Let us consider the octopus.
Its brain is kind of all over its body or maybe it’s got multiple brains? It’s a snail without a shell, a big squishy blob thing, so probably not smart, right? Wrong. Super smart. They solve puzzles. They play games. They outsmart their predators even though they have no physical defense. Soft flesh for sharks to sink their teeth right into.
Two fun books sorta about octopuses:
Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith. What is thinking? Who else does it besides people? What’s it like to be a being that thinks but couldn’t imagine what our thoughts are like? I don’t know. This was a fun book that made me think more about those questions. And also lots of good octopus facts. Cephalopod intelligence evolved separately from ours. That’s nuts!
The Mountain In The Sea by Ray Nayler. It’s a fun sci-fi book set in a hypercapitalist society not far into the future from ours with production/extraction facilities run by computers (sorta HAL from Space Odyssey meets middle-management-replaced-with-ChatGPT) and someone in the book is studying octopuses. It’s like a first contact sci-fi story but instead of aliens from another planet it’s aliens from the ocean (octopuses) which makes way more sense.
They are aliens! I used to love to snorkel. I guess I still love it. I just don’t do it anymore. I lived on a tropical island with coral reefs teeming with colorful life. The first time I ever saw an octopus I was snorkeling at pretty low tide, trying not to rub my belly on any coral. I was looking at fishes, living the dream. Then I saw these giant slitted eyes inches from my own looking at me from an amorphous dark slimy blob slinking into the cracks of some sun-bleached dead coral. I screamed through the snorkel. I did this panicked backwards shove of a swim stroke like I could push this demon away from me and got myself turned around and swam in a thoughtless sprint of terror for probably 20 seconds before I realized that was an octopus, not a monster. I came up for air past the edge of the reef out in open sea, emptied the water out of the snorkel, halfway caught my breath, and went back to look at it. I saw the last of its squishy flesh squeezing into the cracks. I spent the rest of the day feeling like I’d had some encounter with a being from another dimension— an angel or jinn or extraterrestrial. It felt like something nobody would believe. My body was vibrating with awe and terror and wonder and the sense I had some kind of secret.
In fact, lots of people have seen octopuses. That doesn’t change how consequential it felt. The ocean is nuts. We should be nice to it and not destroy it. Quit burning fossil fuels you disgusting freaks.
How do octopuses fuck? Glad you asked. Here’s an enlightening article: The Octopus Penis Arm Doesn’t Just Deliver Sperm— It Sniffs Out the Sweet Spot.
I liked the My Octopus Teacher film. Borrow somebody’s Netflix password and give it a watch.
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Here's a video from the Berm Peak YouTube channel, bicycle-themed entertainment I watch sometimes. Re: Cranks on ebikes that are just an on-off switch for a throttle: “These are exactly the same thing as a doctor’s note that allows an emotional support animal in a restaurant. It’s just designed to take something that shouldn’t be somewhere somewhere.” We obviously need to figure out how to accommodate the many modes of transportation that are not cars. A motorbike with an electric motor is better than a motorbike with an internal combustion engine. It’s still a motorbike and might not belong in a bike lane.
This is a topic I think about a lot. It’s going to come up again. Nobody’s making you read this blog.
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So many problems in the US come from this silly federalist system. Why are there 50 different states in addition to our little offshore territories? Why are the rules about how you buy alcohol, firearms, or marijuana or whether or not you need to register an e-bike different across these open borders? It takes me 20 minutes to bike to New Jersey. Oops, crossed an imaginary line, now there are different rules. Why isn’t DC a state? Why isn’t Puerto Rico a state? Every large city should secede from their state and make a new state. Why not? More states. The State of Philadelphia would have more people than Wyoming. Give us two Senators. Don’t think that’s fair? I guess we’ll have to abolish the Senate too. Good.
This country has some good ideas. It’s not all bad. But it sure seems all bad sometimes. The supreme leader of the USA keeps behaving in a manner that would get you a lifetime ban from your neighborhood bar. He’s a truly evil man and I won’t feel bad if he diarrheas himself to death on national TV or slips on a banana peel and cracks his head open. He’s gonna die somehow. I would like it to be a sort of Looney Tunes kind of ending. Is that such a wicked thought?
In some cases the states have way more power than seems reasonable. In others they just seem like pesky homeowner associations. Why not just one American driver’s license? Why? You get it and you can drive in America. You drive drunk and they take it away. If I was emperor of America that’s how I’d do driver licenses. Also you lose it forever if you’re caught texting while driving even once. Sorry if you don’t like it. I’m the emperor of America. Also a free bicycle for each of my subjects.
