purple stones that she got at a renaissance faire and a wrap of gold wire around her ear. People who have tried to have stars named after you, eat your heart out: Norma is an entire constellation. It’s not much of a constellation, but still.
It means t-square. It also means Norn. How strange.
Steph had a nautilus shell with pearls hanging from it.
Anna had a yin-yang with daisies tye-dye shirt and a silver moon face pendant.
Natan wore a shirt with Yoshi the stupid freaking horse.
Daisy had a dog with her. She’s all about freeing the nipple and she always has people come up to her and see that it’s obviously a top and they’re like “okay then.”
Daisy’s friend is amazed I still have an iPod and it still works. Aside from it shutting down whenever it gets too humid and aside from the fact that I can’t set the time remotely, which doesn’t even make sense, but I’m fine with setting the time manually because my computer is synced up to some remote clock.

“I’m loving this new glitchcore” someone said. Peter was having a few technical difficulties before the show. When you think of the circus, you think of elephants and lions, clowns, and acrobats with death defying tricks. Circumference has none of those things.
Sterling danced with swords and wore a face-covering keffiyeh and pantaloons and a shirt with designs and had blue hair. Maria the Space Dolphin danced with a stick with twirling ends and later with hula hoops. We put more geometric shapes in there too, Peter says, and Maria danced with rounded triangles. We love shapes. Peter said something about having all the right angles but equilateral triangles don’t have right angles, unless you’re on the surface of a sphere.
Greg has a tattoo of a kraken grabbing a squid. Watch Greg entrance a butterfly onstage, Peter said.
Peter Paradox has a tattoo of a six-winged seraph with eyes covering its wings and Hebrew lettering on his back, which was his old stage name.
Peter played that Sarah McLaghlan song when he said he works at a shelter for balloon animals and asked Andrew for three hundred, no, five hundred dollars to adopt the balloon animal or else he’d kill it, but he couldn’t do it himself, so Andrew took the balloon animal and played with it, and Peter was like “that’s not how it works, Andrew.”
He said that he tries to impress the ladies by juggling and demonstrated. After he was finished, he said "that was the music I was supposed to play."
A man watching had leaves in his beard.


Bendy has a glass pendant and a Hakuna Matata name. He does not bend things for a living.

Sirius is a star in Canis Major but the dog was named for Sirius Black, who was named for the star in Canis Major.
Sen is an illustrator and drew a picture of Mario for her cousins and of sand under a microscope and doodles in a small booklet with live laugh llama on it, which you should ignore. She wrote the statement "some lesbians use he/him, for example, God."
Sen has two friends, Taylor and Taylor. Taylor has blue hair. Taylor has a tattoo of forsythia on her arms and of the head of a heron eating a fish with the body being formed from smaller fish. Her pendant is an elaborate forest scene with owls. Her hair is pale blue.
They had to go food truckin' because they had Sirius with them.
Sirius got a piece of bacon and cheese.

There were clowns with red noses and a grasshopper hat and a rubber chicken wandering about. One of them says he also plays a political clown.

Keira was dressed as a monarch butterfly. Not just that, but her facepaint, toenails, jewelry, et al, were all themed around her butterfly wings and dress. She says that she probably couldn’t wear it on Halloween unless she was in a warm place or indoors and she loves Figment because she gets an excuse to dress up like this.
Her earrings were butterfly wings, and her circlet was orange and black beads with twin monarch butterflies on the side. Her pendant was a golden butterfly. Her earrings were the actual wings of monarch butterflies preserved in glass. She wanted to paint her face like a monarch butterfly, which she’s done before, but wasn’t able to. She does like it abstract. Her hair is dark and part of it is in a tight braid.
I told her that predators won’t want to eat her.
Someone told her that she'd be migrating to central or South America.

Sophie was wearing fake Hylian ears.
A woman there was playing a drumkit made from a few drums and a few pots and skillets.

Sarah had a long scarlet and gold scarf and patterned and many bracelets and a few pendants. By the time we met, the lighting was less than adequate. Sarah says she's a hula-hooper but she's not much of one.
I saw a map of popular names by state by year and at one point, Sarah was the most popular name in Massachusetts and it never caught on elsewhere.

Black Light at Night had chalk and tape in which people could draw their own designs, and I drew a rose, and there was a game of twister, and luminous jellyfish and illuminated patterns on the walls.

Bender had a mustache and beard. A man said he’s in disguise.
The DJ booth had a cube with colorful lights that reacted to the music.

The Original Party Trolley, written on a white bus in almost imperceptible black lettering. It wasn't for us although we all wished it could be.


This is the Crystal Whatsit. I asked if it’s from something and she’s like “it came out of the woods.” If you can't tell, the wearer has a fuzzy outfit with the rock parts inside. The helmet is a window to luminescence and the crystals studding the rock glow.
She looked more like an adventurer with her helmet off.

Ripley has a tattoo of thunderclouds on one arm, that symbolizes sudden change, and branches on the other arm, that symbolize change so gradual that you don’t even realize it’s happening. The branches took the tattooer 11 hours to make while the stormclouds took only 4 hours to make. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
Both of them have really subtle colors that I noticed immediately and some people don’t notice for years. She had to talk the tattooer into including the colors.
She wore a mask that some people called an albino crow and I compared to a raptor and that she says makes her think of either a rodo with a raptor’s beak or Horus. Her friend, who was dressed as Anubis with a utility belt and catsuit and light-up helmet with sunglasses covering the eyes, gave her a feather she found, possibly from the gull, and she judged Lex with the Tiresias tattoo’s soul by taking her pulse.
On her utility belt is a glowing stone, that can illuminate her way through the darkest of places.
She says it's so frustrating to nudge people with her snout instead of having working jaw parts and biting them.
Your final form is dust, Ripley says.
Lex said that being your authentic self is a choice.
They called him Spider Jerusalem because he was bald and had steampunk mirrorshades. He also had tattoos of deep space covering his arm.

