A couple of things I missed in this morning's monster of a post. First, Spooky's father, Dr. Richard Pollnac (Professor of Anthropology and Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island) will be joining Chip Barber (Environmental Officer, U.S. Agency for International Development) for a live webcast entitled "Troubled Waters: Anticipating, Preventing, and Resolving Conflict Around Fisheries." It's being broadcast from Washington, DC, but you can watch it here (May 15, 2008, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m., EST). The talk will focus on "...the interactions between demographics, environmental stress, livelihoods, and conflict in the context of fisheries, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia." Spooky's dad has been conducting field studies of fisheries worldwide since the 1960s, from Lake Victoria (Uganda) to Alaska to Vietnam to Thailand to Indonesia to...well, all over.

On a somewhat related note, there's an article at the "ProTraveller" website, "20 Cities, Islands & Countries Threatened By Global Warming." On the one hand, well, it does call attention to particular treasures that are being and will be lost to global warming (the Galapagos Islands, Manhattan, London, Jakarta, Glacier National Park, the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, etc.). On the other hand, I think that it somehow manages to miss the point. Yes, all these sites are indeed endangered, but that's only because the seas are rising worldwide, meaning all coastlines, everywhere, will experience drastic change during this century with even the lowest estimates of sea-level rise. Every inch of coastline, no exceptions. So, spotlighting these twenty sites, and lines like "You might want to book a trip to see some of them before it's too late!" just comes off a wee bit glib. I mean, species face extinction, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced, economies will tumble, and the very face of the globe will change...and we'll lose all these sweet vacation spots. Er...yeah.

Meanwhile, new figures published by the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, based on ongoing studies at Hawaii's Mount Loa volcano, indicate that atmospheric CO2 levels have now risen to 387 parts per million, the highest in 650,000 years. To put that in perspective, the earliest-known fossils that can be referred to Homo sapiens sapiens only date back a paltry 195,000 years (Richard Leakey's "Omo remains" from the Omo National Park in Ethiopia). If we go back 650ka, we reach the Middle Pleistocene, a time when Homo sapiens sapiens had yet to evolve (though remains of another subspecies, Homo sapiens idaltu, the first recognizably "modern" humans, and possibly the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens sapiens, have been recovered from strata that old).

350.org.

Behind the storms of Saturday night and Sunday morning came an enormous wind. The breath of the sky, blowing across Atlanta. Cooler weather, too. A low in the forties (F) last night, and only the low seventies today. Warmer tomorrow. But this wind is impressive, and there were gusts last night to 35 mph. (or 56.32 kph). Today, it's still blowing strong.

And speaking of that which blows...or sucks...or both...

Tomorrow, I have to be in Birmingham for a noon dental appointment (that's my one pm), which means leaving the house by ten ayem, at the latest. And maybe this molar, the one that was cracked in the Great Seizure of October '07, will be pulled, and maybe it won't be. Hopefully, we'll be back in Atlanta before sunset. However, if I return one more tooth shy, I'll be out of commission for at least a couple of days, which means no writing and no packing. We only have 15 days until we go back to Birmingham to get everything that's in storage there (and has been since November 2002) and only 18 days until the move to Providence. There is not time for mouth trauma, but that means nothing to how things will be.

Yesterday...a very bad day. But, and still, we read through all that has been written on Chapter One of The Red Tree. It's better than I recall. Maybe I can get back to work on the chapter late this week, after the dentist. That's all the writing-work there was to yesterday. I had a very hot bath. We packed and packed and packed, mostly books. I had to order a new battery for my iBook ($139.02, so ouch), and Spooky had to reserve the U-Haul truck for the 27th. About six pm, I left the house and walked to (ugh) Starbuck's, because our landlord needed to show the place to a prospective tenant. I sat and drank, overpriced mediocre coffee and finished Chris Beard's book on the origin of anthropoids. A rather good last chapter, largely devoted to the problem of Henry Fairfield Osborn's racism and also to the ongoing issue of "pithecophobia"* An hour later, I walked home again, to learn that the prospective tenant never fucking showed, so I'd exiled myself to an hour at Starbuck's for naught. After dinner, more packing, until, finally, I begged Spooky for a comfort movie, so we watched Serenity again. I was in bed by three, a little late, but there you go. Seven hours sleep.

As for today, I expect I'll wash my hair, then spend the rest of it working on the Palaeozoic Museum in New Babbage and, well, packing. Only about half the books in my office are boxed. There's no chance I'll get any writing done today, between the distractions and the impending dentistry, and I'm not up to that sort of futility — sitting here, struggling to write through the chaos. And I need to drop Vince an email about Sirenia Digest #30. That's a tiny smidge of work, I suppose.

Yesterday, jtglover asked me, "What do you think is your best story? Top three?" And I said I'd think about it and post a reply today. It's damned difficult, and the list changes so frequently. But right now, I'd say they are:

1. "Houses Under the Sea" (from Thrillers II, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2007; to be reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Vol. 19).

2. "La Peau Verte" (from To Charles Fort, With Love, Subterranean Press, 2005).

3. "In View of Nothing" (Sirenia Digest #16, March 2007; to be reprinted in A is for Alien)

I would also list, among my "best" short stories, "The Ape's Wife,", "The Steam Dancer," "Andromeda Among the Stones," "The Road of Pins," "Riding the White Bull," "A Season of Broken Dolls,", and "So Runs the World Away." Your mileage will vary, as this is a terribly subjective question. And there are several stories I feel guilty for not including. Anyway, Herr Ornithorhynchus just showed up with my coffee, steamy hot and not mediocre, so I shall wrap this up.

