The Morning After

Well, this is what I was afraid of. After the main demo on Sunday, when police and protesters got on so well, the cameras turned away and then:

Tuesday

"I'm in Union Square Park and it's 10:42 pm, and all of the sudden police start slamming people up against the barricades and getting everyone excited. Lots of rough handling and then more riot police came and encircled the park, and it's pretty much a standoff right now. People are coming and going, but there are people inside the ring of cops and outside the ring of cops and the subway entrance is all blocked off. So I'm not sure what's going on but that's what's happening."

According to my group's phone blog. Earlier today, a total of 20 of them had been arrested, no names released because they are doing jail solidarity, and no details like, were they doing civil disobedience or was it a police riot?

Nobody hurt so far in the Cluster.

However, I did get notice that another friend (not a Cluster associate) who happened to be in proximity of the dragon float that caught fire was tackled from behind by the police and is in jail with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. Other folks in the vicinity were also arrested regardless of their association with the float or not.

This is the sort of stuff I was afraid of. If people want to get arrested doing civil disobedience that is one thing, but it sounds like they are just getting squished and run down by riot cops??? And is there any media? Someone with a TV and cable will have to tell me.

The Big Apple

I have a bunch of friends and magical compatriots in NYC to protest at the RNC, and I have been keeping them in mind, praying that they may be in the right place at the right time with all the water and information they need to be effective.

It looks like similar prayers and tireless organizing has resulted in (as yet) a HUGE colorful PEACEFUL event, in spite of early media yowling about how protesters were trying to create mayhem in Gotham City.

Since I don't have TV, I go to check out Google and Yahoo this morning, to see coverage and some pics. Nada whole lotta. But check in with Post Peak who had the New York Times skinny.

And for a reality check, take a look at what a girl like me who lives there says.

Early estimates I had heard were lows of 100,000 and highs of 250,000. Good grief, that was a big demo! Then! Read the NYT article which had protest organizers and police agreeing on 500,000.

To me, New York City has always been one of those big scary cities like Mexico City or Los Angeles that somebody would have to drag me to. But here is what my good pal B did: he planned for a month and a half. He is member of no group and got himself allied with an affinity group. Took time off work that had to hurt a working class mortgage-paying budget. BUT he got his expenses covered by taking "pledges" from friends and coworkers, otherwise airfare would have seriously dented him. I gave him a $20 bill with a spell written on it, and I bet other people did too! Their group is using one of my magic oils, and they named themselves after the (now deceased) beloved pet involved in the production of said product.

I heard that the huge Spiral Dance that CNN broadcast showed him for a few seconds!

Protest Warriors are very proud that after all that heckling, they got one guy out of half a million to respond with violence. This guy, who was wearing a Che shirt, smashed the Protest Warrior's car windowshield with his bare fists. A highly respected, well-read rightwing blogger, SMASH headlined the incident: "Peaceful" Protest Ends in Violence. Goddam. Mission accomplished, Protest Warriors. The guy with the smashed windowshield looks positively gleeful.

So, all in all, except for the lack of coverage, a much better than hoped for result on the big demo on Sunday. But the RNC continues, and lots of the protesters, including my pal B and others from my groups in Austin, remain for the week's events. Me, well you know me, I am holding an intention that they are in the right place at the right time with enough water and information, protection etc, but ALSO that they get to take in some great live music and eat excellent food and meet many new friends and enjoy the unexpected cultural bonuses while they are in the Big Apple.

Fun Incoming!

Dear Friends,
I have a new favorite band that is going to blow you away. THEY are not new, but hey, I am still playing catchup in the Austin Music World. The Real Heroes are truly worth all our adoration. Best of 80's pop and postpunk, David Bowie-style sex appeal, and clean-burning danceable riffs. Dang, they DO attract some cute girls, too! They are very big in NYC, how long can we keep 'em in Austin?

Tonight they are at The Parish, which is one of the venues that I am willing to venture into 6th Street for. The sound will be excellent and smoke is not a problem 'cause of the high ceilings, and best of all, there is plenty of room. Room to dance, room for Hero Worship.

