Birds Before The Storm

At 3:30 on Saturday, March 13th I’ll be speaking about anarchism and fiction at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco. I hope that folks can make it out! I’ll be doing a slightly different talk than I did on my tour, too, for folks who’ve already seen me talk about the subject.

Thanks, Elevator!

Q: What’s the difference between boogers and tofurkey?
A: No one eats tofurkey.

thanks, Riot Joke!

My good friend Isis started a blog recently, Patterns In The Void. Isis is one of the stranger and more interesting folks that I know, and their blog covers things like the 13 tiers of lying and the esoteric sexual symbology of feral children. They’re currently writing a book about anarcho-mysticist sexuality and are obsessed with languages and theoretical physics. Good stuff.

I’m excited to say that an interview with myself (as well as my co-conspirator Libby Bulloff) will be appearing in Steampunk Reloaded, the second SteamPunk Anthology edited by the marvelous Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. It’ll be out in October, and it looks to be as good as the first one (which was completely awesome).

A bit of my molar came out just now while I was eating a waffle. Doesn’t hurt, not yet. I feel like, somehow, this makes me a little closer to Poltics Is Not A Banana with its constant references to “our rotting teeth.”

In what is essentially a textbook case of scapegoating, Fish & Wildlife have begun this years round of sea lion killing. For background about the whole thing, there’s an ORC article from two years ago that sums up the problem (the short version is: there’s a dam in the river that kills salmon, and the fish pool up at the base of it, so sea lions hang out at the base to hunt, but people get upset because they want to raise fishing quotas and can’t because the sea lions are eating some tiny percentage of the fish). Anyhow, In Defense of Animals set up a protest the day after the first killing of the season. We drove up to Bonneville Dam and had ourselves a little media spectacle of a protest. What matters, though, is a continued presence, to let people know that yes, folks are watching this despicable act.

I also got to see a fish ladder in person, and see some awesomely pretty fish. More pictures after the break.
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(click on image for poster-size pdf).

I got an email from the Chapel Hill Prison Books Collective with this poster, that goes over a few political prisoners with birthdays in march. The text on the poster is as follows:
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So, they’ve started shooting looters in the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake. They admit right in the first sentence: “One man was shot and killed and some 160 arrested as troops tried to stop the looting of food and other goods during an overnight curfew.”

The looters are after food, first and foremost. The army and the police should be helping the looters recover and distribute food. This is capitalism and government at their absolute and simplest worst. They did it in New Orleans as well. Honestly: how can anyone think that government is a good idea? Here’s the time that the idea of centralized governance seems best, helping respond to a crisis, yet instead of helping, they are protecting their hegemony and, well, killing people who are trying to survive.

I’ve been continuing to document the Palomar Pipeline and its course through the public lands of Oregon. This time, I went out to the Solo Timber Sale (timber sales have funny names like “Straw Devil”, “Biscuit”, and, in this case, “Solo”). It was a controversial timber sale that’s been fought for by environmentalists and won. Tree sits were erected, rare lichens were found, and the courts and the public reached the conclusion that it ought not be logged. But, of course, pipelines are immune to all those pesky environmental restrictions, so they’re planning on punching right through this isolated, beautiful bit of old growth forest. A friend and I went up to explore, and I took my sturdy minivan on sketchy icy roads that of course I probably ought not have.

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