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Lyle Zapato

Harlan Ellison Stalks The Tree Octopus

Lyle Zapato | 2009-09-25.5670 LMT | Cephalopods

Stalking the Nightmare (1982) is a collection of miscellaneous short works by Harlan Ellison. One of the pieces, "The Hour That Stretches", is sort of a fictionalized transcript of a guest appearance by Ellison on the radio show Hour 25, hosted by Mike Hodel.

At Ellison's suggestion, callers to the show (including some of his writer peers) pitch ideas to him, which he then tries to develop into plot synopses for stories, improv style -- at least when he isn't insulting the callers or saving Humanity from mysterious, outer forces bent on our destruction.

After an idea about racing domesticated Arabian camels with NFL players as jockeys and someone suggesting he write "I'm Looking for Kadak" again, only with the Pope thrown in -- both of which he dispatched without synopsizing -- Ellison gets this call:

Hodel put on another caller. Mayer Alan Brenner.

"I know you," Ellison said.

"You sure do. And I've got a beauty for you."

"Be still my heart," Ellison said, sinking down on his spine.

"It's an excerpt from NORTHEAST TREE AND STREAM," Mayer said. "A short history of the famous Chesapeake Tree-Climbing Octopus..."

"Why me?" Ellison groaned. "Which God did I offend?"

"All of them," said Hodel.

Mayer went on, undaunted by sounds of pain coming over his radio.

"This retiring and rarely glimpsed creature lives in the many quiet estuaries of the Chesapeake system. Early each morning the octopus leaves the water and crawls up the trunk of a shoreside tree. It makes its way precariously onto a branch overhanging the water, where it waits for its prey to pass underneath." Silence ensued. Dead air hung heavily in the night.

Finally, Ellison said, "And that's it, right? That's the idea, right, Mayer?"

"Uh-huh."

More silence. Then, in a very soft, very tired voice, Ellison said, "These blue-skinned Jewish aliens with wheels come down to Earth and kidnap the Pope so they can have a race on Arabian camels to establish whether Jews or Gentiles are worthiest to live in the universe, and the Pope gets all these NFL players to ride as his team, because they're all Polish or black and not a Jew in the lot, and they have this watercourse raceway and they race for the universe, and as they come under this tree in the Chesapeake system the octopus drops out of a tree and eats every last, fucking one of them, football players, Jewish aliens, the Pope, the camels, Brian Sipe and Terry Bradshaw and Walter Payton and you too Mayer!"

Ok, so it's not "Devilfish with a Glass Tentacle" or "A Boy and his Octopus", but it's still a Harlan Ellison story about a tree octopus. Now if I could just track down that issue of Northeast Tree and Stream that Brenner found...

Lyle Zapato

Pratchett's Nation

Lyle Zapato | 2009-09-20.1325 LMT | Cephalopods | Piratical Yarrings

This is strange.

First of all, Terry Pratchett published a novel last year, Nation, that features tree-climbing octopuses and no one thinks to notify me, of all people? I'm hurt! If I wasn't already paranoid, this would put me over the edge.

Well, anyway, I'm in the loop now. I only discovered it last night while looking for more things to put on the media subpage on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site. (An aside: What was the deal with 2008? Five books -- that I've discovered so far -- were published with tree octopuses in them, not even counting school text books. And only one of the authors thought to let me know. Thank you, again, Eric E. Olson.)

But here's the weird thing: The cover of the UK edition has a tree-climbing octopus on it, hidden in the shadows. Excellent! But then I looked a little closer at it. It seemed strangely familiar. Here's a lightened and contrasted detail (taken from an extra-large image of the cover found here):

Detail of tree-climbing octopus from UK cover of 'Nation' UK cover of 'Nation'
The added white square on the cover is where the tree octopus can be found.

Now where have I seen that tree octopus before? Oh, yeah, here it is:

Original tree octopus image
Tree octopus image that's been on my site for a decade.

I applaud the cover designer's desire for technical accuracy by using an image of an actual tree octopus (albeit not O. arbori, as specified by Pratchett), but is it really the smartest thing, from a legal ass-covering perspective, to take an image off of some website and put it on a very notable commercial product? I mean, you're designing the cover for a freaking Terry Pratchett novel, not doing graphics on some penny-ante website in your spare time; someone's going to eventually notice, no matter how much you darken the image.

