People season

This picture was taken a few days ago, and now people season has begun in earnest, so the scene is much more cluttered. Characteristics of the season? Many more humans than in the winter, but not many by international standards. Lost beach items, and discarded fishing catches. Last year, a stingray with the hook still in its mouth, that curved mouth that looks like a torque of finely cut moonstones set by a master jeweller. There are few beings as lovely and worthy of respectful admiration as a ray.

There will be many more blue-bottles (Physalia utriculus, otherwise called Portuguese man-o'-war) who end their multiple lives on the shore in the coming months. Blue-bottles are only one species in what's called the Blue Layer that get all washed up and whose mortal coils literally dessicate on golden sands in the summer months. Here is a beached Porpita porpita

W.J. Dakin's Australian Seashores, revised and illustrated by Isobel Bennet tells much about their lives, has much better pictures than I can take, and is a classic that should be reprinted. It is a great book for really learning how the other many billions live, including those who constitute the Blue Layer.

Wonderfully out of range of today's syndrome-proud standards, this passage is typical, and is appropriately about the blue-bottle: "The dried bladders, still containing gas and still blue in colour, may be thick on the sandy beaches, tossed up above the high-water mark by the waves. Children like to pop them by stamping on them."

Sadly, I've never had to shove any children out of the way when I've done my stamping. They don't play this game any more, though last year we were lucky enough to come across a mother and her 6-year-old son, who had just found a tiny, incredibly cute blue-ringed octopus in a tidepool. "Come away," the mother said. "Don't bother the octopus." (And yes, she knew the reputation of the little thing.)

An aweful site

This was a site that would have remained unseen, seeing as it was exposed when a fallen half of a eucalypt was sawn for firewood, and the cracked wood fell apart.

Said to live under loose bark, the inhabitants lived in a crack. When a piece of bark was placed on the now exposed split, life carried on. I don't know if the mother opened her eggsack (as is written), but her babies certainly emerged healthy,
though startled every time the piece of bark was removed for a peek (most of the time, they and their mother were on the underside of the bark, not the surface of the split wood).

These are the spiderlings of the huntsman, Delena cancerides. Their mother lived with them for weeks after they emerged, and it is written that she carries them on her back when she hunts (though I didn't see this).

The Australian Museum tells something about them, and so does Dr. Linda S. Raynor, Cornell University, who says, "The primary research in my laboratory is on the social behavior, mother-offspring dynamics, colony formation, and sexual conflict in the endemic Australian huntsman spider, Delena cancerides (Sparassidae). Delena were the spider stars of the 'Arachnophobia'!"

Phobias! Spiders, ringtones, heights, depths, oysters, tails, the outdoors, the unknown, the undiscovered.

The site was active for three weeks, and now is just firewood.

Och ay! Alistair Rennie takes a poem above and beyond

This is the kind of collaboration I just love.

Lucky me, to have this poem read in the voice that it most certainly has (which isn't mine).

And it's wonderfully illustrated by Mike and Anita Allen.

"Trapped Words" in Mythic Delirium.

We all thought Saunders was ABOVE words

And the terrifying wiggle of his ginger moustache . . .

If only we'd known he was dead.

Beating up bullies, flame-making fun for boys and girls, and other delights

I am very disappointed to announce that Bullies in the blog playground by A.C.E. Bauer is in December's Virtuous Medlar Circle. This essay deserves a wide readership.

As usual, there's also other stuff on the mothersite to stimulate you, shall we say, exclusive (meaning, ahem, few, but the truth so often hurts) readers of the CIRCLE: the I HATE QUOTES quotes, the IRRESISTIBLE links to books, ideas, food for the body and soul—and then back up to this month's new feature in the Circle, the "Dead-Guests-Can't-Say-No Classic"presented for your nanny's delight: a wonderfully illustrated lesson in astronomy that tells boys and girls how to start fires and blow stuff up. If this doesn't inspire you about what to get the littlies to celebrate the birth of 2007 or the death of 2006, then you deserve to be virtually fleischwolfed by a thousand thousand maggot-pale, grub-trunked, bilious, quivering, liverish snivelling cowards.

Remains of a Christmas beetle

This is the time of year when, if you see a jewel, it's likely to be a beetle, or what's left of one.There is a great richness of beetles here in southeast Australia, and many emerge now.

This scarab is a type of Christmas beetle (Anoplognathus) of which there are so many species in New South Wales that Chris Reid and Kindi Smith, of the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Research, Australian Museum, Sydney have produced an illustrated guide.

