Summer Solstice 2010

Hot now in Providence. Summer arrived (again) a couple of days back, and here in the House, we are sweltering. Dr. Muñoz tries to keep us coolerated, but he is such a very small droid and it's such a very large old House. But, still, I am glad for the heat. All that rain and belated March was wearing me more ragged than my usual raggedness.

And here it is Litha, so this evening we'll go down to the sea. It won't be anything elaborate, but at least it will be the sea. I have to admit, I find myself reluctant to go to the shore. And I know it has something to do with what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and with my own complicity in that horror. When the sea is your goddess (even if she is a nonconscious goddess) and your species continues to befoul her at every turn, slowly transforming her into a corrupted morass of petrochemicals and floating plastic debris and dead zones and sewage and fertilizer runoff, the shame has to be embraced, not denied. The sea will, in time, when humans have gone, cleanse herself, but that will be a long, long age from now.

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For the past two days I've been working on a new piece for Sirenia Digest, "Tidal Forces." It actually has nothing much to do with the sea, despite the title. I refer here to other tidal forces. More sorts than one, really. Saturday, I wrote 1,051 words, and another 1,005 yesterday. And yesterday I read it to Spooky, and she likes it.

Night before last, we watched Rowan Woods' Little Fish (2005). It's a very, very good film, though it's also a hard film to watch. Cate Blanchett is excellent, but Hugo Weaving steals the show in what might be his finest performance that I've seen so far. I haven't been reading much, mostly comics and paleontology stuff.

Spooky's begun a new round of eBay auctions, if you'd be so kind as to have a look. Thanks.

And a very happy birthday to faustfatale!

I need to wrap this up and get to work. But I did want to mention that the demolition of the old overpass, where Point Street becomes Wickenden (or thereabouts), has resumed. I noticed a few nights back. Last night, on the way to the market for dinner, I got a couple of photographs of what remains of the southside of the mural (behind the cut):

( 20 June 2010 )

BP "burning sea turtles alive."

I retweeted this story a few hours ago, and it has all but shut me down today. You think you've heard the worst you can hear, that you've embraced the full measure of the horror, and then you hear something more appalling.

BP "burning sea turtles alive."

And there's this video clip:

Most of the turtles in question are Lepidochelys kempii, or Kemp's Ridley turtles. It is a critically endangered species, one of the two rarest of extant marine turtles (the other being the Olive Ridley, Lepidochelys olivacea). It's difficult to estimate the size of sea-turtle populations, but biologists believe that only about a thousand breeding females survive in the wild.

But this isn't actually about the species in question being endangered. If one one turtle from a non-threatened species had been burned alive, one that BP could have allowed rescuers to save, this crime would be just as vile.

Fuck them all to hell.