* A psychological disorder that paleontologist William King Gregory sardonically "discovered" to account for those suffering from an irrational fear of apes and monkeys, stemming from the truth of humanity's own common ancestry with them ("Two views of the origin of man," 1927; Science 65: 601-5). The term derives from the Greek (pithekos ape + phobos fear). Sadly, it's probably as common now as it was is Gregory's day. Hence, creationism and its gussied-up stepchild, "intelligent" design.

And yesterday was the sort of "day off" that I dread, the usual sort. Truthfully, I should have had the good sense to leave the house, go to Fernbank or the Zoo in Grant Park or maybe the Botanical Gardens...anywhere. In fact, I didn't step outside the house all damn day. I thought I had a plan, but it spiraled into something else, which, as I have said, is the usual way of things. I could neither rest nor keep my mind occupied, and the frustration mounted, the frustration and the boredom.

High points of yesterday: I read Chapter 9 of Chris Beard's book on anthropoid origins (Chapter 9, "Resurrecting the Ghost"). The chapter was mainly concerned with Beard's fieldwork in the Eocene beds along the banks of China's Yellow River (Huáng Hé), between 1994-1997, before the strata were flooded by construction of one of the nation's many idiotically short-sighted hydroelectric dam projects. I packed only two boxes.

And speaking of the packing of the second box, I shall now offer another unsolicited testimony to the durability of Apple computers. Somehow, I tangled my ankle in the power cord of my seven-year-old iBook last night, pulled it off the desk, and it fell three feet to a hardwood floor. And besides a bent jack on the yo-yo power adapter thingy — which is not truly a part of the actual computer — no apparent damage was done. It's only my secondary computer at this point, as I now work on the iMac, but it was still a moment of sheer fucking horror, watching it crash to the floor. I assumed the worst. I was amazed. Thank you, Apple.

Oh, but that was not a high point. Uhm. There must have been others. We watched two more episodes from Season One of Millennium ("Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions" and "Broken World"). I built a sort of homage to Dr. Suess' McElligot's Pool behind my Abney Park Laboratory (in Second Life). To quote the message I posted to the New Babbage forum (written, of course, as Prof. Nishi):

"The Abney Park Well:

While trying to recalibrate a portion of the lateral array of my temporal-spatial teleportation beam, I confess that I accidentally confused the X and Z axes, and, thereby, vaporized a vertical shaft of masonry and bedrock just behind the laboratory. The width of the vacated area is approximately 4.2 metres in diameter, with a depth of some 100 metres. The accident has unexpectedly tapped into some subterranean extension of the Mare Verne, creating an Artesian well (though the salinity of the water renders it unpotable). However, initial investigations indicate that the pool is inhabited by a number of species of marine life, including fish of various sorts. All those curious are invited to visit the pool (which, for the sake of public safety, I have walled in) and fish there. I have named the pool in honour of that great, lately deceased New Babbage ichthyologist, Dr. Theodor Geisel McElligot. No swimming, please. Study of this new hydrological feature will continue..."

Spooky (Artemisia) did most of the actual work. I did the design. And yes, you can really fish there, and really catch fish. I also made a few new LJ icons, inspired by what I'd written about Panthalassa yesterday. The one that I'm using today is, of course, a view of North America during the Late Creaceous, with the Mississippi Embayment and the Western Interior Seaway very prominent. I also did one of Pangaea, and one of a Tyrannosaurus rex, and a William Stout painting of a trilobite. I did a little work on the Palaeozoic Museum in New Babbage, adding another of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins paintings and two lithographs of Archaeopteryx. That was the best of yesterday.

Today, we make corrections to the manuscript of A is for Alien, which came back to me from sovay and Massachusetts on Friday.

And here, a mere 21 days remain until Birthday No. -04. Shudder. Belatedly, I'm taking a cue from docbrite and faustfatale, and declaring the whole month of May to be my Royal Birthday Month. So, if you are given to such things, here's my Amazon wish list. Thank you. You wouldn't think a world could get this much more messed up in only -04 years, but you'd be wrong.

I want to write more about Panthalassa — particularly about how one can simultaneously be an atheist and a polytheist, and how one of the things that, increasingly, disturbs me about "orthodox" Wicca ("Gardnerian") is that it is drifting ever nearer a default monotheism, a sort of surrogate Xtianity where the tripartite goddess stands in for Jesus/"God"/the Holy Spirit (maybe chuck the Virgin Mary in there as a "female" mask), and any number of Panthalassa-related issues. But this is getting long. I'll save it for tomorrow, instead.

I've been writing this new story to Tom Waits. Tom Waits and PJ Harvey. Mostly, I've been writing the new story to this song from Waits' Swordfishtrombones (1983):

Rattle Big Black Bones
in the danger zone
there's a rumblin' groan
down below
there's a big dark town
it's a place I've found
there's a world going on
UNDERGROUND
they're alive, they're awake
while the rest of the world is asleep
below the mine shaft roads
it will all unfold
there's a world going on
UNDERGROUND
all the roots hang down
swing from town to town
they are marching around
down under your boots
all the trucks unload
beyond the gopher holes
there's a world going on
UNDERGROUND

Also, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that chimpanzees are more derived than humans, relative to their common ancestor. You can read more here: "Chimps are ahead of humans in the great evolutionary race." Of course, evolution's not actually a "race," and so no one is actually "ahead" of anyone else, and this is going to lead to all sorts of idiotic confusion, but I've learned you can only fairly expect so much of journalists.