Call from the Grave - Bathory

this pretty much sums everything up

Red Barchetta by Rush

Can you believe I still remember all the lyrics to this prog rock epic, but don't know a single children's lullaby? She goes to sleep faster if I humm Geddy Lee's bass lines.

First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

intelligent life in the cosmos

a molecular automaton. a gene's way of making copies of itself whose only true goal is to also make copies of itself, and so on and so forth, we are connected under the skin in ways we can scarcely comprehend. the oneness of life is an inevitable product of evolution and descent from a common ancestor, because we were all one together at some time in the past, against all the others not like us and extinct now, till the first living organism on earth, one of many competing origins to be sure, one design among many but even those a mere drop in the bucket against the myriad possibilities doomed to fail early on as the pieces sorted themselves out. there are only so many ways to build a replicator out nothing, except a young planet with carbon compounds and a newly birthed core belching compounds and seeking to insulate itself from the angry cosmos. these replicators early on and until now in fact, had no idea of exactly what they were doing, a trait which no doubt suited them to advantage, because it still seems that life's tentative consciousness of its own existence seems a mere epiphenomenon in the search for widely distributed berries, a desire for a better hand axe, and a conviction that plenty of clever talk and opportunities to laugh will land a mate and in and of itself make a replicator a better replicator. if healthy brains are an indication of a good replicator, perhaps because the empower the bearer to build a barbed-wire fence or dig row after row of trenches for irrigation, feats equally wonderful as the first good hand axe, we might share brothers and sisters out there in the cosmos after all, because sexual selection is such a common phenomenon out here on this planet that it seems inevitable to be repeated out there, ad nausem, with forked tongues on alien beings and strange sounds filling pale blue methane atmospheres as lovers cry to exchange genes and build the next generation and so on and so on through every galaxy in the hubble field, though perhaps just once per galaxy still an amazing number of times, out there.

halloween with Insect

a scarecrow stalking out there, the shadow man, the thing that comes for children in their sleep. this time of year the living scarecrows and boogimen get up earlier and move about with abandon...halloween is coming and they long to fatten up for the big day. the same is probably true for those malicious house spirits that come out of corners to kick young children in the shins, and run-of-the-mill spooky bats and kittens, both amped up on the promise of landing in a young child[s hair and becoming tangled, or crossing and recrossing some kindergarteners path, dooming him to a virtual lifetime of hard luck.

Note on our species

The sad fact of the matter is that Homo sapiens, as a species, is dwarfed in significance compared to the hydra creatures in the Andromeda galaxy, with their millions of years of advanced civilization, or the confronting lobes, whose existence depends on an array of intelligent host species who have been domesticated. Ultimately, our best hope resides in the possibility that we will give birth to an advanced machine civilization.
There have been eras in our history when this planet was notable in its creatures, and I suppose this is one of them, however. We are destined to be so brief, not like the dinosaurs or the ammonites, and few of us are likely to fossilize.

A Goblin Speaks

First of all, let me introduce myself as a goblin. My name is Zog. I am a red goblin. There are black goblins and orange goblins and green goblins too, and swamp goblins, and bogomils too. Hobgoblins are goblins too, I suppose. We red goblins is a little smarter than most of the other kinds, i suppose, and maybe we is the smallest too. People that walk around in the sun all day, men and elves and persons like that, thinks goblins are bad. We are not bad. We do what is in our nature, same as them. We steal from the two legged ones that build houses up there in the valleys and the plains, because that is what goblins do. If they did not like it they should not live there, above where we choose to live. We got there first.
People up there say we set traps for them and steal their children to live among our own. I suppose this is true. We set out traps because we like trapping and once again, if you do not like being trapped by goblins, you should stay away from goblins. We steal their children because they leave them where we can get to them and besides, some of them should learn our ways. What the surface dwellers do not know is that we send those children, as adults, go back among men and walk among them. We have our spies, same as anyone else, same as the elves and faeries. What the surface dwellers do not know is how many a beautiful young girl among them is charmed by a goblin friend and lead away to live with us willingly. They say the really wise among us, the tallest and the prettiest, have human blood, but i believe otherwise. Most goblins is ugly to surface dwellers and to be perfectly frank most surface dwellers is ugly to goblins. The flesh is so pale and fat up there, the living too easy, the teeth in the mouth lacking any sort of point and the nose a mere button on the face. There are a few of you that are beautiful to us though, and there are a few of us, usually kings and queens, that are beautiful to you, surface dwellers.
Most goblins is not that smart compared to dwarves or elves and such, but our smartest are even smarter than theirs. Goblin swords are second to those made by dwarves, and are better than eleven swords any day. Even elves know this. Goblin machines is as good as dwarf ones, and last longer. Nobody ever asks us how this happens, but the fact of the matter is that a few of us is very smart and those same goblins is usually stronger than the others too so as not to get bullied to death before realizing their true potential.
Goblins like to live under the ground, in caves, but we also live in tunnels we dig, and in houses we construct of stones, under dead forests and in places where the sun do not shine too much. We eat bread and meat, same as you, surface dweller, but spiders and mushrooms too and we farm the last two things underground for soup and such things.
Every kind of goblin has a king, or a queen, or both, and sometimes the goblins fight. Usually we do not though because usually we is in service of some kind of foreman; a dark lord of a god that lives at night or maybe an older dragon or some such creatures as i cannot name. It was us and the orcs that fought the elves and men in middle earth, yes, but the tales you read do not dwell so much on the many times we won, rather than lost. It is true that we hate gnomes but the gnomes started it by hating us and the same goes for dwarves too. We would hate elves too but they is too snooty to even notice us so we think little of them and spend our nights thinking of ways to trap gnomes and rid the land of them.
If there was one think i could say to a human, at least one of the humans that live on the surface and not the eyeless kind we have down here in the caves, it would be to give us a little respect and maybe leave a beer or two out unopened at night, because if you leave us a beer we will not steal your children or set fire to your house, and if you leaves us some food too we will take it as rent for that patch of surface you live on, above us, and we might even get used to you being up there and leave you alone.