If you get downtown a little early, and you are willing to violate the one-covercharge-per-night rule, you can catch Tia Carerra at Beerland. How long will these hard rock jam geniuses keep putting out so much for free? It can't go on forever.

After two cover charges, I will REALLY be in for some FREE downhome backyard entertainment with the Typsy Gypsys on Sat. night. This is the next to last free bellydance show in the backyard of Natural Magic (701 E 53rd St. on the east end of the North Loop biz strip), so make it just in case October's show get sold out. Arrive at 8pm with lawnchairs, blankets, enjoy the free snacks, and bring a few bills for donation for the Franzia or beer, and to TYP your Gypsy! The last two shows featured firespinners from the best of a few troops, and the show was nearly stolen by a boy bellydancer who could jiggle right up there with the best of those hipshakin mamas.

I'll try to get to Nasty's later for the Stick Pony set You know Nasty's, the famous dive behind Mangia Pizza on the Drag? And Stick Pony always attracts the friendliest crowd.

Next of my fun browser is a three-ride surf show at Egos, with the Nematoads (new wave surf, these boys are new, but if we encourage them to turn in their math homework and cut loose, they're going to be great!) and the Queen of Spades, (now a tatsy main course in a surf show, all-girl band that does 60's style classics and originals) and those godfathers of surf, Three Balls of Fire. Last time we went to a Sunday Egos surf show they really did begin at 9pm, but the lineup was totally different than advertised.

Of course, if anyone is interested in hOOOping it up, the hula hoopers Meetup is Saturday Sept. 4th at Barton Springs. Send me a note, or go join at http://hulahooping.meetup.com/ for more info. I am looking for a ride down there with all my hoops...

Have a great weekend whatever you do!
Ivieee
Keep It Up, Fool!
~o}0<

If I Could I Would

If I really paid attention to the news and had time to write a fine political blog I would aspire to the quality of Jonathan's PastPeak. There is lots of daily updates on the election and he seems to be fairly strongly pro-Kerry (instead of merely anti-Bush like most of us Americans) but what I like is that he also tries to view politics in respect to the looming problems of the End of the Petroleum Age and Human Overpopulation.

Having studied population biology in college (I have a B.A. in Biology) I understand the concepts of exponential growth, (which is what humans and the economy are attempting to do) but Jonathan outdoes any college level textbook explanation with his Story of the Petri Dish:

"Suppose you put a small amount of bacteria in a Petri dish. Suppose further that the bacteria population grows exponentially (i.e., by doubling) at a pace that causes it to double each hour. Suppose finally that it takes 100 hours for the bacteria to completely fill the dish, thereby exhausting their supply of nutrients. (It's a large Petri dish.)

Question: When is the dish half full?

After 50 hours (half of 100)?

No. Because the population doubles each hour (including the final hour), the dish is half full just one hour before it’s full. For the first 99 hours the bacteria have got it made. Then wham!

To make this more vivid and memorable, imagine the following as an animated cartoon. For the first 99 hours the bacteria are just partying and congratulating themselves on how smart and successful they are. It’s party hats and noisemakers, Conga lines and champagne, the bacterial Dow Jones going through the roof. Woo hoo! No limits! After 99 hours, some of the bacteria start to worry, but the rest party on — after all, the dish is only half full. Plenty of room left, plenty of nutrients. The first half lasted 99 hours, and there's another whole half to go! Sure, somebody’s gonna have to figure something out eventually, but meanwhile life is good, and nonstop growth will only make it better! An hour later — the world ends.

When growth is exponential, limits are sudden."

The part about the party with champane and Conga lines and party hats reminds me of nothing so much as the 1980's here in Austin, where Ronald Reagan deregulations led to a fantastic growth boom, and the S&L lootings which us taxpayers are still paying for.

404 - Document Not Found

Heh, heh, I searched for a copy of the Bill of Rights to put in my sidebar. The first one was an official US Gubbmint website, which worked fine from my browser, but when I checked the link from my sidebar, I got a Gobmint page that said "404 - Document Not Found."

Hey man, I think they should look hard and try to find it! Maybe we should help! I think we still need it!