Andrew wore a blue robe with floral designs and a red shirt with circle designs, and his pendant was a blue orb held by talons.
Dani wore a choker and braid and black and white costume with a hood but no sleeves. She danced with fans with streamers attached them.
So did Victoria.
There was a woman dancing with streamers in front of the mural and she thought she knew me but this was her first Figment.

No glowstix but I did get this squooshy ring with red, orange, and blue LEDs inside so my hand can be its own rave.
One Financial Center was lit up with coruscating rainbows.

Someone at the dance party was juggling with luminescent bowling pins. There was a dancer with a glowing rainbow sword.

Raven has purple hair now.

A woman had Mateus’ sigil or perhaps it’s the Charon glyph for “wi” and maybe her name starts with that, on the nape of her neck and balloons and stuff on her shoulder. Her hair was indigo.
She wasn’t cut-rate Casey Desmond and she definitely wasn’t the real Casey Desmond, because her sign is Zeromus.

By the time I drew Norela, the lighting was not adequate at all. She really likes my art style.

A woman on the train had pins on her bag that say "Feminist AF" and "future author" and "I ❤ my vibrator."

burning question: if corporations can be people, why can’t dogs?
except they ruled against the monkeys who took a selfie.
Sen says she took a class about non-human personhood.

The path to Longfellow Park is a lot more linear than the path to Danehy Park, and it’s in Harvard Square, which means it’s near food and bookstores.
I found the third part of the Vorrh trilogy, in hopes that I will one day find the second part. I also found All Those Vanished Engines. The woman at the register had hair of red and green, like a macaw’s wing. I also had a Cajun burger, that is to say, a burger with cajun spices and grilled onions, and they were very generous with the fries.
That’s good.

There are no bathrooms in Longfellow Park.
That’s bad.

Darwin’s is nice enough to have a public bathroom.
That’s good.

They close at 8.
That’s bad.

They have really delicious looking cookies and Boylan Black Cherry soda.
That’s good.

In one of the houses’ yards was a wooden cat statue with eyes the color of emeralds.
A girl played the violin in front of Clover.
It continues to be humid as fuck, despite the earlier rain.

This is a play about Henry IV, not a play about Vlad the Impaler. That’s why they suggest not standing in between the yellow lines.

Whereas Richard III is history as a tragedy, Henry IV is history as a comedy.
Henry IV, Part 1 is basically the misadventures of Prince Hal, the future King Henry V, who has been hanging around in taverns with John Falstaff. Meanwhile, Henry IV is dealing with uprisings in Scotland and Wales, which, for those of you who’ve seen Richard II, is his fault, so he can’t go crusading in the Middle East, and Hotspur is challenging his rule and not handing over prisoners of war. Mortimer considers himself the legitimate heir to the throne of England. There’s a battle, Henry IV wins and divvies up his realm amongst his sons. Continued in Henry IV, Part 2.
It’s confusing because a) there are no programs and I was kind of lost because of it and b) Falstaff, for example, is called Falstaff, John, and Jack.
In one scene, Falstaff delivers a stirring speech and the other characters are sitting in the audience, heckling him and throwing popcorn. After that, the sheriff showed up, talked in a southern sheriff accent, and all the bandits hid behind a sheet or behind a lamppost or in front of the bas-relief (it depicts some of Longfellow’s characters, I’ve read) where Longfellow’s bust was.
In one scene, they wore bandito masks. One of them was dressed in a sleeveless plaid shirt and cowboy hat, and she looked like a cattle rustler.
Earlier, when they were practicing the fight scenes, one of them was wearing an oversized pink shirt and a sun hat and thick gloves, and another cast member said she looks like the most ferocious gardener. She’s ready to slay some weeds.
She says to tell your pets about it and they’ll tell other people’s pets and they’ll tell their owners and all the animals.
Longfellow Park is home to a few eastern cottontails.
An audience member had aqueous green hair.
A woman had a mandala tattoo, a woman had a dreamcatcher adorned with flowers tattooed on her shoulder, a man had a nude woman amidst waves tattooed on her arm and wore a hat depicting a lovecraftian cheshire cat, adorned with pins.

On the way home, I overheard a girl from Puerto Rico and a girl from Pakistan engaged in a conversation about fruits and Disney Princesses, and how Pocahontas isn't technically a princess. There was a Puerto Rican festival at City Hall and there was some kind of dance party in Harvard Square, though it wasn't with live music as far as I could tell.

burning question: how do they handle Siri and Alexa in Kerry?