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

Brobee is probably a shambling mound.

Ruby is 21 months old, and we watch a lot of Yo Gabba Gabba together. If you do not know about the show, you have probably googled it by now, so i need not explain it. My question, shared by nearly every viewer, is what the HELL are the protagonists. Sure, you can give the lame Richard Dawkins no mystery answer and say that they are cartoony creatures made by the designer Kid Robot to communicate a sense of otherness and friendliness combined, and to look cool to parents as they deliver repetitive diatribes, in song, on the virtues of sharing. Yes, fine, but from a more in-universe perspective, as Wikkipedia would define it, what the bloody hell are those things?? Dear Reader, at Blood on a Spaceguitar, we are uniquely qualified to identify monsters, so let me share my taxonimic assessments of them.


1) DJ Lance Rock is a well-known club DJ and is a real person. He really does have a sister, named Kemba Russel, by the way...so his sister Kimba is real. His character on the show has significant magical powers, most notably the ability to fly, and of course, to animate and de-animate the inhabitants of Yo Gabba Gabba land. Interestingly, he cannot enter that series of pocket universes without the aid of Plex.

Yes, Gabba Gabba land is a system of four linked pocket universes, with a common electrical grid understood only by Plex, who alone has the power to throw a switch and turn the lights back on if they go out. None of these places makes sense from a geometric point of view because Moono and Brobie need to be transported to a separate set, through the usual white void Lance Rock occupies, to go to a family house Moono must frequently return to. Each is linked to one, or two adjacent partners via a series of square dimension doors, though there seem to be invisible freeways running through the void that DJ rock walks through as he comes and goes about his business.

Dimension door? You heard me. That is a Dungeons and Dragons term and I use it proudly, because only Dungeons and Dragons gives people a perspective by which to answer such dorky questions in a way that has some objective structure. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons can tell you who would most likely win in a fight between a vampire and a mummy (almost certainly the vampire), or a goblin and a dwarf (advantage to the dwarf, but they are hereditary enemies and would never be fighting alone).

So, I picked up my field guides, a smattering of Monster Manuals from the first and third editions, and my memories of books I have lost.

The five protagonists clearly spend much of their time in a carrying case, as inanimate toys, by DJ Lance Rock. He also has a second, rarely-used case containing the members of Moono's family. Thus, they are animate toys, who enter a series of toy universes, by a godlike overseer. This, of course, including the extraimensional goofiness of invisible freeways and wierd geometry, usually going from couch to coffee table, is exactly how children play with toys. A toy will become animate, teleport to another room in the kid's imagination, or follow an illogical freeway through the air, to enter the frame of reference of other toys.

1) Plex. Plex really is a magic robot. Robots do not occur in any D and D campaign I would play, but they occur in some. The character is about a fifteenth level magic user, who is unaware or unconcerned with his vast powers, and plays the role of a loving caretaker to the others. The creature has perfect common sense and is incredibly patient and tolerant, he also has a sense of fun, friendship and play, though the concept of fun had to be explained to him, though when he realized what it was, he was able to put a name on feelings he had clearly been experiencing. Wierd Al Yankovik wanders through with his circus on his own somehow, and Jack Black, running out of gas on an invisible freeway, gets stranded there for a while, but mostly, Plex is responsible for beaming characters into and out of these pocket universes. He can even shrink the toy characters into a smaller frame of reference, the underground world of the oskybugs, with his amazing powers. For some reason, the logs in Brobieland need to be dusted by him, indicating that he is a caretaker of Yo Gabba Gabba Land in many unspecified ways. Clearly, this place is a sort of metaphor for a day care center or preschool, and he is a sort of babysiter. Give him teleport, dimension door, whatever, as long as it is not a combat spell, he probably has it. The character has an armour class of ten, by the way, and one hit point, because he is rendered comatose and nearly destroyed by a snowball in one episode, though his other powers are vast.

