A couple of paleo'-related news items i wanted to pass along. First, a new confuiusornithid bird (avian theropod) from the Early Cretaceous Dabeigou Formation (131 Ma) in Fengning, Hebei Province, northern China. It has been named Eoconfuciusornis zhengi. This fossil is about 11 million years older than all previously known confuiusornithids, such as Confuciusornis sanctus, which are known from the famed Chinese Liaoning fossil deposits. In May 2001, I was fortunate enough to be at the American Museum in NYC, examining mosasaurs these, when an exquisite feathered specimen of the dromaeosaurid Sinornithosaurus millenii (a non-avian theropod, also from the Liaoning deposits) was briefly on display. In fact, there's even a rather fuzzy, low-rez photo of me with the specimen (I swear, my nose doesn't actually look like that):



Part and counterpart.


Also, paleontologists at Brigham Young University have discovered evidence of dermestid beetle larvae having fed on the carcass of a Late Jurassic-aged ornithopod dinosaur Camptosaurus. Cool stuff!

So, yes, Sirenia Digest #29 (April) will be going out to subscribers this evening. That said, there has been a last minute change to the line up this issue. It will actually be comprised of two pieces by me this month, instead of one — "Flotsam" and "Concerning Attrition and Severance." The latter is the especially "brutal" piece I was fretting over so much a few days back. It was originally intended for Sirenia Digest #30 (May). However, Sonya (sovay) needed more time on her new piece, and I absolutely cannot stand to rush another author. So, next month, #30 will include the new vignette by Sonya and my "Rappaccini's Dragon" (which I hope to finish writing tomorrow). Also, there will be no illustration from Vince this month, due to a death in his family. However, he'll be back next month. I hope that was something like coherent, because I am nothing like awake.

I received a very nice email yesterday from Mr. Robert Feldman of Manhattan, the sort that keeps me from taking a claw hammer to my skull:

Ms. Kiernan,

I write to you from the dank, dark, and foreboding depths of the New York Public Library (yes, we do have ghosts and they do wear roller-skates!) where I am currently cataloging the new edition of your Tales of Pain and Wonder. I've read Alabaster and your contributions to Wrong Things and am very much enjoying the stories in Tales.... The Salmagundi and Salammbo stories are truly blowing me away because I attended the Storm King School (1971-74) and am very familiar with that part of the Hudson Valley. Your Pollepel Island is obviously your take on Bannerman's Island with it's spooky ruined castle right near Storm King Mountain. I climbed that mountain many, many times, and slept out overnight there; it is very creepy around there and a perfect setting for your stories. The Hudson Valley has many many places like this, certainly Sleepy Hollow inspired Washington Irving to write his tale of the headless horseman. A bit further north there is an island off the town of Staatsburg where wicked old Uncle Aleister Crowley spent the summer of 1918, supposedly writing "Do what thou wilt"....etc...in red paint on the rocks for passing ships to see. Then there is the town of Tivoli, much gentrified now but an extremely haunting place in the '70's when I attended Bard College just down the road from there. Thanks for reminding me of these places; they have an atmosphere that's very misty and otherworldly and I have many memories of them. I am enjoying your work very much and am looking forward to reading more. I've cataloged at the Library for twenty years now but this is the first time I've contacted an author. This is a good day job for an old Punk Rock/Goth guitar player and the perks are I get to discover writers like you and Poppy Brite while I'm working. Best wishes and I'll be looking forward to reading more of your work.

It makes everything just a little bit easier to take, knowing there's a copy of Tales of Pain and Wonder at the central branch of the NYC Public Library, where once I climbed a stone lion. Thank you, Robert.