I knew it would rain by this time last week. Just another monsoon day.
I have absolutely no clue what the suite from Bernstein’s Mass entails. They decided not to put the program notes on the site. I’d imagine it’s just Things Get Broken without the vocalist and maybe a somewhat different orchestra, as the Mass calls for organ, acoustic guitar, electric guitars, kazoos, banjo, bass guitars, synthesizers, finger cymbals, bongos, temple blocks, drum kits, alto and tenor saxophone, steel drums, gourds, tambourine, bottles, and tin cans. The FBI told Nixon that there are anti-war messages contained within the text and maybe he shouldn’t applaud or “AROOOOO” lest he be embarrassed.
In A Mind Forever Voyaging, it’s on a list of banned works because of messages of religious tolerance, along with Profiles in Courage, The Trial, Animal Farm, The Fate of the Earth, and Walden.
What I do know about the Rite of Spring is that everything2 calls it “Le sacre de printemps,” in Russian, it’s called Sacred Spring, “Весна священная” instead, it’s a ballet in which primitive people perform rituals celebrating spring, which culminates with a young girl dancing herself to death, and it caused riots at its premiere. I read somewhere that either Debussy or Ravel told the rioters to cram it down and shut the hell up because he couldn’t hear the music. After 1917, he kind of abandoned modernism in favor of neoclassicism, which is really too bad. It’s very dissonant and very arhythmic, perfect to be covered by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic.
I’ve heard the Candide overture and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, maybe not for wind ensemble. The bassoon-played-as-high-as-it-can-possibly-go-as-to-be-unrecognizable intro is based on a Lithuanian folk song and there are a few other Russian songs in there. There are parts of this that evoke Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age.

Mallory, who has multiple cats, has no idea what “meow” means.

I forgot to put this in the last post: Michael compared Trump to Charles II of Spain, who looks a lot like his father.
He said that George V, Wilhelm II, and Nikolai II look like brothers.
He also said that the Roman Republic was notoriously corrupt and he doubts most people even noticed when Julius Caesar declared himself dictator.

burning question: what are the odds that it monsoons on a concert that doesn’t have a planned rain date or rain location?
Ugh, it still beats last year.

We have an osprey and a cormorant and a blue jay who did the flight test by himself and passed. We got a painted turtle and we’re in the process of putting brackets and zipties on it. We got a sad raccoon and we painted him red so we could monitor him. Kenzie found a toad and Greg amputated its broken leg.
There’s a mystery cake in the refrigerator and no one knows what it was for.
Amelia loves the smell of iso. It smells like victory.

Christina has a picture of goat powerlifting and Jen said it looked like ballet and that anyone with talent should photoshop a tutu on Len.

All the rooms had hand sanitizer in there and the vets who came to check the place out were only there for two hours and probably didn’t care what the place looked like. While this was happening, a mouse escaped and Sierra was throwing things around trying to catch it. A squirrel bit her and then died.

We had a red-shouldered hawk. We x-rayed him (Christina said "me 'n' my bird.") and learned that not only was his femur broken, and it wouldn’t be so bad if it was just that because we could just pin it, but he twisted it while he was trying to escape from whatever he was caught in. On top of that, he had rodenticide poisoning.
He’d need to perch on both legs and if one of them is permanently broken, he’d just put too much pressure on the good leg and that would be painful.
Alex kept missing the vein or occasionally going through the vein and it took an hour.
While this was happening, Jen brought in a goose with blue gauze covering his face so he looked like a Mexican wrestler (Jacob) or a ninja (Amelia or Cassie. Oh, shit, now I’ve forgotten everyone’s name again)
Jen says a goose can be anything it wants to be.

We have two domestic bunnies who were attacked by something but as far as I can tell, they’re just missing some fur on their faces. We also have Tina and Happy boarding with us and yes, Tina is named after Tina Belcher.

Michelle and her son came in with some greens and one her son found a red-eared slider, they named it Snappy, and they sent it down to live in South Carolina or wherever.

We finally got some good news that didn't require a video and the wildlife center's notoriously fickle wifi. There's a new anti-malaria (in this case, chronic) drug that they've been working on since the 1970s. Since malaria doesn't just involve flu-like symptoms like pretty much every other disease, it involves sweats, headaches, fatigue, anemia, vomiting, edema, liver failure, kidney failure, brain swelling, hemoglobinuria, blood cell clumping, coma, and death. Fun stuff. And since the protozoan typically hangs out in the liver where it can't be reached by other drugs, this is especially great.

I met a tuxedo cat with three legs.

I got The Witchwood Crown new and Journey and Ancient Light used.
I saw a book in Swedish but obviously didn’t buy it. No idea what it’s about or if there’s a translation out there.

burning question: seriously, how is “a taco truck on every corner” supposed to be a bad thing? Especially if you can get tacos al pastor.

I was told there’d be a taco truck there. In a just world, this wouldn’t be a problem because we’d have a taco truck on every corner. But instead, Bon Me was out of rice and so I had a salad, which is like a rice bowl without the rice and more lettuce and almonds and tomatoes and I had jalapeños and shallots anyway and I had miso lime dressing but they also had vinaigrette and spicy peanut dressing.

Brattle Books has an outdoor section and there’s no order I can discern.
On the other hand, I found Grunts by Mary Gentle at the library. I think Grunts costs about 7 dollars including shipping and handling on Amazon, but I got it for 50 cents.
I was, of course, looking for Ecstasia. Hope springs eternal.

July 20 is the anniversary of Chester Bennington’s suicide, and so Alexandra (she calls herself Sasha) was singing Linkin Park songs and her friend was playing acoustic guitar. Someone provided cookies.

I met a dog in the public gardens named Mr. Wiggle.
The tree with big leaves and white flowers is called a catalpa. There are dawn redwoods as well. I think the clicker tree is an ash. There's no label on that tree and I can't tell an ash from an elm.

Renée thought I was someone else. Renée makes me want to listen to Talk Talk. Renée has a bead flower in her hair and a tattoo on her wrist that says The World Is Quiet Here. I think it has something to do with either Lemony Snicket or Algernon Charles Swinburne. Renée, Jeff, Devon, Will, and I played a card game called Love Letters, which, as Devon pointed out, has no actual letters aside from the words printed on the cards but it has many dimensions of looooooove. You’re supposed to take a card out of the deck because it prevents card counting, as there are cards that allow you to trade hands with someone or make someone show you their cards or guess what card someone has or show each other cards with the stipulation that the player with the lower card is out.
Jeff asked who the hottest one was and Renée was like “everyone looks at Devon.”
They were eating dark chocolate covered almonds and ruffled potato chips from Trader Joes. I haven’t set foot inside a Trader Joe’s in about 900 days and I thought “shit, have they moved away from things from other countries that you probably can’t find elsewhere?”
I had this thought a few days before about food being the first casualty of the Republicans’ war on diversity. Mostly because you have to cater to certain populations that consider Swiss cheese too exotic.