Shrimp du Lac

More on bugs. Sea bugs, leetle arthropods that eat on the bottom. Well, I love 'em. Growing up on the Gulf coast, you eat 'em, you love 'em, you eat some more, all your life if you can.

At some point, I had had my fill. A tolerance level dose. I had been a vegetarian, was just transitioning to no being a vegetarian, and on a trip back home I had a crab poboy at a local dive with my aunt and mom. Man, was it good!

Then, less than an hour later the little blisters began to appear. All around my mouth. A ring of blisters, red and oozy, that lasted nearly a week.

A fluke? In trying things later, all seafoods gave me the same reaction, and not just around my mouth, but in my mouth, between my teeth, and even the fake crabmeat stuff, surimi, which is what, one percent cod? gave me a reaction. When I got the same reaction from wheat roast, I stopped eating high protein stuff of all sorts. Time for a detox.

It wasn't for another three years that I tried to eat anything out of the ocean. It was my birthday and my folks took me to a place called the Aquarium. I got the seafood platter, and damn the consequences.

No blisters! And since then it looks like I can eat seafood again. Now, the moral and environmental ramifications, you'll just have to look back to Wisdom of the Deep for that.

Needless to say, my cooking of seafood though, is as a result in it's infancy. Here is my first attempt, at the age of 41, cooking my own shrimp. Why even try, when you have a dad who once said, "I took them shrimps and I thew em on the grill!"

Nearly a pound of jumbo brown shrim, peeled. About half a cup of coconut milk and a quarter cup of lime juice and a splash of Tecate. Shakes of Tony Chachere's. That's the marinade, now put it in the cooler and go windboard and hula hooop til you're hungry. Be sure to clean the grill well if you are using a public one at the park!

They cooked much quicker than I thought, and some were kinda tough. LM doesn't mind that, but I hate to overcook fish and seafood. The cococut milk flavor really absorbed into the shrimp, and the lime juice pretty much pre-cooked them a la ceviche. Next time I would add the lime juice at the very end of the marinade session.

Grilled summer squash were mild and juicy as sides. Perfect veggie complement to those little seabugs. Yum Yum!

Teamwork

We just got back from the Lake, LoverMan and me, and I'm glad it didn't happen DURING but you're still not in the mood AFTER neither...

"What was that noise?" "I don't know, but I heard it." "It sounded like a flying cockroach." "Yeah, well I think it is and it's right there!" (Pointing to the cluttered bookshelf right next to the bed.) Silence. "There it is, what can I kill it with?" Shuffle. "Here." A tennis shoe. WHACK!WHACK! "Good job!" "Flush it quick!" "Okay." -Flurrrrrsh-kllggg- "Goddam!" "Where is it? I can't see!" "It's on the VCR, wait don't hit the VCR!" "OK NOW!" -Whack! His eyes, and my reflexes, my ears and his reflexes, whatta team. "Okay sweetie, I'm gonna go sleep in my tent, I love you." "Bet there's no roaches in your nice zippered tent, sweetie." "Usually not." Kiss kiss.

But it wasn't over. I came into the livingroom to log on. What, am I supposed to go to sleep after that?? A roach scurried up my naked thigh from under the chair! Squawk! It In the kitchen, Emo the new black kitty pounced, forcing it into the doorway. Whack, whack! Dead roach! "Emo, don't run away, we got it! Emo, you helped me kill the roach!"

Emo just heard the whack, which must have sounded like harsh discipline, dammit, and out the catdoor he went.

Now, it's just me, just me and the cockroaches. Just me and the roaches and the Palace Princess Slipper of Death. Eyes all around my head, while I am writing this, I tell you. Breathing. Knowing exactly where the Palace Princess Slipper of Death is. ONLY hold it by the heel.

Four O'clock! the doorway jam! Whack! Dammit, it got thru the jammit! Swing open the door, it must be on the other side.

But it is not. Instead, there is a big, pink FAT Mediterranean Gecko.

Teamwork.

The Picture Tree

The Picture Tree is a project that came directly from the Faery Queene while the Cult of the Faery Star was paying tribute. We got off real easy this time, a fun walking-orders for the whole family, not some grueling or embarrassing trial/task. Nobody had to give up drinking or smoking, or remain silent until 77 pounds of scrap iron was removed from the wild. Nobody had to quit their job and follow their dream. This time.