I did 1,189 words yesterday on the new story, the aforementioned "Rappaccini's Dragon." I'd really hoped to finish it this month, but the mess that was Monday made that impossible. Then I packed four very heavy boxes of books, and Spooky washed more dinosaurs (photos here in her LJ; humglum), including my set from the Royal Ontario Museum and the Boston Museum of Science. Just now, she was making a joke regarding "Bathosaurus," and I checked, because I figured there was surely a "Bathysaurus," and there is, though it's not a reptile, but the Deepsea Lizardfish, Bathysaurus ferox. Anyway, after the packing, we read over "Flotsam" and "Concerning Attrition and Severance" for the sake of line edits. I think we finished that up at 7 pm, then had leftover chili for dinner. I looked over the new National Geographic, which is largely devoted to China and the ecological catastrophe that is China (fully 50% of the Yellow River [Huang He] — the sixth longest in the world — has been declared "biologically dead").

More Millenium last night, episode #9 from Season 1, "Loin Like a Hunting Flame." And then the new episode of Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel. And why the hell do I write all this crap down? Some odd compulsion to record.

Tomorrow is Beltane. Already.

I really am loving the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds disc. After last years Grinderman solo project, I had a feeling they'd be headed back this direction after the low point of Nocturama (2003). Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! feels a lot more like Let Love In with smatterings of the earlier albums.

Spooky just told me that the foreclosure rate in the US has jumped 112%, on average more than doubling over the last year, with Nevada, Florida, and California being the hardest hit. Actually, the increase in California was 213%. And so it goes.

So, yesterday I was Distraction's bitch. You know Distraction, right? One of the nine of the Seven Deadly Sins of Writing. Anyway, I think I left myself wide open by getting up too late, then spending too much time on my LJ entry. After that, well, there was the lease for the new place in Providence (mailed off yesterday), and there was research I should have done days and days ago, and there was lunch, and there were questions about when the moving company is coming to give us an estimate, and there were hydrothermal vents on Mars, and there was news of the new Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album — Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! — and there was email, and there was a sudden obsession with figuring out which of my British Museum prehistoric animals had come from Philadelphia in 1986 and which from London in 1997. And so forth.

The research, for "Rappaccini's Dragon" (for Sirenia Digest #30) concerned tracking down the following quote from Robert Burton's very, very lengthy The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up (1621):

“Mithridates by often use, which Pliny wonders at, was able to drink poison; and a maid, as Curtius records, sent to Alexander from King Porus, was brought up with poison from her infancy.”

Now, I knew that bit about Porus (Parvataraja) sending the tainted woman to Alexander came from Burton, but finding my way through that maze to discover that, in fact, it came from the First Partition, Section 2, Member 2, Subsection 1, that was another matter. And I start reading, and I keep reading, even when I know Distraction has intervened and I am no longer seeking the relevant passage, but just reading. Oh, and on top of Robert Burton, there was also a related bit from the Hindu Pranas I needed to find, and that led down another avenue of Distraction. In the end, I wrote a meager 268 usable words yesterday.

Then I took a damn bath. I did not leave the house yesterday. Spooky made a pot of chili for dinner, and we watched the eleventh episode of Millennium. And then, despite AADD-afflicted Leetspeaking dumbasses who choose names like Ferretfart Frog (I'm not making that one up), I spent a few hours on Second Life, rping with Pontifex and Ardere. Imagine a film co-directed by Alex Proyas, David Lynch, and Joss Whedon, in which demons congregate in a deserted nightclub in 22nd Century Tokyo, throw in lots of blood and a trippy cyberlounge soundtrack, and there's the rp we did last night. I think the MMPA would have rated it Z. But, I was a good nixar and made it to bed by 2 ayem. I think I was asleep well before three. Go me.

One of the very few good things about packing is finding things you'd thought you'd lost. A few days ago, it was my copy of Animal Ghosts, a book I ordered from one of those Scholastic Books fliers back in 1973 or '74, when I was in fourth grade. The book was actually published in 1971 by Xerox Education Publications, and produced by Walt Disney. Its an odd mix of actual and fanciful paleontology and neobiology, with a smattering of cryptozoology thrown in. I think what made it one of my favourite books for several years were the better than average black-and-white illustrations — lots of old-school dinosaurs and such, often portrayed in rather dynamic (if sometimes absurd) situations. Anyway, yeah, book not lost. There are a couple of scans behind the cut (but, again, I warn you that they are LARGE):

( Animal Ghosts )

Also, Spooky just (humglum) posted her photos of the dinosaur-washing ordeal of Sunday, which you can see here. And yes, that is the magical Liopleurodon that can show us all the way to Candy Mountain (hiding behind the Brachiosaurus).