I can understand if the cover artist left the octopus out, and your boss told you just before the deadline that there had to be a tree-climbing octopus on there, and Google image search is just a few tempting clicks away... but, really? No one around the office can draw an octopus, not even one that would be mostly in silhouette? What are they teaching you people in design school? Drawing octopuses should be part of the fundamentals!

Just so we're clear, I have absolutely no intention of making any sort of drama about this (not that I rightly could... ahem), and everything's cool as far as I'm concerned. Mostly I'm disappointed that more effort wasn't put into having a proper tree-climbing octopus illustration on the cover (and none at all on the North American version, at least that I can see). But whoever's in charge of the cover-design department at Pratchett Heavy Industries needs to give some stern lectures to their underlings lest they get themselves into trouble in the future.

Lyle Zapato

Book Review: Drome

Lyle Zapato | 2009-09-19.0440 LMT | Cephalopods | Cascadia | Hollow Earth | Lost Worlds | Retro
Cover: 'Drome' by John Martin Leahy
But why had they set out on a journey so strange and so hazardous -- through the land of the tree-octopi and the snake-cats, through that horrible, unearthly fungoid forest, and up and up, up into the caves of utter blackness, across that frightful chasm, up to the Tamahnowis Rocks, into the blaze of the sunshine, out onto the snow and ice on Mount Rainier?

Drome, written and illustrated by John Martin Leahy, is a pulp story about a strange underground world, home to a lost civilization that may be the progenitors of ancient Greek culture. It was originally serialized in the Jan.-May, 1927 issues of Weird Tales, and republished as a book in 1952. I'm reviewing the book, which I believe has some differences from the pulp original (a preface, footnotes, and some casual references in the main text to atom-bombs and television that don't seem particularly 1920s-ish.)

The story has two elements of interest to me: 1) it starts in Cascadia (the entrance to the underworld is on Mt. Rainier) with references to regional history and culture and 2) it mentions Cascadian tree octopuses, albeit of an unusual and deadly subterranean variety. So naturally I had to acquire an original copy for the ZPi library and review it.

Read more...

Lyle Zapato

La Pieuvre Des Arbres

Lyle Zapato | 2009-07-22.9780 LMT | Cephalopods | Nature | Art

Below is some rare footage of a tree octopus from 1928:

The scenes were shot by the French experimental filmmaker Jean Painlevé and originally appeared in his surrealist nature film about octopuses, La Pieuvre (The Octopus). The silent short with the scenes in their original context can be found in the recently released Criterion Collection of Painlevé's work, "Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé".

(Thanks to Joshua for bringing this to my attention.)

Lyle Zapato

The Cloo Harvest Begins

Lyle Zapato | 2009-03-14.3520 LMT | Food | Technology

Four years ago I predicted that the technology of "cultured meat" -- meat grown in a vat from tissue samples, which is being promoted by the NPO New Harvest -- would inexorably lead to celebrity cannibalism:

C-level celebrities, unable to make any money in the crowded reality TV market, will turn to peddling their own flesh to pop-culture-obsessed gourmands. I think it's safe to augur that Kenny Rogers Roasters will start serving actual roasted Kenny Rogers and that an all-in-one George Foreman Grill/Meat Maker will let you grill up some George Foreman.

This turn of events will darken as unauthorized celebrity tissue samples find their way into the meat market. Big-name celebrities will be targeted, with stalkers and opportunists trying to steal medical biopsies from doctors or even samples directly from the source. In this black market of celebflesh, counterfeiters will flourish, leaving many celebrities torn between feeling violated by meat pirates and offended by being falsely portrayed as too stringy.

In time, these celebrities may find it wise to give into fan demands by offering up their officially licensed flesh as a gourmet alternative -- think "Newman's Own Meat". Increased pressure to perform gastronomically will lead to scandal over the common usage of "meat-synching" by celebrities of subpar flavor. There may even emerge a new kind of celebrity who's known only for how good he or she tastes, resulting in a generation of kids whose highest ambition in life is to be considered delicious.

Many of you called my prediction ridiculous, or disgusting, but were unable to argue against my logic. Well, now my prediction is off to an early start with the threatened introduction of tofu flavored like actor George Clooney.

Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA (presumably now standing for "People Eating Tasty Actors" -- hopefully I'm not late with that obvious joke), unveiled their plan to use Clooney-sweat, harvested from a gym towel acquired by a PETA operative, to engineer artificial Clooney-flavoring which would be added to tofu, creating what they're calling "CloFu".

