Virtual stage fright

I recently submitted a short story to an anthology. Like, really recently. Probably be a while before I find out if it's accepted. 

The process was a little different than usual. The submission was in the form of a Google Doc, made shareable with the editor. Which I could figure out how to do easy enough, but I quickly found that I couldn't actually write in Google Docs. It just felt too public and exposed for me to be creative. I wound up doing 3-4 drafts in Word and finally copying and pasting into Google.

Something bright

Lucky break yesterday. From my apartment I could see a Northern Cardinal perching on an overhead power line. Switched from one to the other, presumably trying to get a better view.

This bird was such a bright red that it had to have been a male. That said, Northern Cardinals are unusual in a way. Females tend to be redder than in other cardinal species. Certainly more than in the Vermilion Cardinal.

This bird must have been around all winter, since they're not really known to migrate, but I hadn't seen him.

Howlers

This isn't the most recent Ecosophia entry anymore, but it's worth reading and rereading. I do like learning that the wolves that have moved onto the land once occupied by the Chernobyl reactor are living and doing their thing without showing the cancerous effects of the radiation that so many expected. You never know with life.

As for Yuval Noah Harari, sheesh, I dunno. His much quoted provocation about how human rights are a fiction isn't as bad as it sounds when looked at in context, but I don't think it stands for anything good either. At the end of the day he seems to be in the business of assuring the managerial class that they can and should control their fellow humans. As someone who would prefer to evade control I'm not really down with that.

UnRed

I find perception to be a highly interesting topic. When I first started attending college I intended to major in psychology. I changed my mind, but I did love the class in perceptual psychology. And colorblindness is a reminder of why.

Note the two color wheels at this link. On the protanopia wheel blue and yellow aren't much affected. Red is greyed out. Orange becomes yellow and purple, blue. But what's strange is what happens to green. Its essence is leeched out, so that it's barely identifiable as greenish.

Now if you see the two versions of one photograph above―the one depicting a redhead kid in a field―you'll notice that the grass is green in both. So apparently people with protanopia aren't entirely incapable of perceiving green. But it seems a complementary opposite does make something more noticeable.

Any old port in a storm

Fact 1: We get a lot of crows in this area. Certain streets and stretches of parkland, especially. And being a big fan of crows, I like to see them fly and congregate, and listen to them caw.

Fact 2: We had a heavy rainstorm today, pretty much all day.

Put together, these two facts made me wonder where crows go during a big storm. And according to this, what they do is take cover within conifer trees and shrubs. Sounds like it makes sense for them, anyway. And it's good to know they can keep relatively dry.

As for the picture of a marabou stork in a bathroom, it's a neat bonus.

Phil speaks

The story of Groundhog Day is colorful and interesting, and not just because part of it takes place at Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania, hands down the filthiest-sounding place name in America. It's a little bit of Americana that coincides with some older European traditions. The truth is, though, that the question of whether Punxsutawney Phil is right or wrong in his predictions is rather subjective.

As I write this, we're weeks past Groundhog Day. And in fact we just passed the Vernal Equinox. It hasn't been a particularly chilly March. But the temperature today barely got over the freezing point, and it's a few degrees below it outside now.

It actually doesn't mean much for a rodent or anyone else to predict a long or short winter, because everyone won't agree on when winter ended even after it happened, due to it happening in fits and starts. That's not to say the tradition's not fun, though.

Gentleman's agreement?

Pinterest is sort of a microcosm of how the web has gone downhill. The original idea of it had a definite appeal: the opportunity to "pin" images from around the internet to a public or private board so that you'd have them for future reference. Obviously it didn't meant that you owned them, just that you liked and approved of them.

Over the years, though, they've just degraded the whole experience. Features have been disabled, and it's not a tradeoff where you lose one thing and get another. You just lose options one by one. Also their content and censorship policies have tightened to the point of just nuking entire boards out of existence.

Not a great humanitarian disaster, but it makes you wonder. Another company could probably have huge success just by offering what Pinterest did, say, twelve years ago. Nobody's going there, though.

It's the little things

It's funny how things just come back to you sometimes. When I was a little kid I had a book, or someone had it, and I could look at it. Ownership isn't really my point here. But the book was this poem, The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast. Even as someone who gets a little antsy ha-ha when a lot of insects are around I'd have to admit the illustrations were gorgeous. 

Now if you'd asked me when this had been written, I'd have said probably the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Couldn't be from before Victoria's time, right? But as it turns out that it was first published in 1802, when George III was still King. Also that the poet, William Roscoe, was an influential abolitionist, which is pretty cool.

Discordant message

While I'm sometimes tempted to use ad blockers on sites like YouTube, I generally accept ads as the cost of doing business. So a lot of times I let them play through, hitting "skip" when they turn out to be long or really annoying.