Afterwards, Renée and Will played a game called Coup, which is like Love Letters, only more backstabby and set in a futuristic dystopia. How appropriate, as, in the play, Richard backstabs, manipulates, and murders his way to the throne of England. George, duke of Clarence is in gaol because his name begins with the letter G and someone prophesied that someone with a name beginning with G would kill the king's heirs. G for GLOUCESTER. Richard promises to release George and hires two hitmen to kill him. One of the hitmen has a change in heart, one of them doesn't. Richard woos Anne at her husband's funeral, and Anne agrees to marry him for whatever reason. Edward VI dies and Richard becomes Lord Protector until Edward V is old enough to rule. Richard isn't happy with this and has Edward V and his brother Richard locked in the Tower of London "for their protection." Richard and The Duke of Buckingham hold a conclave, preparing for his takeover. Richard and Buckingham spread rumors that Edward's children are illegitimate. Buckingham convinces the court that Richard is only taking the crown because he has to, not because he wants to. Buckingham thinks that killing children is going too far, so Richard III puts him on his enemies list and has Sir James Tyrell do the dirty deed. He reports that Anne has fallen ill and has her murdered, and marries his niece Elizabeth. Richard is deposed and killed in battle (his last words are "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" and the Earl of Richmond crowns himself Henry VII, who promises to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. It’s not a difficult plot but there are many many characters. The comedies are way more convoluted and I’m pretty sure that a lot of the humor comes from the plot getting all tangled up.
Real life, of course, is a bit more complicated than that. Elizabeth I was granddaughter to Henry VII. A heroic or even morally ambiguous Richard III wouldn't fly.
There are debates about whether it's a tragedy or a history.
Edward was played by a boy soprano, who sung in the opening scene.

I regret to say that Richard III did not have bad hair and an ill-fitting suit. On the other hand, Trump is manipulated, not manipulator. Richard III is more like Putin anyway. Sometimes people are both.

Fun fact: some of my ancestors fought in the Wars of the Roses and were stripped of their noble titles.

A woman with crescent moon earrings with a floral motif was speaking Russian in her phone. At least, I think it was Russian. At the very least, something East Slavic. She had a plush lion with her and she asked me to draw him in her hands. She told me he liked it.

burning question: Had you such leisure in the time of death to gaze upon the secrets of the deep?

Ashley’s back from London or whatever.
I feel a chill all through my body. Then a feeling as if a weight was pressing down on me. Nope. Not my imagination. Not my imagination at all.
And the bathroom at Braintree Station was locked. Otherwise, it wasn't a bad day at all.

Eva has an octopus tattooed on one arm and a Miyazaki-themed scene with Totoro and sootballs and Calcifer and Sophie and Yakul from Princess Mononoke. She told me that Miyazaki is coming out of retirement for a new movie. She has pins with things like “I (cat picture) cats” and "uh oh" and her rings depicted serpents or centipedes.

They were serving gelato and sorbetto in the cafeteria.
I had a mixed berry sorbetto.
Ther was a man with tattoos of swifts and a dagger and a skull covered in dozens of eyes.

A girl said "It's not contemporary art. It's a chair." Some things are both but the one they were seated in wasn't.

There were people from the Netherlands and his kid asked where’s Boston on the map and it’s way way way way over there. It’s around 5000 km by air from Boston to London and Google tells me that it’s around 5000 km from Cork, Ireland to Sölƶa-Ġala, Noxçiyçö (Chechnya). Map scales are all screwed up because there’s no one to one way to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface.
I also heard people speaking Greek and Somali.

There's an exhibit on places visited by Giacomo Casanova, Venice, where masks were worn in public from October to Lent in order to break down the traditional class structures and protocols and to give a sense of sexual freedom; Paris and London, which remind me of the book Arslan, in that vast empires were headed in places that were pretty much boils on the ass end of the Roman Empire; Dresden; Constantinople, which is Istanbul, not Constantinople now; St Petersburg, which was renamed Petrograd in World War I because it sounded too German and then Leningrad in 1924; Duchcov; and his amorous exploits, many of which would be downright illegal today, and his career as an alchemist and astrologer, which he used to scam people.
There was a painting depicting the opera Armide.
There is some 18th century porn, mostly involving S&M.
In theory, adultery would break down gender inequality but typically men could get away with doing things that women couldn't. Some things change, some things stay the same.
There's a portrait of a nun, and if you look on the back side, she's lifting up her habit to reveal her bare butt.

A woman had Gustav Klimt tattoos, and on her other arm, the moon.

There are fireflies outside.

burning question: how the fuck does Free Republic have operating costs of $90,000 per quarter? Even Stormfront doesn't cost that much.

