Check out this Japanese TV ad!

Even though Arnold's a Republican, I kind of like the guy for being so weird. And, as I always say, at least he knows what science fiction is!

***

That video of Arnold is actually from the 90s; it's one of many to be found on the cool site Japander which collects Japanese TV ads made by Western stars — as in the Bill Murray/Scarlett Johanssen vehicle “Lost In Translation.”

Looking at a few of these, I realize I'm working too hard trying to imagine outre alien cultures; all I need to do is go on the road.

Still on Arnold's behalf, I'll say that his video is the best of all the ones I've watched at Japander. The thing he's promotign is a stimulant drink generically known as a “genki,” filled with caffeine, ginseng, like that. Keeps the salarymen going.

***

I was just reading an article about a kind of fire ant in the July 2, 2005, Science News. There's something peculiar about their reproduction, leading to this quote, by Denis Fournier of the Free Univeristy of Brussels in Belgium:

“We could think of the males as a separate, parasitic species that uses host eggs for its own reproduction.”

This kind of dovetails with this image I've gotten from thinking about my wife giving birth to my daughter and my daughter giving birth to my granddaughter. The women are connected by a single chain of umbilical cords back through history, all the way to Edenville, with the men just branches off the long vine.

“Hi, I'm your host.” “And I'm your parasite.”

I'm getting a wave of Russian bots posting links in the comment sections. I've edited the blog code so you can't post full web addresses anymore. If you're a non-bot and want to share a web address, you'll need to use a bit of circumlocution or your comment will bounce.

[Riled cow shakes off pesky bots!]

This reminds me somehow of this great new Charlie Stross book I started reading today, Accelerando. I bought it at Borders for $25 yesterday. The clerk was surprised I wasn't getting Harry Potter And The Large Royalty Check instead! Stross is also (with his editors' blessing) giving the book away on line, like Cory Doctorow likes to do with his books.

Has anyone out there ever read a whole book in electronic form? If you comment, remember not to put full web addresses in your answer.

I did some work on my page with my paintings yesterday, making the images better. Here’s a new scan that’s nice, “My Life in a Nutshell,” from 2003.

My Life in a Nutshell, 24” by 20”, March, 2003,. Oil on canvas. Click here to see larger image.

My picture is based on the 1975 painting “Head and Bottle” by Philip Guston.

I’ve always loved this picture by Guston; it’s such a great representation of obsession with alcohol. My take-off, or homage, picture shows a guy who’s enslaved himself to his keyboard instead. His only hope of escape may be the alien inside the sun.

More images of NYC. Got a photo of a woman with a no-nonsense pony tail like a dry water-color brush, reminding me of the students at San Jose State.

At the Met you’re allowed to take photos as long as you don’t use flash, and with the fast digital cams, you can get some nice things, like this detail of a van Gogh. I love what he does with his brush strokes. I always think of the “crazy-eight” motions that a dog makes with his muzzle when he's holding onto a piece of meat or a toy, shaking it in figure-eight patterns, then think of Van Gogh holding a brush in his mouth and doing crazy-eights to get his special texture.

Our last night there, John Oakes held a party on an old fire boat that’s berthed near Chelsea Piers. We sailed all around the lower tip of Manhattan. My pal and fellow writer Paul DiFilippo was aboard. Paul was in the canonical cyberpunk anthology Miror Shades and developed the “ribofunk” style of biology-based SF that I used for Frek and the Elixir. Speaking of Frek, after meeting with my editors, I think my next novel will be a sequel, starring, again, Frek and Renata.

The Staten Island ferry went past, illuminated, like the great ship glimpsed in Amarcord. “E la nave va.”

I miss my granddaughter already! Here’s a picture from when she was maybe four days old, starting to really look around and fasten on things with her eyes. Babies develop so rapidly that every day is different. Imagine if you kept that up for your whole life!