from the archives at Caterina.net, fragment of the head of a queen

brilliant agoraphone and agoraphone in use

nice crow/raven site

Plumb Design's Visual Thesaurus has come along nicely

...on sunny days,
the threading light traveling with me...

Tina Kelley
Immaculate
Verse Daily 02/28/03

Q. Can barnacles choose their mates?

A. No, but it doesn't seem to matter. Each barnacle is both male and female. A barnacle's nearest neighbor is a candidate, and it doesn't even have to be that near. The barnacle has the longest male mating equipment, relative to body size, of any animal in existence.

Q. What's the animal most recently domesticated?

A. Experts expect the cat may someday merit that distinction.

Q. What's the oldest form of art?

A. Storytelling, evidently. Claim is there's never been a human society since the beginning of language that didn't tell stories.

Pretty clever, those leafcutter ants. They grow their own mushrooms.

Q. Isn't there a town called Boston in England?

A. Indeed. It rivaled London as a port six centuries ago. Name came from "Botolph's Town" in honor of a Saxon monk.

Mike Mailway(L.M.Boyd) column, entire, February 28, 2003

Mark Catesby at The National Agricultural Library

London, at night, from the International Space Station

libertarian extremes don't exist, right? everything's cool except what isn't. there's a picture, I think it's by someone named DeSouza, I saw it on an english gallery website a couple of years ago. it still haunts me. I have it somewhere maybe I'll find it and put it here. it just seemed really obviously taken from life, from reality, from a real place and time, and then painted.

at the beginning of my entry into all this I went almost everywhere. one place was one of those gross compendium sites that were so popular back at the century's turn. it had a link to this guy eating a baby. sure looked real to me. and interestingly enough the guy had that half-breed handsomeness I've seen in person. the demon celebrity profile, dark hair a certain cast to his features, no readily identifiable ethnicity but not northern european. some of these dolls have that 'taken from life' dimension, although because they're obviously dolls it would be hard to prove. same with the DeSouza image, unless he gives up his source for it. this whole site exists right at the cusp-edge of enforcable taboo. some of the images are too disturbing, some are magical and worth defending. some are obvious beards for deeper pathologies.

http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~okyou3/

A look at a mythical rock band's earnings, with actual figures compiled from industry sources

blues of musician's business helplessness at NYDailyNews February 19, 2003

"...and the lawn chairs..."

Leah Nielsen, Apology, A Love Poem, at Verse Daily 02/26/03

" These projects invoke a larger urban area than used in other projects. I try to consider the significance of the project site in terms of considerations such as the history of the area and the life of the people who live there."

Tadashi Kawamata at Annely Juda Fine Art, London (via idiotic redirect)

two ideas:
1. that time is actually a sideways movement. that what's really going on is another direction from that. like an axis on the graph. x instead of y.

2.that dimensions are a false abstraction. I was looking down at my pants this morning, sitting on the toilet, and what I later realized I was seeing was the linoleum through a gap between my belt and my pants, but until I understood that intellectually there was no depth or no accurate depth to what I was seeing. it changed when I "understood" it. my mind changed it. the height/width/depth axes are subjective. it's really circular or global, not rectilinear.

Doig has a great image, one of the greatest images I've ever encountered in a book. talking about his early childhood living with his parents in an up-country sheep camp, deep in the Rockies, far from school and town and other kids. it's only a sentence or two, but it stopped me for a long meditative pause. almost matter-of-factly he explains that because his book learning was parental and home-based, and because his parents were occupied and trusted him (the safety of the wilderness!) he could spend the whole day staring at a pool in the creek if he wanted. what he communicates is the naturalness of that, the rightness of it, but what it says is how far we've strayed, that that plain description of an uneventful moment should sound so close to paradise.

O'Nan's medicinal skills are perfectly rendered here. it's perfect because it works. that's healing. there's sickness, pathology, damage. it gets healed. he's a gifted story-teller, a voice that calms and inspires trust, then the magic starts spinning and suddenly you've read the whole book. what happened? something dark and sick was brought to the light and cured. there's something solid, fixed, a gravity of bearing that's carried by those of us who went to Viet Nam, that isn't carried by those of us who didn't go. it's not so much a division of kind as it is a division of labor, of responsibility, of presence and duty.

Doris Lessing's from somewhere else, not just Rhodesia either. Rhodesia on Aldebaran. there's prophecy in her work, not prediction but the voice of the divine channeled through the human tongue. when searching for the divine, people are mostly trained to look for the sparkle and gleam of the cinematic angel, when the real thing is scary, profound and intimidating. she's someone I've neglected over the years, I don't know why, but this book has made me regret that. it would sit well on a shelf next to John Berger's 'King: A Street Story'. it's testimony, testifying, like bright, clean water in this dark, dry time.

..."The worst blowjob a guy can ever get on a scale of one to ten is about an eight," my friend Larry once said. An ex-boyfriend of mine disagreed. "My friend K. told me about one time a girl used teeth," he said, shuddering. Although the main thing going through a guy's mind is, "I can't believe I'm getting some action, this is awesome" (the same applies for intercourse), anything involving teeth is a universal no-no. You might not be outright chomping down on his penis (sorry for that image, guys), but the mere indication -- in this case, a nip or slight raking motion with those pearly whites -- reminds the fellated that biting is a possibility, however remote....

Kate McDowell in the Cornell Sun Nov 14, 2002

{the current state of sexual morality is like the current state of anything. it doesn't exist as a 'thing', a single entity that can be talked about with a singular pronoun. it's a 'them'. there's people all hidden away from the sinful modern world wearing long dresses, the women anyway, and never talking about the big frightening reality of sexual reproduction. most of them are Christians. it doesn't help at all the way the Bible conveniently blanks out on Jesus and puberty. the exact years of any male's sexual peak are missing from the Christ tale. on the other side are people who think anything goes as long as no one gets 'hurt'. but they measure that hurt in minutes or days, or in the case of STD's, lives, but for the most part it doesn't have that long view that makes morality important to me. because short-term morality is just biology making excuses for itself. in between those two extremes are a Walmart's worth of human attitudes. the idea that sex is evil, or dirty, or just plain something we don't discuss, is inherited. and it's inherited in the heaviest way possible. the dark silence, and parental discomfort bordering on panic. so unhealthy attitudes get passed along. my erstwhile generation went the other way, and then got herpes. there's some who believe AIDS was introduced on purpose into groups that were seen as disposable. it's possible, but so's mutation. I lost my sense of proportion about randomness and conspiracy in 1963. not that I believe every wild-eyed screed that erupts from the net, but nothing's beyond the scope of evil, and evil is real. the powers of darkness that still run the world will stop at nothing, it's in the nature of evil to be like that. but HEALTHY attitudes about sex, and HEALTHY attitudes about SAFE sex, are the only weapons we have to combat the darkness we inherited, all of us, at the most vulnerable parts of our beings. and Ms. McDowell, for all her collegiate drollery, and club kid pretenses, offers a healthy attitude and some good advice about something that you would think Christians would celebrate as the human act of creating life. it seems suspicious to me that it has to be sanctioned by bureaucracy and the permission of old men, it seems suspiciously biological that whole permission thing, but masked as religion and morality. and the game of course is by stepping away from societal control you become the champion of licentiousness and disease. well no. that's kind of the whole point here. McDowell insists that safe sex is important, to people who are going to be having sex no matter what anyone says. and in that she does good service.}

serene emptiness of Simon Ladefoged

my question is: where's all the music these machines were making?

Kodak Girls

via nosenseofplace