I didn't find what I wanted at Commonwealth Books or Brattle Books but I did find In Green's Jungles, which somehow eluded me when it was in print. Probably because in the book world, you have 18 months before you have to get it secondhand. Unless we're talking Mobile Book Fair. Or those times Amazon defers people to a third-party seller after less than a year.
I'm pretty sure if I come back to Brattle in three weeks, they'll have an entirely different selection. Except for Heinlein. The only people who would be interested in Number of the Beast or Time Enough For Love or Friday or Sixth Column or Farnham's Freehold are completionists. Hmm, spell check recognizes Protoss but not completionist.
For reasons known only to themselves, Verts is now known as Noon. That's not where I ate: I got a taco from Anna's because I was buying books as well.
I met a woman with a St. Christopher pendant and a dagger constellation of freckles above her eye. I saw a woman with pale thistle hair and cherry blossom tattoos and a man with bathypelagic blue hair.

The new footbridge was almost complete. It looked like it just needed to be paved and something needed to be done about a part where you'd have to limbo or crawl under the old footbridge.

Gabriella was dressed in midnight blue and afternoon blue and moonsilver instead of black and white.

Pomp and Circumstance (the name is a reference to Othello) is five marches. The first one is the most famous, played for Elgar's commencement and then used for pretty much every graduation in the USA ever. If you're in the Philippines or Latin America, you'll hear Gloria al'Egitto ad Iside/La marcia trionfale instead.

Festive Alleluiah by Lyn Williams is an a cappella work that to me evokes Poulenc’s Mass, and repeats the words “Alleluiah”. The Paulina Voices performed at the premiere of The Planets and they performed here. Holst was director of music at the St. Paul's Girls' School.

In the tradition of Arthur Fieldler, two bonus works were played: Summer Skies by Leroy Anderson and a choral work about some kind of bird flying south for the winter. I want to say it was crows but I’m sure anyone could tell you that crows are not migratory. Unless you’re really far north. So far north, in fact, that you’re in Canada.
I wrote it down. I just lost the paper. A few weeks ago, I found a note I meant to give to Ashley, which means it was a very long time ago, and used it as a bookmark in The Heart Of What Was Lost. Or I could just look up Andy Beck's choral music.

Clair de lune was written for piano and arranged for orchestra by Debussy's friend. According to the booklet, Claude Debussy died in 1915. No, he died on March the 25 of 1918, as Paris was being bombarded by the German Army, although it was colon cancer that killed him. It was raining.

Pegasus Promenade is their act of defiance against Trumpism. It's not as overt as the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company putting on Richard III and the Actors' Shakespeare Project putting on Julius Caesar, or the Boston Lyric Opera's performance of The Rape of Lucretia or The Handmaid's Tale. When they got the season's repertoire up, it was titled Constellations.
Pegasus is appropriate because Bellerophon is the first extrasolar planet discovered orbiting a main sequence star. There are planets out there that make Venus look like a day at the beach. Promenade is appropriate because it was inspired by Pictures at an Exhibition.
Aphrodite, represented by the sign Exodus: balance, romance, creativity. Jennifer says she wanted us to feel like we were walking on stars very happily. She sings and the girls’ choir provides wordless vocals.
Proteus, represented by the sign Zalera: Two distinct personalities, one half is quick-witted, fun, and expressive, and the other has a tendency to become serious, thoughtful, and restless. Represented by two instruments with different frequencies, says Rehanna. Rehanna speaks about duality and indecision and wood and brass meander around her voice.
Soteria, represented by the sign Zeromus: Comfort and warmth associated with the zodiac sign.
Hermes, represented by the sign Ultima: Repetitive piano and two cohesive rhythms and lyrics about the pressure to be perfect. It ends with the introduction of a Ghanian drumming ensemble beating on two types of cowbell and shaking a gourd covered in cowrieshells, and then four of them banged on drums. I think the tall one is a fontomfrom.

The first four movements mirror a symphony. Mars is inhuman and mechanical, as was war in 1916. Bernstein likens it to machine guns and tanks. There is a cavalry charge, with only the illusion of triumph. Venus is slow and gentle. It’s funny because Mars could be made habitable while Venus is so inhospitable we can’t study it in any detail because everything we send there melts. Mercury is at times multi-key and polyrhythmic. Jupiter is triumphant. Some people end it with Jupiter but life isn't supposed to have happy endings.
Saturn, long and slow and plodding and stark and yet strangely beautiful, is the opposite of Mercury, Uranus is wild and theatrical and evokes a bearded wizard with stars and moons embroidered on his robe, the opposite of Venus, and Neptune, ambient and disembodied, drifting off into the outer darkness beyond the heliopause as the door slowly closes over the chorus, is the opposite of Mars. Mars and Neptune are both in 5/4 time.
Parts of the Imperial March evoke Mars (or Mary Poppins. Or Mahler’s 6th symphony) and I believe something like it plays when the Death Star, spoiler alert for a 40 year old movie, blows up.
It includes tenor tuba, bass oboe, alto flute, and organ.

Holst was alive when Pluto was discovered and for reasons of his own, never wrote anything for Pluto. There are things called Pluto, The Redeemer; Pluto, Lord of the Underworld; Earth, the Bringer of Life; et cetera, out there. Plus Neptune ends it so perfectly. Maybe if you wrote it between 1979 and 1999, it would make sense.