I don't know what I'd do without Paul Riddell (sclerotic_rings). He keeps me informed, as I squat here in my book-lined niche, afraid to go out into that wide, wacky world of wailing Xtians and Wal-Mart shoppers. For example, without him, I might have missed that Bill Stout (who I've not talked with since Dragon*Con several years back, when we had dinner together) is publishing Prehistoric Life Murals this October. Yay! But, then again, I also would not have to know about Rachel Donadio's article in the New York Times, which reports that even though the number of readers in the US keeps dropping (and don't get me started about illiteracy and functional illiteracy rates in the US), the number of people publishing books keeps going up. Well, skyrocketing, actually. Some 400,000 books were "published or distributed" in 2007 (up from 300,000 in 2006!), but, it should be noted, this figure includes print-on-demand and strictly self-published authors. As of this ayem (16:34 GMT [EST+5]), there are 303,957,569 people in the US (according to the US Census Bureau's "U.S. POPClock Projection,") so this means that slightly more than one tenth of one percent of the US population is being published. This despite "a recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts which found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year." And maybe it ought not, but somehow, to me, this just all doesn't add up. It freaks me out, even if I can't quite say why. To quote Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (quoted in the NYT article), "...given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.” It seems like everyone wants to talk and be heard, but very few want to listen. As Gabriel Zaid, author of So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, has said, "Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.”

Anyway, yesterday I wrote 1,174 words on "Rappaccini's Dragon." Not too bad. I also packed five boxes of books and gave my set of the British Museum prehistoric animals a much needed bath. They get dusty. This collection was assembled between 1984 and 1997, and includes specimens purchased in museum gift shops from Kansas to New York City to London — but I'm still missing the ultra-rare Dimetrodon. Spooky took a photo, because the whole thing seemed to amuse her. I think she's putting it in her LJ tomorrow.

I did not leave the house. We watched the ninth and tenth episodes from Season One of Millennium, and I want a T-shirt that reads, "Frank Black lived for your sins." I did a bunch of Second Life, which I'm actually trying hard to cut back on, if only because I'm growing bloody fucking puking sick of Leetspeak, "txttlking" morons with "names" like Ididyomama229 Potroast, Sexyslut Fishgold, and Restroom Janitor. But...the Museum's coming along quite nicely. In more annoying news, one of the teeth I cracked during the Great October Seizure has started aching again, despite the work done on it in February, and so now I have to contemplate having it extracted and recovering during the same month we have to ready for the move, while I also have to try to keep up with all my deadlines.

Today, we sign the lease on the Providence apartment.

Oh, something cool from Spooky's mother and father. They set up a infra-red camera with an motion sensor on their farm (in RI) to catch wildlife photos. They got the following of a red fox and her cubs (behind the cut; and warning, they are LARGE photos, as I didn't have time to edit them):

( Vuples vulpes fulva )

Somehow, this post seems horridly unfocused and meandersome, so I think it best stop now.

Postscript (4:38 p.m.) — Was I not just extolling the virtues of Mr. Riddell? Well, now I have him to thank for alerting me to this article at the Washington Post, reporting the discovery by NASA of possible remains of hydrothermal springs on the surface of Mars, within the boundaries of the equatorial Vernal Crater. Booya! You can get a glimpse of the photo in question here.

Since we returned from Rhode Island, I've not had much time to keep up with science news or pass along particularly interesting stories, but I just noticed this story at Scientific American's website, "Majority of Dinosaurs May Await Discovery." Personally, I call that a good enough reason to get out of the bed tomorrow morning.

