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.'”

***

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.

I'm guest of honor at The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, called ICFA for short.

My con schedule looks like this:

3/16: Wednesday evening. Arrive.

3/17: Thursday. Noon, a lunchtime keynote talk on writing, “Seek the Gnarl!”. I expect there to be a small amount of overlap with my Readercon 2003 talk. I'll write something new up before then, and eventually post it.

3/18: Friday. In the afternoon, a science talk on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. Here's a preliminary Power Point of the science talk. And from 4 – 5, a panel on “The Transrealist Writers” with Gary Wolfe, Damien Broderick, Peter Straub, John Clute, Kelly Link and John Crowley. In connection with this topic, see my Transrealist Manifesto from the early 1980s.

3/19: Saturday. 10:30 – 11:30, panel on “Cyberpunk and Humanism” with Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Brian Aldiss, and David Hartwell. And 1 – 2, a reading from Frek and the Elixir.

3/20: Sunday. Go to the beach.

Back in 1978 we lived in Heidelberg for two years, and when we came home to pick up our stuff from a warehouse in Louisville, we heard the Beatles song, “Back in the USSR” on the radio in a Winn-Dixie parking lot. Lennon [Whoops, reader Paul Reiners tells me it was McCartney] has this great, authoritative, Elvis-like voice in that song, “You don’t know how lucky you are boy, back in the, back in the, back in the USSR.”

Mutatis mutandis, lucky to be back in California. It rained a lot while we were gone. On the cut bank above the road, each pebble has a rain-shadow beneath itself in the sandy dirt.

It’s more or less spring now. There’s this one vine we always notice, it’s a wild cucumber that eventually bears fruits that look like spiky green ball-sacks, like chestnut pods.

The tendrils are wonderfully curly. Reminds me of Bernoulli’s spiral, and a slogan I often inscribe in the sand at the beach, “EADEM MUTATA RESURGO”, which is Latin for “The Same, Yet Changed, I Re-arise.” The mathematician James Bernoulli (1655-1705) had this inscribed on his tombstone in Basel along with a picture of the logarithmic spiral. I mention this in Frek. The plant, the same yet changed, rearises is the same spot each spring. Springs forth, bearing springs.

Beautiful nature, the same forms occurring over and over. The same computation classes.

The flow of energy in a growing plant is in some ways like the flow along a candle flame.

As above, so below.

One reason I’m going all mysto here is to get my mind off all the discouraging speculations I read in the Sunday Times yesterday about the Chimp's plans for the next four years.

Today’s Martin Luther King’s birthday, and I’m hearing him on the radio, admiring the power of his approach: non-violent protests against unjust oppression. I’m visualizing immense non-violent protests over the impending attacks upon the common people, maybe that could work.