The only zodiac themed works I could think of Makrokosmos. And these compilations. The artwork for the Belias album is a pastoral scene sheep standing in a field amongst a holly tree, and in the distance are majestic mountains and a village and its fields on fire. Belias includes Mars, Feste Romane, The Alien God and Dance of the Evil Spirits, The Infernal Dance of King Kashchei, Night On Bald Mountain, In The Hall of the Mountain King, Ride of the Valkyries, Allegro Moderato from Borodin's second symphony, Finlandia, and March of the Mogul Emperors, which is pretty perfect considering it was compiled by someone who had probably not played Final Fantasy XII. Chaos is pastoral and could use a hymn and fuguing tune by Cowell. Zalera, I think, should be nothing but requiems, perhaps a requiem made from various requiem fragments, Zeromus has the dual themes of the moon and summer. Hashmal is really fricking cool and has Dance of the Tumblers, one of the Pomp and Circumstance marches, and Cortege de Bacchus. Ultima apparently goes for stately charm and elegance and Schubert, whose sign was Famfrit. I'm not entirely sure what the theme of Cuchulainn is. Shemhazai is triumphant. I don't know what's going on with Adrammelech and Famfrit. Famfrit doesn't have a water theme. I know Famfrit is technically an air sign but in an even more technical way, Famfrit is the water sign, so, I don't know, La Mer or The Moldau or Vltava or The Blue Danube or Water Music. Mateus is equally themeless. Maybe I could make sense of them if I had access to the liner notes.
You could put together the Planets suite with these albums. Belias, Exodus, Ultima, Shemhazai, Adrammelech, Famfrit, Mateus.

burning question: what’s your favorite Planet? From the Holst suite, I mean.

Fox And Friends is putting on a summer concert series and one of their bands is Three Doors Down.

Muse, of all things, is the most successful rock band nowadays. I’ve heard that Black Holes and Revelations is the high point of their career, if overblown and self-important. I only heard the space western video song so I don’t know. I’m not too sure what the fan consensus is on Absolution but one time, I picked a song from Absolution and found it unlistenable because of bad production and I once tried to listen to it but found myself disappointed coming off the heels of Kirlian Selections. And after that, Matt’s been introducing dubstep and his (apparently) sincere beliefs that the queen is a lizard person from deep time and we’re genetically engineered slaves for aliens.
Michael doesn’t think there are people that actually listen to Nickelback and they just exist as an example of what bad music is. I think I knew the one person in the explored universe who actually liked Crazy Town.


Michael’s idea for a Last Jedi remake has Rey being Jar-Jar’s child because he used his sith powers to just lay an egg and fertilize it via parthenogenesis. The first order was founded by Wookiees from the future and Snoke is Lumpy, Chewbacca's son. Han Solo is Anakin’s father because of a time loop, but maybe that should wait until Episode IX, I think. Jar-Jar emerges with his Sith forces and takes over the First Order and that's the end of the movie.

Katrina thought “fuckit” and decided that we should try that nametag thing again. So now I can place names to faces. Carly is the one who was born on July 6. She saw a bald eagle a few days ago and today she was eating a leftovers sandwich. Abby looks like Christina but lacks a British accent. Amelia has black and green hair. Grace is new. Christina has no idea what whiffleball is nor does she know how to play kickball in grass that comes up to her thighs. Someone suggested playing it in the flight cage. I suggested the roof. Jacob suggested playing with water balloons.
Someone took the hose nozzle and Jen imagines someone brandishing it threateningly.

We got a groundhog with neurological issues which might mean rabies, a goldfinch, a modo. We're releasing some more opossums. The foxes are gone and the teepee in their enclosure served its purpose well. The outdoor raccoons had some slices of watermelon and papaya on a string.
Leopold might actually be Leah. It doesn't matter that Leah and Leopold are about as etymologically related as Mary and Miranda.

The phoebe is learning how to fly and doing quite well at it. Someone brought us a single wood duck and Caitlin took it with her when she left and met some guy and she was like “psst, hey, wanna duck?” Hopefully she had a black fedora and a trenchcoat in her car.

I think HunëPop needs to be a thing. A dating sim/puzzle game where all the women you date are giant shaggy carnivorous apes. Or men.

burning question: Is someone who listens to pretty much exclusively music from the late 60s to the early 1970s saying he’s never heard of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Ives, Terry Riley, or Edgard Varèse? Should I be surprised by this? Also, would this make Rod Dreher the Dennis Miller of right-wing nutbag bloggers?
Okay, I can understand why he's never heard of Charles Ives.

I ran into Mary at Davis station but she had to work that day.

There were two Emilys at one table and one Emily and one Kim and one guy I didn't get the name of at another. The Welcome Project was making a quilt about various immigration stories. I attempted one and squirted some marker over my hand. On the bright side, I might be able to pass off as a long lost Trump son and swindle them out of their fortune.
I met a husky or something named Isis, you know, like from the Shazam!/Isis Hour tv show. I met a big white fluffy dog who barks when he's happy.
There was a man with a Mondrian tattoo and a woman with blue hair who was dressed like R2-D2, a woman with half raspberry and half orange hair and a woman with a Boo from Super Mario t-shirt and a woman with a seahorse tattoo and a woman with red skull apple tattoos, and a man with a green and violet mohawk. A woman had a strawberry bicycle helmet, a cat t-shirt, and had a pin of Rick and of Pickle Rick and of standing with Planned Parenthood and she held a stop fascism sign. A woman had dog tattoos including a dog wearing a monocle. She sold dog collars and leashes and stuff.
Someone carved raw potatoes and you could use them as stamps.
A woman had an octopus necklace and a rainbow ice cream cone hairclip.
I saw the woman with the tree-waves-lotus-rising sun tattoo but I didn’t get a chance to say anything.
Kim didn’t recognize herself because she was only dimly aware that she was wearing stripes.

The theme this year was Flip so there were acrobats and some artists made these flip books in which you could turn a crank and a dagron would fly through the air or some abstract colors would swirl around. One year, the theme was Robots or Future or something.
The dog tag had an ice cream cone or perhaps a castle sitting atop a swirling cloud. The poster had a puppy licking the ice cream but the dog tag didn't.

Stacking Stones
A folk-rock group. I don't have a lot to say about them but they were good. The last song they played was a traditional gospel song that was pretty obviously a metaphor for slaves escaping to freedom.