What she said to do was: get in contact with a tree, then paint a picture. It was assumed that this picture would include, as all paintings do, aspects of the world as we see it now, and parts of the world as we will it to be. It is difficult for any manner of Art to avoid this, and we didn't even want to try. Because of the genesis of the project, Faery inspirations and the wisdom of trees would be the incorporated, and will continue through the growth of the Picture Tree, for as long as it grows.

Once the Picture, which involved charcoal, watercolor, glue, leaves, glitter, etc., was completed by us, it was blessed, and then ripped into pieces.

One of the pieces will go to the Republican National Convention, where, like the other pieces, it will be glued, stapled, taped, whatever, to a new piece of paper. A new assemblage of Painters will paint a new Picture from the Piece, creating a new Picture Tree. This will in turn be torn into Pieces, and each Painter will take their Piece to create a new Picture Tree from in their own community.

I think this would be a fun project for art class in the schools. I think kidz would easily understand the concept. Paint it then rip it up and send it to a friend to do in their own art class? Yeah!

Photos were taken of the first Picture Tree, and we will post them on a website, though the Queene didn't ask us to do this. In this way, Painters can post Pictures of their own onto the website, so that a Family Tree of the Picture Tree can be kept.

Or not. It could just go feral from here. Wouldn't make any difference to Her.

Just Rewards

To reward myself for my brilliant HTML wizardry, I decided to go make myself a Bloody Mary. It IS my day off, (even tho' I will be going in to work??) so keep your superior disdain to yourself, Prudence!

That is when I realized I had not shared any food or drink recipes in this blog for some time, and that it has gotten a little grim in here. Really, even though I do write about and think a lot about some heavy shit, I am a very lighthearted person with a huge streak of hedonism running through my self-created poverty.

I perfected this Bloody Mary recipe at the beach with LoverMan a couple of years ago, and then improved it considerable since then. Because it has so many ingredients, you make a bigger batch to share, no fewer than three coctails, and if it's more than just me and LM, or even if, I will often double the recipe.

First, peel a big clove of garlic, mush it a bit, and spear it with a wooden toothpick. Put it into a quart jar that has a tight seal lid. I use a big pickle jar. Shake Tony Chachere's Original Creole Seasoning 13 times into the jar. This is the secret ingredient. If you don't have a can of Tony's, go back to the grocery store. Grate fresh peppercorns into the jar, about 1/2 teaspoon. Add one cup of (ideally) Monopolowa (my favorite) or Tito's (LM's favorite) vodka to the spices, and swirl it around. But really, you can use any crappy vodka you want, it won't affect the taste much, but it may give you a hangover. Add the juice of half a lemon and half a lime, and a splash of the juice of Peperoncini peppers or green salad olives. Then in go four capsful of Lea & Perrins Worcesterchire sauce. If there are vegetarians or vegans involved, you can substitute Braggs Liquid Aminos seasoning for the Lea & Perrins, which has anchovies in it. Sorry if you didn't know that before and would rather not think about it. Swirl it all around. Notice I put the seasonings in first with the vodka. That is because the alcohol extracts the flavors better that way. Now, finally, add two cups of spicy tomato veggie juice. My favorite is Knudsen's Very Veggy Spicy.

If you can wait, let the whole thing sit in the fridge for awhile. It really improves with age, especially that speared garlic! The one I'm drinking now was leftover from when LM and I were at his fishing cabin, ref. "Bass Attitude and Beet Wisdom."

Serve on ice with a stalk of celery in the tumbler. Spear olives, a Peperoncini pepper and/or coctail onions on a wooden toothpick and stick this into the top of the celery stalk, so that the celery terminates in a stack of edible "beads."

There is absolutely no reason to wait til you have a hangover to make this drink.

Late Bloomer

Yee-haw! All by myself, following written instructions, I managed to edit the HTML of my blog template, so that I can add links! So go check out the stuff that warps my mind almost daily!

Surf n Hoop It Up!

