DC Animal News Examiner

I'm now the Animal News Examiner for the Washington, DC section of Examiner.com!

I'll be writing about everything animal in DC. Check out my page here, and tell all your friends. Tell your loved ones. Tell your pets.

Ring of fire

I'm in Hawaii right now, and it's been blowing my mind at every turn. Today's adventure: a hike around an active volcano, Kilauea. We came to the caldera's edge just after sunset and waited for the sky to get dark. As the light faded, the glow from the lake of lava inside the crater got brighter and brighter. Until it looked like this (click for monstrously large version) :

Then over to the Observatories at Mauna Kea, the world's largest astronomical observatory. The combined light-gathering power of the telescopes on the volcano summit is sixty times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Keck Telescope and twelve others are at the top, but we went up halfway to the visitor center, where volunteers with telescopes let us use them to gawk at distant astronomical objects. I saw the Ring Nebula, 2,300 light years away. There were more stars in the sky than I had ever seen. The Milky Way was a carpet of tiny lights. "Beautiful" doesn't quite capture it.

Mind = blown.

Updates

I've got a few things going on, mostly exciting!

First, I'm framing a number of paintings for the show at the Pure Wine Cafe in Ellicott City. This entails many hours in the basement every day, playing with power tools and painting things and otherwise fooling around and getting covered in schmutz. Pictures to come...

There have been many adventures with Wowbagger, including swimming holes, night hikes followed by swimming holes, and a beautiful 18th century graveyard we stumbled upon after a relaxing tubing session down a river and an epic barefoot trek through knee-deep mud (whilst trying to get back to the parking lot).

I have a job! I will be tutoring nervous high school kidlings in the dark arts of the SAT. Had to retake the bloody test in its entirety to get the job - needless to say, I am not as smart as I was in high school - but it seems to have been worth it. I start in September. I never thought my first job out of college would require business casual and respectable conduct, but so it goes.

Finally, I've found another venue that might be interested in my art. I've been slacking recently, but I'm gonna have to start churning out new ones again. This is exciting!

A rough draft of my latest:

She's going to be a maenad. With prehensile hair.

Life is good!

Submitted my abstract for the LSA conference in January... months of coding and banging of my head against walls and other stationary objects come to fruition! There will be more coding, of course. Our n (low, approaching silly) is still a problem, so there's lots more data crunching to do before January, but I don't have to worry about that for a while.

Meanwhile, I'm working on framing a number of my paintings for this art show coming up. This entails hanging out in the basement for hours on end whilst high on spray paint fumes and playing with power tools.

I saw Iron Maiden in concert! Dream Theater opened during a sunshower, which was lovely. Then, just as Maiden came onstage, the sky cleared and a rainbow appeared opposite a pretty sunset. Rainbows are so metal.

Fig. 1) Eddie!

Fig. 2)   |m|

Life is pretty sweet.

Planet Word

Stephen Fry is going to host a BBC series on language! It's called Planet Word, and I am geekgiddy about it. He's a beautifully erudite writer and speaker, and one of my very favorite people-I-don't-actually-know-personally. I can't wait to see what the show will be like.

Here's a teaser, from a blog essay he wrote a while back:

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

Do read the whole thing. It made me all shivery.

Finally, this dates back to his Bit of Fry and Laurie days:

Ego boost

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Apparently. Give it a shot!

Just because I like it

Danny Elfman, the mastermind behind the soundtrack of every Tim Burton movie you can name, rocks out with his band Oingo Boingo. The song is Insanity, and it is delectably creepy.




I'd love to take you home with me and tuck you into bed
I'd love to see what makes you tick inside your pretty head
I wish that I could keep you in a precious Chinese box
On Sundays I would pray for you so it would never stop
I'd love to hear you laugh tonight, I'd love to hear you weep
I'd love to listen to you while you're screaming in your sleep
I'd love to soothe you with my voice and take your hand in mine
I'd love to take you past the stars and out of reach of time
I'd love to see inside your mind, to tear it all apart
To cut you open with a knife and find your sacred heart
I'd love to take your satin dolls and tear them all to shreds
I'd love to mess your pretty hair, I'd love to see you dead.

Art show!

One of my paintings got accepted to an art show at Pure Wine Cafe! It's a swanky little wine bar in Ellicott City, outside Baltimore.