Le Prestige
It's what happens when someone tries to create instrumental music inspired by the backing tracks in 90s hip hop and electronica, performed on trumpet, tenor saxophone, drums, upright bass, and alto saxophone.

Matthew Stubbs and the Antiguas
They mash up psychedelic garage rock with the blues and Afrobeat and 60s spy film soundtracks. Julie Rhodes joined them onstage. The booklet didn’t explain who she was but she’s an up-and-coming blues-americana singer and she played at the River Arts Festival as well.

Gogofski
A Balkans trio and sometimes quartet. They sang in Macedonian, Romani, Turkish, and Bosnian. They played at Artbeat:Loops too. They play accordion, clarinet, vocals and tambourine, and tǎpan drums and a few other types of drum.

Nearby,
Long
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lesc
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was on a glass window now covering an payphone cradle and the exoskeleton of a payphone. It was titled "the future of telecommunications was here" Allison, over 5 years, kept tabs on the new stickers and graffiti. Allison called it an exoskeleton too. Dreamers think alike, I guess.
Elsewhere, Gary Duehr mummified a phone in a plaster cast.
There was a fish sculpture and a decorated Barbie in the Inside Out Gallery, which I can't find pictures of anywhere. The world moves faster than Google does.

I had a falafel pita from Amsterdam Falafel.

The Royer Family Band
A bluegrass folk group with Hazel on upright bass and her father Eric on banjo and guitar and Sean, a friend, on guitars. They covered a Neil Young song.

Saboyouma
A seven piece band led by a balafonist from Guinea with a lot of percussion.

Sinnet
An indie rock band. Again, I don't have a lot to say about them. One of the members plays in Soft Pyramids, who played at Loops.

Forró Zabumbeca
Northeast Brazilian folk music, some of which was slow and bouncy, some of which reminded me of Irish music, on an accordion known as the crazy man's instrument because of the fact that each button makes two different notes depending on which way the bellows are moving and a fiddle called a rabeca, a zabumba drum, a triangle, maracas, and woodblock. The vocalist says Brazil has the best ice cream because of all the tropical fruits there and his favorite kind is flavored with the coco babaçu, or drooling coconut.

Boston Cream
Someone called them party punk or disco punk. They’re from Boston, Massachuetts, not Cream, Massachusetts. That isn’t even a real place. One of the members made that joke.

Megan was wearing a pendant with St. Christopher on it and says that he’s the patron saint of travelers and wayfarers and she’s been doing a lot of that. She visited Scotland recently. Her friend is Anna. It was their first time hearing Boston Cream. They said they didn't need salsa lessons.

Mel, singer of Boston Cream, had a crescent moon pendant, a whistle that she used in her music, and a pendant of St. Christopher that she found in the trash. Once I found a ceramic Darth Maul face in a drawer while were cleaning up the art room on the last day of classes. At least, I think it was supposed to be Darth Maul. Sully thought it was the Moon or a cookie. I don’t know what Amanda’s intent was. I still have it. I have no idea what happened to Blocko Man, A Man of Greatness, who was crying and saying “meh!”; Tomato-Head Man. I know someone ended up with Hitler with a constipated-with-rage expression but I have no idea what they did with it.
At one point, Mel was flipped over. She said that if you dance, you won’t look as stupid as she did and most of you are right side up. They were way too animated to sketch properly.

Them Frisky Critters were playing New Orleans style jazz on accordion and banjo and other things. I think they just travel wherever their music takes them.

Sarah’s favorite book is whatever book she just finished.

HONK! held a parade. Sophie took part, playing the melodica. It was led by a woman in a purple feather boa and white gloves playing the rubber chicken.

Jesus Pagan y su Orquestra
Before they played, someone gave us the basics on salsa dancing in half an hour or less. I think that’s why it ended at 9:40. That and the next two bands don’t take a long time to set up.

Serena, Megan, and two others I never got the names of played with a tennis ball and were offering local rocks and had a bunch of rocks and stick fragments lined up all professionally now that all the actual booth people were gone. Trades were accepted. Unfortunately for their rock business, someone came to collect all the tables and put them away. Megan has gauge earrings and a piercing at the bridge of her nose.

Britta has mesopelagic blue hair and floral clothing and wore one of the dog tags around her wrist.

Hayley Thompson-King learned opera vocals at the New England Conservatory and moved away from that and into psychedelic Americana. She sang about Lot’s wife, who was never named in the Bible, about how she was turned into a pillar of salt because she turned back to look at Sodom burning and she interprets that as her heart beats really slowly within, and God was letting her watch the city for all eternity, like a l’Cie, and Lot was kind of a dick anyway, who would have children with his own daughters. She likes playing in Massachusetts because in some places, they’d crucify her for blasphemy. She played a new song for us and is going into the studio to record it very soon. The first song she played was lieder by Robert Schumann and she played a song inspired by one of Albrecht Dürer's etchings. She had just finished a tour of Europe.

A man had two pugs, black and fawn. Both of them were exceptionally skinny by pug standards.

There were four black and white puppies in front of Davis Square. The placeholder names they had include Moose, Orion, and Lucy.
Miranda from the wildlife center and her friend Olivia, how appropriate, arrived when the last group started playing. Miranda has a picture of a raccoon on her phone and people always think it’s a cat. She says she's going to visit the wildlife center soon.

I thought I saw Ashley but I’m pretty sure that Ashley would rather spend a day with me than get a tattoo or get earrings.

