Searching for “hallucinogen + conotoxin”, I found a book called Neuroscience , with too many authors to list here, published by Sinauer Associates of Sunderland, MA. Synchronistically enough, the book points out a connection between cone shell envenomation and betel nut intoxication! They both block the nicotinic ACh receptors. It all fits! Quoting from the book and lifting two of the illos:

“Another interesting class of animal toxins that selectively block nicotinic ACh and other receptors includes the peptides produced by fish-hunting marine cone snails (figure above). These colorful snails kill small fish by “shooting” venomous darts into them. The venom contains hundreds of peptides, known as the conotoxins, many of which target proteins that are important in synaptic transmission. … The array of physiological responses produced by these peptides all serve to immobilize any prey unfortunate enough to encounter the cone snail.”

“Another postsynaptic neurotoxin that, like nicotine, is used as a social drug is found in the seeds from the betel nut, Areca catechu (figure above). Betel nut chewing, although unknown in the United States, is practiced by up to 25% of the population in India, Bangladesh, Ceylon, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Chewing these nuts produces a euphoria caused by arecoline, an alkaloid agonist of nicotinic ACh receptors. Like nicotine, arecoline is an addictive central nervous system stimulant.”

Still more synchronicity. I quite smoking three weeks ago and still want a cigarette often. According to an interesting article on the poisonous geography cone shell,, [where I got the picture above] this Philipino mollusc is also known as the “cigarette snail” because if he stings you, you have enough time left to smoke a cigarette, and that’s it.

[Picture above from the Scientific American. You gotta love how long that geography cone shell can reach.]

Queen Mu of the old Mondo 2000 would love the idea of conotoxins; she used to like to go on about tarantula venom. How strong is the experience? Well, according to Gary Stix, “A Toxin Against Pain”, Scientific American, April, 2005,pp. 88-93, “In some cases, the side effects diminished. But not always. A patient’s delerium, in one instance, ended only after electroconvulsive therapy.”

Now that’s a bad trip, when it takes shock treatment to bring you down!

Question, if the neurotoxin blocks the nicotinic ACh receptors, does that mean that being hit with it is in some way like having a cigarette? Would it remove your desire to smoke?

More rain. Finally the reservoirs are overflowing. Last time this happened, Clinton got elected. There is hope.

Isabel and Rudy were playing Go here for a little bit today.

Time to catch up on some links that came in:

Steve Hooley posted some pictures of the IAFA conference I attended in Fort Lauderdale, FLA a couple of weeks back.

I revised my talk since then, here’s a link to the new version of ”Seek the Gnarl”, complete with a suggestion that lit crit start using Gnarl Theory.

A reader called majcher sent me a link to a Microsoft research project called SenseCam, it’s somewhat similar to a lifebox-capable vlog ring.

Mac Tonnies pointed out that my pictures of the gnats smeared out across time was an example of a kind of picture that saucer-buffs like to say are “rods”. I like aeoroform giant paramecia better.

John Walker made a fascinating web page about a very fractal relative of broccoli called Romanesco.

Here’s a nice picture of a crashed saucer and its dead alien pilot that I found on a website about the real men in black.

In this vein, I went to the National Security Agencey website, searched for UFOs, and found this very X-files list of official (?) UFO documents.. The best one was a report on how to survive the UFOs.

I’m researching this, as I need for some Fox/Muldaur/Men-in-Black types to point out to Bela that the alien cone shells are visible in the video logs of his dead girlfriend’s sunglasses.

****

[Photo of Richard Kadreyl.]

On another front, Richard Kadrey has posted a great new novel called Blind Shrike in PDF form for free download at the Infinite Matrix online SF site.

It’s a hard-boiled cyberpunk fantasy novel set in today's grungy San Francisco — odd that nobody thought of doing this before. Great fun.

The last of the Micronesia entries.

***

It rained a lot in the night, but was sunny in the morning. Rain-fed Eden. I drove alone about five miles to the Pahn Takai (means Under Rock) waterfall just past the U municipal center. (U is a minimally short place-name.) I met a guide there — Jamie, our hotelier had phoned him — he was a short Pohnpeian named Danny. Wearing mismatched flip-flops and an athletic shirt, he led me into the jungle. Sakau plants lined the path, they have knobby stalks and heart-shaped leaves. Danny said that although he didn't like sakau, in Pohnpei they say if you drink sakau, you're a real man. The same old line laid down everywhere.

We came to some two hundred foot cliffs in the side of the mountain, a hundred yards wide, the rocks slanting out, so that when we walked along the base, the lip beetled way out over us. There was a veil waterfall, waving back and forth in the wind. Caves at the base of the cliff with fruit bats living in them.

On visiting this site, you had to place a fresh leaf on an altar at the base the waterfall, for if you didn't, the cliff would fall on you the next time you came. Danny broke off a fern for me to place.

Danny said he'd like to visit the mainland someday. He has relatives in Kansas City, Missouri, there's a lot of Pohnpeians there! That'll be different from Micronesia, all right. Later Jamie told me that one of the locals had lucked his way into taking over a chain of restaurants there, he'd been working for the owner who, having no heirs, had left his fortune to his favorite worker, and now there's fully three thousand Pohnpeians in KC.

***

So now I'm looking at three days of travel to get home. (Day 1) A ten-hour multi-stop island-hop flight to Honolulu via, I think, Kosrae, and then Kwajalein and Majuro in the Marshall Islands, arriving in Honolulu at 2 AM, followed by a twelve-hour layover during which we'll go sleep in a hotel, (Day 2) a five-hour flight to LA which arrives after the last plane to San Jose so, therefore, a night in a hotel at the LA airport, and finally, (Day 3) the quick flight back to good ole San Ho the next morning. It occurs to me, too late, that I would have done better to arrange my tickets to fly direct from Honolulu to San Francisco.

Embry and I had a nice dinner on our last evening here, talking over old times, remembering our boyhoods and our parents. My brother and I. One more brother image: back at the hotel, there's two resident dogs, they always walk around together, sometimes coming to sleep on my porch, one is slightly bigger than the other. And today after our drive I was feeling a little blue to have the trip nearly over, and I was patting them, and when I was patting the bigger one, the smaller one began to growl and nip at the bigger one for getting more attention. That's me and my brother!

During the long trip home we ran into each other again after we thought we'd said good-bye, and we were delighted to meet. The trip's been very good for our relationship. Standing in that waterfall pool with Embry the other day, I was thinking that if I've ever visiting him in the hospital, or vice versa, we'll be reminiscing about this trip. We'll always have this wonderful adventure that we did together.

It's been one of the great trips of my lifetime, right up there with the overland move to California, the trip to Tonga, the trips to Japan, and the time Sylvia and I did a train trip around Europe.

And it's been very good for my head. I feel happy and relaxed. As Melville says at the start of Moby Dick, when you start feeling like calling the undertaker, head for the ocean!

***

I'm proud to have done something so cool to celebrate my retirement. I feel like I'm done with the process of retiring now, and I've done it right. I've made it through another passage.