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I like Inga Saffron. One time she got sued for defamation by local notorious pervert and former Philadelphia Inquirer writer Stu Bykofsky because she accurately quoted him as saying he likes to go to Southeast Asia to pay minors to have sex with him. In addition to being an unrepentant sex pest he also spends his time and money trying to prevent protected bike lanes from being developed in center city Philadelphia. And he hates Inga Saffron, whose article here is pretty good. Surface parking lots are undervalued and we shouldn’t be letting landlords sit on valuable useful land and do absolutely nothing useful with it.
Here’s a good book about parking policy: Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar. It’s a fun read, I promise. If you know where I live you can come on over and borrow it. If you don’t know where I live you can probably borrow it from your friendly neighborhood library.
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Welcome to the newest segment of the blog which I am calling Know Your Enemies. I want you to know about Doug Wilson. He’s a stupid and evil man with a whole lot of power. Here he is praying some wicked incantation with Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, a villainous title if there ever was one.
Here’s what Doug Wilson wrote about sex and gender equality:
“When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission”
He describes fucking as “colonizing” a vagina. That’s pretty rapey!
It’s shocking how open he is about the fact that reinforcing a structure of patriarchal domination in the household and sex lives of legally-married heterosexual couples is necessary for creating the other structures of hierarchical domination he wants in society. Somebody must be dominated for there to be a dominant group.
I don’t tend to buy into the notion that pleasure is a kind of activism or that practicing joy or rest is itself an act of resistance but there’s part of me that sees it now. Every time a woman has an orgasm the pseudo-intellectual calvinist-branded theocrats lose a little ground in their battle for America’s soul and genitalia.
He’s very convinced that God is a petty little shit just like him and that the way things are is the way they ought to be, and it is good to use violence and coercion to keep them that way. There’s the real doublethink of the Penis Police. If the right’s narrowly acceptable parameters of gender expression and relations are really the only natural, normal, and commonsensical arrangement then why do they have to spend so much effort using the whole violent apparatus of the state to enforce such norms? They don’t believe their own shit. They just correctly understand that the queers are a threat to a domination system.
Focus on the Family was kind of right about the “threat” of any deviation from the patriarchal heteropatriarchal nuclear family. The “homosexual agenda” is in fact a threat to a certain way of life. That way of life is just not great. I never liked the talking point of, “Don’t like gay marriage? Then don’t get gay married,” or “What other people do in the bedroom doesn’t affect you.” It kind of does. The question is just whether it is a positive or negative, a liberatory or oppressive effect. The fact is the world is better off, children are safer, cis-hetero romance is purer, due to the influences of the LGBT ancestors who called bullshit on the idea that sex can only be righteous and acceptable if it is done in service of maintaining a coercive domination system. We, all of us, are blessed to share the world with people of diverse sexual identities and orientations. Miserable losers like Doug Wilson refuse to accept this blessing. He has chosen a life of misery.
“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.” Ok pal. The act of ice cream eating can’t be made into a delicious frozen treat break!
I cannot overstate how anti-intellectual Wilson and Hegseth’s breed of theocratic calvinism is. They just took the God-hates-everyone vibes from John Calvin then used big words to convince people of the goodness of an imaginary past where men were men and women were women and children died of preventable disease.
Doug Wilson calls himself a "paleo-confederate" which is just pseudo-academia talk for "confederate" and has had to clarify multiple times that he actually doesn't think chattel slavery is a good institution. He had to clarify it because it certainly sounded like he's pro-slavery. (He is.)
It came as no surprise to me that Hegseth recently quoted the made-up Bible verses spoken by a fictional hit man as actual Scripture. The Bible to them is an arcane rule book, not a story of liberation; a roadmap to conquest and not a vision for flourishing; a weapon and not a balm. It’s trash.
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Related to the above segment: I do not believe in “Christian unity.” I believe in seeking truth and justice. If there’s one bad cop and 100 “good cops” who don’t rat out the bad cop what you have is 101 bad cops. If part of your scene is rapey and you don’t condemn it then what you have is a rapey scene. If progressive/liberationist/affirming Christianity isn’t staunchly vocally materially opposed to the bigoted religious fascism of America’s right wing evangelical Christianity then progressive Christianity is just good PR for christofascists.
