En Garde!

It is spring and apparently it is rutting season among the Zebra doves.



And I do mean rutting. They do not seem to behave exactly like your common or garden pigeon. That is the females seem to be about just as oblivious as pigeons, that is one often seems what I can only assume are the males (its much harder to tell than with pigeons, the males do not have any iridescence like the pigeon) bobbing and bowing to the females cooing charmingly and the females wandering off in the usual manner leaving a rather deflated male behind. I have NEVER witnessed any intercourse between Zebra doves. I can only assume it occurs privately given the Hitchcockian quantities despite the vast population of feral cats in Honolulu and the two or three squabs I've seen huddling in the undergrowth which also leads me to assume they are ground nesting birds.

Recently however the males have begun rutting. Two birds begin bobbing and bowing to each other, cooing of course, in a matter indistinguishable from the more common amorous advances except in its mirrored reciprocation in the party of the second part, I assume another male. The two birds advance and retreat, bobbing and cooing the whole time, crabwise towards each other sometimes jumping into the air and scrabbling and eventually one flies away or they both seem to loose interest.

I could of course have the whole thing backwards. Perhaps the former behavior is aggressive and the latter amorous. I could look it up but I much prefer observation of the Zebra dove to fact. They're odd little birds and I am astonished they haven't been all eaten or run over by now.

"Mother Night!"

Customers... Some people will never be satisfied. You can shake Tinkerbell over that latte till her ass turns blue and the cup starts floating, you can drone on about "mother night" till your hearts content and send you little goblin minions out to butcher heard of unicorns, someone's gonna complain that they wanted that fairy dust latte iced or a free range organic unicorn burger.

We keep having people come in an complain that we carry meat. "You're a health food store! How can you call yourself a health food store if you carry MEAT!?"

It is free range organic meat, but apparently good little hippies don't think the rest of us should have healthy meat. Its veggies or processed crap, you're with us or against us!

Also carob is the devil.

Detail

I find it intriguing the way my brain seems to operate. While in lucid dream state my brain repeats dream sequences with increasing detail, like watching a film clip over and over noticing the details. This is also the way I A) learn my lines and B) writes sequences for my comic.

At least I'm consistant.

Scale

There is a wonderful and infinitely thrilling sense of vertigo that goes along with science. The mind boggling numbers, the impossible to comprehend tracks of space not only in the macro universe but also the micro is amazing. It scares the shit out of a lot of people who's reaction is to feel insignificant or immaterial. They seem to feel the vastness of space only serves to make them smaller. In the words of Richard Dawkins, "some people find this thought disturbing, I find the reality thrilling."

There was a wonderful exhibit at the natural history museum in Boston. Though it might have been the science museum, in fact it probably was. The exhibit consisted of a big room. In the center of the room was a giant globe, at least two stories high, ringed by a walk way. Set on displays along the walk way were plagues and objects, from the size of a grain of sand up through a beach ball. Each plaque read with a note on the comparative size of the object to the giant sphere if the object where A and the sphere B. For instance a pingpong ball might be labeled "if the sphere is jupiter this is the earth." From the macro to the micro, comparing the ball to a microbe and the sphere to a drop of water and such. I remember this being the most delightful exhibit in the museum as it allowed the mind to venture into that terrifying and thrilling realm of imaginary SCALE!

More thrilling even than the vastness of space or the constant interchange of atoms, I think, is the capacity for the human mind to comprehend and hold even a fraction of the information, or to infer, from almost nothing, things we can not even see! The capacity for the human mind to expostulate and imagine and THINK.