The piece is a 3-panel painting of bubbles rising up the wall. 

I'm wildly excited about this - I've never had my work exhibited anywhere before! It will hang in the wine bar for three months, starting in August. Not sure about pricing yet, but I think it will go - if it goes - for much more than I'd been thinking of asking for it. 

The theme of the show is "Breath". I just started another breath-themed painting... with luck, this one could make it into the show as well.

This is a WIP - I'll post the finished version later.

This is exciting!

Quite the weekend

The first part of this weekend was hikes and assorted adventures with Wowbagger: there was an 80's band, some trouble with the law, and a lovely beach. Atrocious sunburns aside (always reapply, kids), it was a great success. 

For Wowbagger

Today was something of a blow to the ego: sat at a farmer's market for 7 hours as people walked past my table of paintings. Almost none of them stopped. One or two came over and looked for a moment, and I even got some compliments, but I didn't sell a single painting. I think it was because I was just across from a table overflowing with pretty shiny beads. I can't compete with shiny things: people love shiny things.

It wasn't a total loss, though. I met a sweet, vague man called Angel. Angel chases storms and photographs clouds. He asked me what kind of weather I liked best. I told him I liked the unpredictable kind, when it's sunny one moment and pouring the next. He flipped through his photos and gave me a picture of just that: looming storm clouds against a blue sky. Then he explained very earnestly that the beams of sunlight coming through the clouds were actually angels coming down to Earth. I nodded. He smiled,  handed me a little figurine of a baby, and wished me luck.

Then I met Crazy Joe. Crazy Joe introduced himself with a dirty joke - the middle-aged ladies nearby giggled in horror - and took a picture of me with my paintings for posterity. He used to sell hand-blown bongs and pipes - "everything but the weed" - at this very farm market 20 years ago. He made quite a living for himself, but things went downhill after he discovered cocaine, and now he wanders around the place hitting on starving artists with pink hair.

It was actually significantly less creepy than it sounds now. The amusing crazy overwhelmed the alarming creepy, and talking to Crazy Joe was a lot more fun than reading patronizing GRE prep books or staring off into space.

Quite the weekend. Now it's time for more aloe and a nap.

Simon Singh vindicated

Science writer Simon Singh wrote an article two years ago in which he called out chiropractors on their fantastical claims and dangerous practices. Soon afterward, the British Chiropractic Association, in a fit of idiocy, brought a libel suit against him. Singh has lost two years of his career to the suit, but yesterday he won.

[EDIT: Oops, my bad. He won his appeal to classify his comments as "free comment" instead of statements of truth, which makes this easier, but he's not in the clear yet. There are still many legal hurdles he has to clear before this business is over.]

Writing that this coalition of quacks "happily promotes bogus treatments" (in one of Singh's books) to describe a "treatment" that has proven both ineffective and potentially lethal strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The BCA thought it was criminal. As soon as the internet heard about the suit, it exploded with indignation and scorn. From Wiki:

"A "furious backlash"^[2] to the ongoing lawsuit has resulted in the filing of formal complaints of false advertising against more than 500 individual chiropractors within one 24 hour period, one national chiropractic organization ordering its members to take down their websites,^[3] and Nature Medicine noting that the case has gathered wide support for Singh, as well as prompting calls for the reform of English libel laws.^[4]"

Sometimes, if you ignore 4chan, the internet gives me hope for humanity. 

The bullshit of chiropractors runs deep. From Singh's original article:

"This is Chiropractic Awareness Week. So let’s be aware. How about some awareness that may prevent harm and help you make truly informed choices? First, you might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that, “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body."

It's not just that it's wacky. People have died.

"...manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

[Some reports here.]

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck."

Happily, the Court of Appeal ruled in Singh's favor, trashing the BCA's suit in scathing terms. From yesterday's ruling :

"The opinion may be mistaken, but to allow the party which has been denounced on the basis of it to compel its author to prove in court what he has asserted by way of argument is to invite the court to become an Orwellian ministry of truth. Milton, recalling in the Areopagitica his visit to Italy in 1638-9, wrote:

"I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; …. that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought."

That is a pass to which we ought not to come again."

Love the Milton. Love that we're winning again.