Thought I'd let my local Friendster hoopsters know about a coupla things -First, on Thursdays in Aug. at 7ish at Jo's coffeehouse on South Congress, they have a surf band followed by a surf movie (free) and I brought my hoops last week and had a great time. This week it is the Ugly Beats playing followed by Step Into Liquid at dark-30. So I'll for sure be there to hear the band and I'll bring my hoops for everyone to play with.Then, I've been putting together a meetup system for hoopers at meetup.com. Check out and join if you like. The next Austin meetup for hoopers is Sat. Sept 4th at Zilker Park at 4pm. Blankets, friends and kids welcome.

Ivieee, aka Hoolah Foolah

Entropy, Evolution, and the Basket We Are In

Once upon a time, when I lived in a houseful of environmental activists, we soon noticed a pattern: that after a stint of organizing, some demonstration or newsletter production period or benefit, the house would be a shambles. Why was it that organizing was such a messy business? I forget, and none of us there at the time remember, who it was that pointed out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that the universe tends towards a disorganized state (entropy) and that in a closed system (as most of us believe the universe to be, or at least Texas) organization is only accomplished by creating disorder in another part of the closed system. From there on out, the house was called Entropy.

Some time thereafter we discovered that there was a more proper definition for the word "entropy" which we all understood to be the bachelor-quality mess the house and our personal lives represented. That more scientific definition was "the amount of energy present in a system that is unavailable for work." More than a few pitchers and bottles of tequila were toasted to that!

Only because I was a fan of Ken Kesey's books did I later get into some of the less funny aspects of the 2nd Law. Having polished off Sometimes a Great Notion I careened straight into Demon Box. I won't even attempt to explain what a "demon box" is except that it is a perennial quixotic attempt to defeat Entropy and make possible the Perpetual Motion Machine. So often my introduction to reality comes through fiction that I will sometimes say things like "There is no such thing as fiction."

I had to check out a nonfiction treatment of the same concepts, and only now do I wonder if Ken Kesey had just finished reading Entropy by Jeremy Rifkin before coming up with Demon Box. Surely there were lots of physics professors who understood that stuff, but did Ken even take physics in college?

Entropy is very frightening in a way that may have contributed to my retirement as an activist while at the same time making me believe more in the goals and motivations of the environmental and green left movements.

Entropy argues that the process of evolution, and the evolution of human civilization not just follows the 2nd Law, but accelerates it. Each new advantage of evolution results in a creature more able to exploit natural resources and convert them into offspring and heat (aka entropy, the energy that has gone from a useful state to a dissipated one).

Next Rifkin has us take a look at human culture in this context, because we humans have managed to evolve beyond the necessity of evolution. Now knowlege and technology have superceeded biological evolution as the means for our species to accelerate the exploitation of natural resources. And when we talk about acceleration, it is not a mere mathematical acceleration, it is exponential, reflecting the exponential growth of human population, which has a consequent result of producing a lot of unusable energy aka heat, that is, global warming. I don't even think that global warming was a concept at the time of writing of Entropy.

Rifkin mostly relates this process to the uncomfortable processes that humanity has gone through in the search for the next energy source. Our habit is to get into a new energy source and then accelerate its exploitation until it is all used up and then switch to the next most easily exploited source, which is not as efficient and therefore in the effort converts a higher percentage of usable energy to heat waste. There are charts and graphs, so watch out!

His suggestion? If we want to be a long-lived species on a resource-plentiful planet and let other species do their thing, too: slow down. Slow down the conversion of natural resources into human beings, because as the most highly evolved beings on the planet using highly evolved energy intensive technology, we are very expensive on the planet and our organized state of living causes a concurrent increase of entropy in the system (our planet Earth). We experience this as global warming, hurricanes, and political instability, but it could just be called what it is: entropy.

So what is the bad news? It would be unlikely, anti-patternistic, and devolutionary to make any choices like this, because while we have used culture to accelerate the "goals" of evolution, we have never used culture to limit those goals in the interest of a long-term purpose. Anyone who make choices like that, well there are names for them. "Conquered" "colonized" "loser" "whining liberal" if you get my drift. Unfortunately, asshole/conquistador/fratboy genes win out in the entropic game of evolution, producing more heirs and more heat.