Ants do a marvellous job eating out the soft flesh of insects.

Books in Russia: A true story by a friend I'll call 'Ж'

Independent writing and publishing is under threat in modern Russia. The government regularly publishes a list of 'banned books' which are not to be sold in bookshops. Though legitimately published, these books are now in the strange position of being circulated like the samizdat books of the Soviet era (and subsequent editions must presumably be printed in the old basement style.)

Ostensible criteria for the banned list are: books which 'promote' drug use, books which directly criticise the present government, and (ironically) books which criticise the Christian church.

The publisher of William Burroughs' 'Junky', Hunter S Thompson's 'Fear & Loathing' and Tony White's 'Satan Satan Satan' (all banned) has suffered at the hands of the Russian government, waking up one morning to find his bed surrounded by police, and awaking shortly after that in a mental hospital — this was a mere 'warning' (he was released after two weeks by an annoyed doctor, who found he was healthy and was baffled as to why he was there). The publisher was also locked out of his bank account.

While in some Western countries the police are seen as a state-sponsored street gang, in Russia the government hire actual street gangs to carry out some of their work for the purpose of deniability: this year the offices of T-ough Press were fire-bombed and a year ago two independent bookstores underwent a similar attack. In many ways the government has changed only in name and the system continues much as before, using many of the same techniques.

Some new methods have been imported from the capitalist West, however. While the Soviet government claimed to have eliminated class but only eliminated the middle one, the vast gap between haves and have-nots is now a matter of money as well as influence. The uncategorized mish-mash of 'modern' and Soviet-style manipulation in Russia is hard for western commentators to get their heads around and requires too much 'backstory' to describe, and so most western media simply ignores it (until someone known to the West is assassinated, and still the story is not adequately explained).

There was more coverage of Russia when the original Iron Curtain existed, because criticism could be used for political ends. Now the Russian leadership is a 'friend' and his methods too similar to those of Western countries to make criticism of it a comfortable experience.

Dung beetle ambulating on a piece of paper

An extremely reluctant model, who just wanted to rush off. Built to dig in, the dung beetle found paper quite unsatisfactory. This allows you to see contrast, so I heartlessly frustrated its racing till I got one sort of satisfactory shot. After the session, a nice pat was found for it, and in just a few movements, it disappeared.

Dear Associate Director, Fulfilment,

I do 'rely', as you say, on your magazine for some things, but I never expected Fulfilment! When does it begin? I have, as you should know, been a subscriber for some time, and have not received Fulfilment yet, even with your bumper issue.

I don't doubt your 'Sincerely', but you state categorically: 'The time will never be better.' By whose authority, when, and for whom? I saw a stone inscribed with these very words in Tutankhamen's tomb, and what did he get?

Not to say I don't trust you, but please have the Fulfilment Director write to me, if he writes. Or he could just Make Himself Known.

Better yet, just send me a 3-wish lamp. Your firm must have a warehouse full of them. At the stroke of my third wish's Fulfilment, you can consider your offer Accepted.

PS A friend who Reads Over My Shoulder has just interrupted, saying that Fulfilment doesn't mean you fulfilling my wishes, but me fulfilling yours. If that's true, this is a special offer indeed, if you think I should pay you for the privilege. If, however, you wish to query my rates:
1) I am not that kind of woman, not without a picture of you, a list of your skills, and your cooking creds, to begin with.
and
2) no apologies, but I don't discount.

So this aspersion can't be true. Nosey friends have suspicious minds. I look forward to saying hah! to her, having rubbed my lamp with Complete Satisfaction. You wouldn't simply want me to renew a subscription. btw, I enjoyed your magazine's favourable report of Professor Daniel Oppenheimer's 2006 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long words Needlessly"

November VIRTUOUS MEDLAR CIRCLE features Steve Aylett

I don't usually use the 'm' word. But aylett's deceptive 'm' (and possibly 'm's) made me do it.

In The Virtuous Medlar Circle you'll also find the latest delicious column by A.C.E. Bauer (which changed my cooking plans) . . . and then, going down:
More Irresistibles (links) including:

• The Coup de Grâce, Alistair Rennie's latest short story
• a wonderfully tacky mnemonic from Matt Kuchta of Research at a Snail's Pace
• an instruction to find a wrongly out-of-print, totally irresistible guide to joyful poetry of a type (which includes the Reverend Edwin Emmanuel Bradford, who put women in their place and celebrated the beauty of handsome boys)