Legs that wouldn't quit

...because they had to tell time. 

I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a nudist resort in Indiana, even though that Midwestern state isn't the first place I'd guess one would be. It was started by a German immigrant, which feels right for the Hoosier state. Eventually it passed into the stewardship of Dick Drost, an especially unfortunate name when you learn why he had to leave Indiana.

But it's the leg that really interests me. A giant female leg, crooked just so, casting shadows on the numbers of a sundial is a brilliant idea. It's not necessarily one that needs to be limited to clothing optional settings, either. Imagine if something like this was erected in any of the country's remaining town squares. Certainly seems like something that would make you sit up and take notice.

DP

When I was a kid, Dolly Parton jokes were―like a couple of other things―pretty big. But I learned early on that she was a great singer and songwriter first of all. Learned it with my own ears. Much respect.

There are those who still hold against her some things she said and did during the COVID year. Well, what can I say? Big propaganda campaigns can pull a lot of people in, and that one certainly did.

Andean stimulant

Had a good laugh today on this page of miscellany, and particularly on the explanatory note for the 23-Down clue:

The coca plant is native to South America, and is similar in appearance to a blackthorn bush. Coca leaves have been chewed by humans for centuries, perhaps even as far back as 3,000 years ago. Chewing the leaves apparently produces a pleasurable numb sensation in the mouth and a pleasant taste. The most famous alkaloid in the leaf is cocaine, but this wasn’t extracted in its pure form until the mid-1800s. The extracted cocaine was used in a medicines and tonics and other beverages, including the original version of Coca-Cola! Before 1903, a glass of Coke would contain about 9mg of cocaine. Coca-Cola still uses coca leaves, as the flavor is prized, but the cocaine is extracted before it arrives at the bottling plant.

Now I've always thought that the flavoring in your basic bottle or can of coke was strictly derived from sugar, kola nuts, and carbonation. But apparently they're still using coca leaves for flavoring as well. Ah, but "the cocaine is extracted before it arrives at the bottling plant."

Now all that cocaine they're extracting has to go somewhere, doesn't it? Of course those whose job it is to extract it just pour it all down the drain. Riiiiiiiiiight.

Meanwhile Coca-Cola is having afterparties that sometimes last until sunrise.

ἔντομον

Okay, this is the strategy I have for bugs. For summer and probably into early autumn, you gotta have one.

If it's in my apartment, I'll do my best to kill it. I have to live here. I've relocated some moths to the outside in the past, but there's not always time.

If it's already outside, I'll let it be. As an illustration, if there's an ant where my foot is about to come down, I'll do my best to miss it. The ecosystem does need them.

Obviously, those that try to sting or bite me are an exception. And I've grimly accepted that I have to put the kibosh on lanternflies whenever I see them and am able to get to them. Although I'm still hoping our birds acquire a taste for them.

Foxy

Sly Stone hit some lofty heights in the early days of his career. For a while it seemed he could do no wrong. It didn't really last beyond the early 70s. In 2011 he put out an album called I'm Back!, but it didn't really prove he was. That's true in a lot of cases. The downside of achievement is the struggle to equal it. But at least you've achieved.

As to the title of this song, it's still summer, not as hot. Bit better for sleeping.

Up & down

Let me describe a sliver of a dream I had recently, and the effect it had on me. 

There's a balcony or a deck. It's impossibly high up, A sci-fi skyscraper, like out of Metropolis. A cat is out there. It either climbs the guardrail or someone lifts it, that detail is unclear.

And there I shake myself awake. I don't have an irrational fear of heights. I have a very rational belief that you don't mess with heights past a certain point. And while cats are graceful, there are limits. 

Side 3

In short, this is an unprecedented moment in paleoanthropology. For the first time in the history of science, a form has been distinguished by its genes and nothing else. Can it therefore be considered a species?

From The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals by Silvana Condemi and François Savatier

As that very brief passage points out, Denisovans have been defined by their genes. Actual skeletal remains have been minimal. Genes can sometimes be a blueprint that wasn't actually followed in construction. Therefore, our understanding of Denisovans is very limited, and will be expanded―knock on wood―by further discoveries. Ideas will have to be revised.

Still, they were a very significant find, and a recent one. The finger bone fragment from which they were identified was only found in 2010. Yet the largest portion of the world's population is probably related to them, if distantly.

This is a good book. It has to take some rather arcane biological subjects and make then comprehensible to the lay reader. At the same time, it's respectful to the general public in a way that surprises me for a book published in 2025.

It also has beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations from Benoit Clarys, who seems to be very familiar with this kind of subject.

Am I missing something?

Science can be cool, when it's not dreary, as it frequently has been in recent years. And it's not a bad thing to try and perceive new things. But this "new color", olo? Man, I just don't know. It's a highly saturated blue-green, which seems to look nice. But apparently you can only really see it when a laser is shot into your retina. How often do you think you can make time for that?

It sounds like something that will be semi-remembered as a crazy fad in a few years. But making a new color name out of the middle three letters in "color" is kind of clever.

They are the eggmen

 

If you see a walrus's snout up close you see all these little bristles. Those are to feel along the ocean floor for food like clams and such. They're very good at surviving in the far North. This video was shot off the coast of Svalbard. They're also quite graceful in the water.

Anyway, just wanted you to see that. There was another walrus video I could have shown, but the background music was a little distracting.

