Yesterday we went to a tea party given by some of Sylvia's co-workers and friends. I dressed up like a professor — I'm thinking Alan Turing in the faculty locker-room here.

And I drank a lot of tea. (Picture from a Celestial Seasonings refrigerator magnet — every object is bloggable!)

I switched from coffee to tea about a year ago, and have come to really enjoy it. Hard to get a good cup in a restaurant, obviously Lipton's has nothing to do with it, but even if you get the good bags, its tricky having the right amount and temperature of water. Making tea is a somewhat alchemical process. But when you get it right you can kind of taste the caffeine. It tastes like electricity.

I get that line from a scene in William J. Craddock's 1960s San Jose novel, Be Not Content, where they're eating brownies with LSD in them and one of the characters named Baxter says he can taste the acid, it tastes like electricity, and the narrator remarks, “We should haver realized this was a bad sign,” and then Baxter goes into a hideous freakout. I can't find the book right now, it's somewhere in my house, I paid a pretty penny to get a used copy last year. Well, when it turns up, I'll blog it.

And now back to revising The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

Ever since this summer, my novel Master of Space and Time has been under option for a movie directed by Michel Gondry starring Jack Black. This book had nice covers in both the hardback edition

and paperback editions.

It's out of print now, but a new edition with yet another great cover will be out soon from Thunder's Mouth Press, an Avalon imprint.

The movie is by no means a done deal; neither my agent Marty Shapiro nor I have heard anything new about it for months. But I’m thinking of it today because I got a link to Charles Eicher’s blog where he’s ruminating about the possible deal and speculating about my thoughts, it was flattering, but it felt odd reading it.

Meanwhile I’m laboring on a revision of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I though it was done, but now after setting it aside for two months and coming back to it, I’m seeing it needs a lot of polish, and am a little uptight about how much work I have left.

Today Rudy, Jr., and his friend Penny stopped by, along with Rudy’s dog Slug. Penny rented a van to move some of her stuff. I love how the flash make’s Slug’s eyes look.

This pose of Slug’s is called Prairie Dog.

Sylvia and I went down to the annual Los Gatos Christmas Parade, a cozy event where pretty much anyone who wants to can form a group and march or drive down the main street.

Some guys who call themselves the Los Gatos Camel Herders — I think it's that old Mason/Shriner thing of enjoying dressing up in Eastern garb, in other words, these guys are probably not Moslems. Do people in the mid East ever have parades where they dress up like Westerners?

The Bubble Angels under I forget what aegis.

Los Gatos Meats, which is place that will butcher up your deer meat for you, had a float with some reindeer on it, reminding me of those pigs in chef’s hats that you see all over the South. I wrote a story called “The Men In The Back Room At The Country Club,” about a guy who becomes a kind of pig-chef, cooking humans for aliens, and it is supposed to appear in Infinite Matrix some day.

And some born-again types, even in yup Los Gatos. I looked up John 3:16 to see if it has anything to do with camping, but no, it doesn’t. Would you go in this tent?

Is a minister who pressures his flock to vote for an anti-human regime really any different from a deer who leads his fellows into a slaughterhouse? Budda-boomp.

Aw, I promised myself I wouldn't talk about politics in here, and just listen to me. Maybe the minister of the church with this tent-float is a really good guy, you never know. And certainly it's nice to have God in your heart, yes. But, look, when I go camping, I want trees and streams. Nature is, after all, the cosmic ur-religion, all on her own. Hail Gaia!

Today’s big news is that my San Jose State University computer science student Harry Fu has gotten three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky-scroll cellular automata (3D BZ CAs for short) working for his Master’s degree writing project.

Way to go, Harry. Nobody’s ever seen three-dimensional CAs before except on supercomputers or using special hardware, especially not 3D BZ CAs, and our man Fu has these mofos working as a Java applet running Open GL!!!

Note the spontaneously forming scrolls. The first 3D BZ CA picture shows a 3D version of the Hodgepodge Rule, and this one is the 3D Winfree Rule.

Gnarly much? Live mushrooms, vortices, jellyfish.

So how can you, too, run Fu’s applet? I’ve updated these links on March 12, 2011. You can go to Fu’s Welcome to CA 3D page for an overview.

And then proceed to o Harry Fu’s CA3D download page, which walks you throug three steps

(1) Make sure you have the latest and greatest version of Java, this would be version 6 today. Anyway, go and get the JRE (Runtime Environment) for your Mac or Windows system. You don't need the full developer’s kit, just the JRE.

(2) Get JOGL (Java bindings for Open GL).

(3) Run Fu’s application, ca3D.jar.

Geekin’ OUT! And lovin’ it. You realize, of course, that your brain is a 3D BZ CA?

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What else I did yesterday.

After meeting with Fu, I walked over to downtown San Ho and skated on this cute rink beneath the palms right beside the Fairmont.

And then I went into the ADMISSION FREE San Jose Art Museum. Frankly, the art there is more interesting to me than anything I saw in Milano. I think spending so much psychic time with Peter Bruegel cured me of feeling like I have to care about religious art at all anymore. But that’s another topic.

Is this great, or what? It’s “Desire for the Other” by Brian Goggin, also the creator of that amazing Defenestration building in San Francisco at Sixth and Howard, with all the furniture jumping out the windows. In this piece we see an airport-lounge-style sofa devouring a wing-back armchair. Note the bulge of its last meal in its gut.

This last picture shows a piece by Tony Oursler, a really slimy looking object, it’s a curvy fiberglass shape with a video of eyes and mouth projected onto it, the mouth is babbling. In general I despise art that makes noise in a museum, as IMHO it’s unfairly detracting from the many silent works here. But other than being noisy, this is a really cool work.

Of course it would be gnarlier if it used 3D BZ CAs. If they ever make a movie of one my WARE books, I really hope they use 3D BZ CA projections for the bodies of the boppers.

Turns out Kenny’s reading from Never Coming To A Theater Near You was on Tuesday, not Monday.

Here's a picture of Kenny and me, taken by his wife Patty Williams, a professional photographer (it shows). We were leaning in the back doorway of a pizza parlor; we're lit by pizza light.

Earlier in the day I drove down to Santa Cruz early and went to Four Mile Beach alone.

So far as I’m concerned, this is the gate to paradise. Right off the parking lot there on Route One, four miles north of the last traffic light in Santa Cruz.

I think this is a godwit. It’s cool how when you zoom,the sun reflections make those stars.

The surfers work the north end of Four Mile Beach, and down at the south end there’s a collapsed natural bridge. To me this is a real power spot, feels like a million miles from anywhere. As I recorded in my writing notes for Frek and the Elixir, I wrote “EADEM MUTATA RESURGO” on the sand here, and then an alien cuttlefish writhed out, and then I came here again a day or two after 9/11 and thought about that saying some more.

It does get a little lonely out here; this is my pet duck.

And my closest friend.

I met Kenny and his wife Patty at the Union Coffee Shop, then went over to the Capitola Book Cafe to see him do his presentation. He was great, mostly answered questions, it’s a pleasure to hear his voice. He does movie reviews on NPR, so is fairly well known now, there was a good crowd.

Forty freaking years since I roomed with this guy. To me, he's cuter than ever.

Correction: I meant to say that the woman on Zappa's Joe’s Garage was Dale Bozzio, onetime Playboy bunny, former wife of Zappa’s drummer Terry Bozzio. Dale was also in her own band, Missing Persons. Her voice on Joe’s Garage is unbelievably cute.