I used to think I needed to find unity and connection with Christians whose theological framework I find upsetting and offensive. I don’t anymore.
In 2016 Naomi and I had just moved to Kolkata but had temporarily relocated across the border to Bangladesh to attend an immersive language school. It was shortly after the Holey Artisans terror attack in Dhaka so not many foreigners were out and about. We were fairly unconcerned and were just walking around trying to meet people and eat street food and practice our limited Bengali. A few weeks in some other expat invited us to church. We’re churchy people. I’ll go to church if you invite me. It was an “international church” which I took to mean it was gonna be some kind of American-style evangelical worship-songs-on-guitar followed by some pastorman rambling about something for long enough to zone out. One or two more songs. Dismissal. That sounded tolerable and possibly even enjoyable to me at the time.
Getting there was an adventure. We did some walking and a bus. Then we took a hand-pulled rickshaw which I felt horrible about. I am and was somewhere around 100 kilos. Barefooted and flip-flop-shodden men who weigh 50 kilos tops are begging to be our beasts of burden. We are slightly lost. We are running late. Some rando is telling me it’s unwise for foreigners to visit because some were recently murdered at Holey Artisans cafe. I am aware. We let an impoverished man bamboozle us out of like three US dollars when it “should have been” 20 cents or something. He hauls our fat asses for an uncomfortably long time and distance. We arrive at the location. The church services occur in a hotel ballroom. Guards with 12-gauge shotguns slung over their shoulders greet us with English “Good morning,” and instruct us to pass through a metal detector. I try a little “Assalam alaikum,” and “Shubho shokal,” and they’re pumped because they think I can actually speak Bengali and I don’t understand their response and they switch back to English.
Fancy lobby. We’re directed to the conference room hosting a church service. It’s air conditioned. I have walked through a portal to the United States of America. It starts out smooth enough. A couple cringey Jesus-is-my-boyfriend type songs, an appeal to donate some money for food for people affected by some recent floods. I throw some rupees in the offering bucket.
Then some Dutch asshole goes to the pulpit and starts talking about the End Times, how the book of Revelation is a roadmap of impending future events, that all of the bizarre blood-soaked visions are a mix of semi-cryptic foreign policy predictions and actual horror and gore. He asserted that the seas would actually turn to blood. He made it very clear he believed the seas would turn into actual blood, like the kind your heart pumps. So I guess all the sea creatures float to the top and die as the whole planet scabs over? Whatever. I can forgive stupid. But then it got cruel. He said the whole world outside Christendom lives in fear and hopelessness because they don’t know about escaping this bloodbath. We are safe because we have, against reason, given mental assent to these improbable assertions and will therefore live happy lives in heaven while the Muslims and other nonbelievers are tortured to death on this tortured hellbound planet. I paraphrase slightly here.
We left. The armed Muslim guards continued to be extremely kind and wanted to make sure we were getting home safely, somewhat concerned we didn’t have private drivers like so many of the other foreigners.
I was fuming. I had been raised in this kind of Christianity and thought I had left behind (accidental pun) this bullshit and found something better, something that actually gave us hope for this fragile planet and all its fragile inhabitants. I was angry. I cried, which surprised me. The faith I’d salvaged from the wreck of American Evangelicalism required not just my abandonment of American evangelicalism but also the destruction of American Evangelicalism. Some things are for destroying, not reforming.
“Bangladesh would be better off if all those missionaries hadn’t showed up with their end-times prophecies in air-conditioned ballrooms,” I said to Naomi. It’s true and I still believe it.
I do not care about Christian unity. Bad Christianity should be condemned. Christian infighting is good. Being on the wrong side of the infighting is bad.
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In the Book of Common Prayer there’s a “collect” for every Sunday as well as a bunch for various concerns or occasions. To pronounce “collect” correctly place the emphasis on what feels like the wrong syllable. That’s how you say it. It’s a prayer to collect your attention on the theme of the text(s) or holiday or whatever. Some are great, some are meh, some are mildly offensive. This one has been an earworm for many years:
Almighty God, who created us in your own image: Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression; and, that we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the maintenance of justice in our communities and among the nations, to the glory of your holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
MAKE NO PEACE WITH OPPRESSION
That’s a good Collect. I’m not the boss of you but if you haven’t prayed in years or ever and you’d like to you could do worse than saying aloud, “Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression.”
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Here’s a photograph from April 1977 relevant to two of the greatest topics: going on strike and hating cars.