The Perceptionists: Mr. Lif & Akrobatik.
I find that rap is very focused on lyrics while I tend to get lost in songs. They're regarded as Boston's best rappers but I don't really know enough about the genre. At times, they got very political.

Last year I had Fungal Fruit, which is passionfruit and lime. This year, I got Alien Snot, which is kiwi and blue raspberry.

burning question: What do you make of Judas Iscariot?

At the Museum of Fine Arts is an Endless Feast, sculptures of the food various kids ate the night before. Most people ate fairly mundane things. Ayisat, which is a Nigerian (I think Yoruba) name, ate spicy pepper soup. I like Aliyah’s enthusiasm. Aliya ate spaghetti. It was good. One of them had a burrito cake. Maybe Letaura or Sedelia, which are just names that caught my eye. Leah had a taco and gatorade. Not that Leah. I saw the name Zaniah and thought “isn’t that a star?” and I was right: Zaniah is derived from the Arabic “زاوية“ which means corner. It’s in Virgo.
I had a shawarma for dinner.

A woman there had hair of amplified grapefruit and tangerine.

Rachel says she’s never met anyone who spells her name Rachael with an extra a.
She thought Blade Runner was about ice skating so obviously she’s never seen that.
She was wearing a bull’s head pendant, possibly symbolizing the zodiac sign Chaos but if it did, she didn’t say so, that she just got. I thought there was Chinese writing on it but it turned out to be just a design. Once she was wearing a glass pendant with a flower inside or something like that and someone wanted to take a picture of it so she could draw it. She had black fingernails and a design in henna on her hand.
Alexa was wearing a pendant of violet and blue glass and hoop earrings.

There’s some sketchbook pages and journal fragments that Bharti Kher made while living at the Gardner Museum.
If you bleed in deep water, your blood will look green.





The neapolitan ice cream colors are the artwork, not a placeholder. It’s in memoriam of Freddie Gray and the colors are the average hue of a photo of him.
And I'm not the only person who thought of neapolitan ice cream.

Gardner owned a lock of Ferenc Liszt's hair, a cigarette butt Johannes Brahms was done with, a glass filled with sand from Egypt, a pair of bazubands owned by the wife of Bahadur Shah Zafar II, and a canopic jar but not the preserved organ.


Josh Knowles was back, this time with an acoustic violin, playing some duets with Ruby Rose Fox on keyboard and vocals. He has a new album now and he plays violin on Ruby Rose Fox’s new album. Ruby Rose Fox’s voice is far deeper than I’d ever expect it to be. Since her name is Fox, I had to show her the baby foxes we had at the wildlife center a few years back.
I have a drawing of the two, done in pencil because pens are verboten, and it’s the only drawing I did inside the museum because my graphite (a long long time ago, it was thought that graphite was a form of lead and not carbon) ran out. In the drawing, Josh is finger plucking his violin but mostly he played it with a bow. One of her songs reminded me of Goli. Ruby Rose’s friend is a a drummer and she has neon carrot hair and a tattoo of a venus sigil of roses with a fist inside of it, and a portrait of a woman surrounded by flowers.
I also drew a fern tree for the scavenger hunt. I can't imagine what kind of people would not draw the fern tree. As for paintings and other objects from the museum I'd take with me, I picked a sort of covered chair for shelter, an angel candlestick that I could possibly magick into an angel to fly me off the island or if it doesn't work, I could at least have something to bash a run of the mill wild boar or a monster, and a mandolin, because if I can't magick up some angels or hippogriffs, I'd have nothing better to do than learn to play the mandolin and also to repair mandolin strings.

There were bunnies in the Monk’s Garden, where you could look for giant gems and win some fake plastic crystals and a gem pouch. A woman saw a kitten the size of her palm. I'm pretty sure she did use the term kitten.

The scavenger hunt was the same thing as last year’s. They had some other things you could do, like look through a cut-out circle and sketch the first surprising object or view, sit back to friend with your friend and have them choose an object in the museum and describe it to you and sketch it based on that description, make a dot whenever you stop to look at an object and then connect those dots, sketch a shadow and have your friend shape the shadow into a creature of some sorts, and sketch an object in the courtyard from each floor.

When I was about to leave, a family from Ireland began the scavenger hunt. I'm not sure what they were hunting for but they talked about how in Ireland, it isn't raining all the time like it normally does and now there's a drought and how in Massachusetts, a lot of people are of Irish descent.
My theory is that Donald Trump is attempting to summon Ineluki, the Storm King.

I thought Sara was Anne. Also, I really don’t understand how Sarah isn’t above Ashley on top 10 names of the 1990s or 1980s or any specific year in the 1990s list.

A woman had a tattoo of a sword and The Terminator and Wolverine and pendulums around her year.


A woman on the train had a tattoo of a tree with a lotus flower and waves and a sun above it and sun-spoked hoop earrings. There really wasn't much going on on my train journeys so I spent them reading The Gospel of Corax. I finished The Heart of What Was Lost yesterday.
It's probably not much of a spoiler but click at your own risk anyway.
[Spoiler for The Heart of What Was Lost]I wonder if Sulen will turn out to be important. His name is strange by Hikeda'ya standards. But then again, in the original trilogy, we only encountered four named Hikeda'ya: Utuk'ku, Ekimeniso Blackstaff AKA Ekimeniso of the Brooding Eye, Akhenabi, and Drukhi.
I described Hikeda'ya society as "the Spartans discover Japanese fascism" but they're way more feminist than Japanese Fascists, who make Isfahan look like Nakkiga.

burning question: How is clean water not a human right? I'd say something about disincorporating Michigan and distributing it amongst its neighbors, but its neighbors are Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, so that wouldn't really help the people of Flint.