Whatcha gonna do? I wonder what Charles Darwin would have thought.

A Little Update

My thumb is better, but there is still something wrong in that joint.

Emo is recovering from his neutering op. Animal Trustees, which provides low cost spay/neuter and other services, rocks. And since Spooky, my 8 yr. old white cat was beating up on the new arrival, I looked up info on how to introduce a new animal into the household. I had figured that they just needed to have time and establish dominance, but this site recommends gradual introductions and not allowing aggressive behaviors, which can become patterns. Kind of like humans, I guess.

And I have been taking myself on a cautious tour through some scary landscapes: the rightwingers blog community. I am really quite frightened by what I see there. These people are only two links away from this blogger's Vine, but they might as well be on another planet as far as world view goes. That would be totally okay with me, but unfortunately those accumulated worldviews add up to war, untempered nationalism, and a very meanspirited intolerance of anything left of Rush Limbaugh. This polarization is very dangerous, I think. We are becoming a divided nation, and the dominant class is getting more and more aggressive towards the submissive counterculture. Every time the left scores (Farenheit 911, nearly busting Bush for treason re: the Valerie Plame outing, etc) the rightwing response gets meaner, ruder, and more intimidating. Are we supposed to puff ourselves up in response? Hiss and spit? Wouldn't that further the divide, which if allowed to continue, could result in us evolving into separate species, or a pogrom or forced death march????

Reading about things like Protest Warriors, which do things like harass CodePINK (positively the creampuffiest side of the left, and proud of it) as they are leafletting could develop into patternistic aggressive behavior just like my cats, I am aftaid.

Of course I am very sensitive about aggressive nationalism after reading Night by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, an autobiographical account of his boyhood experiences in Aushwitz and beyond, a struggle to survive and make sense of the inhuman cruelty of the Holocaust.

When my own family members talk about forced deportation of people like me and my friends who criticize Bush or neocon nationalism, I wonder how far away we are from reliving one of the worst nightmares humanity has ever created.

Higher Learning

Which house do you belong in?
I'm in Ravenclaw...

Book Review

Finally! I finished Triumph of the Moon! I have been working on this book for 4 months. Between the microscopic typeface, and the fact that I only read at bedtime and usually with only xmas tree lights so as not to wake LM, and because I was taking time to chew, I let this one take its time.

Triumph of the Moon examines the history of the genesis of modern pagan witchcraft. It is written by a real historian academic scholar, Ron Hutton, and he spends most of the book debunking popular pagan stories of our own genesis, like where Gerald Gardner got his material, no, there was no pervasive goddess religion that covered all of Europe, and no, the people killed during the Witch Burning time were not practitioners of witchcraft or an underground pagan religion.

My only criticism of the book is that once he smashes a myth, he rarely bothers to suggest an actual reality as opposed to the delusion. So I feel like I have woken up from a dream, but I can't find my glasses and I don't remember how I got here. Some kind of reconstruction is in order here.

I wonder what some of the living authors who purposefully or ignorantly passed on bad information will do to recant or do a new foundation job where the shims got taken out. Starhawk in particular takes some direct hits. The bookwriting and reading pagan clergy need to pay attention to this sort of thing.

It strikes me how easily language and human willingness to be deluded allow falsehood and misinformation to be passed around. Again I wonder how much else of the world we are taking for truth, just because it is part of the fabric of pop culture/the dominant paradigm (or the submissive counterculture's reaction to it). In many ways, myths and lies are easier to perpetuate. They are catchy, like advertising jingles. We want to believe. Truth is much more complicated, it takes time and work to do it justice, and most people just do not have the time or intellectual curiosity. Reminds me of the "Honesty" card in Brian Froud's Faeries Oracle deck.

I toast people like Ron Hutton who are brave enough to confront willing self delusion. "Here, I found your glasses. They were covered with crud, so I cleaned them for you." "Oh, thanks, Ron, but I sure hope you made coffee too, 'cause I have a mean hangover. And you're not nearly as cute as when I took you to bed!"