Now things get fun. Each creature clearly has elemental properties, of some sort, because the four pocket universes they occupy have an elemental logic symbolized by the character. Toodies is a land of perpetual winter and snow, Brobie's is an autumnal forest, Foofa's is a land of spring and summer dominated by flowers, and Moono's is a rocky and warm desert or moonscape inhabited by ants and talking cacti. Moono we know to have a nuclear family. and we have seen adults of his species, but the others we have not seen as adults. Each is in the mindset of a small child, and each has been an infant at some point in its existence. Brobie is four years old, but we do not know the ages of the others. Only Brobie required a diaper as a one year old. They all possess a stomach and eat food. Even Plex, the robot, comes from a design that must spend some time in the body of a small robot, with the mind of an infant, so childhood is universal even to the robot, who has the mind of a sensible but nonauthoritarian adult, has a baby niece. Presumably, Plex's highly intelligent mind needs to be educated like that of a human in order to function.

2) Easiest is Toodie, who is clearly a white dragon, or a white dragon with some blue dragon ancestry. She is a creature of a pocket universe dominated by cold, possibly also inhabited by winter fairies, where frozen lakes exist and salmon and trout swim under the ice. She may actually be dragonkind, with some human ancestry as well, because though the most energetic and impulsive member of the group, she clearly has a good heart and is far from evil. Even among evil species, such as blue dragons, there are good individuals, especially among the hatchlings, and Toodie is obviously a hatchling. It was not much of a stretch for her to pretend she was a dragon in the dress up episode, as it is not a stretch for Plex to dawn a wizard's cap. Toodie is human enough to get a cold, however, and need to be treated by Anthony Bourdain, the doctor. White dragons have some connection to that para elemental plane at the intersection of the elemental plane of water and the negative material plane, and that explains ToodieLand. It is scary to imagine how powerful and dangerous she will become as she ages, it is good that she will be extremely well-socialized.



3) Brobee is clearly some sort of shambling horror. This is not to say he is evil, and in many ways he resembles the DC comic character, the Swamp Thing, who was a person of the greatest possible virtue, comparing favorably to even Batman.



The DC comics character is actually an Earth Elemental, of the specialized type that represent the living part of the plane that is influenced by the positive material plane, and Brobee, since he has a human stomach and many other human attributes, is most likely a creature with an elemental bloodline which also includes humans, a genasi...though his shape and appearance suggest some affinities with the shambling mound..... It is my guess that Brobee will reach a point where he will assimilate and devour everything in his path, growing to enormous proportions, and the "party in his tummy" will be a very real apocalypse for Yo Gabba Gabba Land.



4) Moono is quite clearly a cyclops, but there is more to it than that. Cyclops are actually described in the volume Dieties and Demigods, with the Greek Mythology Pantheon, a rather obscure source. Heraclitus writes of a good cyclops, and they are clearly not all stupid and evil. Moono and his family are nice even by the standards of YoGabbaGabbaLand, a place where no real violence can possibly exist and evil is impossible. He is nice, even among very nice little monsters. He among all of them seems to have the stuff of a hero about him, Toodee showing the potential for deception and cruelty and Brobee being downright maudlin at times. He has a beast within him, and in the bacchanal of childhood play, bites his intimate friend Foofa.



Since we see his whole family, my prediction that the adults of his species were not borne out by future seasons of the show, he is essentially full size, though he towers over the rest of YoGabbaGabbaLand and is a giant by human standards. His family is very much like a human family. Unlike Brobee, he did not germinate from a spore, or like Toodee, hatch from an egg. I wonder about some attachment to the elemental plane of earth, however, possibly through a lineage including xorn, which would explain his columnar appearance.



5) Foofa is certainly the hardest to identify, so here my taxonomic skills are strained, but I think I have her figured out.




She is clearly connected to the Elemental Plane of Earth, specifically that current of living things that runs through it. She and the swamp thing, and Brobee, could share a summer home there. In the DC comic, The Swamp Thing, it was called The Green, and developed in detail. She also has faierie affinities, as evidenced by her desire to play the role of a faerie or faerie princess at every opportunity. She is the most analytically intelligent of the four children, though Moono is very inquisitive. She and Moono seem to be closer to each other than to the other monsters, though the two female characters, Foofa and Toodie, also share a bond, as do Moono and Brobie. She is a vegetable creature, a fact made obvious by the flower perpetually in bloom on her head. She is shaped like a sack, though a cute one, and it is my guess that she is neotenically arrested in some sort of larval form. Clearly, her bloodline includes high elves, faeries, and probably dryads or nymps as well, it includes some monstrous plant creature as well, my guess being a neo-otyugh, explaining her understandable pathos at having the mind of a sensitive and intelligent young girl in a body destined to, or suited to, grow into a horrible, devouring monstrosity.