Septa workers were on strike. Traffic got bad because cars don't fit in cities. CARS CREATE DISTANCE!
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From the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, November 1, 1969. Photograph by Don Pasquarella, captioned “Mass transit means four on a bike for youngsters making a trip along 54th Street near Chester Avenue in West Philadelphia.”
So many people biking around with fewer people on their bicycle than fit. What a waste.
If you want to ride my tandem with me call me anytime to make a tandem date. I paid $450 for that thing and ride it like 2 miles per year. You and me could go ride down the river trail to a donut shop or something instead of looking at your phone.
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Lookin’ for fun on the worldwide web? Howzabout this map where you can click anywhere and see the path a drop of rain would take to flow to the ocean. I guess we’re assuming the drop does not evaporate. For best results, get stoned first.
As a kid I liked to get out to pee when we were driving over the Rockies. I liked the idea that my piss was flowing both ways. The stream flowing out of me flows to both the Pacific and Atlantic. So that’s a fun thing you can do on the continental divide.
I still love to pee off a cliff. Why? I don’t know.
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Kids’ books are mostly mediocre. Here are some good ones. My criteria for making it on this list is that if a stranger walked up to me in the kids’ section of a book store and said to me, “I want to get a book for my three-year-old nibling. What do you think I should get?” and I saw one of these on the shelf I would say, “Yeah, buy this one. Great book. A+.” Listed here in no particular order. Thank you to Naomi for helping with this incomplete list.
Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder. Most books that come recommended by performatively progressive parents annoy me. I hate “A is for Activist.” Why the hell am I telling kids “F is for Feminism?” Makes no sense. It’s like evangelical media but for people who have those In This House We Believe lawn signs. This one is a banger though. It’s pleasant to read. It’s joyful instead of preachy. The illustrations are nice to look at. You can read it slowly and ask questions about the pictures. Fun for a wide age range.
Flotsam by David Wiesner. This book rules. It has no words. A kid is looking around at the Jersey Shore and stumbles upon a fantastical portal to another dimension. His other book about aliens the size of bugs also rules and also has no words. Both of these are special to me because Francis started insisting on reading them to me instead of me reading them to him at bedtime. Wordless books are great!
Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers. A delight to look at. A pleasure to read. Like Bodies Are Cool, it has a pleasant cadence. The illustrations are top-notch. Every character’s fashion sense is perfect. Mary is often trying to turn the page as I’m still admiring the illustrations. Shout out to friend Julia for gifting this to us while dropping off a meal after Mary was born.
The Going To Bed Book by Sandra Boynton. I was a skeptic. It grew on me. It doesn’t make sense, which used to bother me. Naomi says, “The flow of the book is so pleasant! When the moon is on the rise, we all go up to exercise!” Weird to all go above-deck to get sweaty after you’ve taken your bath and put your pajamas on. What is this? Some kind of interspecies polyamorous love cruise? I honestly don’t know. But I like reading it now.
Hold Hands by Sara Varon. I love to hold hands. Francis loves to hold hands. We used to read this book together all the time. He’s more of a Dog Man book kid now. Which is fine. Not getting on this list though.
Saturday by Oge Mora. It’s a sweet story. It has lots of ups and downs which I find is a good plot shape for itty bitty kids. Oh no! Something went wrong! They overcame it. Something bad again!? Oh look, they’ve wriggled out of it. Great. It’s a sweet story about how much a parent and a child love each other. Fun illustration style of colorful collaged print scraps.
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Spoiler alert: This bear’s hat has gone missing so he asks a bunch of animals if they’ve seen his hat and they all say no then he realizes he knows who has his hat and it’s that damn rabbit so he eats the rabbit and is happy to have his hat back. It’s funnier in the book though. He has some other hat-related books. This is the one I wound up with first. Friend Jess gave it to Francis while Mary was being born. Billy Goats Gruff by same author/illustrator is also excellent.
Mr Seahorse by Eric Carle. It’s mostly about the illustrations for me with Eric Carle. These ones are fun because you’ve got some illustrations printed on clear pages so you can only half-see the camouflaged fish on the next page. A pregnant male seahorse goes and greets a bunch of male fish who are in some way caring for or carrying the eggs they’ve fertilized. “Hello Mr Stickleback!” It’s fun to read. He manages to make the fish look expressive without making them look like a smily face superimposed on a fish body. Good illustrator. Rightly acclaimed.