I'm All Thumb

I might have to go to the emergency room tomorrow! Shit! Thursday night, my left thumb started to hurt, and it got stiff and crunchy at the last joint. Then when I woke up Friday it was frozen stiff and sore and swollen. I took the day off to self-medicate, but here it is Saturday night, and it is still big and painful and now it has some fever.

Either: the sprain I got breakdancing over a year ago actually chipped the bone and I have a bone spur, or, the cactus/mesquite spine I took to that knuckle over 5 years ago finally decided to get infected and/or come out, or the little knife wound I got cooking two weeks which seemed to heal just fine actually didn't, or, when I was under the house earlier this week or in bed a spider bit me on the thumb.

Too many variables! Ice, painkillers, aspirin, echinacea, reiki, and ichthammol and it is still screamming with pain!

I have been to the emergency room on my own behalf only once, but I left before I got treatment so I didn't get a big bill. I'm kind of scared that an emergency room doctor will be as clueless as me, and will give me antibiotics which won't work. I CAN'T take antibiotics anymore unless it's life-threatening, my immune system is all crapped out by antibiotic abuse in my youth.

So now I go to bed with the ichthammol on, hoping it will draw out the poison/infection/foreign matter like it has done for me so well in the past.

Black Cats, Crossroads, and Friday the 13th

I got a new kitty, a rescued/abandoned 9 month old. He is shiny black, with a star on his throat and a crescent moon on his belly. I named him Emo.

I called Animal Trustees of Austin to get an appointment to get him neutered. Don't get me started about people who refuse to spay or neuter their pets. When they are in Hell hanging by the nuts from the intestines of all the abandoned kittens and puppies they are responsible for, they won't think I was harsh.

As Luck would have it, the first possible date for me to get my kitty fixed is this coming Friday the 13th! The lady setting the date chuckled about that. Here is what LM (LoverMan) said: "Castrating a black cat on Friday the 13th? ARE YOU MAD!??" All tongue-in-cheek, of course. LM is possibly the least superstitious person I know.

But am I poking a finger in the eye of Fate here? As a witch, I love superstitions, but I don't usually take them in the same way that the general public does.

The last time I encountered a black cat superstition was in fact on me and LM's first real date. He was giving me a ride back home from a show and a party, and it was very obvious that we liked each other very much. At a major Crossroads, a black cat ran across the streets in front of us! I think he asked me what that meant to me, and it just popped out of my mouth: "A black cat crosses your path, you make an important decision real fast. Like right now I am deciding whether or not to invite you in when we get to my house. Okay, I decided."

And it was one of the luckiest decisions I've ever made!

Finally Summer

After a very long grace period, it finally feels like summer in Austin. Nobody, with the possible exception of Trailer Park Girl seems to notice or comment that we have had a blessedly cool summer so far, and it will be cooler within less than two months, which is a very short summer in Texas indeed!

I am one of the few people here who lives without air conditioning. I ride my bike to (minimally air conditioned) work just before noon, and I have to be cheerful to people upon opening the shop. So it can be done, adapting to the heat.

My theory is this: your body's metabolic processes are all done by enzymes, large proteins that break up food molecules, reassemble them, and do just about every biochemical conversion that takes place in a living being. But they are very sensitive to temperature changes, and most operate witin a two to four degree celcius range, some even less. This is the "reason" that some animals (birds and mammals) "decided" to be homeothermic (warm-blooded) which means that we will burn calories to make our bodies cooler or warmer in order to maximize enzyme function. So when it gets too hot or cold, we are potentially burning as many or more calories than we are gaining from enzymatic metabolic processes. Okay, all the previous was textbook, now here is my theory: At that point, your body is faced with the choice of shutting down, just sitting there and doing nothing because it is too hot, or doing a bit of biochemical dirtywork and switching enzymes for ones that work better in a few degrees hotter or cooler body core temperatures. That is the place in adapting to temperature change where we feel uncomfortable and complain a lot about the heat or cold.

The only thing to do is just go right into it and adapt and change enzymes. Be hot for awhile, exercise, don't retreat into air conditioning because that will just fool your body into thinking that it can put off that enzyme job for another few days or weeks even.