A Goblin Poem

Oh, dark of night, may you last forever
And may the screech of the owl and howl of the distant wolf
beckon me along under your skies
to surprise the humanfolk in their beds
and take all their valuable possessions as they sleep,
to set traps for their brave warriors and foul the water
of their wells.

Oh, deep caves, may you stretch on forever underneath
the earth, feed and shelter me with your sweet batmeats
and endless rivers full of blind fish, may i smell the rock
below my feet and feel your coolness forever.

Oh, goddess of evil, Thuzok, queen of all goblinkind,
may you reach out your hairy arms to me and wrap me in
your bosom, for if I die under the foot of the Rok or
by the arrow of a treacherous elf, I will come to you tonight
beloved one.

A Partial List of Extrasolar Monsters You Should Avoid

Cerambranian man-swallower
Necrotic spore-thrower
Arcturian brainweb worm
Eobrontops
introduced Requium sharks
pyro beetles
Delgonian Mind Leach
Nadrick, of Palain 7
Sargon
introduced venomous warp spider
howler
white tipped neoshark
pig destroyer
Red shafted impaler
creeping shadows
skull flies
zoospores
Xenomorph, variety seven
Xenomorph, variety six
parachuting doll demons
executioner fungi
fangstones
purple worms
doughballs
Mother
Solaris
Mersian
The Legion of Doom

Ophrys fuciflora Pollinator, Surrey (1)

dear ruby

it is tough to know what to make of a perfect day like this-they bloom like flowers and transform gradually into some kind of fruit. nothing is permanent though and there is a little sadness to the experience of such a thing because it cannot last forever, gradually taking shape on a playground with a stuffed bat and perhaps culminating on a patio at earwax, i saw a look in your eyes like you really understood what it means to love a person back, and for the rest of the day we were giggly and soft for each other and I did not know such a thing could exist were it not for you i never would. you tell a wonderful story and were a very good sport about the sandwich shop being closed, and i am glad you call me da da now.

Pterosaurs

The naked pictures of ex girlfriends and ex wives, they are somewhere in them, though only the negatives. as a friend said so many years ago, not to long after i shot some of those pictures, the negatives were all i had left of those people and i suppose that was true at the time, but now they are like geological eras buried under layer of sediment, the ecological character displacement of two species of mussels irrelevant after a mass extinction that uplifted the habitat into an eroding hillside. i suppose something fossiiferous is also evident in my relationship with this kindergarten era report card, so lifeshattering at the time, the M for most of the time rather than A for all of the time or N for never, appearing in every single box, both good and bad. as an adult, and a teacher with years rivaling those of my old teacher for the K era, that most cambrian of all of our eras in life, Tomotian even, i now realize that those Ms are probably the result of a time constraint on the teacher's part, perhaps a headache brought on by too many outside voices inside. From the eocene of my life I have pictures of my old house unrehabilitated, from the Cretaceous I have my wedding photos, but like fossil strata, there is a preservation bias here, and many wonderful years of my geologic history passed with barely a memento, and no photographs to speak of. my entire undergraduate college education is a ciper, save for a few strange writings, except that one taxa, the academic, uninteresting to me now, was preserved assiduously.

each of these moving events is a mass extinction of sorts...of possessions and also of the mementos we use to mark occasions. some of us need fewer mementos than others, but we tell a history of ourselves through them the same way crionoid skeletons mark the climate of a now extinct continental shelf, and like geological strata, they are irregularly obliterated at intervals, leaving us to guess at unknown common ancestors for my motivations to do things. some of them were beautiful and others were kind, some of them were lovers and some adversaries, my old analyses of Monet's Houses of Parliment is irrelevant to me, and my explorations into dungeon modules overstudied of late, though ignored till recently, and now i do a brief survey of some of these things that flowered like ancient Rhynia and flew about like pterosaurs, leaving traces of the strange continents of my past.

Gondwana

I think of distant Gondwanaland, its mighty glaciers and dark forests, its reefs and shoals and rolling dunes. I wish to return. To see the Glossopteris forests and once again feel the wind of the Tethys on my face, to gaze upon rivers teeming with labyrinthodonts and swim with dangerous ammonoids. to this strange lost place, its dragonflies the wingspan of an albatross, its tree trunks packed so thick a person could not squeeze between them, i can return in thought only, to a time before mammal and dinosaur alike, to a time when trilobites walked gingerly along the beast and the tully monster road the waves.