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painting on a cylinder
Tuesday, December 23 2025
Gretchen was well enough this morning to drive down to Little Loaf, the vegan bakery in New Paltz, to pick up various items, some of which would be going to Washington, DC in a few days, partly for her father's upcoming 81st birthday. She also got a couple savory sandwiches for us to eat immediately. Since I am still the healthier of us, it was my job to take Charlotte for her morning walk. We went on a conventional loop up the Farm Road, through the abandoned go-cart tracks, and back home across the scrub-forest highlands. I was wearing a new coat Gretchen had bought me, and, despite outdoor temperatures at around freezing, I became uncomfortably hot and broke into a sweat. (Mind you, this hike is far from strenuous, with an elevation change of at most one hundred feet over the course of a mile and a half.
Along the way, I came upon several places where the snow was covered with millions of snow fleas, tiny insects that come out when it's just barely above freezing. I don't understand why those conditions are the ones these insects select to throw a jubilee in, but that's what they do.
Gretchen recently orderd a pepper grinder that I will be giving her as one of her holiday presents. She casually suggested that I paint something on it, so today I endeavored to do just that. It's not actually easy to wrap a cohesive painting around something that is basically a narrow cylinder. I ended up painting two different species of mushrooms, an Amanita muscaria and a pair of Russula emticas, then a flying raven, then a bipedal black bear. I wasn't super happy with the results, but the medium was affecting the message. At some point I'd made enough art to decide I owed myself some drinking.
I've been watching a lot of Pluribus analysis on YouTube, though much of it is pretty low quality. For example, some commentators seem to think the radio noise Manousos, the hard-core anti-Others immune man from Paraguay, has discovered at 8.613 MHz is somehow related to the broadcast containing the recipe for the RNA joining virus, but that makes no sense from a plot perspective or for the show's carefully-developed (and well-structured) science framework. It would make more sense for this frequency (and perhaps others) to be the one their hive-mind communicates telepathically on, since that would have to have some basis in reality, especially in a reality as decidedly non-spiritual as the one presented in Pluribus. And even the better commentators tend to be a bit long-winded, seeming to find symbology where there probably isn't any. I like tantalizing theories, but I care less about why it is our heroine is wearing a yellow jacket and how that relates to an insect with that name. (No, yellow jackets are not a parasitic wasp that infiltrates beehives, whoever it was who spewed such nonsense!)
Late this evening, I saw a review had arrived on YouTube for the Pluribus season finale. Had that been released? I saw that it had, and immediately downloaded it. Normally I'd then wait for Gretchen to have the time to watch it with me, but by then she'd gone to bed already. I just had to watch it, maybe just the cold open. But that cold open was amazing! (A young woman who had been immune to the joining is custom-joined with a tailored version of the virus, suddenly getting a creepy smile on her face and losing all interest in the baby goat that clearly loves her.) So I watched the rest of the episode, one that ends with our heroine back in Albequerque feeling betrayed and taking up the Others on their reluctant willingness to give her a nuclear bomb if she really wanted one.
Charlotte on the Farm Road on our walk this morning. I'd just slipped and fallen on some old ice under a dusting a freshly-fallen snow, causing Charlotte enough concern to bark at me. Click to enlarge.
I had ChatGPT create this image for me after a prompt relating Johannes Gutenberg to biblical Judas and asking for the resulting image to be in the style of a lithograph by Albrech Dürer. This is my new GitHub avatar. Click to enlarge.
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