I've been working on Mathematicians in Love the last couple of weeks and it's going well.

I wrote a funny scene yesterday. The narrator Bela is meeting up with his girlfriend Alma and her parents outside the Greek Theater at UC Berkeley right after Alma's commencement ceremenony. Alma's parents are from Santa Cruz…

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“This is my friend Bela,” said Alma. “And these are my parents Gary and Sarah. Bela and his friend Paul have been letting me live in their apartment.”

“Yo,” said Gary Ziff. He had long curly hair hanging down like a welcome mat, a walrus mustache, and a Hawaiian shirt. I made him for a parrot head. Sure enough he lit up a joint, right there on the street.

“Gary,” said Alma. She called her parents by their first names. She looked very cute in her white graduation robe and mortar-board, which set off her dark eyes and intense features.

“Hey, we’re in Berkeley,” said Gary. “This is a party town. I used to come up here in high-school and freakin’ run wild. Want a hit, Bela?”

I waved him off. I was feeling buzzed enough from the wine, the emotions, and the weeks of over-mathing.

“I’ll shotgun you,” said Gary, rounding his lips and blowing a stream of smoke my way. “It’s my special Ziff-zone mix. I put termite powder in it.” I accidentally caught a pungent whiff and felt instantly dizzy. “Doin’ my job,” added Gary. “I’m an exterminator.”

“Make him stop, Sarah,” said Alma.

Sarah Ziff was a stocky woman with a short ponytail, her hair black with gray at the roots. She had a sweet doughy face behind her pointy black cats-eye shades. But now, hearing Alma’s distress, her mouth formed a fierce expression.

“Don’t. Ruin. The day,” she said to Gary, drawing back her lips to reveal teeth like corn kernels. She clamped her hand onto his shoulder and gave him a shake with each word.

“Whoah,” said Gary. He took a few steps back, did one more toke, then pinched out his joint and dropped the roach in his pocket. “Bring the band down behind me, boys.”

“I think it’s time to feed him,” said Sarah, folding her expression into sweetness again.

In case any of you don't know about it, be sure and check out “Wag”'s site on the The First Twins. There are insane complex comment threads on the blog. He's getting, like, a hundred thousand hits a day.

And the enterprise has the good effect of somewhat humanizing the First Family, after all, it feels better to think of them that way.

This image of Alien Jenna was created by Paul Mavrides to illustrate an SF story that Rudy and Rudy wrote for Infinite Matrix: Jenna and Me.

Today is Inauguration day, a very dark time in our country's history. Keep the faith, stay strong, don't give in. We have the right to say no to a corrupt and elitist government. We owe no fealty to a leader who behaves as if he hates us.

Here's the chimp poster once again, this time in larger format. Click the image for a larger view.

Resist.

You are not alone.

I just got the occasionally appearing and very funny zine “Nice Distinctions,” from Arthur Hlavaty, who for years called the zine “The Dillinger Relic.”

It's hard to even keep up a paper zine anymore, what with the blog form edging it out. Arthur has a blog as well, maintained with a fairly high-level and fanatical amount of bells and whistles, e.g. links to friends, multiple daily posts, etc. In some sense the zine was the precursor of the blog.

Arthur was a junior when I was a freshman at Swarthmore College. He was 21, and he used to be willing to buy liquor for freshman such as me, which meant that I got to know him a little. I was impressed with how worldly and degenerate he seemed. How un-preppy. How seedy and iconoclastic. How recklessly funny.

Once in an early “Dillinger's Relic,” Arthur wrote something like, “I'm imagining myself at the pearly gates, and Saint Peter asks me what I did for science-fiction, and I say, 'I bought booze for Rudy Rucker.' And St. Peter says, 'But he wrote anyway.'”

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Speaking of Arthur vis-a-vis the freshmen, I found an amazing 11-frame animated gif of a Conus magus cone shell eating an innocent gobie fish.

That's the siphon on top, and the proboscis on the bottom. Apparantly the proboscis harpoons the fish with a detatchable poison tooth, then reels it in, with the proboscis opening up like a tunnel to another demention.

For full information, image credits, and a downloadable Quicktime movie, see the kickass Melbourne Conotoxins website.