There's a weird one I've seen lately. It's for Stop & Shop. A voice over says "Uh-oh (couple names I can't remember) are shopping hungry again!" And the man and woman go nuts throwing things into their cart.

The weird part is that it looks like they're supposed to be high with the munchies. Like, I'm pretty sure that's the intended effect. But it doesn't quite come off because they're so skinny and cadaverous that it genuinely looks like they haven't had solid food in weeks. The ad creators landed on something more disturbing. Maybe someone was feeling prankish.

A return

A while ago RIPTA changed their bus pass system. Instead of getting a new pass made out of thin cardboard every month, you can get a plastic card that you keep permanently, reloading it with money every month.

In practice, the plastic is so cheap that it will eventually break. Once that happens the card can't be read by the sensors, so you have to get a new one. Which happened to me this week.

I found out that the store where I'd gotten these bus cards before didn't have any on-hand. What I was happy to learn is that RIPTA again has a customer service office in their downtown depot, and that the nice lady I used to buy bus passes from is back. So I bought a new card from her and transferred the funds from the old card.

Nice to see her. Also good to know that some more sanity is returning post-COVID.

狐仙

I was talking to a gentleman today―second time I saw him this particular day―about Chinese mythology. He did more of the talking, because while I've read a little about it, I couldn't bring much to mind. So I decided to give myself a little refresher.

The figure of Huxian is quite interesting. A trickster figure who can make you wealthy but will also steer you onto the wrong path. The idea of foxes being untrustworthy apparently crosses over between wildly divergent cultures. There's a practical reason for this among farming communities, of course. But it also feeds a human need for deceit, I think. In this case projected onto other creatures.

Wind you can hear

The Russian artist Marianna Vladimirovna Veryovkina had a fascination with Germany, a country which gave the world German Expressionism during her lifetime. She in fact Germanized her name to Marianne von Werefkin, which is the name she's been known by since then. As a member of the Russian nobility she pretty much had to indulge her curiosity about foreign lands, as the Russian Revolution made her homeland a dangerous prospect.

The title of the above painting has been translated as "Storm Winds." The winds are palpable, causing trees to lay almost on their side. This is nature at its most forbidding. It does exude a kind of fascination, though, in the sliver moon. Still, you can't blame the small human figures for gravitating to the light and warmth of the tavern or cafe.

Primary primer

I got a mailer recently from the Board of Canvassers. A reminder that we in Rhode Island have a Presidential primary on April 2, and where to vote. I appreciate this. Still, what to do?

Obviously Joe Biden is going to win the primary. He'll get the nomination, unless the Democrats convince him to step aside. And in truth, nobody in the party with a snowflake's chance of replacing him is that much better. In the general, Trump may be a better, but there's still going to be a historic lack of good options.

I'll probably vote for a hopeless dark horse candidate. Someone who I can at least support and look at myself in the mirror.

Do I hear another bid?

Am now reading Sotheby's: Bidding for Class, by Robert Lacey. It's about Sotheby's, as you might have guessed. Lacey's first chapter is an extended vignette on the auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's estate soon after she died, and provides some justification for the adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

After that Lacey backtracks to deep background, the auction house's founding in London during the eighteenth century and the history that followed. They've always been in competition with Christies, but both sides have had to remain dignified in public. During the early years Christies specialized in art and Sotheby's in books, but it was inevitable that the two would start to step on each other's toes.

Another interesting detail is that Peter Cecil Wilson, one of their top auctioneers of the twentieth century, served in British Intelligence with none other than Ian Fleming. He often claimed to be the basis for James Bond. Weird if true, but who knows?

Losing face

Of course I still see them, although thankfully not as many as there were before. The masked, that is. But when I see them it's in some bizarre contexts. A guy on bicycle or a woman walking onto the porch of her house, neither of them within six feet of anyone, for whatever that meant in the first place.

The thing is there was never any logic to it in the first place. COVID wasn't sold to people the way you convince grown-ups to do things. It was always just fear and guilt, limbic system abuse. So a few souls are just married to it now. After all, when do you stop? The very question makes you a bad person.

Riches of embarrassment

A giant pumpkinhead monster gazes into a bomb shelter filled with teenagers. It wades in. Seconds late a wave of blood rises. It looks like you didn't secure the lid on the blender while making your cranberry smoothie.

This is Dark Harvest, which I remember being a pretty good book by Norman Partridge. The movie is filled with baffling dialogue, incompetent fights, and yes, moronic CGI gore. Best things to say about it are that it's relatively brief and good for unintentional laughs, except for those unfortunate times when it's trying to be funny.

I only just caught up on the news that the Coen Brothers are not only getting the band back together but working on a horror movie. Good news, because after tonight I'm convinced that the genre could use whatever they have to bring to it.