While not quite vat-grown Clooney-meat, it is a harbinger of the looming intellectual property concerns raised by the easy availability of people's DNA -- a trail of which we leave wherever we go in our biological detritus of shed skin-flakes, finger grease, and lost hairs. If Clooney doesn't have a patent on his genome (or at least the genes that give him his flavor), can he legally do anything to stop PETA from making CloFu, or future New Harvesters from offering ClornDogs, ClooStew, chicken cordon Cloo, or other Clooney-based entrées? Or what if someone applies for a patent before him? Or if patents on DNA are ruled invalid?

It's a Brave Cloo World we're entering. Make sure to bring a bag lunch.

Update 2009-03-20: It occurred to me on rereading this post that the link I made from PETA's proposed artificial Clooney-flavoring to the cultured meat industry as envisioned by New Harvest might seem tenuous to the uninitiated. However, last year PETA president Ingrid Newkirk offered a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012." That, in one year's time, Newkirk could go from "let's replace immoral murder-meat" to "let's enjoy the sweet, sweet, sweat taste of George Clooney" just illustrates the dangerous allure of celebrity cannibalism.

Lyle Zapato

Music: Dreamland Days

Lyle Zapato | 2009-03-12.2650 LMT

Dreamland Days

Jason Smith, the Austin-based musician behind Dreamland Days wrote me last month about his newest project, and I unfortunately didn't read the email till now (sorry, Jason!) Anyway, here's what he wrote:

I am about to put out a record (100 copies at first). I was the only person involved in the making of all of it. You have inspired me to produce a song called "TRANS­DI­MENSIONAL­MAN" (it will pop up first at [MySpace] if you wish to hear) and I think you might like it, it was written in the fourth dimension of course with my AFDB on.

So, here's a belated "check it out".

Lyle Zapato

Book Review: The Procession of Mollusks

Lyle Zapato | 2009-02-14.6090 LMT | Cephalopods | Cascadia

The Procession of Mollusks, a novel by Eric E. Olson.

(Disclosure: I received a free copy from the author and am thanked in the acknowledgements.)

It's the 49th annual March of the Mollusks festival in the Pacific Northwest town of Newport Bay and a strange murder has taken place: the body of Board of Supervisors Chairman Snodgrass is found hanging upside down, naked, drained of all blood, with a saucer-shaped wound on his back. The initial suspect is Dr. Roberto "Berto" Fiori, a malacologist with controversial theories about mollusks, in whose house the body is first found. But things become more complicated as the victim has trouble staying dead.

Olson's first novel is told through the narration of two characters: Torrence Haflek, a reporter with a fondness for parks who may-or-may-not actually be employed; and Jimmy Wilson, a 13-year-old fascinated with sealife and videography. Both discover they're suffering from an unexplained medical condition that gives Haflek waking hallucinations and Jimmy a voracious appetite.

The plot thickens as the two -- along with Berto and Angela Angraboda, Haflek's ex -- uncover Snodgrass' involvement in a plan to end the danger of red tide poisonings for shellfish consumers (and thereby promote the shellfish industry,) with a neuromodulator implant, now undergoing clinical trials in Newport Bay. And then there are the giant, seemingly-friendly snails that have begun to appear in the area by the thousands, bringing with them the attention of Sir Richard Attenborough.

Also, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus plays a role in Dr. Fiori's research. I won't go into details, but if the sasquatch find out what humans have been doing to their food supply, there's gonna be some delimbings. Tree octopuses are watching from the woods and parks around Newport Bay, and they've taken an unusual interest in Haflek, whose relation to them is reminiscent of Tyrone Slothrop's relation to V-2 rockets.

The Procession of Mollusks is an enjoyably bewildering tale of hermaphroditic gastropodan sex, transhumanism (of a sort), and the existence of objective reality itself in a world mediated by nature documentaries.

Lyle Zapato

To Boldly Go Where Lord Kelvin Already Went

Lyle Zapato | 2008-11-19.1990 LMT | Kelviniana

Speaking of J.J. Abrams and trivial entertainment news with minor connections to subjects on my site... Perhaps in acknowledgement of his service in the War of the Worlds, Lord Kelvin has been honored with a starship in his name in Abrams' upcoming Star Trek reboot.