Tempting tales

In our souls, we need to know that wild things are out there. "Wild things" is a pretty general term, and can cover all sorts of weirdness.

The legend of Haunchyville is florid and violent, like a half-remembered synopsis of Tod Browning's Freaks. A group of little people are employed by the circus. Their boss is an abusive prick. When they've had enough, they kill him by cutting off his arms and legs. Then they make their own settlement in Wisconsin's Waukesha County. An albino child visits the town and they take him in. He becomes their guardian, a deadly one if needs be.

Stories like this, even warnings like "Here be dragons", individualize the world. They make it possible to believe that more than one kind of place exists.

A writer on his second professional trip to the part of Wisconsin where all this was supposed to have happened found a disappointing sequel:

Returning to the site on a bright and clear early afternoon five years later, I find my old fears confirmed: what was once a tantalizingly wild and undeveloped area—perfect for a colony of vindictive little people!—is now an upscale and bland subdivision. Pre-fab houses dot the bulldozed landscape. Front lawns the size of golf courses stretch on for miles.

The word for this is "Empire". Power expands far from where it was before, and reshapes its new settings in the image of the one it just left.

But empire can't expand forever. Eventually the new logos fall off and the land is in new hands.

Big yellow

Here's something to see. It's a giant public sculpture in Rochester, New York, known as Threshold. The color is what they call safety yellow. Whether it's actually the color most easily registered by the brain, which the article asserts, I don't know. But it is a color that comes up a lot in children's media of all kinds.

On the other hand there are the shadows it casts. Shadows and light, the brightness of the mellow setting up a contrast. A very neat use of negative space, as this was all left-over material.

Wish-ship

I only ever saw the first two episodes of Stranger Things and it didn't really grab me. But reading in this column about the fans known as Bylers doesn't surprise me. 

My first exposure to the term "queerbaiting" came through Supernatural. Supernatural, which was on a smaller network for fifteen years, was a horror-adventure show where two all-American boys with frayed psyches and shotguns hunted demons and vampires all over America, almost entirely filmed in Vancouver, BC. Anyway, in the later seasons "Destiel" became a big thing. "Destiel" was the shipping name between Dean (Winchester)―one of the two brothers at the center of the show―and Castiel―an angel who helped them in their fight against evil of all kinds. A number of fans, some of whom had toyed with a brother-brother angle I won't go into right now, had convinced themselves that these two characters should be a couple. Of course Dean was pretty flagrantly heterosexual and in the context of the show getting romantically involved with an angel was always a bad idea. Anyway, the writers made the mistake of acknowledging the fan's desires but never fulfilled them. Resulting in much denunciation.

Fandom is a double-edged sword. These days almost nothing has what would have been considered a big audience in the 20th century. If some of the people who do watch get really involved and talk about your work on social media, that would seem to be a good thing. But in a number of cases they have expectations, and don't like being told no. Look at the world of fanfic. Now some people who write fan fiction may be good writers, or could develop into such. But as a rule it takes what is already a fantastic environment and pushes it further towards simple wish fulfillment. Sometimes this is sexual, which gets all the attention, and sometimes not. But a lot of this stuff is united by an attitude of "I want this to happen, so it will happen."

If, as deBoer says, this approach has been spreading to real world politics, that's not a good thing. Politics is a two-way street. You have to recognize that other people will want different outcomes from the ones you want. If you just expect to be indulged and you don't pay some respect to those who dissent from you, the long term results will be destructive whether or not you get what you want in the short term.

Just get on back to the twilight zone

Something I read a few years ago and am somewhat heartened to see is still online is a blogger's track-by-track review of The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, which I think on balance is the best Bonzo Dog Band album. She's pretty on-target that the Bonzos were satirizing the popular pretensions of the time, and found a striking and funny way to do so. Most of those pretensions lived on, but what can you do?

I'd add a couple of things. First, it's true that John Lennon adopted some counterproductive attitudes toward Art in the latter half of the Beatles' career. Luckily, something in him knew better than to completely follow through with them. His solo work contains wordplay and quirky musical touches, even if he thought or at least claimed to think that they shouldn't.

Also, the "We are normal and we want our freedom" line apparently comes from Marat/Sade. Love was actually the first band to make use of it, in their song "The Red Telephone".

Language just keeps getting weirder

Here's a sentence you wouldn't have heard fifty, or even twenty years ago. "I just ate an edible." Congratulations? It might be more worth mentioning if you had eaten an inedible.

This is of course a result of cannabis culture, which has expanded since many states started on the road to legalization but which doesn't interest me. As for what they call edibles, even if you can retain the flavor as you add the stuff that contains THC, I'm not sure I'd want to eat anything that could make me paranoid. Or drowsy, beyond the usual. But to each his own, I guess.

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕

Rahko is a creature in Finnish mythology. This Rahko being is connected with the moon, but exactly how is a question. 

In one version, he is a thief who was bothered by moonlight, which can perhaps be a nuisance if you are a thief. He decided to paint the moon black with tar. This results in the new moon, and also the face you may see when looking up at the moon. 

In another version, spirits known as kapeet eat the moon, and the Rahko forges a new one out of cow hooves and fat. 

So in the aggregate, the Rahko is responsible for either the moon being there or for it not being there. Or perhaps both. After all, the phases of the moon are cyclical.