Revenge of the Raccoons by Vivek Shraya. Friend Archi gifted us this one. We love raccoons. It makes kids laugh.
There are other good books. Some I barely tolerate. Some are more or less interchangeable. Mary loves a lift the flap or pull the tab situation. She’s ripped apart a number of them.
Scottish Castles, along with other pro-Scotland propaganda pop-up books, gifted by Scottish friend Rebecca trying to indoctrinate Francis into enthusiasm for Scotland years ago is somehow still surviving though the pop-up fireworks above Edinburgh castle are long gone. The children yearn for touch screens. Ye Cannae Shove Your Granny Off The Bus is still in rotation but missing some of the pop-ups and flaps.
I’m sick of Curious George. Oh, the kidnapped monkey misbehaved! It turns out it’s all OK actually. That’s the whole plot.
You know what else I don’t like in children’s books? Happy farm animals. I’m sick of idyllic red barns, rolling green hills, and some smiley-faced farm animals getting along in the clean air and sunshine. Farm animals have miserable short lives entirely for the benefit of the species that will then cut them up and eat their body parts. They are not happy places and they are not happy animals. I have read too much pro-big-agriculture propaganda to the children. It’s anti-urban slop. Rural America is a hotbed of bigotry and cruelty whose main economic drivers are ecocidal resource extraction. That last sentence seems too harsh until you consider how suburban/rural Americans talk about cities at which point you realize it’s politely restrained. Anyway. I was reviewing children’s literature.
Lots of patriotism and copaganda in kids books too. When Francis was maybe two years old he liked to make me read a book he’d gotten from a Little Free Library that was all about respecting and celebrating the American flag. He liked it because I made a vomiting sound every time I saw an American flag which was every single page. He thought that was hilarious. “Again!” “Daddy loooook! It’s a America flag! You gotta throw up!” I got tired of the bit and threw away the book one day.
Leave a comment with some children’s books you would wholeheartedly recommend to a stranger shopping for one-to-six-year-olds.
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I saw this at Lidl yesterday.
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This video rules. I have not seen his other videos. Not clear what his shtick is. Motorcycles and stuff. I love his enthusiasm and awe and the unpreparedness combined with a can-do attitude.
The fact that there’s a video of a postal ebike converted to be a camper trailer rail-traverser machine stocked with zip ties and duct tape really shows how lovely the Internet can be. As much as we all resent “the algorithm” and “recommended for you” pages of data-mining corporations’ streaming services, it really is incredible that a video so clearly recommendable to me yet so unrecommendable to others wound up spoon-fed to me by the caring arms of a tailored feed.
All hail the The Enthusiastic Generalist. They’ve got Fun Facts but aren’t know-it-alls. Mistakes are adventures! Obstacles are plot-twists!
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Coming soon to a blog near you:
-Best sour candies ranked. Top contenders are Trader Joe’s Super Sour Scandinavian Swimmers, Sour Patch Kids, Haribo Sour Belts, sour grapes. Leave a comment demanding the inclusion of another sour candy.
-The flavors within each of the multiple-flavor type sour candies ranked. e.g. for Scandinavian Swimmers the light pinky peach one is best, then blue dolphin, then dark pink, then red starfish. But for Haribo Sour Belts orange is the best. I think blue flavor is second best. Will need to do extensive research for this important journalistic endeavor.
Mail sour candy to:
SOUR CANDY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
c/o Ben Wildflower Art LLC
PO Box 4798
Philadelphia PA 19134
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Mary learns things so fast. She is twenty months old, which is to say she is an age that it is now annoying to measure in months. She can scoot down the stairs on her butt. She’s a very effective communicator despite limited vocabulary. She understands direct action. Screaming when I walk away from what she wants, enthusiastically rocking her whole body to nod yes and plunging out of my arms to get what she wants. She does not ask. She takes. Do adults owe her a living? Of course they do.
Sometimes I see myself in her face and I feel terrified. She’s going to have the whole ordinary range of human emotions, which is a scary thing to have brought a person into. She will be devastated by shattered dreams, gutted by rejection, giddy, in love, depressed, anxious, horrified. What a thing it is to be a tiny soul in this big universe.
Mary admiring leaf:
Mary admiring forklift:
Mary reading to cat:
Mary reading to self:
She loves sitting with me.
Mary enthusiastic about a wiffleball:
Everyday she surprises me with how much she loves me. There is nothing more pure.
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I hope you all hate what is evil and cling to what is good today.