USS Kelvin

The USS Kelvin (designation NCC-0514) was, according to one fan site's calculation, constructed in the 2220s -- predating both the USS Enterprise and James T. Kirk. George Kirk, James' father, apparently served as first officer on the Kelvin before it was destroyed by Romulans:

USS Kelvin blowing up

While the plot of the movie is closely guarded, might we suspect Kirk's father died in that explosion? Could this be the event that prompted Kirk to give up his misspent youth of driving Corvettes off of cliffs to follow in his father's footsteps by joining Star Fleet, thus setting him on the path to become the greatest Starship Captain in the history of the Federation, if not the Alpha-Quadrant, and save countless lives from a quadro-triticale famine on Sherman's Planet by averting the Tribble Menace? Sure, why not.

Obviously this ship is even more important than the Enterprise to the history of Star Trek. How fitting that it should named in Lord Kelvin's honor.

Lyle Zapato

A Quantum Of Polydactylism

Lyle Zapato | 2008-11-14.8608 LMT | Polydactylism | Mysterious Doodads | Site

The manifested Jungian archetype of polydactylism pokes its many fingers further into the doughy belly of popular culture.

Gemma Arterton's hands

Gemma Arterton, the new "Bond Girl" in the latest 007 film, A Quantum of Solace, was born with 12 fingers. Unfortunately, her two extra digits were removed shortly after birth by the Medical Establishment -- dogmatic proponents of physiological uniformity who would rather butcher healthy mutants than have to spend valuable golf-time learning the names of new body parts. But try as they might, Establishment doctors are on the losing side our evolutionary destiny:

"My dad had them [extra fingers], and my granddad," Arterton told Esquire magazine. "I feel like we're one step ahead -- a sign of things to come. ... We could do more stuff if we had extra fingers -- faster texting, faster emailing, better guitar-playing."

Also of note in the entertainment world, the new FOX series Fringe features a six-fingered hand-print both on its marketing posters and on bumpers before the commercials:

Fringe hand

Besides documenting the mysterious Observers and the menace of giant floating place-names, Fringe follows investigators searching for the truth about "the Pattern" -- an emergence of strange scientific phenomena and experiments that may signal a tipping point in Humanity's patience with J.J. Abrams. But could the show actually be on to something? Could there be a "the Pattern" in real life? And if so, is it not logical to surmise that "the Pattern" is the Handlebrot set -- a single, yet infinitely complicated, unifying pattern of our existence that has been for eons guiding our development into the polydactyl super-beings that Gemma Arterton foresees?

dactyl fractal

Undoubtedly, yes.

On a less momentous note, a while back I moved my Dactyl Fractal Zoom toy from the wallpaper subdirectory (where I haphazardly put it after I originally created it) to a proper subdirectory of its own. This broke the link from Stumble Upon, a popular random-link site which was the source for most of the traffic to the toy. Well, now some Stumble Upon user has found the new location and re-stumbled it, which has resulted in the Dactyl Fractal Zoom getting around 40,000 hits just today. Egads! Anyway, I added a few links to the containing page, so hopefully all those people won't just stumble past the rest of my site. My apologies to those who preferred the starker, link-free version.

Lyle Zapato

Lord Kelvin & The Olympic Water Cube

Lyle Zapato | 2008-08-05.0220 LMT | Kelviniana | Technology

In 1887, Lord Kelvin, in a paper titled "On the Division of Space with Minimum Partitional Area", sought a way of partitioning space using a foam of equal-sized cells with a minimum surface area. His solution, known as the Kelvin structure, consisted of repeating tetrakaidecahedra with slightly curved faces.


Stereoscopic photo of a tetrakaidecahedron, constructed out of soldered wire, from Kelvin's 1894 "On Homogeneous Division of Space". (Cross eyes to view in 3D.) Also, I have a paper model approximation of a Kelvin cell available for download [PDF].

It wasn't until 106 years later that Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan discovered (aided by advanced computer software that would have taken millions of years of run time on a standard Victorian era difference engine,) a solution that had 0.3 percent less surface area than the Kelvin structure. However, their solution, the Weaire-Phelan structure, uses two different shaped cells instead of Kelvin's simpler single cell solution.

As the New York Times reports, the wall and roof structure of the new Beijing National Aquatics Center, also known as the Water Cube, is based on the Weaire-Phelan solution to the Kelvin Problem. The building's designer, Tristram Carfrae, tilted the structure 60° to give the surface an almost random look (although it does repeat its pattern). According to this 2004 article, it was for this pseudo-irregular "organic quality" that the Weaire-Phelan structure was chosen over the Kelvin structure, which was originally considered.


The Water Cube during construction.