Wisdom of the Deep

Since I began eating fish and seafood again, I decided to research to research the health and environmental implications of that dietary choice. Most of us know that the oceans are not as invulnerable as we thought back in the 60’s, and that overfishing has dramatically impacted the size and number of many fishes, and that pollution has made many unfit for human consumption.

Another question for me is probably not of interest to you consumers of animal flesh, and that is whether the fish in question is intelligent, has feelings, nurtures it’s young. “Intelligent fish?” you sneer? Hold on a minute, though. Some marine fish become sexually mature late in life, have a short breeding phase, and then go on to live a hundred or hundreds of years. What is going on there? I wanted to screen these fish for potential consciousness, especially after a saleslady friend of mine told me that although she ate seafood, she wouldn’t eat groupers because they were intelligent and nurtured their young.

I haven’t been able confirm her claim, but it is immediately apparent that nobody should be eating grouper at this point. Here are some of the resources I found, which makes it lots easier for me to eat seafood responsibly:

For example, Monterrey Bay Aquarium says ‘Orange roughy live longer than 100 years—the fillet in your freezer might be from a fish older than your grandmother! This deep-living fish, once known as the “slimehead,” grows very slowly and doesn’t spawn until age 20. Fishermen find them as they gather to spawn. At first, bonanza catches could be taken. But years of heavy harvest on the spawning grounds have decimated populations. Management is now in place, but it will take decades for this slow-growing fish to recover. Orange roughy are caught by bottom trawling, a method which can damage the seafloor, with unknown impacts on the fragile deep-sea ecosystem.’

Seafood Choices Alliance warns: ‘All commercially fished flounder in the Atlantic (summer, windowpane, winter, witch and yellowtail) are depleted and overfished. Landings have fallen by approximately 70% for summer flounder and 65% for winter flounder within the past 20 years, and by some 60% and 95% respectively for witch and windowpane flounder within the past 15 years. Landings of yellowtail flounder dropped approximately 90% between 1983 and 1995, and have since only partially rebounded.’

But, according to Environmental Defense ‘Channel catfish are the most commonly farmed fish in the United States. These omnivorous fish are raised in ponds in the Southeast, and are fed mostly vegetable-based diets. Channel catfish are a native species, and escaped farmed catfish do not appear to cause ecological harm.'

Much less is available about intelligence and emotional capacity of sea animals, with the exception of whales and dolphins, which of course should not be on the menu for many reasons other that it is the next most deplorable thing to cannibalism. The most that I have encountered about non-cetacean intelligence in the sea is about octopi and related cephalopods like squids and cuttlefish. These mollusks, relatives of brainless clams and oysters, have large brains, extensive sensory nervous system processing ability, learning capacity, and maybe even language and emotions. I have seen mind-blowing video of cuttlefish flashing color-changing patterns of rapid-fire diversity. Why? Especially when it seems to have nothing to do with simple camouflage, mating or hunting? I give these animals the benefit of the doubt for intelligence and don’t eat them.

Here is a really balanced look at cephalopod intelligence. ‘...the 1992 "look-and-learn" study, by neuroscientists Graziano Fiorito and Pietro Scotto at Naples, is the most controversial of all the attempts to understand learning in cephalopods. To test if O. vulgaris could learn a skill by observing the activities of other octopuses, the researchers trained one group to choose a red ball or a white one. When the trained animals reliably approached one or the other ball, untrained octopuses were allowed to watch. When later presented with a choice of their own, these animals not only selected the same ball more often throughout the five days of the trial, but also learnt more quickly through observing than the original subjects had under classical Pavlovian conditioning.

"The rapid acquisition and the stability indicate that observational learning in Octopus vulgaris is a powerful mechanism of learning," the researchers concluded (Science vol. 256, p 545). The finding was astounding not least because observational learning is considered by some to be a preliminary step to conceptual thought.’

This experiment has not been replicated in peer experiments (non-reproducible results) and how intelligent calamari are remains debatable. Of course one of the main problems is not how intelligent, but how differently intelligent they are, and we are still in the process of discovering how to ask and test this question. In other words, we humans are not yet clever enough to figure out how smart an octopus is. ‘Nuff said!