Nothing like a very, very long dream in which I watch, among other things, Manhattan consumed in a roiling thermonuclear fireball to get me ready for the day ahead. Nothing in the whole wide world like waking up from apocalypse.

Yeah, well. Anyway...

Yesterday was sort of a mess. I did the Blog/LJ entry, then sat here, and sat here, and sat here, staring at the screen and the window and the books on the shelves, trying to find whatever it is that I'm going to write next. The next vignette for Sirenia Digest or the short story I hope to have time to write during the second half of June, before the arrival of the Daughter of Hounds CEM. At 3:00, I was still sitting here, still staring, and not one word had been written. So I wandered over to Wikipedia and spent the next four hours writing an article on the new dwarf macronarian sauropod, Europasaurus holgeri. Thanks to corucia, I had the article from Nature, so I could at least do a thorough job of it. But...

Well, it wasn't work. Never mind that distilling a three-page technical paper is considerably more difficult than my usual sort of writing, and never mind that I was at it nonstop until after seven. Because no one's paying me to write Wikipedia articles on dinosaurs. And if no one's paying me, I just can't seem to convince myself that it's work. And if it's not work, then, my conscience reminds me, it's really just goofing off. I believe in Wikipedia. I truly do. If I do say so myself, you will find no news article online annoucing the discovery of Europasaurus which is even half so informative and accurate as the piece I wrote yesterday. Once upon a time, layreaders and even avocational paleontologists and science nerds might have had to wait weeks or months to get detailed information on new taxa. Wikipedia is one of those things that redeems the white-noise chaos of the internet. It's a good thing to devote one's time to. It has the potential to make this ignorant world a little less so. But it's still not work. I find no end of irony in the fact that I would now feel far less guilty about not having written salable prose yesterday had I wasted the whole afternoon sitting here staring at the screen of my iBook and the tree outside my window and the books on the shelves instead of doing the useful and worthwhile thing which I did instead. Because one thing is "work" and one thing isn't.

Tiddley frelling pom.

Spooky made delicious vegetarian Indian food for dinner, and then we managed to get in a decent walk at twilight. No bats, and not many lightning bugs. And then we read and read and read, because I needed to fill my head with words. And then I did some editing on the aforementioned Europasaurus article and added two images. By then it was long after midnight, and I lay on the sofa and watched the middle part of Jackson's King Kong, all the Skull Island stuff, because having filled my head with words, I needed to fill my eyes with something lush, and that primordial "green hell" was just exactly what I craved. Kong and giant insects and all those marvelous neverwere dinosaurs, Vastatosaurus and Ferrucutus and Venatosaurus and those grand retro sauropods — "Brontosaurus," he calls them. Oh, and also Foetodon and the skin-birds. But I digress. I'm very, very good at digressing, especially when I'm only half awake and the nightmares still seem more real that the daylight on the floorboards.

Roger Ebert loved The Proposition as much as I did. He seems hit or miss to me these days, but this time I think he's spot on. I would have said a lot of what he said, if I were any good at writing movie reviews. And here's the official website for the film again.

By the way, Spooky has a birthday coming up on the 24th, two weeks from tomorrow, and she also has a wishlist. You know, for kids.

I suppose I'm duty bound to mention that the Senate killed President Asshole's latest attempt to write bigotry into the Constitution. I mean, since I brought it up the other day. I love this quote from Senator Sam Brownback, regarding the GOP's intention to keep pushing for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage — "We're making progress, and we're not going to stop until marriage between a man and a woman is protected...protected in the courts, protected in the Constitution, but most of all, protected for the people and for the future of our children in this society." Er...excuse me, but protected from what? No, really. Do these hysterical bigots actually believe, in their heart of hearts, that gays and lesbians could somehow make a bigger farce of the "sacred instuition" of marriage than heterosexuals have already managed to do? Do they think, perhaps, that legal marriages between gays will so repulse poor, unprotected heterosexual couples that they all decide to live in sin, rather than risk being mistaken for queers by getting married? I just can't figure it out.

And right now, I'd rather not try. Coffee, please and thank you...